← New Books Network
New Books Network
Michael B. Cosmopoulos, "The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Greek Epic Poetry" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
01:22:08
Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello, everyone. Welcome to New Books in Archaeology. I'm your host, Ryan Tripp. Today we have endowed chair and professor of Archaeology at University of Missouri, St. Louis, Michael Cosmopolis. Welcome.
- [01:30]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [01:32]
B
He has recently published the World of Homer, Archeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Greek Epic Poetry, published by Cambridge University Press. And that's the book that we'll be discussing today. So let's get into it. How did you come to research and write this particular study?
- [01:55]
C
Well, I sort of grew up with Homer. I grew up in Athens, and I was surrounded by monuments and histories and legends. And since ever I was a kid, I sort of. I was raised with these stories. So as I was growing older and getting more and more into my archaeology studies, Homer always remained a constant in my life. And then when I started to teach Homer, I started making connections between archaeology and the material remains of the past and poetry and epics and Homer. And eventually the idea of writing a book on Homer sort of started to percolate in my mind. I resisted it for a while because I knew that the bibliography is so huge that this would be sort of like a black hole, a vortex that would sort of suck in. I would be sucked into it for years. So I kind of resisted it for a while. But Then eventually, especially as I was teaching Homer and seeing the response that my students had to the epics and how interested and excited they were about them, eventually I decided to put pen to paper and write this book. And this was just the beginning. Because in the end, this book turns out to be one of a series of three books that I'm writing on Homer. It's not quite a trilogy because one is not the sequel of the other. They just represent the main aspects of Homer in which I am interested. So this book is about the world of Homer. It basically reconstructs the entire nexus of economic, social, political organization. Material remains in the epics and also explores the processes by which the epics were created. The second book is more personal in that it explores the universal human experience in the epics, especially war and violence. And I have a personal connection to this because my family was heavily affected by the Second World War. So I realized these connections that we see between Homer and modern life. So this is the second book which I just finished, and the third book will be Homer and Archaeology. Basically the connection between epics and myths and material remains of the past. So this book, the World of Homer, is really the first step in this path on which I am trying to learn more myself about Homer and how Homer is connected to our world and to our past, and also trying to share this knowledge with my students, with colleagues, and also with the wider public.
- [04:48]
B
So, you know, I wish to begin with your assessment of ancient treatments of Homer, particularly the initial references to Homer and sort of the cult that followed him. And then if you want to, we can move to Aristotle, Herodotus, etc, and attributions to Homer.
- [05:05]
C
Right.
- [05:05]
B
I, you know, I, I'm familiar with present day debates over, you know, who Comer was or the Homers were and you know, but I was, you know, I was. I've never actually read ancient treatments of who Homer was and you know, I thought it was an novel approach. So go right ahead.
- [05:29]
C
Yeah, I appreciate that. Let me start by saying that the book is divided into three parts. The first part is about Homeric scholarship from ancient Greece from the very beginning down to today. The second part reconstructs the world of Homer, economy, society, politics, etc. And the third part part builds on the first tooth and deals with the issue of the emergence of epic poetry and the epics. So the first part, which is about Homeric scholarship, as I said, starts from the very beginning. And when was that? The first references to Homer date to the second half of the 6th century BC. And just to put things into the wider perspective here, Greek tradition held that Homer lived and composed the Iliad and the odyssey in the 8th century. There were no references, we have no references about that, just a vague sort of tradition. But what is interesting is that the earliest references to Homer by authors, Greek authors, date to the second half of the 6th century, which is almost two centuries after the time in which Homer was supposed to have lived. And these are early philosophers who deal with the poems. Some of them, like Heraclitus, deal with, have issues with the way that the poems represent the universe. Others have issues with the morality of the gods and so forth. But the point is that this is the first time anywhere and at any period, in any period that we hear the word, the name Homer. And the question is why? Why then? And we can tie this emergence, this appearance of Homer to the wider issues, the wider trends in society during the 6th century, especially in Athens. Athens was a bustling scene of artists and scholars, of course, but also poets. And it appears that there were professional guilds of poets. We know at least of two of them who competed against each other. So it was very competitive scene. Now, one of those guilds were named Homeride, literally means the descendants of Homer, or the people of Homer. And here's the thing, it looks like the Homeride invented a mythical, a sort of a fictional ancestor whom they called Homer after the name of their own guild rather than the opposite, to whom they attributed their poetry. And they did this so that they could gain a competitive edge over their opponents. And it's a phenomenon that we see in other cultures as well, in which poems are attributed to a fictional ancient poet just so that they can gain more prestige. So it looks like Homer was not a real historical personality. Homer did not. From what we can gather from the evidence, there was no Homer who sat down in the 8th century to compose the Iliad and the Odyssey. Rather, Homer was a fictitious character made by this guild that carried the name Homer Ede in order to gain, to add prestige to their poetry. And the other thing is that the name Homer itself is not a real name. There was nobody in ancient Greece named Homer ever. Well, not, I shouldn't say ever. We have some people named Homer after the third century, but they are named after this fictional poet. But there were no. If you walked in the streets of Athens or other cities, you would never encounter a person named Homer. The name itself is an invented, it's a made up name. It appears that the etymology of a name comes from the roots of two words. Hom and are. And together they mean assembling, putting together smaller pieces to create a larger whole. So basically, it's another word for rhapsode. The rhapsodes were poets who quote, unquote, stitched together shorter poems to create longer ones, which they then proceeded to perform. So Homer literally means rhapsode. It's. It's another name. It's like today calling someone metalsmith or word weaver based on what they do. So putting everything together, the late appearance, the late occurrence of the poet in quotes, Homer, the lack of evidence for any kind of historical background to the poet, and the name itself, the etymology itself, it appears that Homer never actually existed. And that, of course, opens up other questions to which we can return. The main question is, where did the epics come from? If there was no Homer, who created them, who composed them? But we can revisit this a little later. The point is that by the end of the 6th century, it appears that this fictitious character had taken hold. This is also the time in which epic as a literary genre develops and grows. And there are many reasons for which this is done, not a small reason of which being sort of fostering the sense of pride in the history of the Greeks and their common past. But it looks like during that period there is a sort of conflation between an author and a genre. And that's where we come to. That's where Homer. That's how Homer was created.
