Poetics of Repetition in Homer

Abstract

Repetition in Homeric poetry is a matter of performance, not only composition. I argue that this observation applies to the Homeric phenomenon of “repeated utterances.” This argument is part of a larger project, which is, to show that Homeric poetry is a medium of oral poetry. That project is exemplified in a 1996 book entitled Poetry as Performance, where I argued that the text of the Homeric poems, that is, of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is derived from a system that needs to be distinguished from the text itself - or, better, from the Homeric textual tradition that editors try to reconstruct as a single Homeric text.[1] The text of Homer is merely the surface. Underneath that surface is the system that is Homeric poetry, which needs to be analyzed on its own terms, as a system. This system, I argued, reveals a medium of oral poetry. My task here is to take the argument further by showing that the phenomenon of repeated utterances in the Homeric textual tradition is explainable in terms of this system, that is, in terms of oral poetry.