I have started with Alcman's fragment 39 because this poem offers the most detailed description of the complex relationship that the poet establishes with the voice of the birds.With this premise I hope it would be more clear the meaning of another well known fragment, in which Alcman claims to know the songs of every kind of bird:¹¹

Alcm. fr. 40 Davies = 140 Calame οἶδα δ' ὀρνίχων νόμως παντῶν

In this short fragment Alcman says nothing about how he acquired the special knowledge of which he boasts. The verb οἶδα at the beginning simply states that he possesses it. The word νόμως recalls the idea that the birds' song can be considered as a codified song. Alcman claims to know an uncountable amount of songs, corresponding to the endless variety of the melodies uttered by the singing birds.

The skill boasted by Alcman can be found elsewhere. Continuing the topic of poets' lives, a very singular, and mostly neglected, tradition about Homer's life tells that Homer was son of two Egyptians and that his nurse was a prophet, daughter of the priest of Isis. Once, honey flowed from her breast in Homer's mouth and the baby, during the night, uttered the voice of nine different birds. The nurse, then, found the baby playing with nine doves on his bed. One day, in a state of possession, she pronounced some prophetic lines in which she foresaw that the baby will be famous and that he will build a temple to the nine Pierides. For this reason Homer always respected birds.

Eust. in Od. 12, 63 [1713, 17] = De Martino 1984, 140–141

᾿Aλέξανδρος δὲ ὁ Πάφιος ἱστορεῖ τὸν Ὅμηρον υἱὸν Αἰγυπτίων Δμασαγόρου [cf. Cert. Hom. Hes. 3, 21 = 758 FGrHist 13c Καλλικλῆς δὲ †Μασαγόραν] καὶ Αἴθρας, τροφὸν δὲ αὐτοῦ προ-

See contra Calame 1983, 548, who refers the "I" speaking in the poem to the performers of the chorus.

φῆτιν τινὰ θυγατέρα (20) Ὤρου, ἱερέως Ἴσιδος, ἧς ἐκ τῶν μαστῶν μέλι ῥεῦσαι ποτὲ εἰς τὸ στόμα τοῦ παιδίου. καὶ τὸ βρέφος ἐν νυκτὶ φωνὰς ἐννέα προέσθαι, χελιδόνος, ταῶνος, περιστερᾶς, κορώνης, πέρδικος, πορφυρίωνος, ψαρὸς, ἀηδόνος, καὶ κοττύφου· εὑρεθῆναί τε τὸ παιδίον μετὰ περιστερῶν ἐννέα παῖζον ἐπὶ τῆς κλίνης. εὐωχουμένην δὲ παρὰ τοῖς τοῦ παιδὸς τὴν Σιβύλλαν, ἐμμανῆ γεγονυῖαν, ἔπη σχεδιάσαι. ὧν ἀρχὴ, Δμασαγόρα πολύνικε, ἐν οἷς καὶ μεγακλεῆ καὶ στεφανίτην αὐτὸν προσειπεῖν, καὶ ναὸν κτίσαι κελεῦσαι ἐννέα Πιερίδων (25)· ἐδήλου δὲ τὰς Μούσας. τὸν δὲ καὶ τοῦτο ποιῆσαι, καὶ τῷ παιδὶ ἀνδρωθέντι ἐξειπεῖν τὸ πρᾶγμα. καὶ τὸν ποιητὴν οὕτω σεμνῦναι τὰ ζῷα οἷς βρέφος ὢν συνέπαιζε.

It seems noteworthy that the most distinct feature that defines the prodigious nature of the young Homer is precisely his skill in speaking the language of birds, and that even if this tradition is as old as that of the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi,¹² the fact that the poets are able to speak like a bird goes back to a more ancient tradition. To be cautious, the tradition is at least as old as Alcman's poetry.

Poets' special relationship with the birds is a feature that connects them with other special people such as seers and prophets.¹³ The birds' signs can be the subject of an archaic poem, as it is well displayed by the Bird omens (Ornithomanteia) assigned to Hesiod, a poem that was attached to the end of Works and Days in a specific branch of the Hesiodic tradition.¹⁴ The final lines of Works and Days are a reminder of the importance of correctly interpreting the signs coming from the birds to live in the right way.

Hes., Op. 826–828 […] ὄλβιος ὃς τάδε πάντα εἰδῶς ἐργάζηται ἀναίτιος ἀθανάτοισιν, ὄρνιθας κρίνων καὶ ὑπερβασίας ἀλεείνων

Hesiod was concerned with prophecy. Pausanias (9, 31, 5) says that Hesiod was taught about mantic art in Acharnania and that it was still possible to read the

See Bassino 2019, 115, who mentions the earlier sources (say, 5th century BC) of the materials included in the Certamen. See also p. 125, ad 21 for a commentary on Callicles' information about Homer's father.

In Soph., Ant. 1021, the seer Teiresias says that the birds' song is no more intelligible for him due to the miasma spread by Oedipus: οὐδ᾽ ὄρνις εὐσήμους ἀπορροιβδεῖ βοάς. Porphirius recalls that the old prophets like Teiresias and Melampous were able to understand the language of the birds: Porph., de abst. 3, 6 εἰ δεῖ πιστεύειν τοῖς παλαιοῖς καὶ τοῖς ἐφ᾽ ἡμῶν καὶ τῶν πατέρων γεγονόσιν, εἰσὶν οἳ λέγονται ἐπακοῦσαι καὶ σύνεσιν ἔχειν τῆς τῶν ζῴων φθέγξεως· ὡς ἐπὶ μὲν τῶν παλαιῶν ὁ Μελάμπους καὶ ὁ Τειρεσίας καὶ οἱ τοιοῦτοι.

We do not have reasons to consider worthless the words of schol. Hes. Op. 828 a, 3 (p. 259 Pertusi) τούτοις δὲ ἐπάγουσί τινες τὴν Ὀρνιθομαντείαν <\*\*\*>. See Ercolani 2010, 436–437 ad loc.

ἔπη μαντικά he composed. Another Hesiodic poem, the Melampodia, concerned the figure of the prophet Melampus. It is possible that the title Explanation of prodigies was another form of the title Ornithomanteia, but it is also possible that it was a different work.¹⁵

To summarize, the tradition of the poet as a wise man (or cultural hero) able to speak and understand the language of the birds and interpret the signs that birds expressed to men, confirms the general idea that the archaic poets, by reason of their exceptional qualities and their divine gifts, must be considered among the σοφοί, or, in the well-known definition by Marcel Detienne, as mâitres de verité.¹⁶

It is possible to go further still. It is very tempting to try to connect the idea that the poets know the language of the birds with views about the life of the most ancient men. As we have seen, the Greeks seem to be aware that in the most ancient times men (all men, not only the poets) learned to sing from the birds. The passages by Democritus, Chamaeleon, Lucretius quoted above can be considered an attempt to build a rational explanation of the process that led men to acquire the skill to sing and compose poems. But the boundaries between those rational ponderings and a mythical tale are not well established. Democritus' and Lucretius' theories cannot be proven. If we accept them, we take them as self-evident and not because they are founded on tested evidence. They are nothing but fascinating myths.

For these reasons, we can find some help to better understand the idea that the poets can speak the language of the birds, even outside Greece, in the myths of other cultures. A comparative approach can offer new perspectives to the reading of the Greek authors. A precious source of inspiration are the astonishing histories about an American trickster. In 1956 a book was published by the anthropologist Paul Radin,¹⁷ who collected the tales about Wakdjûnkaga, a sacred character of the Winnibago, a tribe of the Sioux nation. The book could boast the collaboration of Carl Gustav Jung and Karl Kerényi and thanks to the fame of the authors and to the English translation made in 1956 (Radin 1956), Wakdjûnkaga and the figure of the trickster became familiar to everyone concerned with anthropological studies.

For an introduction to the corpus Hesiodeum see Cingano 2009, who considers, however, the Explanation of prodiges as a different title of the Ornithomanteia.

A fragment by Heraclitus, 22 B57 D.-K. διδάσκαλος δὲ πλείστων Ἡσίοδος· τοῦτον ἐπίστανται πλεῖστα εἰδέναι demonstrates that Hesiod, like Homer, was considered by the ancients as a mâitre de verité. On Hesiod's poetry as an example of "wisdom poetry" see the remarkable studies by Ercolani (Ercolani 2010, Ercolani 2012, Ercolani 2016).

Radin 1956.

Wakdjûnkaga was a chieftain. The day before a battle he violated the traditional rules and he was criticized by the other warriors. He then renounced his social status and went far from his tribe. Once he abandoned his weapons, his canoe and his status symbols he became something different from a human being. He had no more self-consciousness. He did not perceive the boundaries of his own body. When he slayed a deer, his right hand, which was cutting the deer with a knife, quarreled with his left, and eventually the right hand wounded deeply the left (Radin 1956, chapters 4 and 5). In a climax of violence, Wakdjûnkaga inflicts the most painful cruelties and cannibalizes himself. Wakdjûnkaga can also change his gender. He can assume a female identity and give birth to a child.¹⁸ As a female he/she got married with a warrior but also with a fox and other animals (chapter 20). Neither man nor woman, Wakdjûnkaga is no more a human being than he is an animal. Thanks to his extraordinary qualities Wakdjûnkaga is also responsible for many inventions very useful to mankind. He creates and gives order to reality, granting names to things. The linguistic skills of Wakdjûnkaga are very interesting for our discussion. When he renounced his role as chieftain and began a new life,

from there on he continued alone. He ambled along calling all the objects in the world younger brothers when speaking to them. He and all objects in the world understood one another, understood, indeed, one another's language (Radin 1956, 7).

Wakdjûnkaga can speak to all things and to all animals, and all things and all animals can speak to him because he understands them. This is the first skill that he experimented in his new life. He can speak the many languages of nature because there is no clear distinction between him and nature. The myths about Wakdjûnkaga are the myths about a primordial age in which men and nature were one and the same. In this respect it is hard to find more penetrating words than those of C. G. Jung:

this phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages […]. He is obviously a 'psychologem', an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful copy of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level (Jung 1956, 200).

This aspect is consistent with the myth of the seer Tiresias who once became a woman and then came back to the male identity: Ov., Met. 3, 323–331.

The idea that there has been a phase in which the single cannot be separated from the whole can be traced back already in an enlightening explanation of totemism by Jane Harrison:

[totemism] stands for fusion, for non-differentiation. Man cannot project his individual self, because that individual self is as yet in part undivided; he cannot project his individual human will, because that human will is felt chiefly as one with the undifferentiated mana of the world; he cannot project his individual soul because that complex thing is as yet not completely compounded.¹⁹

Harrison's position is consistent with Lévy-Bruhl's theories (Lévy-Bruhl 1910) about the cognitive processes of primitive men. The French anthropologist sustained that the principium individuationis does not belong to this phase of human development.

The psychic condition of the trickster can also be experienced by modern men. Some hints of the trickster's awareness of his own boundaries can be detected in the first phases of babies' evolution, who are very concerned with their own bodily exploration. Self-aggression is a common experience of animals, for example dogs that bite their own tail or paw because they do not perceive their own body's limits. Among men, self-injury can be observed in many pathological states of mind. Even well-tempered adult humans can, however, enter a mental condition in which there is no distinction at all between self and other, rational and irrational, aware and not aware. I refer to the condition in which the unconscious displays its power. I draw here from the notion of unconscious of Ignacio Matte Blanco, the Chilean psychologist who undertook a deep revision of Sigmund Freud's theory. Matte Blanco developed an original theory of the unconscious named the theory of bi-logic (see Matte Blanco 1975). In this theory he considered the unconscious not as the state of mind in which the repressed aspects of our personality are expressed, but as a different way to think, quite similar to the processes of the more advanced mathematical theories, in particular that of Dedekind. In the mathematics of infinity, the principle of non-contradiction has no relevance and it is impossible to distinguish between part and whole. According to Matte Blanco, the human unconscious works in a similar way. In 1988 the Chilean psycologist published a book in which he elucidated the developments of the bi-logic theory formulated in 1975.²⁰ Matte Blanco unifies the sphere of thinking and the sphere of feeling in the unconscious dimension. The natural tendency of thinking to divide and distinguish, and the

Harrison 1927, 122.

Matte Blanco 1988.

natural tendency of feeling to unify, cannot be separated. They support each other. This happens in the bi-logic structure, which is active when we consider the same reality as formed at the same time by parts and simultaneously as an undivisible whole. The bi-logic structure has different levels of complexity. In the fifth and most complex level every form of thought is impossible. Any one thing cannot be distinguished from anything else. All things form one only indivisible thing. This is exactly the condition represented in the myths about Wakdjûnkaga. This is exactly the condition which Harrison, Levy-Bruhl and Jung refer to.

It is time now to go back to Alcman and the Greek poets. The theoretical frame we have sketched can give a more solid explanation to the archaic poets' claims to be able to speak and understand birdsong. The poets wanted to be considered as extraordinary people, but the skills they boast can be appreciated by everyone, since according to the tales about the most ancient times it was common to speak and understand the voices of other animals, birds in particular. The poets keep alive the experience of ancient men, when they were one only thing with nature. Ordinary people can have indirect access to this privileged experience during infancy or in the oneiric states of mind when the unconscious reproduces the same conditions as ancient men. It is not by chance that the tale about Homer reported by Eustathius combines infancy and dream.

