Customer Reviews

Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Publisher's Weekly review evaluates this book perfectly: The historical evidence for the existence of the Trojan War is fascinating, and the specific evidence and conclusions presented by Andrew Dalby are highly possible, but the book contain a major flaw. He digs through a variety of Egyptian, Hittite, and Greek sources to argue that the Trojan War of Homer--and the major characters, such as Paris--are collapsed versions of a variety of historical events that took place in the 100+ years before the composition of the original oral epic. He may be wrong, but he supplies evidence and reaches for conclusions that are at least moderately supported.

The problem comes with his "bold assertion" (as the publishers call it on the jacket) that Homer was a woman. Well, so what? It has been stated before, and few would be particularly upset if it were proven to be true, so there is nothing "bold" in it. The real weakness comes from Dalby's weak evidence and his loosely constructed logic. Even more glaring is that this assertion doesn't seem essential to the book itself. This book is really a collection of thoughts and ideas related to various aspects of Homer's texts, and the Homer as Female thesis is a weak attempt to provide a controlling idea. However, Dalby only presents this thesis 2/3 of the way through the book and then quickly moves on. It's a way to stand out, and perhaps a way to sell a few more books, but it isn't very important.

This is a good book and an interesting book when it allows itself to be what it is: an educated collection of thoughts related to history, oral literature, and Homer. It's when it pretends to be something else that it fails.

Read the parts that interest you and ignore the rest.

This is no book of an afternoon. It challenges even a hell educated reader, indeed its roots are such that they are deeper than many PhD's in literature are capable of delving.Three clearly different segments, notes, a guide to other readings, and a bibliography constitute a scholarly treatise.

While other reviewers write of the premise that "Homer" was a woman as a difficult stretch, I am inclined to ignore the idea under the conclusion that it has little relevancy for my readings of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and a suspicion that such a claim may be an illustration of the fashionable readings of the two works that Dalby discusses throughout.

His discussion of historic parallels and potential geographical place identifications relating to the Trojan War is a substantial part of the work. So if you are interested in linguistic Schliemannism, this is a good source.

The discussion of the major changes that took place in twentieth century understanding of the nature of oral poetry, the role of Milman Parry, Lord, and Murko - while employed for proof of the female Homer premise- is both a concise history of scholarship and reveals much about lengthy oral poetry. Again a good reason to read this book.

Needless to say, the vast discussion about "Oral" poetry is of serious merit. The relationship of performance to text opens up the entire author/text/audience question of modern critical theory. Since oral poetry is always changing from performance to performance, what happens when it is written down. Modern critics need to consider the ideas.

But what about the Phaedo? We remember that bit about the orphan word, written and without its "fathering mind" to defend it. Dalby looks extensively at practice, concepts, pronunciation and other matters of ancient Greek poetry. This is a motherlode of valuable data.

Brickbat70's response to Dalby's book is a good one. With my five-star rating, however, I am more forgiving of the author's few less-convincing arguments. Certainly his discussion of the Paris-Alexandros question is a stretch--one that covers too much ground to satisify. The female authorship issue notwithstanding (an idea that has been around at least since Butler), Dalby's broader discussion of gender relations and conflict in the epics is sensible and at times enlightening. This book is a very useful and informed contemporary discussion of the conversion of oral composition to written text. Unlike so many others, Dalby avoids the "we-can't-really-know-anything-about-Homer" refrain whenever possible, preferring instead to make reasonable assertions based on history, language, and close reading. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in the field.

In "Rediscovering Homer," Andrew Dalby asserts that the epics attributed to Homer "are better--more subtle, more complex, more universal--than most others" because they were (he contends) written by a woman.

This assertion clearly rests on Dalby's belief that works written by women are better than works written by men because they are more subtle, more complex, and more universal than works written by men. The assertion is at best unsustainable.

Imagine a critic who wrote the following: "The novels of William Faulkner are better--more subtle, more complex, more universal--than most of those written by Virginia Woolf because they were written by a man rather than a woman." Most readers would deem this assertion outrageous. Dalby's assertion is no better.

And even if it were true that women's literary works are generally "more subtle, more complex, more universal" than men's literary works--and no objective evidence supports this subjective conclusion--that "truth" would not sustain an assertion that Homer was a woman. One could draw Dalby's conclusion only if (a) there existed some objective measure of literary merit--of subtlety, complexity, and universality--that only women could achieve and (b) we could determine reliably that the Homeric epics met that objective standard. Of course, neither condition is met.

The quotation with which I take issue is drawn from Dalby's preface. He does not improve on it later in the text. He establishes at best that in recent history many (perhaps even most) oral poets were women--but one cannot draw conclusions across cultures (and millenia) to conclude that, among the Greeks, there were more women epic poets than men. And, again, even if one could draw that conclusion, that conclusion would not logically lead to the conclusion that Homer was a woman. One could draw that conclusion only if all epic poets in that time and place were women.

Dalby dismisses the ancient tradition that Homer was a man. That dismissal also lacks merit. In fact, Dalby himself helps establish the accuracy of that tradition. The ancient tradition held that the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were both written by the same person, a man known as Homeros. Dalby (like some other recent scholars) has concluded that the ancient tradition was correct in attributing both works to the same author. Given that the tradition was correct in that regard, there is no reason to reject it as unreliable in regard to the sex (or, for that matter, the name) of the epics' author. Indeed, the reliability of the ancient tradition in one respect (i.e., same author for both works) helps confirm its reliability in the other respect (i.e., author was a man named Homeros).

