UC Irvine

Self-consciousness in the Homeric poems has been a subject of much scholarly attention over the past three decades. Much of this scholarship has focused on scenes of storytelling that take place within the Iliad and the Odyssey. Much of that work analyzes the Odyssey as a literary text. Since the Odyssey is the extant textual byproduct of an oral tradition, I use Jan Vansina’s model of speech types in oral societies to analyze the different types of oral traditions that appear within the text. I focus on Odyssey 8-12, which take place during a day of athletic contests and feasting on the island of Skheria. Storytelling is the central to these books. In Odyssey 8, Demodokos, a blind bard, sings three songs. Books 9-12 are Odysseus’s first person recitation of his own adventures. Interspersed with bardic songs and personal narrative, there are also moments where characters give anecdotes about the past, a type of speech I term historical gossip. Each of these types of speech has two distinct audiences, an internal audience and an external audience. In conjunction with the analysis of audiences and Vansina’s model of speech types, I utilize Jonas Grethlein’s model of temporal divisions that appear in representations of the past in the speech of Homeric characters. Employing this combined methodology, I argue that there is sufficient evidence in Odyssey 8-12 to show that the oral society that produced it was conscious of the process though which these oral traditions were created.