Subject: Very old response
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jun 30 2002 - 18:35:06 EDT
A couple of weeks before leaving school for the summer I had marked in my
inbox a few messages to which I wanted to respond when I was not exceedingly
preoccupied with the goings-on of the end of the academic year. Time passed
and I neglected the marked messages. I have just now gone over them and
found that most were too involved with long-gone dynamic conversations to be
revived by me now. To respond to them now would be very bizarre. There was
one, however, that was a brief aside to a conversation and is sufficiently
independent that I think it can still be responded to.
I said to Micaela, as an illustration of something in a discussion early in
May:
<< . . . it seems to me that although Achilles is half-god and therefore
quite unlike us, his rage ("rage" is the first word of the Iliad, and of the
recorded Western literature) and selfishness and poutiness are universal.
>>
To the parenthetical comment, Jim responded:
<< heh...depends on what you define as western literature :)
But still a pretty interesting observation. >>
My very late response, now, is to Jim's quite punctual one:
I suppose so, especially since that can be said of anything (that the sky is
blue depends on what you define as sky). But perhaps you've hit on
something particularly relevant to me, specifically, since if I were
arbitrarily required to give a definition of Western Literature within eight
seconds of being asked unexpectedly, and money or lives were at stake,
something to the effect of "following from Homer" or "which began with
Homer" would very probably occur in my hurried and muddled response. It
does indeed depend on what one defines as Western Literature, and Homer is a
profoundly seminal figure in what I would define as such -- perhaps it would
be more accurate to say THE seminal figure in what I would define as such.
He would almost surely be part of a rough definition, in fact.
Oh, I know what you were thinking. You were thinking about the Hebrew
Bible. And rightly so, since probably no other literature that had a very
significant influence on greater Western Civilization can rival Homer and
parts of the Hebrew Bible for sheer, quite-nearly-inconceivably-immense
antiquity. And while the dates of composition are very speculative, there
might be parts of the Hebrew Bible that, either as a written or oral
tradition, predate Homer. But I still stay that Homer's were the first
words of the Western Literature. Why? Because the Hebrew Bible snuck into
the West through a back door long after the tradition was established.
We unfortunately cannot look at the copyright information at the beginning
of the Iliad (or Genesis) to determine an original date of publication.
Indeed, early quotations and fragments show rather divergent versions which
were only standardized centuries later, so if there even were a rough
publication date, the books underwent some changes afterward. In the third
volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of Western World, which is
dedicated to Homer (the first and second volumes are introductory materials
and an index: Homer begins their canon), the Biographical Note for Homer
begins very aptly:
Homer is not a man known to have existed, to whom
the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey is imputed. Homer
is the author of the Homeric poems, a hypothesis constructed
to account for their existence and quality.
It is believed that there was some standardized text of Homer in the sixth
century B.C.E. because of the recitation of his poetry (and nobody else's)
in a set order at the Panathenaic festivals, but there is evidence of
divergent texts later than this, and there was not a lasting standardization
until that of a scholar at the Alexandrian Library, Aristarchus of
Samothrace, in about 150 B.C.E. Precisely when and where Homer lived was as
much a mystery then as it is now. He was considered ancient by Plato, and
the many classical accounts of his life seldom or never agree about his home
or even his century. It has even been doubted that there ever was such a ma
n. It is now widely and vaguely held that he might have lived sometime
around 800 B.C.E., maybe earlier.
It has long been acknowledged on technical and linguistic grounds that the
earliest form of the Greek alphabet was almost certainly adapted from
Semitic writing systems by a single man. It has more recently been
suggested (quite controversially) that this adaptation was done by one man
in order that he might record Homer. In any case, the Greek alphabet is
very important because it was the first to make the rather artificial
distinction between consonants and vowels. The letter B, for instance, (or
beta) cannot be pronounced by itself. It is taken to represent a sound but
it requires a vowel to designate an utterable one. It is in some way PART
of a sound, and a part without a concrete, independent existience. Its
separation from vowels -- differently from the Semitic languages, this
separation was necessary to efficiently and accurately record the phonology
of Greek -- was an extraordinary intellectual achievement. The invention
of this first vocalic alphabet made it possible for the first time to utter
accurately a word one saw written without ever having heard the word uttered
before (vowel "pointing" was not added to the Semitic systems until much
later, so one simply had to know from knowledge of the language how to
vocalize each word). Whether or not there is truth to the suggestion that
this alphabet was invented to record Homer, it is true that his poetry was
the first of all we have to be recorded by it.
We are even less certain of dates concerning the composition of the Hebrew
Bible, particularly the older strands. Conjectures I have heard and read
regarding the written composition of the very oldest parts, probably in many
cases from older oral traditions, range usually from 800 to 1500 B.C.E. The
older dates, of course, are invariably suggested by traditional and
sometimes fundamentalist sources, the slightly less old dates by other
scholars. However it happens, some parts of the Torah certainly might
predate Homer as written documents, and are very likely to predate him as
oral traditions. But the ancient Hebrew literature was then part of a
separate tradition in the Near East which probably would have remained
obscure in the West if not for a particular Jew with a messianic movement,
which, unlike other messianic movements of the era, eventually converted the
emperor of Rome. This Yeshua or Yehoshua fellow (whose name was corrupted
by Greeks into Iesou, and eventually by other westerners into Jhesu and
Jesus) began to bring a separate written literary tradition into that of the
West sometime after the year zero, when Homer had already been a part of
that of the West -- indeed, he started it -- for a very long time. If not
for the success of this man's movement, the word "Bible" would probably mean
nothing to us, so what we now can call the Hebrew Bible would be designated
only by the very un-western-sounding "Tanakh" -- Genesis would be
Bereshith -- and it would likely be no more a part of the Western Literary
Canon than the Quran.
When reading the classics of Western Civilization chronologically, it makes
a great deal of sense to start with Homer. At my school, which is
overwhelming devoted to the Great Books of Western Civilization (all hail
the Program) and where the first assignment for freshmen is the first books
of the Iliad and we don't get to the Bible until sophomore year, it has
become almost something of a cliché to speak of the so-called Great
Conversation. This is taken to be an on-going discussion had by the
greatest minds in the history of the West, recorded in old books, the
reading of which allows any of us to enter into the Conversation to
participate and learn. The premise this understanding relies upon is simply
that there is a great degree of continuity to the canon, that one author
puts forth ideas that are digested, accepted, or rejected by subsequent
authors, that Mark Twain discusses some of the same ideas as, and benefits
from the previous thoughts of, Shakespeare and Plato -- that even without
reading Aristotle or Virgil an author in the tradition is influenced by them
by means of the influence they had on other authors in the tradition. The
Hebrew Bible certainly participates in the Conversation, and is indeed a key
figure in it. But it was Homer who asked the opening questions.
-robbie
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