05 - Between Archaism and Modernization: Synchronically Productive Aeolic Features in Homeric Verse-Making

Homeric poetry is composed in a remarkable poetic language that appears to admit lexemes and morphemes of distinct chronological and dialectal provenance. The dialects most prevalent in Homeric diction are Aeolic and Ionic, which often appear in Homeric verse side by side. Scholars have accounted for this linguistic variation differently, yet the communis opinio remains Milman Parry’s hypothesis: 

“There thus ceases to be anything surprising in the fact that the Iliad and Odyssey can be turned into Aeolic almost word for word: the formulaic diction was learned by the Ionians from the Aeolians, and though under the stress of habit of their own speech, they made it Ionic wherever that could be done without harm to the technique of its use, they otherwise kept it almost without change, since the way in which verse is orally made forced them to do so.” (HL: 45)

This paper examines various Aeolic dialect features, such as genitives in –οιο, datives in -εσσι and aorists in -σσ-, to better understand the complementary distribution between Aeolic and Ionic forms in Homeric diction. My investigation suggests that whether an Aeolic or Ionic variant is deployed is dependent on the metrical structure of the root and its preferred localization in the verse. In other words, it is conditioned by meter rather than obvious historical factors. A few conclusions may be drawn from this finding. First, that Ionic and Aeolic variants of the same word are almost always in complementary distribution, that is, in metrically distinct environments, does not guarantee the retention of metrically irreplaceable inherited Aeolic forms. Aeolicisms in Homeric diction can instead reflect the selective integration of metrically distinct variants into an Ionic epic diction, which could have taken place all at once (Phase Model) or over sustained interaction between several generations of speakers and poets of East Ionic and Lesbian Aeolic (Diffusion Model). Moreover, if it can be shown that the process of Aeolicizing in Homeric diction is at least partially synchronic, then the scholarly practice of ‘reconstructing’ Aeolic prototypes of Ionic phrases in Homeric diction becomes even more problematic. Last, and perhaps most exciting, studying the synchronic variation between Aeolic and Ionic forms in Homeric diction and the poetic language of the Lesbian lyric poets may offer new insight into the dialectal competence of poets in Asia Minor and the way that they and their audiences conceived of other dialects and their role in poetic composition.

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Presenters

Jorge A Wong II, Harvard University