I.D. Greeks 0010
An emendation : The term I use for the oral poet, “rhetor,” is not the term usually used in the discussions of oral poetry, “rhapsode” is. However, as Plato points out in the ION, the rhapsode makes a point that, when singing, he does not know what he is doing because he is possessed by the god to be able to give himself over to singing a very long fixed text. Whereas the ‘folk’ singer before the text is firmly fixed, as Milman Parry and Alfred Bates Lord demonstrate with Serbian epic singers, to a certain degree re-creates the song to fit the audience and occasion which implies the manipulation of the listeners such as a rhetor would be doing in manipulating a jury with his prearranged speech memorized as Francis Yates has demonstrated by the specific objects in a specific courtroom and interrelated symbols related to the content of the speech.

‘Folk’ is put in scare quotes because one of the points of all this is that oral culture is not inferior to written culture, a point implied in Plato’s PHAEDRUS, that written culture is by no means more “civilized” than oral culture. In fact, just the opposite case has been made by a number of writers. However, the prime evidence of all this is the great sophistication of the ILIAD, the ODYSSEY, and Hesiod’s THEOGONY and WORKS AND DAYS which Parry and Lord and others have demonstrated from their fieldwork with Serbian epic singers are filled with metrical and thematic formulae that seem ‘quaint’ or ‘repetitious’ to us but could keep a singer going as he re-creates the epic he is singing by filling in metrical gaps in the song and continuously reminding the audience of constant themes and the character and qualities of who and what he is singing about. This actually, then, becomes a forerunner of systematization of the ‘theology’ and ‘philosophy’ behind the poem that gives the superior epics their authority that makes them endure for audiences desiring to understand their world through those epic poems.

If one has read any of the fragments of other Greek epics – and I realize this is a very unfair judgment since there is little to judge by – they ‘seem’ very dry and devoid of the profundity of thought we are familiar with in Homer and reminds me continuously of Shakespeare – an apt comparison because Shakespeare is doing exactly the same as his counterpart in the original epic singer re-creating his song in performance because he is developing in his characters thinking implicit, “in the air” but undeveloped, explicitly forbidden by law but permissible to put in the mouths of characters who suffer calamity, death, or reform into acceptable ways of explicit cultural thought. Homer also has his characters speak things unacceptable to the norm, but tolerable for the same reasons as Shakespeare. However, both Plato and the Christian theologians turn this against him by saying “Is this how one SHOULD portray the morally exemplar gods as behaving?”

But Homer, like Shakespeare, is not teaching what SHOULD be but portraying things and people and fate as they actually are and as people actually know that they are. They are both well aware that “the world as it should be” is a world of fairy tale fantasy that does not and can never exist in reality. This same way of approaching an audience is also clearly evident in the OLD TESTAMENT, that A) the world as it really is clearly presented as such, and yet, B) sometimes in very different ways and very different degrees of sincerity, “the world as it should be” always seems to prevail in value over the world as it is. In all these composers, one can always find what one wants to find, i.e., the composition is always designed with the audience in mind.

One might make a case that “the TRUTH” as morally imposed, as socially demanded, started with the Pre-Socratics and the NEW TESTAMENT, but I think this would be very difficult to really do if one interprets each composition by itself as self-contained instead of interpreting the texts as a unity judged by an overriding point of view that is not, in reality, present in the texts themselves. One could put the case here in terms of Ivan Karamazov: “If God does not exist, then all things are permitted” as opposed to its overwhelmingly obvious corollary “If God does exist, then nothing is permitted,” i.e., any “freedom” in a real and thorough-going theological or philosophical system is an extremely limited freedom whose context of so-called choices become so irrelevant to the individual person’s desires and real situation that it becomes no choice at all, or rather “freedom” becomes the choices and actions of a truly Hegelian/Sartrean “Other.”