The Greeks were familiar with the idea that a man can become something different from a human being. Their myths offer plenty of tales about metamorphosis to another form. For the same reasons they easily admitted the existence of hybrid creatures like centaurs, satyrs, nymphs and dryades, which remind us that it is possible to be simultaneously a man and something different from a human being. Within this general idea we must place the tales about the poets' portentous skills.When Alcman claims to understand and speak birdsong he is building a mythical tale to give authority to his own words.We can consider this tale as we consider Hesiod's or Archilocus' tales about their meeting with the Muses, since for the Greeks it was normal to refer to gods the true fact that poets, like seers or prophets, were exceptionally gifted people.

The particular skills of which Alcman boasts are deeply linked with orality, since they originate in sounds and produce sounds. It is relevant that in different cultures, when we are told of people who can speak an unknown language (xenoglossy) or a non-human language (glossolaly) we are never told that people are able to write that language, and on the contrary we are always told that people are able to speak that language.²¹ It is evident that to use a writing system

See for example the miracle produced by the Holy Spirit during the Pentecost, when Jesus'

requires the use of abstraction and conscious thought. This implies that the bilogic structures, to recall Matte Blanco's theory, cannot work, while orality is perfectly coherent with the conditions in which men perceive a continuum between themselves and the world around them, and in which there is no clear perception of the specific nor of the individual identity. Orality is then the only possible form of communication in those states of mind in which is impossible to keep conscious and unconscious thought separated.

In conclusion, comparing the poet's voice to birdsong is much more than a literary topos. It is a living fragment of memory coming from the deepest layers of the human experience. It is a timeless truth about the evolution of mankind that Greeks expressed in mythical form. An idea that modern anthropology, developmental psychology and theories of the unconscious can now explain with more solid evidence.

### References

apostles could speak unknown languages (NT Acts 2:4). For the quite similar phenomenon of glossolaly in ancient and modern times see Bettini 2018, 159–181.

### Lucio Del Corso Epos and Paideia between Orality and Writing

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 shedalight 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.

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].

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'

The famous "Iliad from the casket (ἐκ τοῦ νάρθηκος)", mentioned also in 26, 1; see Nagy 1996, 200 –203.

Both BGU VI 1470 and P. Flor. II 259 are discussed in Fournet 2012, 127–128 and 141–142.

Bagnall/Cribiore 2006, 77 and 375–376 (with previous bibliography).

Fig. 1: BGU VI 1470 (c) Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Berlin.

for the Hellenized world and, if so, to what extent? What evolutions did such a system undergo?

While I cannot hope to provide a complete picture, I can at least try to offer a few suggestions, by focusing on some tiles of this mosaic, juxtaposing literary echoes, images, and written items.

In Classical Athens paideia was a private affair.⁴ Teachers did not need any titles or specific qualifications, nor were there fixed procedures for their selection or to check their work, differently from what happened in many other areas of social life: the community controlled only teachers' moral behaviour, and could act harshly and cruelly toward them in the event of any threat to the status quo. Similarly, there were no fixed curricula, although the school routine was organized according to guidelines which were universally followed, as in the case of the primacy assigned to the study of poetic texts.⁵ From the very beginning, most of the teaching focused on poetry.⁶ The most effective descriptions of the way poetry was taught are paradoxically offered by the most lucid critic of the Athenian educational system, Plato. As we read in his Protagoras:

ἐπειδὰν αὖ γράμματα μάθωσι καὶ μέλλωσι συνήσειν τὰ γεγραμμένα, ὥσπερ τότε τὴν φωνήν, παρατιθέασιν αὐτοῖς ἐπὶ τῶν βάθρων ἀναγιγνώσκειν ποιητῶν ἀγαθῶν ποιήματα καὶ ἐκμανθάνειν ἀναγκάζουσιν.

when they (scil. the children) have learnt their letters and are getting to understand the written word as before they did only the spoken, are furnished with works of good poets to read as they sit in class, and are made to learn them off by heart (Prot. 325e; transl. W. R. M. Lamb).

Plato does not mention epic, but it is clear that it is included in the kind of poetry he is describing. In any case, for the philosopher this was a wrong way of teaching young people, since it did not allow them to attain virtue and wisdom, which were the ultimate goal of education.⁷ But combining reading with the memorizing of long selections of poetic texts was the most common educational practice throughout the Classical age, at least in Athens, as Plato himself confirms in many passages. In the Laws (7, 810e) he clearly voices his annoyance at the spread of this approach to texts:

λέγω μὴν ὅτι ποιηταί τε ἡμῖν εἰσίν τινες ἐπῶν ἑξαμέτρων πάμπολλοι καὶ τριμέτρων καὶ πάντων δὴ τῶν λεγομένων μέτρων, οἱ μὲν ἐπὶ σπουδήν, οἱ δ' ἐπὶ γέλωτα ὡρμηκότες, ἐν οἷς φασι δεῖν οἱ πολλάκις μυρίοι τοὺς ὀρθῶς παιδευομένους τῶν νέων τρέφειν καὶ διακορεῖς ποιεῖν, πολυηκόους τ' ἐν ταῖς ἀναγνώσεσιν ποιοῦντας […].

See the general picture in Beck 1964, especially 72–146, and, for a shorter but updated survey, Pritchard 2015.

Morgan 1999; Griffith 2001; Rihll 2003.

Robb 1994, 159–182 and passim.

Nightingale 2001, 136–154; Gastaldi 2002 (both especially focused on the pedagogical model described in the Republic).

I verily affirm that we have composers of verses innumerable – hexameters, trimeters, and every meter you could mention –, some of whom aim at the serious, others at the comic; on whose writings, as we are told by our tens of thousands of people, we ought to rear and soak the young, if we are to give them a correct education, making them, by means of recitations, lengthy listeners […] (transl. W. R. M. Lamb).

Alternatively, the philosopher adds, teachers used to make a selection of passages, combining summaries (κεφάλαια) with ὅλας ῥῆσεις, and asked their students to learn them by heart, if they wished "to become good and wise".⁸

In such passages from Plato the study of poetic texts is immersed in an 'aural' dimension, where books and the spoken word both play a key role.

The starting point was always a written text, whose physical features, presumably, could vary significantly: sometimes it was an actual book, such as the "works of good poets" mentioned in the Protagoras, which were literally ἐπὶ τῶν βάθρων, "on the benches" of the students and had to be read by them; sometimes it took the form of draft notes, such as the κεφάλαια of the Laws, which were actually combined with early anthologies compiled for specific purposes. Moreover, students used for their exercise writing boards, where ephemeral texts were constantly added, as we can infer from written sources (Plat., Prot. 326d)⁹ and especially vascular paintings.¹⁰ The coexistence of different writing materials, designed for specific literary practices, is a characteristic of the Greek system of textual production, attested by many sources.¹¹ It is quite natural to find it in school practices as well, especially because the use of different objects as rolls and tablets is one of the most striking characteristics of visual portrayals of school scenes.

Indeed, the circulation and the availability of books and perishable writing materials in 5th century BC Athens was probably much wider than what some scholarly reconstructions suggest,¹² as is clear from the more accurate surveys of indirect sources and some outstanding archaeological findings made in the late 20th century, but partially published only in recent years. Papyrus was not very expensive in itself. In 408 BC, during one of the most troubled times in Athenian history, a 'blank' papyrus roll, one chartes, was worth one dracma and two obols, according to the long inscription recording the expenses for

Plat., Leg. 7, 811a εἰ μέλλει τις ἀγαθὸς ἡμῖν καὶ σοφὸς ἐκ πολυπειρίας καὶ πολυμαθίας γενέσθαι. Turner 1965.

Some relevant examples are mentioned in Del Corso 2003, 59–60.

Del Corso 2016.

See e.g. the 'reductive' perspective of Harris 1989, 65–115; for a critical discussion of this point of view see Bagnall 2011, 2–4.

the building of the Erechtheion (IG I<sup>3</sup> 476): less than a manual laborer's daily wage.¹³ Some decades later, on a 'shopping list' written on an ostrakon found in the agora close to the Prytaneion and possibly to be connected with its activities, we find mention of one χάρτης, or roll, along with daily items of little value: dishes and bread loaves.¹⁴ For city elites, it was quite normal to own books,¹⁵ but this was not impossible even at a lower social level. In 1981 thanks to emergency excavations in one of Athens' suburbs, Daphne (53 Olgas street, now Ethnikis Antistaseos street), it was possible to recover a section of a large necropolis, probably belonging to the demos of Alopece, which extended along either side of the ancient Astiki odos.¹⁶ The dead buried there belonged to the middle or upper-middle class, as is demonstrated by the sobriety of their tombs and grave goods, where the most valuable items are some lekythoi of mediocre workmanship.¹⁷ One of these individuals, who died during the first years of the Peloponnesian War, was buried with everything he needed to enjoy the highest levels of paideia (besides a bag of knucklebones), a lyre, an aulos, a harp, a quill, an ink-pot and especially a set of writing boards and a papyrus roll, on which poetic texts, including epic verses, were originally written (though they have now faded almost completely).¹⁸

Because of the finding of such unusual collections of items, the tomb has been called the Musician's tomb, implicitly suggesting a profession for the deceasad. But there are also other possibilities. Since full anthropological and genomic data are not available yet, we cannot be sure even of the sex of the deceased. We only know that he/she was young, maybe in his/her early twenties,¹⁹ maybe younger, as an ephebos.²⁰ The traditional idea of a young professional musician is not impossible, though we find parallels in inscriptions only for later periods.

Lewis 1974, 129–134 (for a general discussion, starting from the Erechtheion inscription and comprising also Hellenistic and Roman sources).

Lang 1976, B 14 (P4899); Caroli 2016.

On such heavily discussed topic, apart from the 'classic' contribution by Turner 1952, see at least Del Corso 2003, 12–19, and Cavallo 2020, 18–25, both with further bibliography and discussion of the different positions.

Descriptions of the excavations in Pöhlmann/West 2012, 1–2, Pöhlmann 2013, and Lygouri-Tolia 2014.

Simon/Wehgartner 2013

For a general description of the finds see Pöhlmann/West 2012, 2–3, Alexopoulou/Kaminari 2013, Terzes 2013; for an analysis and a partial edition of the roll and the tablets see Pöhlmann/ West 2012, 3–10, West 2013, Alexopoulou/Karamanou 2014, Karamanou 2016, and Karamanou 2019.

Karamanou 2016, 52.

Lygouri-Tolia 2014, 19–21.

But there are also other possibilities. The objects linked to music and education could point to a teacher or, if the dead was too young, a talented "ephebos, whose progress in music qualified him to teach younger pupils", as Eutychia Ligour-Tolia suggested.²¹ In any case, the young age of the deceased also suggests a further scenario. In funerary art, references to books and reading always point to individuals who died before they were able to play an active role as citizens, and who therefore are celebrated by stressing other qualities, such as their paideia: this is particularly the case with women and young people who died prematurely.²² These two categories are the subject of several art works, some of which are quite well known: the lekythos by the Klügmann painter (Louvre, CA 2220),²³ to give one example, and some stelae dated to the second half of the 5th century BC, such as the one from Thespiai, which shows an elegant girl, with a box, beneath her seat, where an open bookroll lays (Athens, National Museum, 817)²⁴ [Fig. 2], another from Amorgos, where a seated boy takes a writing tablet from a standing friend (Athens, National Museum, 4470),²⁵ and lastly the most famous, the 'Grottaferrata relief', which – according to an accurate examination of its stylistical features by Elena Ghisellini – was probably made by a Ionic sculptor (maybe originating from Paros), who was active also in Athens, for a long period.²⁶

In such cases, rolls and other writing materials are the symbols of the deceased person's paideia, not of his or her professional activity. The rolls, tablets and musical instruments inside the tomb at Daphne could have the same function. But what is interesting for us here is that the deceased's relatives chose to preserve some epic verses, yet not ones from the Homeric poems, as we will see.

The book culture that we may reconstruct through such glimpses of evidence was characterized by reading practices full of performative elements, where the voice playedakey role. After memorizing a text, a schoolboy was expected to recite it in front of his teacher and 'classmates'. This part of the lesson is depicted on many red figure vases, such as the well-known Douris 'school' cup (Berlin,

Lygouri-Tolia 2014, 21.

Del Corso 2003, 49–66.

Beazley 1963, 1199 no. 25, where the standing female figure is alternatively identified with a Muse; even if such interpretation is followed in some studies, it would be preferable to consider her as a 'mortal' woman: see e. g. Cavallo 2009, 59 and Walter-Karydi 2011–2012, 221 (both with reproductions of the vase); 'domestic' and 'divine' elements overlap in the interpretation of the scene by Bellier-Chaussonnier 2002, 337.

Karouzou 1968, 107.

Karouzou 1968, 49; Greek Art 1979, 232, no. 187.

Ghisellini 2007. The relief is now in the Museum of the Exarchic Monastery of St. Mary (Grottaferrata, Museo dell'Abbazia di San Nilo).

Fig. 2: Relief from Thespiai, Athens, National Museum, 817. (c) photo L. Del Corso.

Antikensammlung, F2285),²⁷ and another cup by the Eretria Painter (Paris, Louvre, G 457), where the teacher is Linos, and the student Mousaios.²⁸ Sometimes the performance becomes an agon, with the proclamation of a winner (and tears from the losers). Such 'mini-agons' were often held in a private setting and hence were open only to the teacher's students: one of such occasions is alluded to on

Beazley 1963, 283 no. 47. This is one of the most studied (and illustrated) red-figured vases dealing with education: see e. g. Immerwahr 1964, 18 f.; Beck 1975, nos. 53 f.; CVA Germany 21, Berlin 2, pll. 77.1–2, 78.1–4, 127.1–5. See infra, fig. 4 and, on other interpretations of this scene, footnote 38.