If "Rediscovering Homer" consisted solely of Dalby's assertions regarding Homer's sex (or gender, to use the more recent term), I'd give it only two stars. Much of the rest of the work, though, is better reasoned. Dalby is very good at reviewing the work of other scholars and pointing out where those scholars have overstated the evidence or rested their arguments on unfounded assumptions. He is particularly compelling on the "one author" issue. (Of course, so is Bernard Knox in the introduction to Fagles' translation of the "Odyssey.") Unfortunately, Dalby does not apply the same tools of critical thinking to his own arguments. Dalby often makes absolutist statements that help him sustain his argument, but those statements are themselves not sufficiently founded. (His comments about the motives of oral poets are especially prone to such absolute averments.) Had he explored more carefully the underpinnings of his own arguments, this would be a far better work.

As it stands, this work does have its value. Even where Dalby strikes me as arguing beyond his support, it is clear that he is fundamentally knowledgeable about the underlying scholarship, and his biases are apparent enough that the reader can grapple with them.

[Note: Edited to correct a typographical error.]

I initially had trouble with this book: I don't know if was the author's style of writing or my lack of familiarity with the subject matter. Had the subtitle dealt with "oral poetry" rather than "inside the origins of the epic" perhaps I might have attacked the book differently and it might have been clearer the first time through. I became familiar with the subject by reading the book quickly the first time, and then I re-read the denouement, as it were, chapters 8 and 9. This is fascinating. This is very much like a detective novel so I won't give away the ending.

I have always wondered how a poet, in this case, a Homer, could recite a poem as long as the Iliad or the Odyssey. Andrew Dalby has answered that question. That alone would be worth the price of the book. But he also provides a history of how Homer rose to fame in such a short period of time, who Homer might have been, and whether Homer wrote the epics or just sang them. Along the way, Dalby provides us enough trivia about poet-singers, rhapsodic singers, and Homeridic poets to last several cocktail parties on the Quad. His research took him to Serbia / Bosnia, and it is almost too good to be true that songs of Christian-Muslim conflicts four hundred years ago led Dalby and his predecessors to their fascinating theories.

The subject matter deserves a larger opus. The book is relatively short with only 204 pages of context preceded by 27 pages of introduction. It seems like the type of book that will go to soft cover relatively soon to be sold in airport bookstores. It is possible the author had a longer book in him but the publisher knew that the small audience would grow inversely proportional with the size of the book. The bibliography is very good, and the index appears to be excellent.

[I think "Publisher's Weekly" did a disservice by highlighting the gender issue in the opening line of its review. In fact, Mr Dalby's discussion of gender occupies a very small piece of the book -- less than 18 pages of the 231 pages of text/introduction. Mr Dalby would have been remiss not mentioning it once he considered that possibility; like the rest of the points in his book, he lays his theories out in the open for others to discuss, but is not fanatic about them. If it bothers anyone that much that a woman might have written down these epics, throw that part of the book out. It won't detract from the rest of the fine points. And just to be clear here; Homer was male but he did not write the epics; he merely sang them. Someone else wrote them down. That's the whole point of the book.]

I heartily recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in "Homer's" two epics, those interested in philology and literature of the Western canon, or as I noted earlier, simply want more trivia for a cocktail party on the Quad than one could ever imagine.

This is very interesting book that discusses how the Iliad and the Odyssey came to be composed written down and preserved for posterity. An interesting sideline was whether or not Homer was a man or a woman.

The starting point for scholarship is the Iliad which all scholars concede is an example of authentic Homeric poetry. Although I found the endless lists in the Iliad boring when I read it, Andrew Dalby shows just how useful it is in providing modern historians with details of the early Greek world. Dalby makes a great case that the Odyssey was a much later work and is the more mature work of the poet.

How we came to have both works is interesting in itself. Both were part of the oral tradition and were intended to be performed almost like progressive jazz with the singer interspersing his own personal touch to the performance. Around 600 BC, a wealthy patron met someone who could perform these works. These unknown people probably are among the most influential in world history. By their actions, they made it possible that both works would reach an audience over the next nearly 3000 years and would help establish and define western culture. When one thinks of all the works of art that came out of the Iliad and the Odyssey this is an astonishing contribution. What was the original reason that the patron commissioned the work to be written down? It boggles the mind just how much of western history pivots on chance encounters such as this one.

Along with the context of the poems themselves and their survival over the years, Dalby also examines the texts themselves and the meaning behind certain encounters between the gods and the heroes of the two epics. In several events he calls to mind some of the more dramatic events of the Trojan War and its aftermath. My personal favorite was Helen verbally sparring with Aphrodite in which the mortal woman accuses the goddess of being little more than a madam in a whore house because of her role in the abduction by Paris. What these vignettes do is show just how the Iliad and Odyssey are able to address the greater issues that transcend their original time and place. Another fascinating section is Dalby's examination of the work on Achilles's shield and how it shows day to day life in Homeric Greece.

Dalby's work provides a very good opportunity to revisit these two Homeric classics and to have a better understanding of their past, present, and future context.

I read a great deal about the Mycenaean period and the story of Troy. I'm sorry but I found this work so tedious that I didn't finish reading it..and I don't intend to.