- [11:38]
B
To clarify for some of our readers, some of our readers may think that Athens kind of sprung up during the classical period, and that's not necessarily the case, and that's what we're discussing. So my question is, why do you think there was such extensive interest in Homer's life during the classical period and even the Archaic period?
- [11:58]
C
Well, actually, to be precise, the interest was not in Homer's life, it was in the epics. An interest in Homer's life appears centuries later, after the third and the second century, where the first biographies, the first lives of Homer, appear. So we're talking about biographies that appear five or six hundred years after the time in which Homer was supposed to have lived. Until then, there is nothing, no biography, except maybe some stories here and there that float around Greece. But even those later lives of Homer are based on fictional stories and traditions. There is no foundation to any of them. Some of them just recycle the same stories and the same traditions over and over again. Others made up new stories, but there is no real biography of Homer. And the reason is that Homer actually never existed. People started taking an interest in the biography of Homer later on, when the epics had become such monumental works of poetry.
- [13:05]
B
So what do you think were differences and similarities between these ancient interpretations of Homer and, for example, his poems in life that you just alluded to in the Middle Ages, Enlightenment, et cetera.
- [13:20]
C
So there is an evolution over the centuries. Homer and the epics have fascinated scholars for thousands of years. And as one period succeeds the other, and the mentalities and ideologies change, so do the approaches to Homer. So starting from the ancient period. You mentioned Aristotle earlier. Until Aristotle, we don't really have any Homeric scholarship. Aristotle is the first one who will actually write critical about Homer. And then he wrote a work called Homerica Poremata, in which he deals with various Homeric issues, including the authenticity of the poems and also his admiration for Homer's dramatic qualities. For the dramatic qualities of the epics is apparent through the poetics. In the third century, there is a strong interest in Homer and the epics. As I mentioned before, especially in the Library of Alexandria, some of these librarians, like Xenodus or Aristophanes, and especially Aristarchus, produce texts of the epics. Aristarchus also produces this text with a commentary. And then in the Middle Ages, in the Byzantine period, of course, the Byzantine period is for a thousand years. The Byzantine Empire is a deeply religious Christian empire. And this is reflected also in the epics, which are seen now under the microscope of ethical and moral behavior. What is acceptable and what is the word of the God, and what parts of the epics agree and do not agree with that. And then comes the Enlightenment, in which we have rational thinking and logical thought and critical analysis. And that's when people start to take apart the poems, trying to understand their different components and also returning, or rather not returning, but opening the issue of authorship. Were they composed by one poet or by many? Especially there was this German scholar, Woolf, who wrote a classic book in 1795, 1990, 1796, I think, called Prole Gomena to Homer. And that's when he introduced the idea that the epics were the products of a long oral tradition, that there was not one single creator composer of the epics, but they were really stitched together, shorter poems stitched together from various other ones. And this created a whole new movement, the analytical. The analysts who believed in many different. That many different composers were behind the epics. So with Woolf, start this whole new approach upstarts this whole new approach to Homer. Wolf believed in many different composers being behind the epics and he starts the analytical movement which tries to prove exactly that. That the epics were composed by many different people, not just by one. And to do so, they point out discrepancies and differences and mistakes in the sequence of events within the plot of the epics. The Unitarians, on the other hand, firmly believed that the poems were the product, were the composition of one singular author. And to support that, they presented arguments showing the unity of the poems. And then, as we come closer to the 20th century, there are other approaches to Homer. Two scholars from Harvard, Perry and Lord, conducted extensive ethnographic work in the Balkans, recording actually the composition and the performance of epic poems. And they proposed the oral formulaic theory in which poems, the epic poems were created were composed during performance. As the performer, the poet recited his poems to an audience. And there were interactions between audience and poet. And this created a sort of an improvisation. That basically not two versions of a poem are the same as they are performed. And then there were others, starting in the middle of the 20th century, the neoanalysts who tried to actually detect and identify parts and themes from earlier epic poems that may have survived in Iliad and the Odyssey. And as we come closer to the end of the 20th century, this takes a different shape and form in that they try to identify mythological themes. Not just parts of earlier poems, but mythological themes that pre existed and have been incorporated into the poems anyway. It's a long road. Homeric studies follows a long road. But the bottom line is actually there are two important conclusions. One is that approaches to Homer change according to the mentality and the expectations and the standards of each period. The second is that there seems to be a general consensus throughout the centuries, especially in recent Homeric scholarship, that the Homeric poems were the products of. Of a long process of oral tradition. That was crystallized in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Of course, differences remain mostly as to whether they were composed by one or by many poets. But the main idea that they were not created just out of the blue, but they are the final products of a long oral tradition. That is a common. That's a common denominator in most. Most theories, most approaches to Homeric studies.
- [19:30]
B
If you can elaborate just a little bit more on these theories, on the homework texts on the epics, you kind of alluded to the oral formulaic theory. What about comparisons to cyclic poetry? You mention in the book a Mycenaean kind of core providence. So if you can kind of address these various theories are just examples that would actually benefit, I think, our listeners.