Beazley 1963, 1254 no. 80; Beck 1975, no. 30.

the cup attributed to the Painter of Münich 2660 in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (17.230.10) [Fig. 3].²⁹

Fig. 3: Cup attributed to the Painter of Münich 2660. New York, Metropolitan Museum, 17.230.10.

(c) Open Access; courtesy of the New York Metropolitan Museum.

However, in some/ circumstances these events could acquire a public dimension: for instance, when they were connected to official festivals of the polis. In Timaeus (21b) Plato says that such agons were held during the Apaturia festival:

τὸ δὴ τῆς ἑορτῆς σύνηθες ἑκάστοτε καὶ τότε συνέβη τοῖς παισίν· ἆθλα γὰρ ἡμῖν οἱ πατέρες ἔθεσαν ῥαψῳδίας. πολλῶν μὲν οὖν δὴ καὶ πολλὰ ἐλέχθη ποιητῶν ποιήματα, ἅτε δὲ νέα κατ' ἐκεῖνον τὸν χρόνον ὄντα τὰ Σόλωνος πολλοὶ τῶν παίδων ᾔσαμεν.

the ceremony for boys which was always customary at the feast was held also on that occasion, our fathers arranging contests in recitation. So while many poems of many poets were declaimed, since the poems of Solon were at that time new, many of us children chanted them (transl. W. R. M. Lamb).

'Official' agons are depicted on several vases: on an amphora now in Boulognesur-mer a young man receives a victory fillet from a winged Nike;³⁰ on a cup in

Beazley 1963, 784 no. 25; Beck 1975, nos. 58–60; Sparkes 2015, 88 (with figg. 7.10 and 7.11). Musée Boulogne-sur-Mer, 667, attributed to the Ethiop Painter; Beazley 1963, 666 no. 15; Beck 1975, no. 228.

Melbourne the scene is more lively: while on one half of the body a music lesson is depicted, on the other the consequences of a contest are shown, with a boy, on the right, crowned by Nike, and another, on the left, waiting for his teacher to slap him.³¹

Book reading and performance seem deeply linked to each other, within a complex oral-aural system which was not a unique feature of didactic practices, but more generally characterized the circulation of literary texts, especially in the private sphere. Reading was chiefly a collective activity,³² so it is hardly surprising that performative elements are also prominent in reading scenes which do not have a school setting. An open roll on the knees of a teacher or a mere lover of literature has a role, as a starting point and complement in performances of this sort.

Within this general picture epos played a key role, yet it was not the only genre to be cultivated, at school as well as elsewhere.³³ The description offered by Plato's Protagoras, as we have seen, fits epic poetry, but it is worth noting that the philosopher uses general terms, without specifying any works or authors: throughout the Classical age the array of texts which were read at school and chosen by teachers was wider than we generally imagine. Homer and his two main poems were already given a primacy: Plato himself chooses him as the main target of his critics to the alleged educative role of poets in book 10 of his Republic (but mentioning also Hesiod and obscure figures as one Creophylos, "the friend of Homer");³⁴ and in 4th century Athens even a mere school teacher was supposed to haveapersonal copy of Homer's poems, as some interesting anecdotes seem to suggest: Alcibiades is said to have punched one of his teachers after discovering that he did not have a complete edition of the poems, and to have mocked another one, who claimed to have made a full diorthosis of the whole Iliad and Odyssey (Plut., Alc. 7).³⁵ But children were required to read and memorize verses from many other works too. The young in the Daphne's tomb – whatever his profession in life – was offered for resting in the afterlife

Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 1644.4, attributed to the Splanchnopt Painter; Beazley 1963, 892, no. 7; Beck 1975, nos. 101, 136, 273.

Cavallo/Chartier 1998, X-XVIII; Cavallo 2020, 20–22.

It is worthwhile to note that Robb 1994, in his detailed survey of sources on literate education in Classical Greece, reaffirms the key role of epic poetry, in Greek educative system, but considering a corpus of texts which did not comprise only the Iliad and the Odissey, as it is clear by the use of expressions as " 'Homer', or the great body of Greek epical verse" (160) or " 'Homer' and other epical figures" (161).

Plato, Resp. 10, 598e–601c (Hesiod is mentioned at 600d, and Creophylos at 600b). See at least Halliwell 1997, Giuliano 2000, and Collobert 2011, especially 49–61.

Del Corso 2010, 87–88.

a roll and a set of writing boards containing verses, presumably epic, which are surely not drawn from the Homeric poems.³⁶ And further confirmation comes from vascular paintings. Some ceramographers are so meticulous as to include a verse on the rolls they have painted, in the form of a miniature inscription, and in one case we even find a sort of book title.³⁷ Such inscriptions never come from the main Homeric poems, even when they refer to Trojan matters. So, in Douris' cup the teacher's roll has the inscription Μοῖσά μοι | ἀμφι Σκά|μανδρον ἐ|ῦρροον | ἄρχομ' ἀ|είδειν, which is clearly an incipit for a work related to the Trojan War, though different from the Iliad. [Fig. 4]³⁸

Fig. 4: Cup by Douris. Berlin, Antikensammlung, F 2285 (c) Berlin, Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

See the assessment of the (little) extant evidence in Karamanou 2019, 95–97.

Immerwahr 1964, 39–45; Gaunt 2014, 107–113.

I follow the text established by Sider 2010 (with full bibliography). The text of the inscription is problematic: apart from the orthographic faults, its syntax is so twisted that it can not be emended. Because of this, Sider 2010, 549–552 suggested an alternative explaination of the whole scene: in his view, the teacher is not attending a performance by the boy, but correcting his faulty homework, a reconstruction not far from Gallavotti 1979, 127–128. Relevant objections to Gallavotti's reconstruction (which can be valid also for the more recent one by Sider) can be read anyway in Palumbo Stracca 1994, 125 (quoting Havelock 1982, 201–202). Scholars do not agree also on the metrical interpretation of the inscription. Due to its evident dactylic nature, the verse is usually scanned as an hexameter (see e. g. Immerwahr 1964, 19), but Page 1962, no. 938 e prefers to consider it as melic, and Palumbo Stracca 1994, 126–128 does not exclude that it could be interpreted as the beginning of a citharody, and so as a 'lyric' hexameter.

In another one, surviving on a fragment from a 'school' cup painted by a follower of Douris, the Akestorides Painter, we read a reference to Herakles, his son Ioalus and his brothers, who were the main charcters of poems and mythological tales now lost, in their original shape, but surely without having a special place in the Iliad or the Odyssey. [Fig. 5]³⁹

Fig. 5: Fragment of cup by the Akestorides Painter; Getty Museum, 86.AE.324 (c) Courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

And when we suspect a reference to the Homeric diction, its recalling is quite vague. On one roll, depicted on a further cup with school scenes by the same Akestorides Painter, we read the inscription ΗΟΣΔΕ | ΜΟΙΚΑ | ΙΜΑΛΟ | ΝΕΠΕΣ.⁴⁰ Such words are clearly the first part of an hexameter, which has an 'Homeric' tone and could suggest a reminescence of e. g. Il. 9, 398 (ἔνθα δέ μοι μάλα πολλὸν ἐπέσσυτο θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ), as John Beazley supposed, but other recon-

Getty Museum, inv. 86.AE.324; Beazley 1963, 1670, no. 4bis. On the place of Herakles and Heracleidae in archaic Greek literature see at least Angeli Bernardini 2010, Koning 2017, 108–112, Barker/Christensen 2021.

Washington, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History 136373; Beazley 1948, 338 f.; Beazley 1963, 781, no. 4; Immerwahr 1964, 22, no. 7; Schwarz 1996, no. 49.

structions are equally possible: the painter did not seem to quote a specific verse, but rather he is allunding to a poetic manner which was based on a corpus of texts far greater than the extant one.⁴¹

Literary paideia, in the Classical age, was versatile and included, according to the definition of Luigi Enrico Rossi, an 'epic archipelago'⁴² which was not limited to the Homeric poems, and which in any case did not necessarily have Homer as its starting point. Only in later centuries did things change.

The idea that poetry had a key role in the Greek educational system endured far beyond the age of poleis. In the long proem to his work, Strabo reiterates such a claim, arguing with some of his predecessors, such as Eratosthenes, who preferred more empirical forms of knowledge. "Greek cities", we read at some point, "educate the young at the very beginning by means of poetry, not for the mere sake of entertainment, but for the sake of moral discipline" (1, 2, 3; transl. H. L. Jones, with minor changes).⁴³ Indeed, compared to what happened during the Classical age, the range of texts chosen to achieve this ethical goal was extremely small and conventional, and was mostly limited to the Homeric poems. Some ancient treatises justify such a choice as a natural and necessary consequence of the intrinsic characteristics of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Among the most enthusiastic supporters of the primacy of the two poems there are the authors of the biographic sketches of Homer wrongly attributed to Plutarch, but written roughly in his age (or anyway after the 2nd century AD).⁴⁴ They are works which were created for teaching purposes, and especially to offer an "introduction for those in the early stages of education" (transl. M. L. West).⁴⁵ We do not know if that text was read in any classroom, but it reflects the kind of knowledge and cultural coordinates which shaped grammarians' engagement with Homer. The underlying theoretical assumption is the natural and overwhelming superiority of Homer compared to any other figure within the Greek literary tradition. Because of this superiority, according to our author, it is essential to read the Homeric poems at school before any other text:

Ὅμηρον τὸν ποιητήν χρόνῳ μὲν τῶν πλείστων, δυνάμει δὲ πάντων πρῶτον γενόμενον εἰκότως ἀναγινώσκομεν πρῶτον, ὠφελούμενοι τὰ μέγιστα εἴς τε τὴν φωνὴν καὶ τὴν διάνοιαν

Lefkowitz 2012, 28.

The Homeric recalling is suggested in Beazley 1948, 339; discussion of the verse in Immerwahr 1964, 22, no. 7.

A metaphor which Rossi used in several occasion: e. g. Rossi 2020, 186–190 (together with another definition: epic poetry as a "spirale infinita") and 206–207 (see also Lulli 2014).

Strab. 1, 2, 3 αἱ τῶν Ἑλλήνων πόλεις πρώτιστα διὰ τῆς ποιητικῆς παιδεύουσιν, οὐ ψυχαγωγίας χάριν δήπουθεν ψιλῆς, ἀλλὰ σωφρονισμοῦ.

Plutarchi Vita I, 1 εἰσαγωγὴν τῶν ἀρχομένων παιδεύεσθαι.

καὶ τὴν τῶν πραγμάτων πολυπειρίαν. λέγωμεν δὲ περὶ τῆς τούτου ποιήσεως, πρότερον μνησθέντες διὰ βραχέων τοῦ γένους αὐτοῦ.

It is reasonable to first read the poet Homer, the foremost among many on account of his age and the best of all in terms of his expressive power, because in this way we can reap the greatest benefit to our eloquence, reasoning and knowledge of affairs (Plutarchi Vita II, 1).

Such statements reflect the arrangement of the scholastic curriculum for a period going from the beginning of the Imperial age to Late Antiquity. In this wide time frame the Homeric poems served as a landmark for all levels of education.Verses from the Iliad and the Odyssey, or even just lists of words or proper names from the poems, represented a good starting point for writing exercises for children who were just learning to write and read as much as for people who aspired to become scribes and needed to practice calligraphic scripts. For example, in MPER XVIII 238 (Cribiore 1996, no. 112) we see a list of names of deities and heroes from the Iliad written by a teacher as a model for his schoolboys. Another teacher model is a writing board in the British Museum with verses from the third book of the Iliad, which are written in such a way that the words and syllables are clearly distinguishable, to help children learn to read (T. Lond. Add. MS 33293; Cribiore 1996, no. 292). On a papyrus strip from Oxyrhynchus someone who was practicing calligraphic scripts (a student or a scribe) transcribed the first verse of the Iliad (P. Cairo inv. JdE 56225; Cribiore 1996, no. 132) twice. For centuries, generations of students sweated over such a verse. And as late as the 6th century, in the monastery of Epiphanius, it was copied – with other Homeric formulas – by scribes who were trained in professional scripts as the Byzantine cursive, as part of their training or just for pen trials. One limestone ostrakon, where it is repeatedly written, has indeed some remarkable features (P. Mon. Epiph. 611, with pl. XIV; Cribiore 1996, no. 168). On it, we see two different hands: one copies the Homeric verse three times, on the upper part; the second transcribes it once more, on the right part, but it adds also, on the lower part, a completely different text: a private letter in Coptic.⁴⁶ The ostrakon was clearly written in a bilingual milieu, where Greek and Coptic texts were used, and produced, together. In such context, Homer was one of the points of reference for anyone who was learning or practicing Greek, even so far from Greece. Similar texts have also been found in or around other Greek monasteries, such as those purchased or excavated by Flienders Petrie in Dendera and in other sites of the Theban region, comprising ostraka with pericopes of different length

Bucking 2007, 40–42.

from the Holy Scriptures, the Maxims attributed to Menander and finally Homer's Iliad. [Fig. 6]⁴⁷

Fig. 6: O. Petrie Mus. 31 (c) The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology UCL.

According to Cornelia Römer's suggestion, it is reasonable to imagine that such texts were written in an educational environment:⁴⁸ even if the Homeric poems did not ensure the salvation of one's soul, the faithful might have problems approaching the Holy Scriptures without them.

