BMCR 2009.02.17, Luigi Ferreri, La questione omerica

Luigi Ferreri, La questione omerica dal cinquecento al settecento.
Pleiadi 10.  Roma:  Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2007.  Pp. xii,
372.  ISBN 9788884984609.  EUR 48.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Bruce Heiden, The Ohio State University ([email protected])
Word count:  2031 words
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Table of Contents
(http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/casalini07/08622647.pdf)

Homerists and others interested in the history of classical scholarship
know the story of "The Homeric Question" --a rhetorical question
asserting that the Iliad and Odyssey had no author--in two closely
related versions that both ascribe the Question's genesis primarily to
the insight of a single iconoclast.  The older and more familiar
version credits paternity to F.A. Wolf and his Prolegomena ad Homerum
of 1795; the alternative version awards paternity to the abbe/
d'Aubignac and his Conjectures Acade/miques ou Dissertation sur
l'Iliade (written and privately circulated 1660s, published
posthumously 1715). The older version, which originated with Wolf
himself, has never ignored d'Aubignac or denied that he and some others
had doubted the existence of Homer before Wolf did, but it incorporates
Wolf's apparent predecessors as forerunners whose partial glimpses of
truth were completely superseded by Wolf's uncompromising research and
its discoveries. Grafton and others have modified these narratives by
broadening their historical context, but the fixation upon the figures
of Wolf and d'Aubignac has not yet been overcome.

In the book here under review Luigi Ferreri has taken The Homeric
Question back to the drawing board and subjected its history to a
thorough reconceptualization, reinvestigation, and rewriting.  In
Ferreri's telling the Homeric Question had no father at all, for it
sprouted (as it were) from seeds carried westward with the Byzantine
scholarly tradition, and by the mid-16th century it was flourishing
visibly in many works of scholarship and commentary.  The scholars who
nurtured its growth were no small band of heroes, but numerous and
often undistinguished. When d'Aubignac and Wolf do finally enter
Ferreri's story they do not transform it especially more than many
other contributors, while in contrast some figures previously
considered less important (or hardly known at all) receive merited
attention.  One might almost say that in Ferreri's study the question
of authorship rebounds upon The Homeric Question itself. But no
cleverness is needed to praise Ferreri's book.  It is an impressive
display of learning that exposes forgotten pathways on the journey that
Homeric scholarship still travels.

Ferreri's fresh approach to the Homeric Question's development is
enabled by his insight that the Question was never actually one
question about the existence of an author, but several different
historiographical topics that scholars connected gradually.  Ferreri
therefore organizes his investigation by teasing apart some of the
classical Question's constituent strands and tracing their courses
separately. His most novel finding is that by the mid-16th century the
idea that Homer's epics were compiled from once-dispersed poems was
already widely known to scholars and accepted as historical fact
without much controversy. The claim that Homer composed orally,
originally suggested by one now-famous passage in Josephus, entered
modern discussion as early as the 1580s. Ferreri relates its ascending
importance to extra-philological factors such as contemporary
ethnographic reports of indigenous peoples in the New World and
philosophical speculation about the origins of human institutions. The
Homeric Question, which in the 19th century context is sometimes
portrayed as a fundamentally philological issue whose far-reaching
implications affected other fields, here appears rather more as a
symptom of issues that impinged upon philology from outside.

The basis of Ferreri's exposition is an extremely meticulous inventory
of primary sources; his bibliography and notes are astonishingly
thorough, unearthing positions pertinent to the Homeric Question in
works not especially devoted to Homer and in some now apparently lost.
Each chapter consists of a quasi-doxographical survey of sources
relevant to particular aspects of the Question during a period of its
development. Ferreri summarizes each source carefully and comments on
its use of testimonia, logical inferences, and relationship to other
sources.  He avoids subordinating individual sources to narrative
trajectories or quantitatively defined trends, and analyzes
unrepresentative positions without making them seem either secondary or
uniquely inspired.  The following outline is a selective digest of
highlights.

