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There has been nearly a century of scholarship now about how there may never have been a Homer, and therefore he couldn’t have had students. Even if there was a
by OfSanguineFire 3y ago
There has been nearly a century of scholarship now about how there may never have been a Homer, and therefore he couldn’t have had students. Even if there was a Homer and he had students, that immediate generation after Homer may still have been a purely oral one, and the text was not committed then to writing.
In any event, as much as poetry remained a matter of live recital, by the Hellenic period there was certainly plenty of prose that was read by connoisseurs, not performed before an audience.
- kijin 3y agoYes, I'm aware of that discussion. My personal theory is that there really was a dude named Homeros who made a significant contribution to the compilation of what we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey, though he certainly didn't make it all up out of thin air. He would have been part of a long line of bards/poets passing stories down from teacher to student, and he would have had students in that sense. Whether the students had access to any written scrolls, of course, is debatable. But the point still stands that they likely had agreed-upon breakpoints to help identify the various parts of a long poem like the Iliad, whether for practice or for live performance. Also, committing something to writing back then was not as final an act as we might think today. Books were copied by hand, over and over again, and lots of people made their own changes in the process. There are large parts of the Homeric epics that we think were added later.