Pericopes from Psalms and and Epistles: O. Petrie Mus. 1, 3–12, 14–17; Homeric verses (mostly from the first book of the Iliad): O. Petrie Mus. 21–34; Menander's monostichoi: O. Petrie Mus. 36–49. Such ostraka, on palaeographic grounds, have been divided in two groups: the 'Group A', coming from the western part of the Theban area, and the 'Group B', probably found in Dendera. Lists of relevant tests, and full discussion of the problems related with their provenance, in Funghi/Martinelli 2003; Funghi/Martinelli 2008 and O. Petrie Mus. 3–7. See moreover the remarks in Lougovaya 2020, 120–121.

Römer 2003, 189–190; Römer 2008, 53–54; O. Petrie Mus. 6–7.

The centrality of Homer was more evident in the school of the grammatikos, the intermediate level.⁴⁹ Any grammatical explanations, any efforts to understand the language, figures of speech, and stylistic rules revolved around the poems. Names such as Priam and Hecuba are used as exempla to explain the rules of the first and second declensions in a small, 4th-century AD codex from Antinoupolis (PSI inv. 479);⁵⁰ in another one, probably written in the same century, we find a list of Aeolic forms of the name Achilles (PSI inv. Ant. 65–308 A/ 1).⁵¹ Grammarians devoted a large part of their time to reading and commenting on Homeric passages (we may remember the letter by the worried housewife in Oxyrhynchus), though the reading patterns they chose mostly focused on a limited number of books: according to extant papyri, in Greco-Egyptian schools the essential readings were the first six books of the Iliad (though others could be read as well), and books four and eleven of the Odyssey (the latter was probably chosen because it dealt with many characters also featured in the Iliad).⁵² The incredible number of copies of such texts, mostly produced by professional workshops, can partly be explained by their circulation in schools. Indeed, students were required to know the overall plot of the two works, including their mythical background and the narrative developments of the cycle (e. g. the death of Achilles, the fall of Troy, and the main nostoi). Papyri have preserved many textual tools which were especially conceived for the memorizing of such information:⁵³ prose synopses (hypotheseis) focused on a plain exposition of the fabula, such as P. Oxy. XLIV 3160 + Strasb. gr. 1401, where we read summaries of the first three books of Odyssey, each followed by a glossary;⁵⁴ or selections of stories about individual characters or episodes, as those attributed to the so-called Mythographus Homericus, which were introduced by Homeric verses (or parts of them):⁵⁵ see e. g. P. Oxy. XLII 3003 (2nd AD),⁵⁶ LXI 4096 (2nd AD),⁵⁷ or PSI X 1173 (beginning of the 3rd AD). [Fig. 7]⁵⁸

Cribiore 2001, 194–197. See also Morgan 1998, 75–78 and 105–114.

First edited in Zalateo 1940, 12–14; Cribiore 1996, no. 372; for the date and the palaeographical features of the fragment, see Del Corso 2015, 182–184.

Del Corso/Pintaudi 2017, 553–556.

Cribiore 2001, 194–197.

Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998, 53–74; Del Corso 2010, 97–101; Montanari 2012, 4–5.

Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998, 62–64, P39.

Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998, 85–118 (with discussion of some relevant papyri); Montanari 1995 and Montanari 2002.

Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998, 97, P52.

Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998, 98, P53.

Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998, 99, P56; for the date see Cavallo/Crisci/Messeri/Pintaudi 1998, no. 46 (Degni).

Fig. 7: PSI X 1173 (c) MiBAC, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

Some of these texts seem structurally linked to school routines. P. Oxy. LVI 3829 (end of the 2nd AD)⁵⁹ records genealogical information on some characters of the Iliad in the form of a 'catechism' ("Who are Hector's heralds? Idaeus and Eumedes"); after the 'catechism' we find a short narrative of the events leading up to the Trojan War and then another one, on the contents of the first book of the poem, introduced by its first verse. More generally, the 'bookish' study of Homer entailed the production of a large number of tools to aid readers: glossaries, advanced commentaries (hypomnemata), and shorter notes (scholia minora).⁶⁰ Some were intended to help the reader understand whole books, as in the case of P. Oxy. XXIV 2405 (2nd-3rd AD) and P. Oxy. LXXI 4818 (3rd AD) and, both of which are devoted to the first book of the Iliad; others were more akin to our own dictionaries, as in the case of the fragmentary PSI XVII 1669 (1st-2nd

Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998, 56–57, P30.

For a survey of extant material and a typological study see Raffaelli 1984; Lundon 2011; Montanari 2012, 10–15.

AD), where we find columns with Homeric words starting with eta, written on the back of a letter (possibly inserted in a tomos synkollesimos) [Fig. 8].

Fig. 8: PSI XVII 1669 (c) Istituto Papirologico "G. Vitelli", Università degli Studi di Firenze.

Such textual tools were surely useful to teachers and students, but they circulated even outside schools, as copies of them are often found in private 'libraries', collections of texts once belonging to individuals who were not involved in teaching. Just one example: Dioscorus – a notary who lived between Aphrodito and Antinoupolis in the age of Justinian, and who enjoyed writing enchomiastic poetry, with results that disappointed more than one historian of ancient Greek literature⁶¹ – had a good library which he inherited from his father, and which comprised at least works by Menander (he was the owner of the famous Cairo codex including the Samia, P. Cairo inv. JdE 43227),⁶² Eupolis (whose work, alas, survives only on a small scrap),⁶³ together with the Iliad (P. Aphrod. Lit. I) and a huge selection of scholia minora on the Iliad, written at least two centuries earlier (P. Aphrod. Lit. II).⁶⁴

A well-educated individual, or pepaideumenos, could not live without Homer or afford to lose the familiarity with Homeric poetry he had laboriously acquired during his studies. This was a rule not only for top members of the local elite, but also for individuals with an average or medium-low education, such as the soldier Strato or the dozens of unknown scribes who transcribed more or less correct Homeric verses on pottery sherds or strips of papyrus, or on other documents they had in their hands. Familiarity with the Iliad and the Odyssey was one of the pillars of a paideia which chiefly served as a means to define one's identity in a world where multilingualism was the norm, and civic structures were controlled by a remote absolute power that was difficult to reach, and often hostile.

It is not easy to find the starting point of this 'Homerization' of school culture. At the beginning of the Hellenistic age, school teachers still relied on a wide array of texts. In one of the few surviving teachers' handbooks, the socalled Livre d'écolier, written in the second half of the 3rd century BC, the anthology of passages to be used with students comprises only a short section of Odyssey book 5, together with verses from Euripides, Cratinus and Strato, and some epigrams by unknown authors.⁶⁵ More Homer crops us in the 2nd-1st centuries BC, when we find some of the earliest reading tools for the poems, possibly written for school purposes. One of the most ancient is a school 'anthology' now in Freiburg (P. Freib. 1b), written on the recto and verso of an erased document: in the last columns of the verso there are short pericopes, where comic trimeters by unknown author(s) follow a quote from the Contest of Homer and Hesiod and

On the place of Dioscorus in the developing of Greek literature during Late Antiquity see Agosti 2008.

Lefebvre 1907; Koenen et al. 1978.

Austin 1973, no. 92. The fragment is stored together with the extant leaves of the Menander codex and shares the same inventory number, JdE 43227; indeed, it came from a different codex, as confirmed by Fournet 1999, 670, though the idea that Eupolis was copied in the same manuscript as Menander is still widely accepted: see e. g. Gagos/van Minnen 1994, 20, and the description of the papyrus in the Trismegistos database, no. 61596).

Fournet 1999, 669–683; Fournet 2015.

P. Cairo inv. JdE 65455; Cribiore 1996, no. 379; Pordomingo 2010, 40–50, and Pordomingo 2013, 191–204, no. 28; Meccariello 2020.

some verses from Iliad 5; on the other side, an Homeric glossary was added (P. Freib. 1c).⁶⁶

We cannot exclude that the production of such tools and the focus of grammatical teaching on the Homeric texts was a consequence of the predominance of the Alexandrian approach to education, i.e. of the idea that the educational system must be centered on a 'scientific' and therefore grammatical study of texts. The various steps in the transmission of grammatike from the Alexandrian turris eburnea, where it was theorized, to all corners of the Hellenized world are yet to be reconstructed: we can only imagine that the diaspora of Alexandrian grammarians and intellectuals under Ptolemy VIII Physkon played a role,⁶⁷ although the process must already have been underway; later it was further pursued by generations of anonymous teachers, who were able to turn a specialist form of knowledge into a practical tool, which was to provide the foundations for Western culture for centuries to come.⁶⁸ Homer was one of the best means to this end.

Yet, the oral dimension was still active, especially in schools, even after such revolution in terms of cultural points of reference and despite the essential role of books.

We know that practicing one's memory was an important activity in ancient schools. Students probably learned most of the word lists – and of the tables of declensions and inflections – recorded on surviving papyri by heart; and many of them were full of Homeric words. At the same time, it is most probable that the practice of memorizing long Homeric pericopes continued. Though the extant sources are not explicit about this point, a hint is provided by some ostraka engraved with a series of incipits of Homeric verses: this is the case with two ostraka of unknown provenance now in Oxford, O. Bodl. II 2170 (Cribiore 1996, no. 193) and II 2169 (Cribiore 1996, no. 201), both of which record the beginning of verses from Iliad book 2, and with a tiny papyrus strip, P. Ryl. III 545, where the first syllables of part of Odyssey book 9 can be read (Cribiore 1996, no. 291). The many phonetic errors suggest that the verses were not copied, and the shortness of the sequences is not compatible with a dictation. Probably they were draft notes, written during the memorization process, as an aid or a way to check one's memory. We do not know whether the memorization of the verses was followed by their recitation in performances of the sort illustrated on Clas-

Cribiore 1996, no. 248; Pordomingo 2013, 205–208, no. 29; Bassino 2019, 77–79 (on the Certamen).

Schironi 2019, 17

Del Corso 2012; Montana 2015, especially 143–183.

sical vase paintings. In any case, from the Hellenistic age onward reading aloud was meant to include performative elements, according to grammarians' precepts: we may find clear instructions in this regard in the opening section of the Ars by Dionysius Thrax, who notes that prose and poetry must be read by "taking care of declamation, of prosody and of textual sections", while epic also had to be recited "with energy" (Dion., Ars 2).⁶⁹

Such training was bound to make at least a little Homer take root in the souls of anyone who took even just the first steps along the path of grammatical studies.

What seems to disappear after the Classical age is the key role of epos in school competitions. Starting in the Hellenistic age, as we know mostly from epigraphic and literary sources, the tradition of scholastic agones was redefined in a more systematic way. During the Hellenistic period it was mostly associated with specific forms of evergetism, designed to allow large sections of the population to achieve some literary education, as we know thanks to inscriptions coming from different parts of the Hellenized world;⁷⁰ and in the Roman age there were competitions among paides or epheboi, connected also with the functioning of the gymnasia.⁷¹

As we may see from encomiastic inscriptions scattered across different regions of the Greek speaking world and spanning several centuries, in such agons musical and poetical competitions played a relevant role, but there was not a distinctive place for Homeric poetry. In school competitions, the status that once belonged to epos was now assigned to other genres: Hellenistic catalogues insist on musically oriented performances, such as kitharodia or the recitation of passages from comedies or tragedies (see e.g. CIG 3088, from Teos),⁷² and later, during the Roman age, together with music, rhetoric achieved a special position, especially

Rispoli 1991; Cavallo 1998, 45–52; Del Corso 2005, 21–30.

D'Amore 2006; Del Corso 2007; Scholtz 2007.

D'Amore 2015.

Extant evidence is surveyed in Del Corso 2007, 162–176. The most detailed catalogue is CIG 3088, from Teos, which lists the subjects which were part of the annual apodeixis (a public performance, where the best students were awarded): for paides it refers to ἀνάγνωσις (reading), καλλιγραφία (calligraphy), μελογραφία and ῥυθμογραφία (both related to the study of musical notations), as well as the performance of passages from comedies and tragedies and the study of κιθαρίς; older boys moreover had to show their proficeincy also in drawing and in the performance of other literary genres, indicated with the obscure word ὑποβολή (possibly related to rhetoric, as suggested in Del Corso 2007, 173–174). In extant catalogues the evidence for students performing epic in public agons is quite limited: anyway, one inscription from Chios (CIG 2214) mentions the ῥαψωδία, which clearly refers to the perfomance of epic poems (Del Corso 2007, 175).

in its simplified form as progymnasmata (the most popular activity being also one of the most basic, namely the composition of prose or verse encomia).⁷³

Public performances of Homeric verses are nonetheless attested until a rather late age. At Delphi and in Boiotia professional rhapsodes continued to engage in poetic duels from the 3rd century BC to the beginning of the Imperial age;⁷⁴ during the reign of Antoninus Pius, one Rhodios, "poet of countless victories" (πλειστονίκης), and one of the leaders of the worldwide guild of Dionysian technitai, was honoured in Ephesos with an onorary decree, where he is called μελοποιός and rhapsode of the Divus Hadrian (IK Eph. I 22). However, schoolboys were not required to learn such ways of performing epic poetry: Homer was the beginning of the curriculum, but the point of arrival was rhetoric, the skill of giving words and concepts the right and most correct form, by using either poetry or prose. Epos still stood as an essential background, marked by the peculiar convergence of book culture and oral culture. Hence, despite the monotony of the school routine, for centuries epic endured as an unparalleled reservoir of poetic dreams, useful for people who were proud of their Greek heritage, but who for the most part had never caught as much as a glimpse of the coastline of Greece.