Ferreri's Chapter One examines the many 16th-17th century discussions
of the rhapsodes, the Homeridae, and the Homeristae.  These discussions
fundamentally aimed at defining what those three Greek words meant;
they were prompted by entries in Byzantine lexica and sought
clarification from other testimonia such as Eustathius and the scholium
on Pi. N. 2.1. Ferreri stresses how heavily Renaissance scholars relied
upon etymology in reaching the conclusion that rhapsodes  were much
like performers of centos. By 1698 standard reference works reflected
the communis opinio that the transmission of Homer's epics had been
seriously compromised by the modifications of rhapsodes during
performances.

Chapter Two traces the propagation of the "Pisistratean Compilation"
stories during the 16th and 17th centuries, as they were taken from the
Vitae Homeri and repeated, usually quite uncritically. Versions of the
compilation story routinely appeared in the prolegomena of early
printed editions of Homer, where readers expected find explanation of
the text's authority; scholars told them why the original sources of
these poems were in doubt.  The formation of Homer's epics through
compilation was such a commonplace it supplied a topic for exercise
questions in an early 17th-century textbook.  Ferreri identifies
Camerarius (1538) as the first scholar to suggest that the unusual
transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey posed a serious obstacle to their
restoration; less than a century later Heinsius concluded that the
epics had been so corrupted, both by the compilation and after it, that
the original texts could never be recovered.  Here Ferreri sees the
emergence of the "ecdotic perspective" in which the philological goal
of fidelity to the author gives way to reconstruction of a text's
diachronic transformation.  Ferreri suggests that Heinsius was affected
by parallel developments in textual criticism of the Bible.

Chapter Three observes how 17th century French "antihomerists" put the
philological commonplaces about the epics' genesis and performance to
use in polemics against Homer's reputation.  The controversy was fed by
extra-philological factors that included valorization of Aristotelian
ideas of formal unity, Calvinist rejection of all authority except holy
scripture, and the rationalist law of universal progress that required
an early poet like Homer to be backward. It is in this period that
Homer is first likened to local folk-balladeers.  Ferreri  argues that
d'Aubignac probably drew many of his positions from predecessors now
only indirectly traceable;  investigating the 18th century printings
and notices of d'Aubignac's essay, he concludes that its circulation
and influence have been exaggerated.  Antihomerism provoked a reaction
from writers such as Boileau and Anne Dacier, who not only defended the
transmitted epics' artistic integrity but discerningly criticized
scholars' use of the ancient testimonia about the compilation.

Ferreri's fourth chapter observes the "oral" strand of the classical
Homeric Question as it developed in an "embryonic" phase. Josephus's
claim that Homer did not write attracted comment as early as 1583, and
between 1590 and 1685 at least four writers drew upon Josephus'
authority to declare that Homer composed orally.  Ferreri stresses that
the growing conviction that Homer composed orally symptomatized
contemporary philosophical preoccupations with the progress of
civilized institutions from primitive origins. He also notes how 17th
century discussions of Homeric orality drew upon comparative
ethnography, including reports of oral cultural memory among indigenous
peoples of the Americas. Ferreri's discussion of Vico includes an
interesting digest of 20th century positions on the question of whether
Vico's Homeric speculations were central or marginal to his
philosophical project. In his section on MacPherson's forged
compilation of the heroic poems of "Ossian," which had supposedly been
preserved as an oral tradition among Scottish countryfolk, Ferreri
notes how Macpherson's admirers likened his work to the compilation of
the Homeric poems by Lycurgus and/or Pisistratus.