- [20:02]
C
Right, yes, that's a great question. Let me start with the Mycenaean period. And just to place this in a chronological frame for your listeners. When we say Mycenaean, we mean roughly the second half of the second millennium BC so let's say 1600 to 1100 BC it is followed by the early Iron Age, roughly 1100 to 700 BC. So the Homeric poems as we know them have taken a recognizable form by the 6th century after the end of the Iron Age. However, we know, based on centuries of analysis of this Homeric scholarship, we know that they incorporate, they integrate elements from different regions and from different periods. How early? Well, it appears that the earliest elements, that the earliest historical elements that we have in the poems, and they sort of help us to date earlier layers in the poems, are early Mycenaean, going back even to the 16th and the 15th century B.C. what we know now, which we didn't know decades ago, is that the Mycenaeans themselves had epic poetry. We have clear evidence for that. We know for sure that the Mycenaeans had epic poems, meaning poems that sung heroic deeds of their kings, their ancestors. We're not exactly quite sure, but we know for a fact that they did have epic poetry when the Mycenaean world collapsed around 1100 BC or to be more precise, not the Mycenaean world, but the Mycenaean palaces collapsed around 1100 BC that some of those poems continued, continued to be sung and performed in the various communities around Greece, preserving the memories of earlier events. Wars and the Trojan War, of course, is the most obvious example. But other stories as well, and depending on the region, they also preserved mythological stories. It appears that there was a whole group of poems dealing with heroic deeds which recall the epic cycle. And the Iliad and the Odyssey have include material that was common that they shared with the poems of the epic cycle. Now, most of the poems of the epic cycle have not been preserved. We have bits and pieces of them preserved in later authors. We have references to them. But we know that at least six of those poems of the epic cycle dealt with issues of the Trojan War. And as you and your listeners know, in the Iliad, we don't have a beginning and the end of the war. The Iliad is not a poem about the Trojan War. It's just an episode of the war. But we do know the beginning and the end of the war and also side stories of many heroes from these other epic poems of the epic cycle. So the question is, what was the interaction between Iliad and Odyssey on the one hand, and poems of the epic cycle on the other. If the poems of the epic cycle predated the Iliad and the Odyssey, then the Iliad and the Odyssey were created as a result of the influence of the epic cycle. If the opposite, the epic cycle, was influenced by the Iliad and the Odyssey. So this was a predicament that sort of tormented scholars for decades. But now we have reached the consensus in the sense that we think that both the epic cycles on the one hand and the Iliad and the Odyssey on the other, derive from the same sort of pool of epic stories that floated around Greece during the end of the Mycenaean period and the period that followed the collapse of the palaces. So this story sort of fed into these different epic poems in different parts of Greece during the early Iron Age. And this relates to the wider issue of the processes by which the epic, because the Iliad and the Odyssey emerged and these processes involve social memory and composition, performance. And perhaps we can return to this a little later. But as far as your question goes, it appears that there was this cross fertilization between stories that appear in the epic cycle poems, stories that appear in the Odyssey. And it looks like in both cases there were also other influences from outside the Greek world, especially from the near east and Egypt and Mesopotamia, and also Indo European influences that are indigenous and we can trace back, going back to the early Mycenaean period on the one hand, and we can detect also in other Indo European periods, poetry, even Sanskrit poetry. So the bottom line is that we have all these influences, both indigenous and external, that feed into the stories of the epic, stories that are expressed in, sorry, in the heroic stories that are expressed in epic poetry. And some of them end up in the Iliad and the Odyssey. So we're talking about complex processes here. It's not like someone sat down a Homer sat down in the 8th century in front of his computer and started to typing or no, took his pen paper and started writing the Iliad and the Odyssey. But quite the contrary, we're talking about products of a very long evolution and recipients of influences from many different parts of the world.
- [25:47]
B
So scalp, now there's the Bronze Age and then there's the Iron Age, there's Bronze and iron. But in terms of cultural transmission and the epic scholars in your book challenge kind of a Bronze versus Iron Age brinary, they even point to non palatial populations in Mycenaean Greece as potential kind of sources of circulation here you did mention the Trojan War what have archaeologists concluded about the historical framework here of Troy or Volusa, substantiated by findings at the Thessarlik excavations?
- [26:25]
C
Both are great questions. Thank you for bringing up these points. As far as the first question goes, this sort of divide between Bronze and IR age, which was what scholars thought back in the 20th century, this is an outdated opinion. Right now we know for a fact that there was no rupture, no gap in the continuity of Greek culture moving from the Bronze Age to the early Iron Age. What we do have is the collapse of palatial administration. So the upper levels of political elites and social and society are destroyed at the end of the Mycenaean period. But the lower levels, the spheres of life that were outside palatial control, the everyday life that continued, and with that, continued elements of the economy and the political organization of the Mycenaeans and their poetry. So we have to be very clear about this, that there was not a gap or a rupture or a break in the continuity of Greek culture. And this explains a lot of the Mycenaean influence that we see in the Homeric epics. So that's one issue. The other issue that you asked about, the Trojan War and the historicity of the Trojan War, that's a convoluted issue. There are a lot of hazy areas here. There are different theories about this. One is that the story of the Trojan War is totally fictional. That was created basically at the time when the Greeks tried to foster their national identity. So this idea of a sort of Pan Hellenic campaign where all the Greek forces came together to fight against an external enemy, this was sort of a symbol of the Greekness that was emerging at the time. And there are also other issues there, a code of honor, heroism, et cetera, that are, according to this theory, are really the main thrust of the poems, not some kind of historic of connection to historical event. On the other end, there is the theory that the story of the Trojan War represents an actual historical event or a combination of wars. So even within this theory, there are different shades. So, for example, it is possible that the story of the Trojan War that we have in Greek mythology was a sort of amalgamation of different episodes, different Trojan wars that happened over the course of the centuries. We have actually good evidence to suggest that there was an earlier campaign against Troy before or the Trojan War that we know in stories about, for example, Heracles campaigning against the Trojans. There's another aspect to this, in that another theory in that the Trojan War that we have in Greek mythology does represent one single conflict between the major conflict between the Greeks of the Mycenaean period and, and the people of northwest Asia Minor, Anatolia. And that conflict happened sometime around 1180, maybe before Christ. And there is evidence to corroborate something like that from the Hittite side as well. You mentioned Wilusa, first of all. It is quite possible that there was an epic about Wilusa. I should mention that Wilusa is the name of of Ilion, which is the Greek name for Troy. So it looks like Troy is mentioned in the Hittite tablets. We have complaints by the Hittite kings to the Ahiyavan, the Mycenaean kings, according to all probabilities, complaining that they are infringing their sphere of influence in Asia Minor and Anatolia. So there is background information to justify the possibility that an actual military conflict did happen towards the end of the Mycenaean period. What does the archaeological evidence tell us about it? Well, here things are not clear cut either. Schliemann of course excavated Hissarlik. He was a great believer in the histories of the Trojan War, but his methods were terrible. Schliemann as an archaeologist did a lot of damage to all the archaeological sites that he excavated. He sort of, sort of bulldozed through through those sites. And of course we owe a lot to him because he discovered the Mycenaean civilization. But it was fated for later archaeologists who worked in a more systematic way to come to Troy and try to sort out Striemann's mess. And Sriman's architect, archaeologist William Derbfeld was the first one. And Carl Blegen, a professor of the University of Cincinnati who came to Troy in the 1930s was another one. So the bottom line here is that there are two possibilities in Troy, that there are two possibilities about which layer was the layer of the Trojan War. And just let me remind your listeners that at Troy we distinguish nine different cities or layers. The layer that we identify as Troy Sikh, the last one of Troy VI was destroyed probably by an earthquake. And this was the one that Derfeld thought that was the Homeric Troy. Blagen thought that Troy 7a is the more likely candidate for the Homeric Troy. The problem is that the destruction of Troy 7A which was by enemy action, while the one of Troy 6H appears to have been by earthquake. At any rate, it seems like Troy 7A they later after the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces. So that's difficult to reconcile. And now there is this trend trying to go back to Troy 6H&RE examine whether it was actually destroyed. By earthquake. Bottom line in all this, it is possible that in Hisarlik, in the archaeological site that we identified with Troy, we have evidence for a military invasion and distraction, followed, by the way, by the appearance of what looks like Bycenaean pottery. So it is possible that we could. If you want to identify one city in Troy with the Troy of the Trojan War, it could have been either Troy VIH or Troy 7A great.