### References

Agosti, G. (2008), "Il ruolo di Dioscoro nella storia della poeisa tardoantica", in: J.-L. Fournet / C. Magdelaine (eds.), Les archives de Dioscore d'Aphrodité cent ans après leur découverte. Actes du colloque de Strasbourg (8–10 décembre 2005), Paris, 33–54.

Alexopolou, A. / Kaminari, A.-A. (2013), "Multispectral Imaging Documentation of the Findings of Tomb I and II at Daphne" in: Greek and Roman Musical Studies 1, 25–60.

Relevant epigraphic evidence collected in Pernot 1993, 84–89; the typical competitions in musical agones are well discussed in Wörrle 1988, 227–258, focused on the specific case of the Demostheneia,afestival held in Oenoanda and founded in early 2nd century AD. On the practice of progymnasmata in Roman schools see, in general, Webb 2001, Stramaglia 2010, Longo 2020, Fernández Delgado/Pordomingo 2020.

At Delphi the programme of the competitions held during the 'Aitolic' Soteria, the festival reorganized by the Aitolians after the defeat of the Galatians led by Brennus in 279 BC (see Nachtergael 1977; Champion 1995; Della Bona 2017, 42–43), included regularly performances by rhapsodes: see e. g. FD III, 4, 127 (around 226 BC) and 128 (around 223 BC). The activity of rhapsodes in Boiotian festivals is attested in inscriptions ranging from the 1st century BC (IG VII 416, from Oropos) to the 2nd AD (IG VII 4151, from Akraiphia); see Manieri 2009, 243–245, no. Oro. 16, and 123–125, no. Acr. 22.

Del Corso, L. (2005), La lettura nel mondo ellenistico, Rome.

Giuliano, F. M. (2000), "Filosofia versus poesia: Platone davanti a un'antica disputa", in: G. Arrighetti (ed., in collaboration with M. Tulli), Letteratura e riflessione sulla letteratura nella cultura classica, Pisa, 377–400.

Greek Art of the Aegean Islands. An Exhibition Sponsored by the Government of the Republic of Greece Complemented by a Loan from the Musée du Louvre at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 1, 1979 – February 10, 1980, New York.

Griffith, M. (2001), "Public and Private in Early Greek Institutions", in: Y. Lee Too (ed.), Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity, Leiden – Boston – Köln, 23–84.

Halliwell, S. (1997), "The Republic's Two Critiques of Poetry (Book II 376c-III 398b, Book X 595a-608b)" in: O. Höffe (ed.), Platon, Politeia, Berlin, 313–332.

Harris, W. V. (1989), Ancient Literacy, Cambridge, Mass. – London.

Havelock, E. A. (1982), The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences, Princeton.

Immerwahr, H. R. (1964), "Book Rolls on Attic Vases", in: C. Henderson Jr. (ed.), Classical Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honor of Berthold Louis Ullman, I, Rome, 17–48.

Karamanou, I. (2016), "The Papyrus from the 'Musician's Tomb' in Daphne (ΜΠ 7449, 8517–8523)" in: Greek and Roman Musical Studies 4, 51–70.

Karamanou, I. (2019), "The Earliest Known Greek Papyrus (Piraeus Museum, ΜΠ 7449, 8517–8523): Text and Contexts" in: A. Nodar / S. Torallas Tovar (eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Congress of Papyrology. Barcelona 1–6 August 2016, Barcelona, 93–104.

Karouzou, S. (1968), Musée archéologique national. Collection des sculptures: catalogue descriptif, Athens.

Lewis, N. (1974), Papyrus in Classical Antiquity, Oxford.

Lygouri-Tolia, E. (2014), "Two Burials of 430 B.C. in Daphne, Athens: Their Topography, and the Profession of the So-Called 'Poet' in Tomb 2", in: Greek and Roman Musical Studies, 2, 3–22.

Longo, G. (2020), "An Approach to Greek and Latin Handbooks on Declamation", in: Segno e testo 18, 57–87.

Lougovaya, J. (2020), "Using Literary Ostraca Revisited", in: C. Caputo / J. Lougovaya (eds.), Using Ostraca in the Ancient World, Berlin – Boston, 109–141.

Lulli, L. (2014), "Local Epics and Epic Cycles: the Anomalous Case of a Submerged Genre", in: G. Colesanti / M. Giordano (eds.), Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture. An Introduction, Berlin – Boston, 76–89.

Lundon, J. (2011), "Homeric Commentaries on Papyrus: A Survey", in: S. Matthaios / F. Montanari / A. Rengakos (eds.), Ancient Scholarship and Grammar. Archetypes, Concepts and Contexts, Berlin – New York, 159–179.

Manieri, A. (2009), Agoni poetico-musicali nella Grecia antica, 1, Beozia, Pisa – Rome.

Meccariello, C. (2020), "The Fountain of Arsinoe in Supplementum Hellenisticum 758", in: Segno e testo 18, 1–16.

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Terzes, Chr. (2013), "The Daphne Harp", in: Greek and Roman Musical Studies 1, 123–149.

### Livio Sbardella Muses and Teachers: Poets' Apprenticeship in the Greek Epic Tradition

Abstract: The Greek epic tradition, starting from the Homeric poems and those of the corpus Hesiodeum, often speaks of itself by referring to singers (aoidoi), but very little information is provided about how the singers learned their art. The main explanation for the phenomenon lies in the principle of poetry's authoritativeness, which is a crucial one for all oral traditions and is especially ensured by the relationship between the poetic message and the divine sphere. But, upon closer scrutiny, certain pieces of information emerge when we read between the lines of some of the main, well-known passages in which the Greek poetic – and particularly epic – tradition speaks of its origins and its first mythical or legendary representations. And these pieces of information bring light both on the evolution of the cognitive processes of the singers and on the growth of Greek epic tradition.

Keywords: Greek epic poetry; singers; apprenticeship; cognitive processes.

### 1 An 'Opaque' Tradition

The Greek epic tradition, starting from the Homeric poems and those of the corpus Hesiodeum, often speaks of itself by referring to singers (aoidoi), i.e. poets, who are certainly portrayed in mythical terms, yet reflect real features and historical developments within this tradition. Much is said about the contents of their songs, their modes of performance, their social prestige, and their relationship with the public; by contrast, very little information is provided about how they learned their art: the tradition is largely reticent, or at any rate 'opaque', when it comes to this particular detail. This becomes even more evident when we compare Greek culture with other ancient, medieval, and modern oral cultures, which seem to display greater transparency concerning apprenticeship into the art of song or storytelling.

To consider only some examples, in ancient India the Brahmins – the custodians of the Vedic texts' tradition, which for centuries remained exclusively oral – were structured as a priestly caste who officiated rites and were responsible for places of worship. Divided by villages, towns, and cities on a hereditary basis, they employed mechanisms for the transmission of knowledge that were not divulged but were socially acknowledged. In the Middle Ages, among the

OpenAccess. © 2022 Livio Sbardella, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110751987-010

Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, scops or skalds, who were in charge of their oral heritage of epic-eulogistic poems, formed an elite selected by the sovereigns and explicitly entrusted with the transmission and performance of such poems. Among the Gaelic-speaking peoples, the Scottish bardd and Irish fili were organised into guild-like family groups that, from generation to generation, passed down a hereditary form of apprenticeship in their poetic tradition and lore that is explicitly described in the sources. In the modern age, comparative studies on oral traditions around the world have shown that, for certain peoples in Central Asia and Africa, the art of oral poetry is connected to explicit or even vaunted processes of apprenticeship: among the manaschi of Kyrgyzstan, the best reciters, while claiming to have discovered a 'vocation' for poetry (often through dream apparitions or other signs), usually recall the name of their "great manaschi", which is to say the teacher who first introduced them to the art of epic song through long sessions of reciting Manas. Finally, the griots of Senegal train in genuine schools or poets' associations that are set up on a family basis, hierarchically organised, and officially recognised.¹

The reticence or opacity of Greek culture when it comes to apprenticeship in the art of oral poetry is not limited to the epic tradition, but also applies to lyric poetry, although in this case it is necessary to take account of the fact that the texts have mostly reached us in a fragmentary form. In direct or indirect accounts about lyric poetry and its performers, no mention is ever made of the way in which this skill was acquired. It is only in the 5th century BC, which is to say well into the Classical Age, that we find a choral lyric poet, Bacchylides, acknowledging that poets have always learned their art from someone (fr. 5 Maehler). However, it is significant that a contemporary of his, Pindar, possibly engaging in a polemic with Bacchylides himself and with the latter's uncle Simonides, insists in claiming that his poetic wisdom does not stem from anything he has learned, but comes naturally to him, and that apprenticeship is typical of mediocre poets (Olympian 2, 86–87).²

For this comparative information on oral poetry traditions and the extensive bibliography on the topic, I will refer to my succinct overview in Sbardella 2006, especially 12–16, 83–87, 109– 119, along with Knipe 2005 on the Brahmins' social organisation in ancient India, and van der Heide 2008 on the Manas and manaschi tradition in Kyrgyzstan; many other useful references on modern oral cultures around the world, in addition to the few provided here purely for the sake of example, may be found in Finnegan 1992 and – specifically on Central Asia and Africa – in Reichl 2000 and Okpewho 1992.

On the much-debated interpretation of this passage in Pindar and the subjects involved in his polemic, I will refer to Catenacci 2013 in Gentili et al. 2013, 51–53 and 410 ad vv. 86–88.

However, there is one piece of evidence that makes this element even more relevant with respect to the epic tradition. The names of great singers transmitted by the Greek epic tradition – from Thamyris to Demodocus and Phemius, from Homer to Hesiod – are all speaking names attributed to figures who, as already noted, belong to the realm of myth or legend. This attests to the fact that, on the one hand, the tradition in question developed over the centuries through generations of completely anonymous poets and, on the other, gradually emerged out of this anonymity by devising representative figures to whom it assigned symbolically charged names:³ Φήμιος, from the root phem-/pham- of the verb φημί and of nouns such as φήμη and φῆμις, is clearly connected both to the poet's speaking and recounting and to the social standing the poet acquired through this activity; Δημόδοκος alluded to the respect shown by the whole people, as well as by the aristocratic elite, towards the authoritative figure of the poet; Θάμυρις and Ὅμηρος, both of which derive from etyma related to public gatherings, bear witness to the epic singers' activity and to their large audience on public festive occasions, directly so in the former case and indirectly in the latter, via the collective term Ὁμηρίδαι; Ἡσίοδος probably comes from the root of the verb ἵημι, "to emit", and αὐδή, "voice, word", which gives us hesi-wodos, "he who emits the voice or word" – a way of describing the poet's ability to lend vocal expression to the lore transmitted by the epic tales.

Why, then, did a tradition that sought to throw light on itself through the creation of prestigious and authoritative figures who could be credited with its origins not also care to explain how these epic singers were trained and learned their art? The main explanation for the phenomenon, albeit probably not the only one, lies in the principle of poetry's authoritativeness, which is a crucial one for all oral traditions and is especially ensured by the relationship between the poetic message and the divine sphere. Although a significant research strand traces the origins of the Greek poetic tradition back to the great cradle of the Indo-European peoples,⁴ there is a significant difference between Greek culture and the other ancient cultures that had the same ethnic and linguistic origin: from its very dawn, it stood out as a more 'secular' culture which did not include a clergy, such as a priestly class comparable to the Brahmins of Aryan India, the

Here I will only refer to part of the extensive and consolidated bibliography on the topic: Durante 1976, 186–203; Càssola 1991, XXIX-XXXV; West 1999, 374–376; Nagy 2009, 287–288; Sbardella 2012, 18–20.

Among the most important contributions on the topic, I will recall in particular the monographs by Durante 1976 and Watkins 1995.

Iranian Magi, the Roman flamines, or the Celtic druids.⁵ The presence ofaclergy, who in some of these cultures were also entrusted with the execution and transmission of a significant part of the traditional poetic heritage, ensured the authoritativeness of poetry by connecting it to a body of lore and skills whose custodians were closely and publicly associated with the divine sphere. This was not the case in Greek society, where no one could boast of enjoying a stable and constant relationship with the divine sphere. In the Greek world, poets could only conceive of a relationship with the divine which constituted the best assurance of their poetry's authoritativeness in terms of a temporary encounter that lent them – and other similar figures (such as the mantis and the chresmologos) – a role as intermediaries between the divine realm and the human one. The divine agent which brought this contact about was the Muse (Μοῦσα, from the same root ment-/mont- as the Latin mens), a supernatural projection of the social group's collective "memory" to which the poetic message was addressed; and this message was believed to pass from the divine to the human sphere through the poet's physical mediation.⁶ Consequently, within this framework the process of teaching/apprenticeship in the art of poetry in its articulate, fully human dimension represented a complicating factor that had to be either glossed over completely or left in the background by emphasising the idea of poetry's divine origin – the only guarantee of the poetic message's authoritativeness. This explains the information's opacity.

### 2 Reading Between the Lines

Upon closer scrutiny, certain pieces of information emerge when we read between the lines of some of the main, widely studied passages in which the

Evidence of priestly figures with exclusive roles does not emerge from either Linear-B tablets or Mycenaean Age iconography, and in 2nd-millennium BC Greek society there was no clear-cut distribution between civil, religious, and military functions (see Adrados 1992, 101–102 and 110–115). Even after the later developments in Greek civilisation, as attested from the Homeric poems onwards, the ἱερεύς, -εια was a performer of rituals and custodian of places of worship that in many cases was quite replaceable, through the transfer of his/her priestly functions to other figures. Burkert 1985, 95 concludes that "Greek religion might almost be called a religion without priests: there is no priestly caste as a closed group with fixed tradition, education, initiation, and hierarchy".

