Read A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald for Free Online

in subsequent as well as distant performances of the “same” story, just the sorts of differences the entire system of oral composition might predict. But the singers always believe that they are singing the story unchanged.
    Two centuries ago F. A. Wolf, in his epoch-making
Introduction to Homer (Prolegomena ad Homerum
), tried to reconstruct the state of writing that could have been known to Homer and his contemporaries. And the introduction, or rather the reintroduction, of writing into Greece is also at the heart of the “Homeric problem.” Reintroduction because, as archeologists in this century have made it known, in the later Minoan and Mycenaean periods (roughly 1500–1200 B.C.E .), Greek was written widely around the Aegean, both on Crete and on the mainland, in the script known today as Linear B. Linear B is a syllabary, that is, it represents each syllable by a different character. While a considerable advance on earlier systems of pictographic writing—which represent entire words or concepts by ideograms or hieroglyphs—a syllabary is less efficient than an alphabet, which assigns to each sound, in no matter which combination, a single sign. Nonetheless, despite the comparative inefficiency, Linear B functioned well enough for the purposes of the Minoan and Mycenaean overlords who employed it, or trained scribes to employ it. Granted, the range of texts for which the script was employed was limited—inventories, public inscriptions, commercial documents; there are no literary texts. The very mode and material of writing would make the preservation of literary texts of any length difficult, although despite comparable difficulties a rich and highly evolved literature is extant in contemporary Sumerian, Babylonian, and Akkadian, also written in syllabaries on clay tablets.
    Literacy was the province of a trained elite, a caste of scribes, as in ancient Egypt, China, and many other cultures. There was not a broad class of educated persons which could form a “readingpublic.” With the collapse of Minoan-Mycenaean culture, the needs for which the script had been used disappeared, and with them writing itself. The fall of this civilization is often treated as a fascinating mystery, something akin to (and at times linked to) the disappearance of Atlantis, but as in the case of the much later “Fall of Rome,” the transformation was likely more gradual. There were certainly wars, there may have been massive invasions and movements of peoples, there may even have been devastating earthquakes and volcanic explosions. But a healthy culture can rebuild and recover from any of these. What clearly happened, over several centuries and under the pressure of these occurrences, is that the old patterns of rulers and ruled, creditors and debtors, importers and exporters, changed.
    Nor was the Aegean basin immune from changes in adjacent areas. Crete became less important relative to Egypt and to the new forces setting out from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. There can hardly be more eloquent testimony to the importance of Phoenician culture and trade than the Greeks’ adoption of an alphabet clearly derived from the Phoenician characters. The first examples of writing in what we now call the Greek alphabet date from the last half of the eighth century B.C.E.
      It is of course a long way from scribbling a few words to writing down the whole of
The Iliad
or
The Odyssey
. Moreover, the idea of doing so would have to occur to someone, and it would not be likely to occur to an oral poet at the height of an oral tradition. This is the gap over which bridges of various sorts have tentatively been built. According to one argument, in the late eighth or early seventh century B.C.E . an artist, perhaps called Homer (unless that be the name, then already traditional, of some outstanding singer at an earlier stage of the tradition), sang versions of the story of Akhilleus and the homecoming of Odysseus so remarkable,