Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond - Paperback

by Gregory Nagy (Author)

This book is a comparative study of oral poetics in literate cultures, focusing on the problems of textual fluidity in the transmission of Homeric poetry over half a millennium, from the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods of ancient Greece. It stresses the role of performance and the performer in the re-creative process of composition-in-performance. It addresses questions of authority and authorship in the making of oral poetry, and it examines the efforts of ancient scholars to edit a definitive text of the "real" Homer.

Back Jacket

With Homeric poetry, it is argued that no single definitive text could evolve until the oral traditions in which the epic was grounded became obsolete. In the watershed era of Aristarchus, around 150 BC, the gradual movement from relatively more fluid to more rigid stages of Homeric transmission reached a near-final point of textualization.