The compelling sociological definition of the Muse as a divine representation of the social control exercised over the poet (see Svenbro 1984, 34–48) also helps define the complex mechanism for legitimating the authoritativeness of poetry that connected the poet, as an intermediary, to the two spheres: that of the (divine) origin of poetry and that of its (social) destination.

Greek poetic – and particularly epic – tradition speaks of its origins and first mythical or legendary representatives.⁷ These are mostly implicit elements which nonetheless help outline a picture – however summary and patchy it may be – of the learning and apprenticeship processes in which epic singers were involved.

#### Iliad 2, 594–600: Thamyris Challenges the Muses

This passage provides a composite view of the art of oral poetry. The punishment which the Muses inflict on the Thracian singer, and which is both physical (blindness) and intended to deprive him of his art (παῦσαν ἀοιδής […] ἀοιδὴν / θεσπεσίην ἀφέλοντο καὶ ἐκλέλαθον κιθαριστύν), is still strongly connected to the basic idea that poetry belongs to the divine sphere – that it is not something independently owned by the poet. However, the challenge which Thamyris throws at the Muses reveals the poet's pride in his own creative ability (the verb εὔχομαι at v. 597 implies the concept of bragging), which entails an awareness that his poetic skills do not depend on the gods but were independently acquired by him.⁸ Moreover, Thamyris is described as a wandering poet, who – unlike other Homeric figures (Phemius, Demodocus) – is not engaged in a stable relationship with a local aristocratic elite; hence, he has no need for a specific social group to see recognised the authoritativeness of his poetry, and this enables him to 'carry' his own poetic skill as a technical possession that is not bound to exclusive social relationships.⁹ What begins to emerge here is the idea that there is an entirely human level of the oral poetic art's apprenticeship, even though it still powerfully contrasts with the ancient view of the poet as an intermediary who is subjected to divine power. The training/apprenticeship process is only adumbrated, without specifying how it actually occurs.

For an overall analysis of the most important passages with reference to the poetic tradition of the Archaic and Classical ages as a whole, see the still useful volume Lanata 1963; for a more specific analysis of Homeric epic, see Grandolini 1996, but see also Brillante 2009.

Svenbro 1984, 48–49 detects in Thamyris a form of dependence on the divine sphere which, unlike in the cases of Phemius and Demodocus, manifests itself through the dynamics not of submission, but of protest. While Svenbro does not develop this point any further, protest or rebellion is always associated with some form of self-awareness and claim to independence, for otherwise it would remain unaccounted for.

Significantly, the only other Homeric passage to mention itinerant singers (Od. 17, 382–385) includes them – along with other figures (the soothsayer, the healer, the carpenter) – in the category of δημιοεργοί, which is to say of craftsmen specialising in a techne.

### Odyssey 22, 330–349 and 8, 487–488: Phemius, the Son of Terpis, and Demodocus, a God's Pupil

This passage isacomplex one, although its development is well-known. The court singer on Ithaca fears that he will fall victim to Odysseus' violent revenge like the Suitors who have just been massacred, since he is guilty of having sung for them during the hero's absence. He thus turns to Odysseus and begs him to spare his life with two arguments: he was forced to perform for the Suitors against his will, and he is the custodian of a skill, the art of poetry, which would be lost with his death. The idea of the loss of the poetic ability, which would cease to exist upon the physical extinction of he who possesses it, seems to imply that this skill cannot be transferred via teaching/apprenticeship; and this point is developed further through the claim θεὸς δέ μοι ἐν φρεσὶν οἴμας / παντοίας ἐνέφυσεν, which describes poetic inspiration as the material transfer of the "paths of song" from the divine to the human sphere. And yet, the contextual use of the debated term αὐτοδίδακτος leaves no doubt as to the fact that the skill in the art of song that Phemius boasts about also includes an aspect related to teaching/apprenticeship. This component can partly be understood as a spontaneous drive towards the art of song,¹⁰ but partly also to mean that the epic singer has learned the art on his own, which is to say as the sole custodian of the teaching received (in accordance with the meaning of the prefix αὐτο-, which expresses exclusiveness), in a context in which the singer alludes to a training phase in addition to divine inspiration.¹¹ Indeed, an element that is usually overlooked in the passage's overall interpretation is that Phemius' name is mentioned in an opening, and hence emphatic, position through the speaking patronymic Τερπιάδης (v. 330), i.e. "son of Terpis (i.e. "pleasure, charm" from the verb τέρπω)": this may implicitly indicate the hereditariness of the talent of bringing pleasure to, or charming, others via song that was already possessed by his father, and which to some extent he has learned. If this interpretation is

This is the view of Lazzeroni 1994, according to whom the attributing to the poet of a natural capacity to learn and his representation as a seer and an intermediary between men and gods constitutes a link with the ancient roots of Indo-European poetry.

In this respect, the interpretation provided by Russo 2007, 191 ad vv. 347–348, is essentially correct, as within the singer's speech it draws a distinction between the technique of song and its narrative content: "il δέ (al v. 347 αὐτοδίδακτος δ᾽ εἰμί, θεὸς δέ μοι ἐν φρεσὶν οἴμας / παντοίας ἐνέφυσεν) pare connettivo piuttosto che avversativo in quanto Femio descrive due aspetti (o fonti) dell'abilità poetica complementari tra loro: αὐτοδίδακτος allude alla fase in cui l'aedo acquisisce consapevolmente le proprie capacità e la padronanza delle tecniche verbali, ritmiche e musicali che gli consentono di esibirsi con successo nella recitazione, οἴμας / παντοίας ἐνέφυσεν si riferisce ai vari racconti presenti nel patrimonio tradizionale".

correct, then in this case, too, the passage does not present an unambiguous conception of the art of song's acquisition; rather, like the previous passage, it displays an attempt – which is taken further here – to combine two different conceptions: one entails an educational aspect, which it identifies with initiation in a family context according to an individual and genetic system of the art's transmission from father to son or from one relative to another, which was typical of many oral cultures. Phemius therefore positively stands out in Odysseus' eyes for three good reasons: because he has shown a natural propensity for the art of oral poetry; because he was born into the trade and inherited/learned an exclusive skill from his father; and because he has gained inspiration for the narrative contents of his art from a god.

In the Odyssey, the verb διδάσκω is also used with reference to the poet's skills when, in Book 8, before 'provoking' Demodocus into improvising on a theme he has chosen, Odysseus praises his skill by stating that Apollo or the Muse herself instructed him, ἐδίδαξε (vv. 487–498); in the same context, the verb is used shortly before as well, again by Odysseus, in relation to all singers, to whom the Muse οἴμας […] ἐδίδαξε (vv. 480 –481). A detail seems to reveal that here, too, the verb is not used with the generic meaning "to inspire", but rather alludes to the actual teaching/apprenticeship process which characterised the actual training of poets, while transposing it onto the level of the relationship between a human subject (who learns) and a divine one (who teaches): this is the only case in Homeric poetry where the male figure of Apollo is introduced as an alternative to the female one of the Muse.¹² This might be an allusive feature intended to create a greater adherence to the reality of poets' most ancient form of training, which must have occurred through an exclusively male relationship, between a father and his son (as in Phemius' case), or at any rate between a teacher and his pupil.

#### Hesiod, Theogony 22–28: the Singer Learns from the Muses

Here, in the proem to Hesiod's Theogony, the didactic component which manifests itself through the teaching/apprenticeship dynamic, is made fully explicit: at vv. 22–23, the verb ἐδίδαξαν, if taken in its primary semantic meaning of "(they) taught", expresses a process of transmitting the art of song from the Muses to the poet, which enabled a mere shepherd to acquire poetic skills through a genuine form of apprenticeship. The communis opinio according to

See also the commentary in Hainsworth 2007, 299 ff. ad loc.

which the verb proleptically alludes to the episode of a single epiphany from the goddesses to the poet, in the context of which they "inspired" his song, is probably the result of a textual stratification that only at a later stage led to the creation of a single scene with a single human subject (Hesiod) via the conflation of two different scenes, with two different human subjects:¹³ the legendary singer (Hesiod), who in the past learned poetry from the Muses (vv. 22–23), and the rhapsode, who in the present is continuing this poetic tradition and on whom the Muses have bestowed the trade's attributes (vv. 24–34).¹⁴ The second highly noteworthy element is the collegiality of the Muses, who teach Hesiod the art of song as a group. Apprenticeship here starts to take the form not of a 'one-to-one' relationship, but of one within a group: on a purely human level, the neophyte who learns the art of song does so by being in touch with a group of expert singers, each of whom can impart specific skills to him. In this case too, the transposition of the process onto the divine level (the Muses themselves as teachers) represents a way of anchoring the narrative in the more ancient conception of poetry's divine origins; by now, however, the process of apprenticeship and training has more explicitly become part of the representation that the epic tradition offers of itself.

### Hesiod, Erga 650–659: the Competition between Local Poetic Traditions

As we have seen, Hesiodic epic bears witness, in a mythical form, to the process of apprenticeship within organised groups of singers. However, it also presents evidence of contact between different local poetic traditions. In the passage from the Erga in question, the anonymous singer, who represents the epichoric tradition of Hesiodic poetry in Boeotia, states that he voyaged to nearby Euboea to take part in an agon to celebrate the institution of a local aristocrat's (Amphidamas) heroic cult. The precise relationship which this passage establishes with the verses from the Theogony's proem previously analysed is evident, as it mentions Mount Helicon as the place in which the poet was initiated into the art of song by the Muses, and where he returns in order to dedicate the material outcome of his victory in the poetic duel to the goddesses. However, no mention is

Even West 1966, 161 ad v. 22, who still interprets vv. 22–23 as standing in continuity with the following scene describing the Muses' epiphany to Hesiod (vv. 24–34), is forced to admit that "perhaps Hesiod is here thinking not of a single epiphany but of a period of practice".

As regards this interpretation of the passage and the elements supporting it, I will refer to Sbardella 2016a, which also provides an overview of the extensive bibliography on the topic.

made of Hesiod, as the aim is merely to implicitly recall his authoritative figure.¹⁵ The text does not explicitly state whom the Boeotian singer met in the agon, but the significant allusion to the Trojan epic cycle's themes (the Achaeans' departure from Aulis) points to a context in which epic tales on such subjects were also recited.¹⁶ What is described, in any case, is a direct engagement between the representatives of different epichoric epic traditions in which the Boeotian poet proves his excellence, but also listens to other "paths of song" (οἴμαι), which is to say other epic tales and other ways of expressing them. By this stage, the learning of this art and the development of the epic tradition no longer occurs exclusively within epichoric poetic groups, but also through mutual contacts between such groups.

#### Pindar, Isthmian 4, 37–42: Homer's 'School'

In Isthmian 5, the lyric poet recalls Ajax's suicide, caused by a competition over the possession of Achilles' weapons. In the verses in question, Pindar then argues that Homer honoured the hero's memory by teaching posterity (λοιποί) to sing his virtue κατὰ ῥάβδον, "according to the sequence of the rhapsode's staff". As I have already suggested elsewhere, the λοιποί whom Homer teaches to sing Ajax's glory should be identified as the rhapsodes of the later epic tradition: more specifically, the Homerids of Chios, who claimed to be his direct "descendants".¹⁷ The passage therefore presents the Homerids' organisation as a genuine school for rhapsodes that was emerging in the late Archaic Age (late

In other words, I believe that this passage and others in Hesiod's poetry (Theogony and Erga) are to be interpreted not as providing real biographical data connected to Hesiod's name, but rather as different stages in the construction of a pseudo-biography by the rhapsodic tradition that looked back to this prestigious name (see Sbardella 2016a and Sbardella 2016b).

As rightly noted by Ercolani 2010, 376 ad vv. 651–653, "la menzione di Aulide richiama il collegamento con il racconto della guerra di Troia". The idea of an engagement with Homer is only a later tradition that can be traced back to the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, which according to some scholars was inspired precisely by this passage from the Erga (with regard to the whole issue, I will only refer to West 1978, 319 ad vv. 650–652); however, this tradition is translating in pseudo-biographical terms – associated with Homer and Hesiod – an engagement between Ionic and Boeotian singers that really did occur and which probably found in late-8th and early-7th-century BC Euboea one of its most important settings (according to a research strand inaugurated by West 1988 and highly influenced by archaeological finds at Lefkandi, Euboea – with its local hero cults – was already one of the major centres for the Homeric epic tradition's development in the Dark Ages).

See Sbardella 2007, 84–85 and Sbardella 2012, 241.

6 th-early 5th century BC), as is also confirmed by other sources.¹⁸ In the context of this school, which traced its origins back to a mythical teacher and forebear, the latter was regarded as the source of both the repertoire of songs performed and of the technique used for their performance: the image projected is that of a multiplicity of poets who learned their art from a single, prestigious figure. In reality, each new rhapsode would learn his trade from many different expert poets according to a system of training within a group that – as we have seen – already emerges from earlier sources, although by this period the group tended to represent and credit itself as a genuine school.