- [33:27]
B
So in the context of your discussion on gender and age, marriage, you know, you. You bring up these concepts of Anax and Basiles and the Mycenaean period and how they're represented not just in the Iron Age, but I think more specifically in the epics and then councils and assemblies. If you could again elucidate that discussion, a brief rundown as well as later kind of classical police influences and writing, et cetera, I think again, it would be helpful for our listeners. And just a brief reference.
- [34:03]
C
Sure, sure. And again, both questions are excellent and very central to the Homeric epics. The first one about marriage and gender, it looks like there is some. We have some elements of the descriptions of families, marriage and gender roles the way we have them in Homer. Some of these elements correspond to what we can gather from linear bit tablets from the Mycenaean period and also from what we know about early Iron Age historical societies. So things like the nuclear family based on the Oikos on the main sort of the household, along with other extended members of the extended family, it looks like this corresponds to historical reality. Oikos appears as far back as the Mycenaean period. Now, in terms of political organization, Anax and Basilos are names that appear in Homer. They both refer to kings. Anax is sort of the higher name for an absolute leader, an absolute ruler. For example, Zeus is referred to as Anax, sometimes Agamemnon. But the standard term that is used in the epics to describe a king is Basileus. And not only that, what's interesting is that basilios also appears as an adjective with different grades, more royal if you want, than others and so forth. Now, both terms appear in the linear betablets. We know that they are Mycenaean terms, but they mean different things. So in Homer, anax is rare and it's used to describe the absolute ruler. In the linear betablets, Anax is the term used for the king of the Mycenaean palace. Stand state Basileus in the tablets, again reminding you that Basilios in Homer means the king. In the Rinnerbit tablets is the Name the term for a lower level official, perhaps not well integrated, not centrally integrated into the Mycenaean palatial administration. So what we think happens is this. We think that when the palace is collapsed, the term Anax, which referred to the king who existed no more after the collapse of the palaces, survived as a sort of distant memory of a supreme leader. And that's why in Homer we find it used only when it refers to Zeus, or in rare cases, to Agamemnon. Also, anax has an emotional connotation and is used, for example, for Odysseus, sometimes by the people who love him. But that's a different story. Basileus, on the other hand, who was a lower level official in the Mycenaean period, seems to have survived exactly because he may not have been in the center of Mycenaean political administration. So as we go into the early Iron Age, the Palais, the Mycenaean palaces have collapsed. Greece has reverted in the sort of kind of chiefdom level political organization. So the leaders of those small polities are called basileis by kings, just because the term survived from the Mycenaean period. So we do have survivals from the Mycenaean period, terms that changed meaning basically over the course of the centuries, but the terms themselves survived. Now, the other major issue in Greek history that seems to have to connect to the Iliad and the Odyssey is the emergence of sick states. Polis, the city state, is of course, the standard political institution for most of Greek history. And we do have mention of polisis in Homer. Polis is ubiquitous in Homer. And the question is whether in Homer we can see a sort of nascent and emerging political organization reflecting the polis system. There are elements that point to that direction. For example, we have references in the references to the Damos, the later demos. And again, this is a Mycenaean name indicating the people, and it survives into the early Iron Age. There are elements of judicial system in Homer that remind us of the later polis. For example, in that the beautiful, gorgeous shield that Hephaestus makes for Achilles, there is a representation of a city state, there is a sort of a trial for a homicide, and there is a history, an expert, that judges the case much the way that Hesiod describes for real societies. And there are also elements of ideology that we find in Homer that relate to the ideology of the polis. This dedication to your city, your country, the sort of spirit of citizenship and duty and self sacrifice. These are all elements that are part of the police network of ideology. So, bottom line, we, in Homer, we do have elements of a nascent political organization that resembles the city state, the polis.
- [39:28]
B
So I was reading your book. I, you know, I saw the Iliad catalog of ships, and I thought, oh, you know, this is going to represent to a certain extent, by sitting in Greece or the early Iron Age did. So if you couldn't compare what's in the catalog of ships with, you know, extant historical sites and linear B evidence. And I do want to note that the political geography was, you know, it was unexpected. I mean, Argolid didn't correspond with the Mycenaean palatial period. We have Laconia with the mixed geography, and then we have Pylos and the kingdom of Nestor over much of Messenia. It was very unexpected. So if you could, again, if you could discuss that a bit, that would be great. Yeah.
