Homer and Hellenes

[Sean Manning]

There is no need to assume that Thucydides' Homer was our Homer. In fact it seems quite unlikely, especially in places like the katalogos. Though I suppose that depends on where you fall on the Nagy vs West issue.

Also, there is no need to assume that Thucydides, or anybody, "studied" Homer before the Hellenistic age, their acquaintance would have been largely via performance and in some instances via rhapsodic texts of specific books, but this is unlucky. The manuscript tradition also plays out this idea of verbatim associations.

Haven't there been studies of the few quotations of Homer which we have before Alexander which tend to show a text similar to our own (not word for word, but pretty close)? I agree that one phrase like "babbling Carians" is unlikely to be significant, since it could be a late variant or one which Thucydides simply forgot about.

And didn't memorizing and learning to manipulate the text of Homer start by the 5th century at least? I would consider that a kind of studying, even if it was less professional and writing-centric than Alexandrian scholarship. There is that tradition about the Peisistratids sponsoring a revision of the text of Homer, although in the archaic period its hard to move from "here are the later traditions which happen to survive" to "here is what actually happened."