Homer and the Early Epic Tradition

Abstract

This chapter seeks to establish what kind of interaction was possible between the Homeric poems and other early Greek epics. The question is crucially affected by the recognition that the early Greek epic tradition is oral-derived traditional poetry. It seems obvious that we must judge the interaction of the early Greek epic poems by different standards from the interaction of, say, Virgil's Aeneid with the epics that preceded it; but just how different will be a theme of the chapter. The question cannot be addressed without considering the relationship between the Homeric epics and the poems of the Epic Cycle, and the difference between an oral poetics and the literary criticism of a written poem: two themes with which Jasper Griffin is particularly associated.