All in all, the picture that emerges from a reassessment of this range of testimonies may be outlined as follows. From its origins, the Greek poetic tradition provides some information – which is never explicitly formulated, but only conveyed through various degrees of allusiveness – about epic singers' training. The elements which emerge, not least by considering the relative chronology of these testimonies, would appear to fall within a specific line of development. Originally, a process of individual apprenticeship was in place based on a relationship between a teacher and his pupil, particularly within the same family (fatherson, relative-relative). This process is retrospectively represented in Homeric epic with reference to the earliest phase of the tradition, which in all likelihood can be traced as far back as the 2nd millennium, when the stable bond between certain poets and noble courts must have favoured a largely 'closed' transmission of poetic skills, insofar as this ensured a socially privileged status. This stage was followed by a more complex form of apprenticeship within a group, which probably became established in the period between the Hellenic Dark Ages and the early Archaic Age, when the loss of stable relations between poets and aristocratic courts brought about more open social conditions for the transmission of the art of song. Finally, no earlier than the 6th century BC, some of these groups were organised into genuine schools.

### 3 Formulaic Diction, the Epic Repertoire, and Cognitive Processes

How does all this fit with what we know about the processes of the Greek epic tradition's development? One important research strand which flourished in the second half of the 20th century has shown that the origins of this tradition,

For an overview and detailed discussion of these sources – the most notable being the scholia to vv. 1 ff. of Pindar's Nemean 2 (III, 29–31 Drachmann) – see Sbardella 2012, 5–63, 253–257.

which was already consolidated in terms of its mythical themes and metrical and expressive structures, can be traced back to the Mycenaean Age during a continental phase in the 2nd millennium.¹⁹ In terms of epic diction's linguistic features, this phase was characterised by the coexistence of Mycenaean and the Aeolic dialect or, according to other scholars, by the use of an Achaean dialect understood as a mixture of epichoric tongues from the Peloponnesian area. In addition to Mycenaean, this also included Arcadian, and then Aeolic was superimposed on it in the Sub-Mycenaean period (c. 1200 –1100 BC).²⁰ As a consequence of the colonisation of Asia Minor's coastal area over the course of the Dark Ages, the continental phase was followed by that of the transfer of the epic song tradition into a colonial milieu: here, epic diction was partly restructured on the basis of expressive elements from the East-Aeolian area, and especially of a predominant Ionic dialectal component. Particularly in the wake of A. Hoekstra's studies,²¹ this phase has been described as one marked by the modification of formulaic prototypes, which is to say the most ancient expressive structures of formulaic epic diction, on through a range of innovations connected to specific phonetic, morphological, and lexical features of the Ionic dialect. The most important of these innovations were: the intermittent use of digamma; quantitative metathesis, particularly for the genitive singular of masculine stems and the genitive plural of feminine stems in long -α; and the use of the ephelcystic -ν. Alongside these major innovations, we find: diektasis, or the stretched pronunciation of thematic vowels; the extension of the third person plural verbal ending -σαν to athematic radical aorists and passive aorists; and the use of the genitive singular in monosyllabic -ου for second declension stems as the outcome of a bisyllabic form in -οο, which has left some traces in poetic diction, where it occurs alongside the more ancient, Aeolic-Mycenaean form in -οιο. To this we should add the adaptation and enrichment of the expres-

On myth, see the pioneering studies by Nilsson 1932 and Nilsson 1933, which first raised the question of its Mycenaean origins, even before the decipherment of Linear-B documents (1953); among the studies produced after this decipherment, see especially: Page 1959 for an overall historical-philological analysis; Ruijgh 1957 and Ruijgh 1985, Durante 1971 and Durante 1992 on Mycenaean phonetic, lexical, and formulaic traces in Homer's language; Hoekstra 1965, Wathelet 1970 and Wathelet 1979, Janko 1982 and Janko 1992, 8–19 on the stages of the linguistic-dialectal evolution of Homeric formulaic diction; Hoekstra 1981 on the protohistory of the Homeric verse (the hexameter); see now Passa in Cassio 2016, 139–196 for a clear, up-to-date overview of the whole issue.

For this second hypothesis, see Ruijgh 1957 and Ruijgh 1985.

See Hoekstra 1965 on the diction of the Homeric poems and Hoekstra 1969 on that of certain Homeric hymns; on the systematic extension of the same method to archaic epic as a whole, see Janko 1982.

sive range through the formulaic flexibility mechanisms studied by B. Hainsworth:²² mobility of formulas, i.e. their free insertion between the various cola of the verse; their alteration in terms of metrical structure via morphological innovations or a different verb order; and their expansion through the addition or intrusion of new elements (adjectives, adverbs, articles, verbs, etc.).

In the Dark Ages and early Archaic period, this whole range of innovations in Asia Minor's colonial milieu increased the expressive potential of epic diction: a phenomenon which cannot be measured precisely against the more ancient phase, but which can be evaluated as a whole by considering its indirect effects. Indeed, in continental Greece, where it had first emerged in the 2nd millennium, the epic tradition continued to exist for some time in parallel to – and perhaps quite independently of – its development in the eastern Aegean.²³ It is highly significant that – roughly between the late 10th and the first half of the 8th century BC, although it is impossible to establish precise dates – the continental tradition came to almost completely conform to that of colonial Asia Minor in terms of its use of formulaic diction: the epic tradition as a whole, regardless of its local variants, conformed to Ionic diction because the increase in expressive potential which had occurred in Asia Minor was such, on both a qualitative and quantitative level, that it widely established the new, developed form of diction as a model. Some significant local traits endured at a local level, yet these did not prevent a substantial and general degree of standardisation.²⁴

Another evident development which occurred over the course of the epic tradition's colonial phase concerns mythical themes. The Trojan epic described the conquest of a city in Asia Minor accomplished by Achaeans from continental Greece and the Aegean islands. The city in question, of course, is Troy, which in the 2nd millennium – which is to say in the heroic age in Greek collective memory – ruled over the coastal area of Asia Minor and the Hellespont: the very geographical area which, over the course of the Dark Ages, was settled by Greek colonists. This epic is probably rooted in some mythical tales of the 2nd-millennium epic tradition, alongside other epics that were already well-established at the

Hainsworth 1968.

The main champion of the hypothesis ofaparallel, independent development of the continental and other local traditions with respect to the Ionic one is Pavese 1972, 15–169 and Pavese 1974, 57–107, according to whom the later Ionic facies of the diction also found in continental areas is merely a superficial phenomenon.

The most evident and debated case is that of Hesiodean poetry, which is to say of the epic poems in the corpus Hesiodeum, on which see – most recently – Cassio 2009 and Lulli 2016, to which I will also refer for a discussion of textual-critical issues and a bibliography.

time.²⁵ There is no doubt, however, that it acquired greater prominence and was fully developed in a colonial milieu at the beginning of the 1st millennium:²⁶ here, for understandable reasons related to the creation of a mythical proto-history for the processes of Asia Minor's colonisation, the tale acquired the extension known to us from the Homeric poems and from what we can reconstruct about the other poems of this cycle. Moreover, in this colonial environment the first opportunities emerged for well organized performances of this epic saga within the context of major public festivals that brought together various poleis from Asia Minor to celebrate and consolidate their shared identity: the panegyris of the Panionion at Cape Mycale is probably one of the most ancient settings in which the Trojan epic saga was extensively performed.²⁷

However, within this overall development of the epic tradition an important role was also played by the aforementioned evolution of cognitive processes related to poets' apprenticeship. As far as we know, in Ionic Asia Minor, between the Dark Ages and the early Archaic Age, the most favourable historical and environmental conditions emerged for the formation of groups of singers structured as professional guilds. Here, before anywhere else in the Greek world, civic associations, such as the so-called phratriai that were centred on shared cults of common ancestors and found their moment of greatest civic recognition in the major annual festivals (Apaturia), displayed features markedly connected to professional and corporative – as opposed to more genetic – interests.²⁸ This form of social organisation promoted the formation of professional groups of various sorts, including singers' guilds, which claimed descent from a prestigious mythical figure (the Homerids of Chios from Homer, the Chreophyleioi of Samos from Chreophylus) according to a model of association that was soon exported to other areas of the Greek world. Then, as already noted, over the course

What I am referring to in particular are the Argonauts' epic as a more ancient 'structural' model for the Odyssey (see the now classic work of Meuli 1921) and Heracles' feats, with which Homer appears to be at least partly familiar, as an established epic tradition (see especially Sbardella 1994).

Remarks of this sort can already be found in Sbardella 2011, 31–37.

See the extensive monograph by Frame 2009.

See Maddoli 1978, 513–531; the earliest evidence for this phenomenon dates from the 7th century BC, which led Roussel 1976, especially 51–61, to adopt the extreme thesis according to which these pseudo-aristocratic groups never had any real genetic basis, but were established as secondary structures within the social order of the polis; however, the phenomenon must have emerged even earlier, and Jones 1987, 325 also notes that in Miletus, for example, phratriai were the most broadly associative forms of the civic body's organisation, not connected to genetic ties (like phylai and patrai) or territorial bonds (like demoi).

of the 6th century BC the enlargement of these groups and their increasingly hierarchical structure led to the formation of genuine schools.²⁹

This development of the milieus and methods associated with apprenticeship must also have entailed a development of cognitive mechanisms through what we might describe as the creative hyper-stimulation of singers in group contexts. Those who learned the art from a range of teachers and who had many reference models could more directly experience and adopt the range of innovations that each of these teachers made to the traditional epic repertoire, both on the thematic level and on the formal and expressive one, and could in turn expand these innovations and transmit them to the next generation of poets. So what it is possible to reconstruct in relation to several generations of epic poets, in the period at the turn of the Dark Ages and the early Archaic Age, is an exponential growth of innovative features which were progressively introduced into the structure of epic diction through the dynamics of apprenticeship and emulation typical of organised professional groups. This growth spurt was thus followed, in the same professional groups of singers, by an effort to progressively crystallise the text – first mnemonically, and then also in writing³⁰ – and to arrange it into increasingly coherent narrative macro-structures intended for wide-scale performances, and typical of the rhapsodic technique.³¹ In this phase, which can be placed between the middle and the late Archaic Age, the expressive broadening of epic diction did not come to a halt but was affected by the poets' more limited skill in introducing innovative features,³² which was counterbalanced by their increased skill in performing a vast epic repertoire, chiefly arranged into fixed narrative sequences.

On Ionic rhapsodes' guilds and their development, see now Sbardella 2012, 5–63, with an extensive bibliography; on groups of rhapsodes in Boeotia, see Sbardella 2016a and Sbardella 2016b.

On the process which led from the memorisation of the text to its recording in writing, see especially Nagy 1996, 110–112 and Nagy 2002, 9–35, who however tends to regard writing as only coming into play at the end of the whole process – no earlier than the 6th century BC – almost as a kind of accidental final act, when in fact its interaction with memorisation processes must have begun long before then through prolonged and complex dynamics (see Sbardella 2012, 55–62).

On these rhapsodic performances, see Sbardella 2012, especially 38–63 for an overview. Hoekstra 1969 has defined this as the sub-epic phase of diction's development, highlighting how it was largely marked by a decline in poets' expressive innovation skills compared to more ancient phases.

### 4 An Overall Model for the Development of the Epic Tradition (and Epic Diction)

Based on what has been argued so far, in what follows I will propose an overall model for the development of the epic tradition and its means of expression, formulaic diction, which also takes account of poets' forms of apprenticeship and of the transformation of their cognitive processes over time.

### References

Càssola F. (1991<sup>2</sup> ), Inni Omerici, Milan (1975<sup>1</sup> ).

Sbardella, L. (2016b), "La eris dei cantori: gli Erga e la tradizione rapsodica", in: A. Ercolani / L. Sbardella (eds.), Esiodo e il corpus Hesiodeum. Problemi aperti e nuove prospettive, Rome, 83–108 (= Seminari Romani di Cultura Greca n.s. 5).

Svenbro, J. (1984), La parola e il marmo. Alle origini della poetica greca, Turin (or. ed. 1976).

### Manuela Giordano From Oral Theory to Neuroscience: a Dialogue on Communication

Abstract: The purview of this paper is twofold: to set the theoretical framework to ground a fruitful dialogue between oral theory and neuroscience and to apply neuroscientific findings to the Homeric model of communication as shown particularly in the Odyssey, where a singer or storyteller (Phemius, Demodocus, and Odysseus) sing to an audience gathered in a banquet. A primary concern of the paper is to explore the bearing of neuroscientific research on aspects of cognition involved in interactive communicative settings, where verbal and emotional aspects are involved. It is shown that Homeric passages identify silence, enchantment and pleasure as the three interconnected factors of successful and attuned verbal communication and that they make perfect sense when seen from the perspective of neuroimaging studies, which further illuminate the cognitive articulation underlying those factors. In the enriched hermeneutic framework provided, the Homeric idea of singing, sharing and acquiring knowledge as a deeply emotional experience is shown to possess a firm ground in neurophysiology. Some prospective methodological remarks on the meta-dialogue between Classics and neuroscience conclude the paper.

Keywords: Homer; communication; empathy; neuroscience; orality.

### 1 Prefatory Remarks: Homeric Scholarship and Branching Out

A century ago, the Homeric quest(ion) brought Milman Parry and Albert Lord on adventurous trips to the Balkans, where the young men studied and recorded the songs of 20th century Serbo-Croatian poets, the guslari.¹ While conventionally marking the beginning of the so-called Oral Theory, their intellectual enterprise was at the same time a bold move that physically and epistemologically displaced the framework for understanding Homeric texts, from libraries to field-

Parry 1971; Lord 1960. Recordings available at https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/milman-parrycollection-of-oral-literature. Debate and definitions on and of orality thrive, of course; for a recent assessment see Ready 2019, 1–9.

work. Ever since, for students of Homer, to deal with orality is to branch out into unchartered scholarly territories.

