Iliad Written in 762BC?

[Lyceum]

Glottochronology btw guys is when you take samples of texts in the same language a set time apart, you can calculate the difference/change and come up with a value, X, which can be further extrapolated however much you want to track language change. Even non-linguists should see the problem with this, language changes at a different rate in different ways and depending on analysis you can get vastly differing results.

Not to mention the possibility that parts of a text were adjusted with each new edition, thereby adding 'later' elements of language to the samples selected.

Well it depends on whether or not you see the text built up in layer by layer as the old German school does, I don't think that really passes muster nowadays. I mean obviously we have performative corruption, but that's normal in any one oral poem which somehow becomes canonical. But later dialectical forms and things like hyper-correction are remarkably few, we occasionally find marked Atticisms, errors in the use of the article and so on but not the kind of stuff you'd expect. The Homeridae (or perhaps the Chreophylidae?) did their job very damn well, Kinaethos' tampering aside.

As I understand it, it is almost impossible to access any version of Homer older than the Alexandrian editors. Scholars can use quotes and allusions in early writers, but they are few and may have been corrected by later editors who 'knew' what Homer said. So there is a Homeric Multitext project which it intended to give scholars a plethora of Iliads and Odysseys rather than one canonical text.

Hm? the article I read cited it and linked to WB.

I'm sort of confused at what you're saying here, I don't mean glottochronology requires the same text massively apart just any samples from the target language. Pre-Alexandrian well it depends on a few things, like how much an influence do you think Zenodotos had over the text? We also have some sizeable quotations and allusions. In general the papyri tradition actually resemble earlier Greek very well in prosody, accentuation and whatnot so clearly the editors had access to a living, consciously, archaising tradition. Or they somehow had access to modern Philology. So its really hard to pin point "our" version. I suspect that, overall, its markedly more aged than its first testimony.

I know some, like Skafte-Jensen, even wish to take the Alexandrian corpus back to an early Attic collation under the tyrants, make of that what you will...I think its an interesting idea but I'm probably more multiform, I see people like Aristarkhos utilising Zenodotos, the Athenian recension, live performances etc.

The Homer-multitext project does some good work but...well, that's another discussion all together! Has its moments though. I would also say that, as per comment, absolute dating is indeed tricky and quite likely unneeded overall, though like many of this generation I'm seeing a lower and lower date becoming more sensible.