M.L. West's Making of the Odyssey

[Qimmik]

Now available in the UK:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Odyssey- ... he+odyssey

Not cheap, but selling fast!

[Scribo]

Hmm...yeah I've seen some of this from talks he's given (at least they seemed to be right precursors) and some interesting discussions about my own methodology. I think I'll just library this one until it massively drops in price tbh. If you read it anytime soon give us a review.

[Paul Derouda]

I got my copy on Tuesday, after a sluggish delivery time of over two weeks...

I've read a bit over half of the book now, and here are my first impressions.

In many ways it's similar to the Iliad book, but general tone seems less polemical. The main point of the Iliad book, that the Iliad was written by one poet who later made insertions to his own work, is now argued to hold for the Odyssey as well (the Odyssey poet is called "Q", while the Iliad poet was "P"), but West takes it more or less for granted now, since he already developed that argument in the first book. There are some differences: West argues that "Q" has copied sections from the Iliad (and elsewhere) and adapted them to his Odyssey, sometimes not too successfully. West doesn't explicitly say (or if he did, it passed my notice) that "Q" was literally copying from a manuscript of the Iliad (as opposed to just relying on his memory), but that seems to be the implication. In that case, the emerging picture is of a writer who is a step closer to the modern "writer" (as opposed to a fully "oral" poet) than the Iliad poet.

Another difference is that for West, the Odyssey poet is a consistently slapdash artist, who simply doesn't bother about little inconsistencies, as he cares more about the general effect and a good story. For West, that explains most of the oddities that were deemed interpolations by earlier Analysts, as well as many linguistic problems. But unlike some of those earlier Analysts (Denys Page comes first to my mind), he isn't trying to make us believe that the Odyssey as we have it is an awfully bad work – quite the contrary, as in other places West also does a superb job in reminding us why exactly we love the Odyssey (or at least why I do). The infelicities he is pointing out are mostly convincing, and he gives good explanations to many I already knew before. Unlike another commentator of the Odyssey I was complaining about in another thread, he isn't telling us that a deliberate verbal repetition is "tired style"... Just occasionally, I wonder whether West is appealing too easily to "slapdashness" – for example, he considers η 69 ὣς κείνη περὶ κῆρι τετίμηταί τε καὶ ἔστιν an instance of Q's eccentricity, while in Garvie's commentary the line is simply considered to be probably corrupt. A malicious soul might say that West is assigning every oddity in the Odyssey to this "slapdashness" and thus taking an easy way to avoid difficult problems.

But I suspect there's a simple reason for this one "problem": I think West is trying to keep this work as simple as possible and understandable to as wide an audience as possible. And there I think he succeeds; everything seems eminently simple (too simple, one is almost tempted to say...). Difficult linguistic problems are not really accosted, which is a pity, since I would have loved to have heard his take on the so called "early" and "late" linguistic features in the Odyssey, for example. Also, West rarely calls anything an interpolation in this book. As it's difficult for me to believe that he thinks that there are any less interpolations in the Odyssey than in the Iliad, I suspect it's just to keep the book as streamlined as possible, as discussing interpolations isn't vital to the main argument. (And perhaps he's trying to be diplomatic, knowing that some of his potential readers might be offended at the idea of interpolations in the Odyssey, just are they might be offended of the idea of a writing Homer. Just give them one difficult idea at a time... ) But if the rumors of an upcoming critical edition are true, I suspect (and hope!) that the linguistic problems will be addressed later on.

West has a lot to say about the background of the Odyssey as well, but I'm not going deeper into that now. Although (like I said above) he seems to avoid being too argumentative in this book, he's very firm about the date of the Odyssey: "I do not see how anyone in the face of these arguments can entertain a date for the Odyssey before 650". (p. 41)

All in all, and not surprisingly, it's one of the best books on the Odyssey I've set my eyes on. The biggest quibble is that everything is almost too smooth – although West is probably right about many things (he always is...), it's the very reason why an innocent reader might not notice how controversial all this really is.

[Qimmik]

Thanks for your thoughts and impressions, Paul. I've looked it over without having read it from cover to cover, and it seems more interesting than the Iliad book, less controversial and more informative, to me at least.

[Paul Derouda]

An example that illustrates well the difficulty I mentioned above:

Od. 3.196-200:
ὡς ἀγαθὸν καὶ παῖδα καταφθιμένοιο λιπέσθαι
ἀνδρός, ἐπεὶ καὶ κεῖνος ἐτίσατο πατροφονῆα,
Αἴγισθον δολόμητιν, ὅ οἱ πατέρα κλυτὸν ἔκτα.
καὶ σὺ φίλος, μάλα γάρ σ᾽ ὁρόω καλόν τε μέγαν τε,
ἄλκιμος ἔσσ᾽, ἵνα τίς σε καὶ ὀψιγόνων ἐὺ εἴπῃ.

199-200 were athetised by Aristophanes and Aristarchus, as well as a number of modern scholars (as concordance interpolations from 1.301-302). They are clearly out of context here, but West (p. 162) accepts them and makes the poet's carelessness account for the incongruity. I'm not saying this is not possible, but it makes distinguishing between carelessness from the part of the original poet and a concordance interpolation a very subjective matter.

[Paul Derouda]

I forgot to post a continuation to my "review" here when I finished the book a few weeks ago. Reading the second half took me a bit longer, as I re-read the second half of the Odyssey along with it, which I hadn't done in a long time.

Basically, I found the first half of the book more interesting, and I suppose that's precisely the reason why West put the "evidence" part last in his book. I found most of it very convincing, but it will not probably interest the casual reader so much. The first half, on the other hand, I think is a must for anyone who is seriously interseted in the Odyssey, as it works as a good (though controversial) general introduction to the Odyssey, with a very wide range of subjects discussed.

I believe that West's theory on the genesis of the Odyssey (like that of the Iliad) is correct, more or less: that it is the work of a single writing poet who from time to time made insertions to a text he had already written, and that this process probably took several years. This looks much more plausible to me than any other theory I've seen yet. I didnt't look up every example of insertions West gives, but I looked up many, and they were all convincing. I can give a couple of examples if you like.

West also thinks the Odyssey poet literally copied verses from the Iliad and elsewhere. This I find more difficult to accept, but I think this too needs serious consideration.

If I wasn't as enthousiastic about this book as about the Making of the Iliad, it is because that first book already blew my mind, and for that reason the second book had less surprises left. If you want to read just one, read the Iliad book, because I think West put more effort into it. If you want to learn about the Odyssey, read this one, at least the first half.