The question of whether an individual’s fate can be changed creates a tension that runs throughout the Iliad. In Iliad 16 and 22 Zeus contemplates saving Sarpedon and then Hektor from death. Both times he is met with outrage (on the part of Hera and Athena respectively) and is rebuked via the formula ἔρδ’· ἀτὰρ οὔ τοι πάντες ἐπαινέομεν θεοὶ ἄλλοι at 16.443 and 22.181 (“Do it, but not all the rest of us gods will approve”; see also 4.29), and he does not follow through on the threat. Despite what the formula implies (i.e., that Zeus can change the fate of these mortal men), the fact that he never acts on this suggests either that he cannot or that the consequences would be so grave that he will not risk it.

So too the textual variations that we find attested in the multitude of ancient sources—quotations from ancient authors, fragments on papyrus, and the scholia in the margins of medieval manuscripts (which derive ultimately from the work of Alexandrian and Roman scholars)—are just as likely to have been generated by the system of oral traditional poetry in which the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed, and therefore can be considered every bit as “Homeric” as those that we find in our modern printed editions. Modern editions are primarily based on the texts found in a handful of medieval manuscripts, which postdate the oral tradition by more than a millennium. In this book I propose to take these far more ancient sources seriously and to treat the variations, or multiforms, that they preserve as traditional variations generated in performance whose poetic implications are worthy of exploration.

Albert Lord’s 1960 book The Singer of Tales was the culmination of decades of close observation of a living oral epic tradition in Yugoslavia and careful application of that work by analogy to the Homeric epics. Lord went to Yugoslavia initially in the early 1930s, as the undergraduate assistant of Milman Parry. Parry’s 1928 doctoral dissertation on the traditional epithet in Homer had been a brilliant demonstration of the economy and traditionality of Homeric diction, but even Parry himself did not fully grasp the implications of this work until Parry and Lord went to Yugoslavia to observe the still-flourishing South Slavic oral epic song tradition (Parry 1971:439). It was in the context of this fieldwork that Parry came to understand that Homeric poetry was not only traditional but oral—that is, composed anew every time in performance, by means of a sophisticated system of traditional phraseology and diction. For Parry, witnessing the workings of a living oral epic song tradition was a paradigm shift. Through the analogy with the South Slavic tradition, the workings of the Homeric system of composition became clear to him.

In two expeditions to the former Yugoslavia, in 1933–1935, Parry and Lord together collected songs, stories, and conversations from singers of the South Slavic epic song tradition. Albert Lord took additional trips in the 1950s and 1960s, and in many cases was able to rerecord the singers he and Parry had captured decades earlier. No two of the songs collected were exactly alike, nor did any two of the singers have exactly the same repertoire. These singers composed extremely long epic poems in performance. In order to do this they drew on a vast storehouse of traditional themes and phrases that worked within the metrical rules that give the poetry its rhythm. That is to say, they created and used what we call formulas to build each verse as they went along, instead of employing static, individual words or words memorized in a fixed order. Just as formulas are the building blocks of a line in performance, themes are the larger components that make up songs. The poets observed by Parry and Lord moved from one theme to another as they sang; themes were connected in the oral poet’s mind and his plan for the song followed from their habitual association in the tradition. This performance method resulted in each song being a new composition, which is why no two songs that Parry and Lord recorded were exactly the same. Each song was a multiform of a notional song that never existed in a single “original” form.

Parry and Lord applied the findings of this fieldwork to the Homeric poems by analogy, and they were able to show that the workings of the South Slavic system reveal a great deal about how the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed. Parry planned a series of publications based on his observations and subsequent analysis of Homeric poetry, but it was never completed. His surviving writings have been incredibly influential, but he died at the age of 33, long before he had a chance to pursue the many implications of his fieldwork. It became the work of his young undergraduate assistant, Albert Lord, to brings these ideas to the world. Of course, scholars before Parry and Lord had proposed that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed orally, but never before had the system by which such poetry could be composed been demonstrated, nor were the implications of the creative process truly explored. The Singer of Tales does just that.