- [40:14]
C
The catalog of ships and political geography in general is a huge topic, just because the catalog of ships deals with so much of Greece, so many different areas of Greece. And just again, to remind your listeners that the catalogue of ships is a long text in the second book of the Iliad. It's basically a long and boring text in the second book of Iliad. It's just a list. It's a list of kings, where they came from, how many forces they brought, and so forth. So it's not really fascinating reading, except that it's a wonderful snapshot of political geography in the world of the epics. It's not history, and we can't expect it to paint a picture of real historical political geography in any period. It's a poetic construction, and we should view it as such. But it does give us a sense of what the political geography was like inside the epics in the world of the poems. It gets tricky when we try to identify which parts of the catalog of sheep actually correspond to historical reality and to which periods they correspond. So, as you very correctly mentioned, there are cases where they do not seem the element. The descriptions that we have in the catalogue of ships do not seem to correspond with the historical reality of one period. The case of the Argolid, for example. In the epics, the Argolid is divided into two kingdoms, that of Mycenae and that of Tiryns, led by Agamemnon and Diomedes. However, consensus among archaeologists is that in the Mycenaean period, the Argolid was one unified kingdom under the king of Mycenae. It is only in the early Iron Age, when Mycenae declines, that Argos, for example, appears and becomes prominent. And this is an element that seems to derive from the early Iron Age. Same with Laconia, Sparta. Sparta is founded in the early Iron Age. And yet, of course, it figures very prominently in the Iliad and the catalog of ships. And there are other sites that appear in the catalog of ships that did not exist in the Mycenaean period at all, for example, in parts of Euboea, Karistos, or in Thessaly or in Arcadia. So what's happening here is that we have elements from different regions of Greece and different periods within its region. There is this amalgamation. Again, it's the same pattern that we noticed earlier, that we discussed earlier. We have this amalgamation of historical elements of the early Iron Age seeping into the poems, along with memories of elements of political organization and political geography from the Mycenaean period. We have this blending, and it's not done in any systematic way in the epics. And the reasons for that, again, is that the epics crystallize a very long, long oral tradition of going back centuries in Messenia that you mentioned. This is a fascinating case, actually, and this is the one that I'm especially interested in because the excavation that I direct at Eklina, it's a Mycenaean capital, and it's one of the nine capitals mentioned in the catalog of ships. Nine capitals of Nestor. It's identified with apart Aipy, which is the Mycenaean name of Eklan, according to what to do the evidence. So here's what's happening in Mycenaean Pylos. In the Iliad, in the catalog of ships, there is mention of nine cities, nine capital cities of Nestor. And all of them can be placed in the western part of Nestor's kingdom. Then in the ninth book of the Iliad, this is the embassy of Achilles. And as you remember, Achilles withdraws from the battle. Agamemnon realizes that he needs him later on. So he sends an embassy with Odysseus, under Odysseus, to offer gifts to Achilles and entice him to come back to fight. So this is the embassy to Achilles. And some of these gifts are cities. And actually they are cities belonging to Nestor. I always thought this is kind of cheeky on the part of Agamemnon to offer to Achilles somebody else's cities. But what concerns us here is that there is mention of 7 cities of Nestor that are being offered to Achilles. And all seven of these cities can. The toponyms, the place names, can be located in the eastern part of Nestor's kingdom. So we have nine in the west, seven in the east least. Let's rewind a few centuries and go back to the Linear B tablets from the palace of Nestor, which give us a snapshot of political administration of the Mycenaean kingdom of Pylos. In those tablets, there is mention of, guess how many. Nine capital cities in the western part of the kingdom and seven in the east. It's exactly the same numbers. The names change, but the number is too precise to be a coincidence. And I think that as the centuries passed after the collapse of the kingdom of Pylos, the memory of an elaborate political administration with nine and seven cities remained alive and eventually seeped into the Iliad in these two different parts. Again, not as a conscious effort to preserve history, nothing like that, but rather as an element from the past that had lost its historical meaning. It didn't really mean anything to the people of the early Iron Age. It was just an example of how powerful the kingdom of Nestor was. So back to your original question. In the catalogue of ships and the political geography in the Iliad, we have this blend, this amalgamation of different elements from different periods and from different regions.
- [46:34]
B
Okay, you've sort of addressed my next question, so let's move on. How and why did elements of the economic organization of Mycenaean Greece persist in the early Iron Age? I think that's a good question. And what does this as well, you go into the shipwreck evidence, which I thought was interesting, and the economic organization itself mean for not just your, but, you know, scholarly interpretations of the epics.
- [46:58]
C
Yeah. In the book, I discuss the economy of the Homeric epics. I have organized this discussion into three parts. Agropastoral economy, trade and industry. So if you look at all these three main elements of Homeric economy, you notice pretty much the same thing that we noticed until now, that there is an amalgamation of different elements from different periods. For example, the. Although we don't have information about agricultural strategies in Homer, the information that we can deduct about crops, about stock breeding, they seem to reflect more of an early Iron Age reality than the Mycenaean reality. Then, when it comes to trade, Mycenaean trade was mostly in the hands of the palaces. Although there was free market operating outside the range of the palaces, the main part of trade was in the hands of the palaces in Homer, and this corresponds to the situation in the early Iron Age. We're talking about individual tradesmen and free markets. Very rarely are kings involved with the actual trade. So it looks like that in The Iliad and the Odyssey. We have elements mostly of the early Iron Age economy, which was the contemporary economy during the centuries that they were being. These two poems were crystallized, sorry, were being formed. But at the same time, there are still some elements from Mycenaean economy that survived. What we know about Mycenaean economy is very little. There are no references in the Linear B tablets, for example, to trading partners of the Mycenaean outside the Aegean. There are a couple of references to Phoenician products, for example, but no direct references to Egypt or other parts. We do have evidence. We do have references in Egyptian sources, like the Aegean list of Amenhotep iii, two places in the Aegean. In fact, that list may actually represent sort of a geographical map, if you want, of a travel, of traveling to the Aegean. But we don't really have any Mycenaean evidence. We do have shipwrecks. There are four shipwrecks from the eastern Mediterranean. The largest one, the Uluburun, is perhaps the best known one. There are smaller ones, the Cape Caledonia and a couple of smaller ones also that show. So the trade operate at the different scales. So the Uluburun shipwreck seems to have been larger scale, lots of bras, lots of more valuable content. The other three seem to have been operating at the smaller scale. So again, we have a composite picture in the epics of different levels of trade. In the epics, trade is mostly in the hands of Phoenicians. Indeed, most of them are hustlers and low. They're not held very highly by the Greeks. Even Odysseus himself, when he tries, because Odysseus, it's his standard, his standard way of approaching new situations by line, by pretending to be someone else. So even Odysseus pretends to be a trader himself. And the idea is that traders are not held in high esteem. But we don't really have the official formal trade that operated in the Mycenaean period.
