Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles

Since we are starting our unit on oral knowledge soon, it made me think of maybe one of the most famous examples of literature that used to be oral, namely, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The epic poems, believed to date to around 800BC, were orally performed, possibly for hundreds of years before they were finally written down. Bards memorized the basic stories for the poems, but probably composed a lot of it as they went, using a variety of stock phrases in order to get the correct meter. This is why the Odyssey so often uses the phrases "grey-eyed Athene," and the Iliad tells the whole putting-on-armor process many times. Repetition like this is often seen as a bad thing in current written work, but it wasn't when poems were performed orally. Repetition helped the listener to keep track of what was going on with the poem.

After researching the history of these epics, I wondered how to relate it to my experience today. The poems are still popular today, but only seem to have influence in college classrooms and a few scattered cultural idioms. I personally have read the Odyssey and much of the Iliad, but people nowadays do not go to performances of bards singing their own individual, memorized version of these stories. Then I realized that, for me at least, the connection is a different, much less structured kind of oral knowledge. I read the Odyssey for the first time when I was fourteen, but it was not the first time I had heard the stories contained in it. I already knew the story of when Odysseus had his men tie himself to the mast of his ship so he could listen to the sirens, and the story about the cyclops and how Odysseus escaped by holding onto the belly of a sheep. I knew that at the end of the Iliad, Achilles is shot in the heel, and Hector, the truest hero, is killed and his body dragged behind a horse around the city of Troy. I knew this because when I was a child, my mother told me these stories. She studied Latin and Greek in college, so it makes sense that when she thought of things to tell her children, the stories she had enjoyed and studied not too many years before came out. I don't know how many of you had the oral tradition of ancient Greece passed to you along with stories of Santa Claus and the three little pigs, but it was passed to me, and although I have never listened to a full recitation of Homer in Ancient Greek, the stories are still part of my personal oral heritage.