Making of Homer

The oldest book in the Western canon spent four hundred years as something that was not a book at all. Between the collapse of Mycenaean Greece around 1200 BC and the arrival of the alphabet, no Greek could write, and the poem we call the Odyssey lived only in the mouths of singers who could not read. Twelve thousand lines, passed from old bard to young, across a gap as long as the one between Shakespeare and us.It should have dissolved. Instead it arrived so intact that it describes Bronze Age armor no singer of the eighth century had ever seen, later dug out of the ground exactly as the verse remembers it. How that was possible defeated European scholars for two thousand years, until the 1930s, when a young American classicist named Milman Parry packed recording gear into a car and drove into the mountains of Yugoslavia to listen to living oral poets compose epics of Homeric length with no text in sight. What Parry and Albert Lord recorded there explained the whole thing. The famous repeated phrases, the wine-dark sea and rosy-fingered dawn, are not decoration. They are the working parts of a composition engine, built so a singer could build thousands of lines at speed and never lose the thread.This is the story of that engine and of everything that happened to the song afterward: the hexameter that carried it, the relics it preserved by accident, the borrowed Phoenician letters that may have been used on Homer before anything else in Greek, the rhapsodes who performed it in Athens, and the editors of Alexandria who cut it into the twenty-four books still on the shelf. Along the way it takes on the oldest argument in classical scholarship, who Homer was and whether there was one at all, and shows what the evidence can and cannot say.By the end you will know how a poem crossed four silent centuries, and why the answer is stranger than any single author.