- [50:50]
B
So we have Mycenaean bronze weapons and we have the iron weapons usually found in the epics. Can you then compare Mycenaean warfare with the shifting tactics and warfare in the epics? And you go through a litany of evidence that I thought was fascinating, like the Dendra armor, the boar's tusk helmet. If you can address this evidence as well, that again would be helpful.
- [51:19]
C
Right. In the epics we have, again, we have a combination of different tactics. So we have evidence, for example, we have references to organized lines of soldiers marching against the enemy. Enemy. We also have evidence for soldiers fighting individual duels or attacking the enemy at will. We also have references to different types of weaponry, some of which actually go back to the Mycenaean period. For example, we have references to long shields that cover the entire body, which had disappeared by the end of the Mycenaean period. In fact, these are early Mycenaean. We have other seals that are round. And of course, bronze versus iron. This is perhaps the best known example of these anachronisms that we have in Homer. Homer talks a lot about bronze weapons, as if bronze were the main material used for or weapons during his period. And then in the early Iron Age, we know that bronze had been replaced by iron. And yet this is one memory of the Mycenaean period that we find in Homer. There are other. Many other elements. Warfare is a huge topic. For example, the armors themselves we have in iconography. In Mycenaean iconography, and also in later early Iron Age iconography, we have armors made of plates. The Dendra armor itself is made of sheets of bronze wrapped around the body. The boars tusk helmet that you mentioned, that was not really used in battle. It wouldn't offer any real protection. It were more of a. It was more of a statement. Look how many, you know, wild boars was a very dangerous hunt. So wearing a helmet made of tusks of wild boars was a symbol of the bravery and the valor and the skill of a hunter and a warrior. But we do have a description of a borstusk helmet in Homer. Borstusk's helmets disappeared from the world after, at the end of the Mycenaean period. How would it survive in the epics? And it is possible that the memory of these weapons survived. And again, I'm going back to what we discussed in the beginning about Mycenaean epic poetry. It is possible that some of those Mycenaean elements of Mycenaean poems survived and they were incorporated in the epics. And that is also corroborated by elements of Mycenaean dialect surviving in the Homeric language.
- [54:16]
B
Language.
- [54:16]
C
But that's a different story. So Borsdask's helmets could have survived as memories. They could have been found in graves, Mycenaean graves that were reopened during the early Iron Age. But the bottom line is that they are Mycenaean elements that we find in the epics. Chariots also. There is quite a bit of debate as to the use of chariots in Homer. Some scholars think that they were used as quote, unquote, code, battle taxis, shuttles. So in the sense that they would carry the warrior to the front and then the warrior would get off the chariot in order to fight. We don't have evidence for extensive use of chariots in the battlefield. How about real life? Well, the terrain in Greece is very fragmented and mountainous and rugged, perhaps too much so for chariots to be used in battle. In battle. And yet in the linear Metabolus from Knossos, for example, there is reference of significant investment in chariots. So why? How were they used? These are questions that remain unanswered. But together, all this evidence again leads us to the same conclusion, that Homeric warfare is not a snapshot of warfare in the early Iron Age age, or in the 8th, or in the 9th, or in the 10th century. Not even that, not even in the Mycenaean period. But it's really an amalgamation of elements of warfare from different periods put together. The Homeric world overall is a poetic construct. It's not a world that represents. We cannot treat the Homeric epics as history. We can try to see which parts of them are inspired by historical reality, but they're not history. It's a poetic construction made up of all these different elements.
- [56:11]
B
So on that note, I think you pose a very, very important point and this question is kind of trying to prompt that point here. So which sanctuaries and religious feasts referenced in the epics parallel findings in the Mycenaean archeological record, including the Linear B tablets? And then this is what you make a very great point at the end of this particular chapter. Yet they don't appear in the post Palatian Iron Age record. If you can explain the significance of that question, it would be great.
- [56:44]
C
Yeah, let me just start by saying that in the inner Betablets we have references, as you mentioned, we have references to several Greek gods that we know from the later Greek Pantheon. Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, possibly Dionysus, Apollon Ares, under different names. But basically the Greek pantheon is there there. We have also gods who. I'm sorry, in later periods we have gods that do not appear in the Linear B tablets. The best known example is Aphrodite. Aphrodite is unknown. The goddess of love is unknown in the Mycenaean Greece. We have some discrepancies too. For example, in the Linear B tablets in Knossos and Pylos, where Zeus is mentioned, he has different wives. One is Hera, the other is Diwal, the female of Dias of Zeus. So again, in The Mycenaean period, we have the seeds of later Greek religion, both in what the gods are concerned and also in what rituals are concerned. Sacrifices and invocations, oracles and prophecies and seers, these are all elements of later Greek religion that originate in the Mycenaean period and survive through the centuries. And we see them in the epics. Now. Some of the gods seem to have different names. For example, Apollo does not. The name Apollo does not appear in the inner tablets, but we have a God who has the Characteristics of Apollo, I.e. eneal. The name Ares appears as a person's name, and it is possible that it is a theophoric name in the Inerby tablets, but this is unclear. Dionysus appears in the inner Betablets. Demeter, probably not. There are some gods about which we are uncertain. The other aspect of religion is also also religious officials, priests, some of these officers, the religious officials of the Mycenaean period, the tasks they perform survive into later Greek religion as well. So overall there is continuity. But again, as one would expect, there are changes in names of gods. There are changes in some religious beliefs. Mortuary beliefs also fall under religion. Different burial customs in the Mycenaean period. Different burial customs in the early Iron Age. And in the early Iron Age, we have. Sorry, in the epics, again, we have this amalgamation of burial customs. Cremation is the standard form of burial in the Mycenaean. Sorry, in the epics, not in the Mycenaean period. In the epics and the ironic age, the burial of Patroclus is the most famous example of cremation and so forth. So again, amalgamation of different elements from different periods in the epics. The epics do not preserve the picture of Greek religion at one specific period in time.