Lord asserts in The Singer of Tales that in an oral tradition like that in which the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed, “singing, performing, composing are facets of the same act” and that the implications of this process are “both broad and deep” (1960:13). Indeed they are. The work of Parry and Lord and the scholars who have built on their efforts suggests that, rather than there being a single master version of each poem from which all others descend, in its earliest stages of development there was a great deal of fluidity in the Greek oral epic tradition. Countless variations on the story of the Trojan War and the episodes within it—the anger of Achilles, the returns of the heroes, and any number of traditional tales—are known to have been current in different times and different places in antiquity, and were likely composed in performance by countless poets whose names are now lost to us. At the same time, because Greek oral epic poetry was already traditional in content in ancient times, any audience on any given occasion of performance would already have known the story and the characters. There would have been nothing about the story, the language, the rhythm of the song, or the characters that was new for that audience. A poet in a traditional song culture like that of the ancient Greeks could compose poetry in performance using techniques, plots, characters, and an ever-evolving corpus of formulaic language that he had inherited from many previous generations of singers. The material and techniques were traditional, but each performance was a new composition—a recomposition, in and for performance.

This dynamic necessarily affects how ancient epic poetry is understood and appreciated. To make an even more modern analogy than Parry and Lord’s South Slavic one, for an audience that knows Anakin Skywalker will become Darth Vader, Star Wars is no less full of drama and tension as he proceeds down that path. Many a Star Wars fan has been content to watch that story replay itself again and again upon subsequent viewings. But for the Homeric epics there was an additional layer of tension. Certainly Achilles was always going to choose to return to battle and die at Troy, but the song that narrated that choice was always being composed anew. Not only might different singers arrange the song differently, and not only might there be variations on what episodes were included in any given performance, but there was always the lurking possibility, however unlikely, that the current performance would turn out differently.

But just how fluid, how multiform, was the Greek epic tradition? If the tradition was, as I have claimed, quite fluid in its early phases, why do our medieval manuscripts present us with a relatively uniform text? How do we get from the creative and vibrant oral epic song tradition that Albert Lord describes to the seemingly fixed text of the roughly two hundred manuscripts of the Iliad that survive from medieval times? Can’t we simply regard the examples of multiformity such as we find in the scholia at Iliad 20.30 as anomalies or interpolations, perhaps the work of rogue singers, scholars, and scribes, and conceive of the “true” Iliad as having existed in a primarily static form for two and a half millennia or more?

Nagy’s model has many points of contact with that offered by E. S. Sherratt (1990). Sherratt analyzes various passages of the Iliad as examples of the difficulties of relating material culture to the poem for the purposes of “solving” questions of when and how it was composed, noting that many passages of the Iliad seem to present “the juxtaposition or super-imposition of more than one chronological reflection” (1990:810). She proposes to explain these archaeological layers as reflexes of the oral tradition in which the Iliad was composed, arguing that over a long period of evolution some historical periods would have been more generative than others, with corresponding changes in the formulaic diction and its representation of material culture.

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Indeed if any character is “bound” by fate it is Achilles, as Laura Slatkin has shown in The Power of Thetis (1991). Zeus, the third ruler of the universe, does not get overthrown. In every case, he thwarts the next generation from taking over. A perfect example is Achilles, who is the son Zeus never had, according to Pindar, Isthmian 8:

Zeus prevents his own overthrow by forcing Thetis to marry a mortal, Peleus, and their son of course turns out to be Achilles. Instead of becoming the supreme ruler of the universe, Achilles will be merely supreme among mortals, and doomed to die young, in battle. This same myth plays an important role in Aeschylus’ tragedy Prometheus Bound. In that play there is a secret that is a crucial part of the plot: Prometheus knows the key to Zeus’ downfall, and it is Thetis. As Slatkin has written (1991:101): “If Themis had not intervened, Thetis would have borne to Zeus or Poseidon the son greater than his father, and the entire chain of succession in heaven would have continued: Achilles would have been not the greatest of heroes, but the ruler of the universe. The price of Zeus’ hegemony is Achilles’ death.”

Achilles is bound by fate and by narrative tradition, but Achilles’ poem, the Iliad, was not fixed and monolithic in antiquity. It was multiform. And the wider epic tradition from which the Iliad emerged was more multiform still. It is my aim in this book to explore the traditionality and multiformity of the Iliad in a way that gives us a greater appreciation of what has been handed down to us.