Oral Tradition

The only clues you have to your history come from a long line of stories passed down through your people. These stories are used to educate children, instruct how one should live their life, and unify your people as one culture.

During a time without writing, oral tradition was all the Greek people had. Legends and rumors passed down over some four hundred years. These stories were bedtime stories that told the history of their people. They were retold year after year. Over four hundred years, the stories changed. Details may have fallen out of memory. New telling included aspects from the storytellers’ own time to make the stories relatable. The stories became legend. Legend became mythology. Mythology told of gods mingling directly with mortal and superhuman heroes fighting incredible monsters. Mythology became history.

The path of oral tradition carries a great deal of information, but should be pursued carefully. Legends reveal truths about how events and people were remembered, but the facts may be difficult to extract.

Who wrote The Iliad?

This is a more difficult question than one might think. Who was Homer? Was he a penname? Was the epic constructed by a group of bards? Did two different people write The Iliad and The Odyssey? Was Homer a woman? Scholars debate all of these questions and more. The general consensus theorizes that Homer was an illiterate male bard from around 715 - 630 BCE.

Whether a man named Homer physically took a pen to papyrus and wrote out the full epic does not really matter. What does matter is that an entity called Homer gathered regional legends into a single epic. He did not create the stories. The stories were a product of an entire culture, and so the ancient Greeks did not care so much about authorship.

These epics were completely memorized and recomposed with each telling.

The bard recreated the exact wording of the epic by using a set epic style of poetry, which relied on a certain number of syllables and the frequent use of decided epithets. If The Iliad seems repetitive by constantly using epithets like 'ox-eyed Hera' or 'swift-footed Achilles' with different characters, it is because the entire epic was recited from memory as it was retold.

CRITICAL THINKING:

How do cultural stories unify a people?