- [60:13]
B
Okay, let's get to the last kind of concluding chapters here. You put forward various theoretical frameworks for memory and memory making cultural memory. So how did habitual and semantic memory, how did this function in Bronze Age cultures to maintain authority? And then while later the early Iron Age peoples repurposed the ruins of sacred sites, and ultimately, why was this storied landscape a bit more contiguous than divergent?
- [60:48]
C
Right, That's a point that goes straight into the heart of the issue of the emergence of the epics. Memory, Memory is very important. By now, throughout our discussion, it has become clear that the epics preserve a lot of memories from earlier periods, from different periods. And in fact, even some of the elements of the epic epics are much later, down to the archaic period. So we're talking centuries of elements that are integrated into the epics. So memory is very important. How are these elements preserved from one generation to the next? And for that I had to go and study the mechanisms of social memory, the mechanisms by which not just individuals, but groups and communities remember their patterns. And overall, there are two types of. Two modes of memory, as you mentioned. One is habitual memory. And this is the kind of memory that is preserved through performances, communal events and so forth. Poetry would fall into that. The other is semantic memory, which is mostly visual. So what you see in images, in pictures and in monuments. So for the people of the early Iron Age, the people who succeeded, who survived rather the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces, they still led their lives, they still went out to their field to cultivate their fields, they still got married, they still had funerals for their loved ones, they still celebrated together as communities. So it is during those events, those communal events, that their shared, shared stories and their shared elements, sorry, the shared traditions were preserved. And again, this goes from one generation to the other. As far as visual reminders of earlier events, visual memories are concerned. In the Mycenaean palaces, we had these huge fresco wall paintings, representation, large scale iconographic programs that showed. Some of them, especially at pillars, showed wars and battles and what have you. These, these iconographic programs at the end, after the collapse of the palaces, of course, disappear. But what does continue is military iconography on vases and possibly other perishable materials that we don't have anymore. So we still have this element of heroic stories being preserved in visual manner in those, on those vases. Now, the other, another aspect of memory is the environment in which people, the environment which people inhabit in Greece, there has never been a period, never throughout the thousands of Greek history, where the landscape did not preserve visual signs of the past. Ruins destroyed buildings were always part of the landscape. And looking at the way that memory works, especially, and I'm here, I did a lot of work trying to understand the way that memory works in French historiography. These are the French historiographers especially Pierre Nogat did, laid the foundations for understanding how we interact with our environment in terms of preserving memories. So sites of memory, what affects French call vieux de memoires, are very important in preserving communal memories. Why? Because they become the vehicles of stories and traditions. Take the Lion Gate, for example. The Lion Gate was never buried. The relief of the Lion Gate was always visible for centuries. Or the Athenian acropolis, or in my site, the one that they excavated at Klein at this massive cyclopeia building was never buried. So people who continue to live around these ruins of the past turned these ruins into vehicles, into tools of remembering. Combining that with the habitual and the semantic modes of remember, of memory, this led to a phenomenon in which monuments and stories from the past and, and also performative exercises like poetry became the carriers of memories and tradition. So how was the story of the Trojan War preserved through all these modes? How were all the stories, you know, the labors of Hercules, you name it, Perseus, all the stories were preserved from one generation to the other through these modes, modes of remembering. So that's one part of the emergence of the epics. The next question is how those stories seeped into the epics. So we're talking about two different processes here. One is the actual process of preserving the memories from the past. The other is the process by which those memories entered into epic poetry. But basically, as far as memory is concerned, again, we're talking about the complex process involving material remains of the past, past stories preserved in communal events, and visual representations of stories that become the carriers of the history of the community. And one final point about this is that the history reconstructed at any given point in time by a group of people is not necessarily objective history. It is the history that meets the needs and the standards of that community at that specific point in time. It is a mirror of a community's ideas about its own identity and ideas about the past. So we have to be careful in understanding that social memory does not preserve intact and objective the story, the history of the past. It is more rather the interpretation of a community by a community of its own past.
- [67:05]
B
All right, so we're kind of at the end game here. So in terms of memory, but also performance, you mentioned the concept of composition and performance. And then top down, bottom up compositions and performance. What are the two stages? Well, elucidate that concept. And then what are the two stages of that? And then the transition from local memory making to these religious festivals. And finally circling back to the beginning here, the appearance of multiple homers.
