“Having Had No Predecessor to Imitate, He Had No Successor Capable of Imitating Him”, 2020-01-17 (; backlinks):
[Summary of the Homeric Question that gripped Western classical literary scholarship for centuries: who wrote the Iliad/Odyssey, when, and how? They appear in Greek history out of nowhere: 2 enormously lengthy, sophisticated, beautiful, canonical, unified works that would dominate Western literature for millennia, and yet, appeared to draw on no earlier tradition nor did Homer have any earlier (non-spurious) works. How was this possible?
The iconoclastic Analysts proposed it was a fraud, and the works were pieced together later out of scraps from many earlier poets. The Unitarians pointed to the overall quality; the complex (apparently planned) structure; the disagreements of Analysts on what parts were what pieces; and the Analysts’ inability to explain many anomalies in Homer: there are passages splicing together Greek dialects, passages which were metrical only given long-obsolete Greek letters/pronunciations, and even individual words which mixed up Greek dialects! (Not that these anomalies were all that much easier to explain by the Unitarian hypothesis of a single author).
The eventual resolution relied an old hypothesis: that Homer was in fact the product of a lost oral tradition. There was, unfortunately, no particular evidence for it, and so it never made any headway against the Analysts or Unitarians—until Milman Parry found a living oral tradition of epic poetry in the Balkans, and discovered in it all the signs of the Homeric poems, from repetitive epithets to a patchwork of dialects, and thus empirical examples of how long oral traditions could produce a work like Homer if one of them happened to get written down at some point.]