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THE ILIAD FOR US is a text to be read; for its composer, his audiences, and several generations of audiences after them, it was a live vocal performance. Scholars of Greek epic and related genres have become increasingly sensitive to the losses in affect and significance that occur when such a performance survives only in the form of its 'libretto'.1 But for students of Homer the desire to recapture the power of the performed Iliad confronts the silence of the historical record: the first traces of performances of Homer date from the mid-sixth century, perhaps more than a century after the epic's composition.2 Denys Page probably spoke for many in declining to speculate about how the questions concerning Homeric performance might be answered.3 Others have been less cautious. The issue of the performance structure of the Iliad has proven an especially fertile ground of speculation, because the evident coherent design of the poem indicates that its composer intended it to make a profound impression as a whole upon its audiences. Yet the immense length of the Iliad renders continuous performance a physical impossibility. Scholars have therefore tried to imagine a performance structure that might accommodate the necessary pauses but preserve unity of impact. This paper will review the proposals that have addressed this issue, evaluate their plausibility, and offer a new contribution to the discussion.
Three theories of Homeric performance structure may be dealt with briefly; these lack plausibility because they underestimate either the aesthetic importance of the epic's coherence or the requirement that its outstanding features be accessible in performance. According to A. B. Lord, Homer, like a South Slavic guslar, could have simply stopped whenever he got tired;4 this overly close identification of Homer with South Slavic singers has been criticized by A. Parry (supra n.2: 212) among others. Lord later suggested that the Iliad may have achieved its monumentality through the influence of the scribe who took it down from its oral composer-in-performance, who would never have intended it to be performed as a whole at all, at least not after the performance in which it was dictated.5 As poems until the late fifth century in Greece were heard and not read, Lord's theory would mean that Homer, or rather Homer's scribe,...