- [67:39]
C
Right. Again, to follow up, thank you for raising this point. That it tags directly to what I was just saying, that the emergence of Greek epic poetry is a combination of two different processes. One is memory, and the other is what we just mentioned, composition, performance. And this is sort of the process that explains how the memories of the past entered Greek poetry. Poetry. Greek epic poetry. So we know, thanks to the work of Parry and Lord and Greg Nagy and then many other philologists, Especially we know the importance of composition performance. We know that poems are not created somewhere in somebody's office, but they are composed out in the field. While poets perform their poems, they interact with their audiences and they make adjustments. They change their part of their poems to match the expectations of their audience because they are professional. Basically, they want to please their audiences. So if you're a poet who sings about the Trojan War, you're invited to sing about the Trojan War, let's say in Sparta. You're not going to go to Sparta and sing about heroes from Crete or from Athens, you're going to sing about heroes from Sparta. So basically, composition performance is a process by which poems are composed while they are being performed based on feedback and interaction that the poet gets from the audience. And this is important for two reasons. The first is because it means that these. These poems constantly change. There are no two identical versions of the poems. There are as many versions as performances. And the second important point about that is that this means what. It means that the epics were never really memorized and performed, at least in the early stages. We have this idea that, quote, unquote, Homer or any other poet would memorize his poems and would go perform them from memory. That's not how it worked. The way it worked is that itinerant poets, sort of like the medieval bards, the troubadours, if you want an analogy, they would go from one place of Greece to the other. They would sit down, they would perform their poems, and they would adjust the poems they would compose. They would improvise as they were performing. They would compose in such a way that their audiences would be pleased to do that. They would include local elements from the places where they sang into their poetry. And this would include both elements from the contemporary elements from the time where they actually were performing, and also elements from local histories and traditions going back perhaps centuries in different areas. So what happens is that in the early part of the early Iron Age age, as we're coming out of the shock of the collapse of the Mycenaean palatial administration, these poems would be performed in different parts of Greece, and they would sort of be built from the bottom up, if you want. So this is the additive stage in the creation of epic poetry in which in countless parts of Greece, countless brilliant poets would compose their poems and they would improvise in order in each performance, in order to incorporate elements from local traditions. Later on, towards the end of the early Iron Age, and as we go into the Archaic period, things change. Why? Because the Greek world becomes more interconnected. We're coming out of those, those early sort of chiefdom level polities into city states that are more formal. More people now attend the religious festivals like the Panionia in Asia Minor or the Panathenaea in Athens. They draw crowds from many different parts of Greece. And in those festivals, poetic performances are given as a competition. Poets would compete against each other about their poetry. This involves another process of standardization of poetry, a subtractive level. So basically, in the early parts of the early Iron Age, we had these poems created, shorter poems, I think, in different parts of Greece. As we go into the Archaic period, a process of standardization happens in which the specific local elements are sort of homogenized, are taken out of the poems and the elements are left that would be of interest to people from different parts of Greece. So this is the subtractive state. If you want a stage and it is formal, it's from the top down. And the purpose is to create standardized versions of the poems that would be performed in different religious festivals. Now, the Panathena seem to have been a critical junction, a crucial junction in the history of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It seems that Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens, introduced the epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey into the Panathena in 522 BC. And in order to do that, it looks like he regulated the poems. So basically he established a sequence of performances, poets narrating and singing different parts of a sort of relay, if you want, of these long poems. By the way, these are very long poems. The iliad is about 16,000 lines and Odyssey about 12,000 lines. So they could not be performed in one sitting by one person in the Panathena. So basically, finally, that's when the standardization and the fixation of the poems happens. And that's when I think they were written down. Until then, they were purely oral compositions at the point in time where they started being standardized and being performed in official religious festivals, not in the small community festivals that were performed in the early Iron Age, but in large official festivals that drew crowds of people, of people from all over Greece. That's when they started become homogenized. So the bottom line here, I think that we have two processes here, or rather two types of composition performance. Until now, we thought that composition performance happened in the great religious festivals. But this does not explain this wealth of different regional elements and different historical traditions that we have in the epics. So what I think happened was that but in the first stage we have local performances by Many different poets. And as we go into the Archaic period, those performances become standardized and end up being the Iliad and the Odyssey that we know. And actually, this goes back, as you said. Let me close with this. This goes back to the fact that I don't think there was one Homer. There were many Homers in the sense that there were many brilliant poets, poets in the early part of the early Iron Age. This could explain also these different traditions about the birthplaces of Homer. There were many cities in ancient Greece and islands that claimed the honor of being the birthplace of Homer. And having many different poets in all different parts of Greece could explain these different traditions. And you know what? In my mind, the end of it, the gist of all this is that that there's no real reason for us to believe that there was one Homer who created all this. I mean, how many great philosophers do we have from ancient Greece? How many great tragedians do we have? How many great historians? Why do we have to think that there was only one great epic poet who created these magnificent poems? I think there were many. It's just that they lived in an era where individual authors was not acknowledged. And their names are sort of lost, unfortunately, in the haze of early Greek history.
- [76:18]
B
All right, so we're coming to an end here. What's going on with you next? I don't mean to hit you from left field, but what's next for you?
- [76:27]
C
Well, I just finished, as I mentioned in the beginning, the second book in this three, part three book series. And this is on the human experience in Homer. My family was very much impacted by the Second World War, my parents and their whole generation. And this affected also the way that our family was raised. The same with my friends as well, our whole generation. And as the older I grew, the more I realized that our experiences were not just our own experiences, but they were part of a universal human experience. And the more I read about Homer and the Odyssey, I realized how loss and tragedy are so embedded in the epics that they actually represent the epics. I think at the first time in human history that someone looks at humanity and the way that humanity is affected by war and violence. And there is a whole slew of other parts of our lives that can be found in the epics. So the second book I just finished is about that. The universal human experience in Homer. And I'm working slowly on the third book, the Homer and Archaeology. I have the advantage of being a field archaeologist, excavating a Mycenaean site and more. So a Mycenaean side that is mentioned in Homer. So I am fortunate in that I am able to see the actual material world described in the epics coming out of the ground, excavating buildings and objects and down to board tasks, helmets coming out of the ground. So for me, this is a blessing because I can put two and two together. I think that I can put two and two together and understand and make connections, connect the dots between archaeology and poetry.
- [78:30]
B
Again, left your question. When can we expect that second book? Or can we.
- [78:34]
C
I just finished and sent it to my editor, so I'm hoping that in the next few months we'll proceed with that. Thank you.
- [78:42]
B
Professor Cosmopolis, thank you for joining us today.
- [78:46]
C
It was absolutely my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Mr. Tripp.
- [78:50]
B
The book is the World of Homer Archaeology, Social Memory and the Emergence of Greek Epic Poetry, published by Cambridge University Press earlier this year. I'm Ryan Shipp, your host. On behalf of Professor Cosmopolis, please tune in to new books on archaeology next time. Thanks for joining us.