In the diction of the Iliad and the Odyssey, a well-made epic song is repeatedly marked as a truthful account delivered in due order and point by point — the formulae kata kosmon ('in due order'), kata moiran ('in due measure'), the verb katalegein ('to recount, catalogue-like'), and the phrase alētheiēn katalexai ('to recount the truth') attach to praised, truthful narration and never to Odysseus' lying tales. This is the same poetics that South Slavic oral epic singers, interviewed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, articulated when they described a good song as telling events exactly as they happened. Yet the two Homeric poems are composed as teleologically unified wholes, unlike the episodic, paratactic poems of the lost Epic Cycle and the genealogical compositions of Hesiod. Margalit Finkelberg (2020) posed the resulting questions and left them open, and the subsequent literature has not resolved them: why do Homer's poems profess a poetics they do not practise, by what historical process did this discontinuity arise, and whether the Iliad and the Odyssey can be considered traditional poems 'in the proper sense of the word'. These questions remain actively contested in scholarship up to 2026, with no resolution.

Background

The Iliad and the Odyssey are Greek hexameter epic poems transmitted under the name of Homer, composed in a highly formulaic poetic language — a fixed repertoire of reusable word-groups shaped to the dactylic hexameter meter. Since Milman Parry and Albert Lord's fieldwork on South Slavic epic singers (published in Lord's The Singer of Tales, 1960), the dominant framework for studying them has been oral-formulaic theory: the poems took shape in a tradition of composition-in-performance in which singers assembled songs from inherited formulas and thematic building blocks rather than reproducing a fixed text. The singers whom Parry and Lord interviewed in the 1930s described the well-made song as a truthful account delivered point by point, 'exactly as it happened', and condemned ornamenting a song or combining several stories into one as a distortion of the truth.

Margalit Finkelberg (2020) showed that Homer's own diction proclaims the same poetics. Formulae such as kata kosmon ('in due order'), kata moiran ('in due measure'), the verb katalegein ('to recount, enumerate, catalogue-like'), and the phrase alētheiēn katalexai ('to recount the truth') regularly mark praised, truthful narration — for example Odysseus' praise of the bard Demodocus at Odyssey 8.487–498 and the markers attached to Nestor's and Odysseus' truthful narrations (Odyssey 3.331, 10.16, 12.35) — while the same formulae are never attached to the lying tales Odysseus tells in disguise. The poems thus verbally endorse the traditional poetics of point-by-point, catalogue-like truthful narration, the poetics that Notopoulos (1964) called parataxis: the juxtaposition of self-contained narrative units of equal status in plain succession, as in a catalogue, which he set in polar opposition to the organic unity postulated by Aristotle.

The difficulty is that the Iliad and the Odyssey as we read them are organized in the opposite way. Each opens in medias res ('into the middle of things', i.e., at a late point of the story, with earlier events supplied retrospectively), and each subordinates its digressions, catalogues, speeches and set-pieces to a single overarching action — the wrath of Achilles; Odysseus' return and the restoration of his household. This is precisely the kind of unity of action that Aristotle (Poetics, chapters 8 and 23) praised in Homer and denied to the episodic poems of the Epic Cycle. The Epic Cycle is the set of lost archaic Greek epics (Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Telegony and others) that carried the mythical history of the Trojan and Theban wars; they survive only in fragments and in compact prose summaries (testimonia) transmitted from Proclus' Chrestomathy, a late antique compilation. Those summaries, together with Aristotle's criticism, portray Cyclic narrative as paratactic: a sequence of self-contained episodes linked by plain 'and then' connectives, without overarching thematic or teleological subordination. Hesiod's Theogony, a hexameter poem on the genealogy of the gods arranged ab ovo ('from the egg', i.e., from the absolute beginning), is the other archaic exemplar of such genealogical, chronographic ordering. The mismatch is therefore sharp: Homer's poems profess a poetics they do not practise, and the poetics they profess is realized in works attributed to other poets.

Finkelberg ends by asking whether the Iliad and the Odyssey can be considered traditional poems 'in the proper sense' at all, and leaves the explanation open. The modern debate is conducted between broad, long-standing positions that define the space of answers. One family of positions treats the poems as monumental compositions — large-scale unified works created by single poets (or very small groups) who deployed newly emergent unifying compositional strategies at a moment when the tradition's own self-understanding still articulated the older paratactic poetics: Finkelberg's The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (1998); West's The Making of the Iliad (2011), which argues for a single poet composing with the aid of writing; Jensen's Writing Homer (2011), which on the basis of modern fieldwork argues that the poets themselves wrote their songs down; and Friedrich's Postoral Homer (2019), which holds that the transmitted epics are 'postoral' products of literate reshaping. A rival family, associated with Nagy's Homer the Preclassic (2010), holds that the poems' unity crystallized gradually through centuries of reperformance by rhapsodes (professional reciters of Homeric verse) and that textual fixation came late, so that what we read is a stabilized performance tradition rather than a composer's original; the multitext edition of Iliad 10 by Dué and Ebbott (2010) similarly argues that the evidence should be described in terms of multiformity (coexisting legitimate variants) rather than a single original text. Adjacent work has mapped the two sides of the contrast: Dowden (1996) on the difference between 'Homeric text' and 'Cyclic text', and Sammons (2010) on the art and rhetoric of the Homeric catalogue. No position has commanded consensus, and none was tailored to the specific paradox of the professed poetics.

Problem Statement

Give a historically grounded account of the discontinuity at the heart of early Greek epic: explain how the unified Iliad and Odyssey relate to the traditional paratactic poetics that their own diction proclaims. Homer's metapoetic formulae — kata kosmon ('in due order'), kata moiran ('in due measure'), katalegein ('to recount point-by-point'), alētheiēn katalexai ('to recount the truth') — frame epic truth as catalogue-like, point-by-point narration, in the same terms used by living oral traditional singers, while the Iliad and the Odyssey are themselves unified, teleologically organized compositions unlike the paratactic (episodic, juxtaposing self-contained narrative units in plain succession without overarching subordination) Epic Cycle — the lost archaic Greek epics on the Trojan War, known only through fragments and later prose summaries, whose incompatibility with the narrative strategies of the Homeric epics was highlighted as early as Aristotle — and Hesiod's genealogical poetry, the archaic works for which such traditional poetics does effectively account. Homer, although he repeatedly refers to the practice of traditional poetry, is silent on the matter of his own poetic practice, which differs markedly from it. The account should explain how this discontinuity arose and resolve the question Finkelberg (2020) leaves open: whether the Iliad and the Odyssey can be considered traditional poems in the proper sense of the word — that is, composed in performance out of the inherited formulaic repertoire, without reliance on writing.

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