Rethinking Orality I

Codification, Transcodification and Transmission of 'Cultural Messages'

Andrea Ercolani, Laura Lulli, Andrea Ercolani, Laura Lulli

• Editorial: De Gruyter
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110752069
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Antike & klassische Literaturkritik

The volume deals with the mechanisms of the oral communication in the ancient Greek culture. Considering the critical debate about orality, the analysis of the communicative system in a predominantly oral-aural ancient society implies a reassessment and a deep reconsideration of the traces which orality embedded in the texts transmitted to us. In particular, the focus is on the 'cultural message', a set of information which is processed and transmitted vertically as well as horizontally by a living being, so to be differently from a genetically encoded information, a culturally defined process. The survey intertwines different approaches: the methodologies of cognitivism, biology, ethology, to analyze the embrional processes of the cultural messages, and the tools of historical and literary analysis, to highlight the development of the cultural messages in the traditional knowledge, their codification, transmission, and evolutions in the dialectics between orality and writing. The reconstructed pattern of the mechanisms of cultural messages in a prevailing oral-aural system cast a light on a shadowy aspect of a sophisticated communication system that has long influenced European culture.

Epos and Paideia between Orality and Writing

Lucio Del Corso

Abstract

The paper moves in two directions. At first, it aims to offer a quick overview of the role played by epic poetry in Greek educative system, from the Classical age to Late Antiquity, examining also the evolution of the corpus of texts used by teachers and students; moreover, it focuses on the role of the oral dimension of the learning and teaching practices which involved epic poetry. In order to shed a light on problems involving complex cultural dynamics, different sources will be used: school scenes on vases and reliefs, literary evidence, and especially extant ostraka and papyri, some used to read, learn, study ancient epic poetry, some others just showing its diffusion.

Keywords: Homer, orality, Greek papyri, ancient Greek school, Attic vases.

We have only one fragment of the account of the fall of Carthage described in the last part of Polybius’ book 38, but it can be considered one of the most famous pages in Greek literature (Pol. 38, 21). The victor, Scipio Aemilianus, is alone, standing in a landscape of ruins, lost in his thoughts, when suddenly he starts crying, and quotes two verses from book 6 of the Iliad: “the day shall come when sacred Ilios shall be laid low, and Priam, and the people of Priam with goodly spear of ash” (6, 448 – 449; transl. A. T. Murray). Scipio was fond of Homeric quotes. According to Plutarch, during the siege of Numantia he commented on the news of Caius Graccus’ death with a contemptuous verse from the first book of the Odyssey, thus becoming unpopular among the plebs (Plut., Tib. Gr. 21, 4 – 5). The Roman general was not the only one who relied on Homeric quotes to express intense feelings. Ancient historiography offers a wide array of leaders and politicians who quoted the Homeric poems in crucial circumstances. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (20, 6) reports that Pyrrhus invited the Romans to fight in the open field by reciting the verse which Hector addresses to Aiax in Iliad book 7 (242 – 243), challenging him to battle. Plutarch again informs us that the humble Philopoemen fed on all the verses by Homer which could direct the souls toward military valor (Philop. 7). Before him, Alexander, the archetype of all leaders imbued with poetry, had developed such a visceral passion for Homeric poetry since childhood that he always carried a complete edition of the Iliad with him, edited by Aristotle himself, his tutor (Plut., Alex. 8, 2).¹

But in the ancient world Homer was not just for the happy few.

Let us move decades forward and many hundreds of miles, reaching Egypt. We have no information about the military valour of Strato, a soldier stationed on the isle of Elephantine some years before 190 BC; but he certainly knew some Homer, as he was able to jot down the first nine verses of the Odyssey on an ostrakon which he was using to prepare the draft of a petition addressed to his strategos, Socrates, to complain about the behaviour of a fellow soldier (BGU VI 1470) [Fig. 1].

Fig. 1: BGU VI 1470

(c) Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Berlin.

There are no breaks between the document and the quote from Homer: what we have is a kind of stream of consciousness where Homeric poetry is a substratum which resurfaces when the hand does not know how to go on. In other cases, an allusion to Homer is a way to express solidarity among colleagues. Thus Timaios, one of the managers of senator Appianos’ estates, jokes with his colleague Heroninos by comparing their employer to Zeus, who – as we read at the beginning of the second book of the Iliad – “was not holden of sweet sleep” (Il. 2, 1 – 2; P. Flor. II 259).² Elsewhere, in the ‘glorious and most glorious’ city of Oxyrhynchus, the tragic story of Hector and Andromache was uppermost in the mind of a housewife, who, in a heartfelt but disorderly letter, asked her son Ptolemy whether he was still studying “the sixth book”, even though his teacher had left, and urged the boy and his paidagogos to find soon another teacher (P. Oxy. VI 930).³

We could add other sources, and other findings, from Egypt or from other corners of the Hellenized world. But even this simple list of scattered evidence reveals the stratified functions that the Homeric text exercized in the cultural koine of the Hellenized world, and its ability to cut across social strata, places, and even ethnic groups. The link between epos and paideia was a close and enduring one, and because of this it is difficult to trace its development, especially when we think that our varied evidence (which is necessarily Egyptocentric from the Hellenistic age onward, and mostly indirect for the Classical age) leaves some crucial questions open: how were Homeric texts approached, at school and elsewhere, and which where the dynamics of their circulation? How common were books, schools, and teachers outside the main cities and ‘cultural capitals’? More generally, is it possible to speak of a homogeneous ‘school system’ for the Hellenized world and, if so, to what extent? What evolutions did such a system undergo?

While I cannot hope to provide a c...