In his fifth chapter Ferreri shows how during the second half of the
18th century the conviction that Homer could not have written was fed
by the speculations of Condillac and Warburton about the slow evolution
of alphabetic writing from hieroglyphic inscription.  Ferreri accords
much attention to Rousseau, who like Vico conceptualized the orality of
Homeric poetry as proximity to natural passion.  Heyne emerges from his
rival Wolf's shadow as a pioneer of comparative ethnography in Homeric
studies. Bajamonti, a follower of Vico who claimed that a poetic art
like Homer's survived in rural Dalmatia, seems to have been the first
to regard Homeric repetitions as formulas (1797).  Ferreri also
observes developments that did not focus upon orality.  Readers may
recognize (though Ferreri does not) perhaps the earliest appearance of
Homeric Analysis in Ferreri's summary of a 1785 essay by the
neo-d'Aubignachian Mercier, who claimed not only that the Iliad was an
inept compilation, but that it developed over centuries, and that its
constituent poems revealed traces of their different periods of
composition. In 1787 Cesarotti responded to the provocation with a
systematic critique of d'Aubignac, Vico, and Mercier; this essay, a
preface to Cesarotti's Italian translation of the Iliad, identified and
publicized the already longstanding academic argument against Homer's
authorship. Here the Analyst-Unitarian controversy is visible, outside
the time, region and institutional setting with which it is usually
associated.

The sixth and final chapter centers upon Wolf's Prolegomena of 1795,
which Ferreri approaches through the immediately preparatory event of
Villoison's publication of the Codex Venetus A of the Iliad with its
abundant scholia (1788). Ferreri reminds readers that Villoison did not
"discover" the Venetian Codex, whose existence was known since the 15th
century and whose scholia had occasionally been consulted and cited by
scholars with access to the manuscript. Villoison hoped that
information about Aristarchus' criticism would facilitate restoration
of the Iliad to its original form; but Wolf drew the opposite
conclusion, that the work of the Alexandrian critics made restoration
impossible. Ferreri analyzes Wolf's positions at length; among the
features he emphasizes is Wolf's revisionist view of early rhapsodes,
who Wolf argued were also composers.  Following Timpanaro Ferreri finds
Wolf's greatest significance in his adoption of the "ecdotic"
perspective that shifted the goal of textual criticism from restoration
of an original to historical accounts of transmission.  Ferreri also
discusses Wolf's dependence upon Eichhorn's Biblical criticism and
Cesarotti's response to Wolf's Prolegomena.

There should be no doubt that in my view La questione omerica
successfully improves upon the received narratives of the Homeric
Question by extending their temporal span and distributing attention
among many more contributors and factors. Ferreri's book is immensely
learned and intelligent, and I read it with pleasure. I look forward to
the further research into Homeric scholarship it has made possible.

Ferreri's successes do also reveal some of the difficulties inherent in
his project.  La questione omerica displays a certain tension between
the monographic format of a specialized historical study and the broad
cultural developments whose relevance Ferreri incorporates in lengthy
digressions. A reader's perspective, and perhaps even Ferreri's, might
have benefited from an introductory chapter that briefly surveyed the
major ecclesiastical, political and scientific controversies that
animated Europe during the period of Ferreri's study, and situated the
Homeric Question among them.  Such a survey might have brought into
better focus a feature of the Homeric Question that in Ferreri's
presentation emerges piecemeal and incompletely, namely how the
significance and dynamism of the Question were affected by early modern
science's integral negative pole, the "superstition" it was determined
to banish. It might be said that historical claims about Homer's epics
contended less against one another than against an image of Homer whose
character and ideological affiliations aligned it with the authority of
the sacred. This negative factor never fully surfaces in La questione
omerica, where the indirect linkage between Homer and the Bible seems
to press against Ferreri's narrative like a strong wind behind a wall;
for example, Ferreri astutely suggests that textual criticism of the
Bible influenced Heinsius' textual criticism of Homer, but his
intra-philological standpoint registers the event as an instance of
scientific method developing through communication between neighboring
spheres. Here, but especially in an introduction, it would have been
worthwhile to emphasize the deauthorization that historical
investigation of the Bible implied, because the dynamic of
deauthorization does a lot to explain how a few ancient reports about
the Homeric epics were made to suggest a virtual heresy, and why some
Homerists cast longer or shorter shadows than their substantive
contributions to scholarship would seem to merit.

La questione omerica offers much to ponder. Its thorough research
allows us to behold the history of Homeric scholarship with fresh eyes.