Parry and Lord's scholarly experience itself was more influential and farreaching, I daresay, than its specific results – and far beyond the field of Classics. By considering Homeric poems as oral poetry Parry "distanced them from traditional methods of philology and literary criticism, delivering them to a wider anthropological perspective".² As remarked by Sbardella, when Parry's research showed that the peculiar character of Homeric poems can be better explained by comparing them to the poetry of an illiterate Montenegrin storyteller such as Avdo Mededovič than to the most refined and learned philologist "the effect was like a bomb affecting fields way beyond classical philology".³ So much so that at the very onset of his enormously influential book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall MacLuhan declares: "The present volume is in many respects complementary to The Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord".⁴

Oral theory was, however, no anthropology per se. Parry, as a matter of fact, studied linguistics at Paris with Meillet; as Rossi rightly remarks, in Parry's work the anthropological perspective was "almost totally implicit".⁵ If we tend to obliterate this distinction, as we do, it is because Parry and Lord's method and practice were definitely, if not declaredly, comparatist and anthropological. Only some decades after Parry's trips, in the '60s of the last century, a vibrant post-colonial awareness of culture led anthropological studies to flourish and intertwine with orality. Intellectual explorers of the likes of Ruth Finnegan, Isidore Okpewho and Jean Vansina opened the path for classicists interested in orality and willing to learn the ways of West African Bantu singers and Limba story-tellers to better understand Homeric textual practices.⁶ Such a virtual travel to Africa and beyond was another powerful mind-opener and an audacious intellectual move for many Greek philologists and historians, who learned to deal with a "past transmitted by word of mouth", and to understand Herodotus with the

Rossi 1979, 75.

"Può essere spiegata meglio alla luce della comparazione con la poesia di un cantastorie illetterato montenegrino, figlio di un macellaio, come Avdo Mededovič che non dai distillatissimi metodi di analisi della più raffinata e dotta filologia, lo choc è stato talmente grande da produrre […] un vero e proprio terremoto che si è spinto ben oltre i limiti d'interesse della stessa filologia classica", Sbardella 2006, 110.

McLuhan 1962, 1.

Rossi 1979, 75.

See e. g. Vansina 1961, Finnegan 1967, Finnegan 1970, Okpewho 1992.

help of African genealogists, uniting the tools of anthropology with the traditional historical methods.⁷

Ever since, oralistic approaches to Homeric poems has continually made the most from multidisciplinary perspectives, comparatism and anthropology at the leading edge, thanks to which powerful insights and paradigms have been produced.⁸ Furthermore, to engage with modern and non-hegemonic cultures continues to decolonise Homer from antiquarian approaches, creating a perspective on literature far from Western ethnocentrism and displacing epic poems from their position as the first Western masterpiece of a brilliant author to that of a witness to an orally born, collective creation.⁹

This bird's eye view highlights two great seasons of orality studies and Homeric scholarship, during which the vibrant exchange that began in the 1920s with linguistics continued in the 1960s, and down to the 1990s with anthropology and comparatism; this long wave of dialogues has not ended, to be sure, but the time is ripe to open new doors and start new dialogues with contemporary approaches.

It is in keeping with this spirit and century-long tradition that we branch out to a young and promising disciplinary field, namely neuroscience, which in the last thirty years has produced a step-change in our understanding of the human mind and communication. This is not entirely new ground: Elizabeth Minchin has the merit of having introduced cognitive studies to the study of Homer; since her pioneering contributions, scholars slowly but surely have followed suit, enhancing our awareness of the potential of cognitive studies for Classics,

Luraghi 2001b, 10. On the impact of African oral literature on Greek history see particularly Giangiulio 2007.

Of course, the picture is not as irenic as it seems. Consensus on the relevance of oral studies for Homeric scholarship is not catholic, and, if in 1979 Rossi claimed "Omero non si può più leggere come si faceva prima di Parry, e in verità sono pochi ormai ad attestarsi sulle vecchie posizioni" (76–77), today not all scholars of Homer are as keen to look at the same broad landscape, and to see orality as fundamentally relevant to the understanding of Homer. See for example the articulated defence of Ready 2019, 9 against "M. L.West' admonishment 'to shake the oralists off our backs'", in reference to West 2003, 14, a defence which implies that orality as legitimate tool for Homerists still needs to be justified and salvaged. Consistently with the premises of the present volume, this contribution takes, rather apodictically, orality for granted; the issue however does deserve closer scrutiny, but this would largely fall outside the scope of this contribution. On this point see also Ercolani in this volume, 89–91.

See the interview "decolonizing antiquity" in Svenbro 1984, 8–22 (the Italian edition of Svenbro 1971). See also Rossi 1979, 75, on oral theory assigning to Homeric poems a totally different status than that of all other works classical philologists dealt with, "uno status totalmente diverso da quello di tutte le altre opere con cui i filologi classici avevano a che fare".

within and without Homer.¹⁰ In common scholarly discourse, both "cognitive studies" and "neuroscience" are used as umbrella definitions, and have come to encompass a wide and heterogenous range of disciplines, from cognitive linguistics to artificial intelligence, and whose wealth is well represented in the range of case-studies of the recent Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory.¹¹ While broadly following this avenue, however, this paper illustrates a more specific path of inquiry, whose scope is circumscribed to the dialogue between oral theory, Homeric studies and neuroscience stricto sensu, that is the specific field of neuroimaging-based brain mapping research.¹²

The purview of this paper is therefore twofold: to set the theoretical framework to ground a fruitful dialogue between oral theory and neuroscience and to apply neuroscientific findings to the Homeric model of communication.

### 2 Our Head from Within: The Specific Contribution of fMRI Based Research. Potentials and Caveats

Neuroscience is a very young ramification of cognitive studies and is based on the new instrumental methods of neuroimaging, and chiefly on Magnetic Resonance (MRI) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), whose discovery dates to thirty years ago. The fMRI technology uses magnetic potency for a far more accurate representation of brain activity in terms of resolution and dynamic data then was formerly available with electrophysiological monitoring methods (EEG) and PEC (based on radioactive tracing).¹³

In 1990 the fine-tuning of BOLD-fMRI by Seiji Ogawa represented a significant improvement in our representation and mapping of mental processes and opened the possibility of observing our mind "from within".¹⁴ The nuts and

See Minchin 2001.

See Meineck et al. 2019a. On the development of cognitive studies see Gozzano in this volume, 1–17.

For important perspective on cognitive studies and oral poetry see Antovic/Pagan Canovas 2016, and particularly Minchin 2016.

See Ogawa/Sung 2007.

This accomplishment was built on the former invention of MRI by, foremost, Raymond Damadian, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield. Interestingly, on the precedence of the patent there are competing claims; Lauterbur and Mansfield were bestowed with the Nobel Prize in 2003 for the invention, while Damadian, who scanned the first MR image in 1977, was excluded. As Filler 2009, 13, pointedly argues: "when the Nobel Prize for invention of MRI scanning was

bolts of this instrumental method is to scan which brain areas are activated in correspondence with a specific cognitive task performed during the experiment; the activity is established only indirectly, by the variation of the level of oxygen present in the blood vessels (oxyhaemoglobin) of a given brain site.¹⁵ The higher the level of oxygen required, the greater the purported neural activity is assumed by fMRI analysis. In this, fMRI builds on the century-old finding that increase in blood flow is connected to a detectable increase in brain weight and the subsequent inference that the activity of our brain demands more energy – haemoglobin – than any other part of our body. This discovery must now be credited to Angelo Mosso and his brilliant experiments of the 1880s; the spreading of his findings, however, was hindered by the limited knowledge of Italian in scientist milieus of the time, and the attribution is commonly assigned to the British scientists Charles Smart Roy and Charles Scott Sherrington who arrived at the same conclusions as Mosso a decade afterwards.¹⁶

FMRI-based analysis seeks to establish the general correspondence between the sites activated in our brain and a specific activity, be it sensorimotor, linguistic or otherwise, in order to detect the role and function of underlying brain sites and networks. Its scientific impact is major and its application has been both extensive and debated in diverse fields, from medicine to humanities and social sciences, from language to emotions and music. In recent years, in particular, theatrical study and Greek theatre have found a particularly thriving application of neuroimaging, with the work of Roberto Nicolai, Felix Budelmann, Pat Easterling, and, more systematically, Peter Meineck.¹⁷

Our primary concern here is to explore the bearing of neuroscientific research on aspects of cognition involved in interactive communicative settings, where verbal and emotional aspects are involved. Before turning to an experimental application of neuroscientific findings to Homeric texts, however, it is imperative to state an epistemological premise and a caveat.

announced in 2003, Damadian was snubbed and the award went to two more traditional scientists, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield. Damadian is a creationist so he accepts magical and divine intervention in biology. That has made him an intellectual martyr for the creation science crowd. Nonetheless, his omission from the Nobel Prize is a Rohrsach test meaning different things to different observers". For the history of fMRI see also Poldrack 2008.

"FMRI is based on BOLD (Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent) signal change that is due to the hemodynamic and metabolic sequelae of neuronal responses", Ogawa/Sung 2007.

Sandrone et al. 2014.

See Nicolai 2007, 102–104, developed in Nicolai 2010, largely based on the mirror neuron system; Easterling/Budelmann 2010 on "reading minds"; Meineck 2017, where the contribution of brain research is used extensively to illustrate cognitive and sensorial aspects of performance with ground-breaking results.

The point must be expressed rather bluntly: fMRI based neuroimaging does not reveal to us the brain as such. The suggestive images produced by the machine are not the Ding an sich, but a scholarly, inferential representation. This warning comes from neuroscientists themselves:

Not even the most ardent advocates of fMRI research would support a strong neurorealist viewpoint. […] fMRI is one technique among many available to the scientist. If used improperly, it can lead to inconclusive or erroneous conclusions (like any other technique).¹⁸

A specific caveat must be expressed moreover since neuroscience has received growing media coverage, as enthusiastic as often acritical. The results of the brain scan performed by fMRI allow us to construct a representation of specific brain areas' activation during the performance of certain tasks, the degree of likelihood and indicativeness of the actual mental processes heavily depends on the protocols (mainly statistical) scientists use to transcode the thousands of snapshots (voxels) into interpretations – which fundamentally depend on epistemological premises. Ogawa, the father of BOLD fMRI, states this clearly:

With non-invasive neuroimaging, the functional role or specificity of a site is only established indirectly. This is because we cannot measure the actual input to or output from a site. The only means we have for controlling the site's activation is through the external or internal stimulus we give to the brain. It is not known which aspects of the original stimulus are delivered to the site or how site-specific processing proceeds. Until we understand the information processing entailed by the local input-output relationships, we can only try to infer this processing by clever manipulations of the stimuli we give to the brain.¹⁹

However thriving and thrilling the results, therefore, they should be treated for what they are: inference and working hypotheses, not a direct account of mental processes. FMRI images come in different colours, and admittedly the impact is certainly arresting, giving the impression of accessing our mind directly, with the impending danger of exchanging the map for the territory:

Because fMRI research carries an air of technical mystery-unlike surveys or laboratory measures of behaviour – it seems more scientific to a lay audience. The images it creates can seem like snapshots of the brain at work, especially when one glosses over the enormous conceptual gap between those images and the underlying experimental design. In any case, neurorealistic language is endemic to descriptions of fMRI studies in the popular media […]. Several errors are common, including the overstatement of results, a failure to discuss limitations, and the tendency to treat fMRI data as uncritical proof of controversial claims.

Huettel et al. 2014, 486.

Ogawa/Sung 2007 (emphasis added).

Even experienced fMRI researchers are not immune to the misrepresentation of results. A particularly common problem lies in generalizing from brain activation to cognitive process, in the form of reasoning known as reverse inference.²⁰

The real challenge lies in interpretation, which in turn largely depends on paradigms: from computational models to distributed cognition, neuroscientists do not agree on their use of cognitive metaphors to explain what the mind "is like".²¹ If neuroscience therefore is not shorn of doubts and debate, any scientific truth that may be claimed is by definition both changing and subject to successive transformation as research goes on. It is perhaps not altogether otiose the reminder that hard science is as historical as any, as the pivotal work of Thomas Kuhn crucially demonstrated decades ago.²²

The historical dimension is also an important reminder not to devaluate previous brain research. As it has been noted, Angelo Mosso was aware of the same epistemological conundrums surrounding brain research, and intriguingly, "work he published more than a century ago already contains many of the major themes and difficulties that characterize today's functional neuroimaging techniques"; a sobering lesson by all means.²³

We would better shun therefore a naive idealization of neuroscience as a new truth about the mind, an attitude largely resting upon an implicit epistemological hierarchy according to which the so-called hard sciences have a direct way of accessing the truth, a particularly resistant myth of our time, which also implies the inferiority of humanities vis-à-vis the so-called "hard-sciences". On the contrary, this contribution builds on the – admittedly grandstanding but not isolated – assumption that as far as mind and communication are concerned, it is high time to build a metadialogue between humanities and sciences, such as "to automatically collapse ontological barriers between physical, biological, mental, and social worlds";²⁴ we may thus compare scholarly maps and ideally draw a more capacious map which would better represent the complex phenomenon of human communication – be it "oral" or otherwise.

As I hope to show in what follows, our understanding of the cognitive procedures involved in communication can be greatly enhanced, strengthened, and