Panhellenic Evolution

Nagy’s Panhellenic-evolutionary model of Homeric composition holds that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not composed by a single poet but shaped across generations by the cumulative interaction of performers and audiences across the Greek world. “The structural unity of such epics results, I think, not so much from the creative genius of whoever achieved a fixed composition but from the lengthy evolution of myriad previous compositions, era to era, into a final composition” (Nagy 1979, §18).

The Panhellenic vantage is crucial. Where local epic might preserve the peculiarities of one community’s hero, Panhellenic epic is shaped by the selective pressure of audiences drawn from many communities. What survives is what resonates across locality — what is, in Nagy’s phrase, “Panhellenic in the dimension of time as well as space.” The Iliad is what the Greek world could not let go of.

This model has consequences for the Jungian reading. If the Homeric text is the crystallization of centuries of performance, then what it encodes is not the mind of a poet but the psychological material that the community refused to let die. carl-jung‘s claim that myth is the self-portrait of the psyche finds in Nagy’s model a mechanism: Panhellenic evolution is selective memory at civilizational scale. What survives is archetypal because it is what the culture could not forget.

Relationships

• oral-literate-transition
• tribal-encyclopedia
• mimesis-oral
• iliad
• odyssey

Primary sources

• nagy-best-of-achaeans (Nagy 1979)