UC Berkeley

Scholars emphasize the original orality of the Iliad and Odyssey. By contrast, the Jewish Bible is typically presented, not as an “oral text,” but as a collection of written documents. In this dissertation, I deconstruct the opposition between Greek orality and Jewish writtenness. I argue that the attempt to recover a purely oral Homer overlooks essential dynamics in the epics’ composition and later reception; I further argue that a renewed attention to the textual history and reception of the Jewish Bible challenges conventional accounts of the Homeric tradition. These dynamics come into focus when we attend to the writtenness of both traditions, that is, to their material existence as written texts, and when we consider “orality” as an emergent property of writing. The project consists of four chapters. In brief, chapter 1 argues that the Homeric epics stage a polemic against writing that is inherited and elaborated by subsequent intellectual traditions of antiquity. Chapters 2 and 3 turn to Jewish Hellenistic and early Christian sources, tracing distinctive attitudes toward the written transmission of the Jewish Bible, and examining their afterlife in the modern entanglements of Homeric and biblical philologies. Chapter 4 returns to the question of Homeric orality, arguing that the dominant modern reception of the epics paradoxically depends on a theory of Greek alphabetic writing, artificially distinguished from Semitic writing, as a technology of sound recording. Chapter 1 explores the ancient imaginary of Homer alongside related imaginaries of oral performance and writing. Beginning with the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, I argue that the epics do not reflect social conditions of pure orality, but idealize the spoken word against various forms of graphic inscription. My primary case study is the Bellerophon episode in Iliad 6, the most famous reference to “writing” in Homer. I trace its reception through ancient authors from Euripides to Plutarch to the Alexandrian scholars. These discourses, I argue, repeat widespread philosophical and rhetorical tropes about the low status of writing as opposed to the elite status of the poet’s voice. I then turn to the imaginary of textual scholarship in antiquity. I argue that Greco-Roman sources generally disparage Alexandrian scholarship, blaming textual corruption in Homer on the Alexandrians’ bookishness. This is in contrast to a privileged imaginary of mnemonic and genealogical transmission, as represented by the legendary Homeridae or “sons of Homer.” Chapter 2 argues that Jewish Hellenistic literature is crucial to understanding the Homeric tradition in antiquity and its modern reception. I examine the role of writing in Jewish conceptions of revelation, law, and nationhood from biblical through late Second Temple texts. In contrast to the general Greco-Roman subordination of written texts to oral performance, ancient Jewish sources tend to emphasize the stability and incorruptibility of the Jewish sacred library. My core evidence is the Letter of Aristeas, the earliest account of the Septuagint translation of the Bible, and Josephus’ account of Homer’s illiteracy (Ap. 1.12). Both texts, enormously influential in the history of classical scholarship, have traditionally been thought to reflect the doctrines of Alexandrian Homeric scholarship: Aristeas as describing the translation of the Jewish Bible in terms of Alexandrian critical methods, and Josephus as echoing a supposedly Alexandrian doctrine of Homeric orality. I argue, instead, that Aristeas and Josephus adopt a polemical stance toward Greco-Roman cultural institutions, reflecting distinctively Jewish attitudes toward written texts. Aristeas disparages Alexandrian scholarship in favor of Jewish translation; Josephus’ notion of Homer’s illiteracy, unparalleled in Greco-Roman sources, appropriates and inverts Greek disparagements of writing in order to elevate Jewish Law over notionally “unwritten” Greek traditions. Chapter 3 traces the entanglement of Homeric and biblical philologies from early Christian theology through to the emergence of oral theory in the twentieth century. I start with Paul’s theology of circumcision, which draws on the classical metaphor of “internal writing” in order to construct physical circumcision as the written “letter” prefiguring the “spirit” of Christian belief. I trace this notion through Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, John Chrysostom, and other early Christian theologians, arguing that the figure of the Jew in the early Christian imagination takes on the low status and negative stereotypes of bookishness that attend more generally to grammarians, critics, and copyists in the Greco-Roman world. These discourses illustrate the theology of supersession—the notion that Judaism was mere preparation for Christianity—which I argue is central to the modern philological conception of textual history. I then pursue two further areas: Spinoza’s documentary criticism of the Hebrew Bible, which applies supersessionist theology to authorize Christian teaching through proofs of textual corruption; and the broader relationship between biblical and Homeric philologies, leading up to the biblical criticism of Marcel Jousse, a key influence on Milman Parry’s theory of Homeric orality. Chapter 4 turns to the modern theory of Homeric orality and its relationship to the historiography of the alphabet. After surveying modern controversies over the date of the Greek alphabet and its relationship with neighboring Semitic writing systems, I argue that the fantasy of pure orality paradoxically rests on a conception of Greek alphabetic writing as a technology of sound recording. This conception, born in the nineteenth century and elaborated by the Toronto school of communication studies (McLuhan, Ong, Havelock), attributes the rise of Greek rational thought to alphabetic literacy. This theory leads to the paradoxical consequence that the Homeric epics require alphabetic inscription in order to be properly constituted as “oral.” I then return to the ancient controversy over Bellerophon’s “written signs” in Iliad 6, tracing its influence on modern theories of Homeric orality from Wolf’s Prolegomena to the present. I focus on scholars like John Miles Foley and Gregory Nagy, who treat Bellerophon’s “writing” as a metaphor for the purely oral Homeric formula and theme. In the appendix, I offer a discussion of the sources on the widespread and influential ancient legend of an early Athenian edition of the Homeric epics, most often associated with the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus of the sixth century BCE.