History and the Homeric Iliad

This is a really first-rate treatment of the ascertainable Mycenean historical background embedded in the Iliad. Particularly interesting is Page's treatment of the types of things which we know about Mycenean society from archaeology -- notably, its highly bureaucratized form -- which we would have had no clue of from Homer; and his suggestion of layers which are older than the Trojan War surviving from the (inferred) already-existing heroic poetry of the Mycenean period (e.g. the traces of a very old Ajax tradition).

Page fully accepts and builds on the findings of Parry, but adds additional subtle readings regarding older layers discernable in the tradition (obviously, the Catalogue of Ships, which gets a chapter in itself) as well as show more layers added after the initial textualization (to coin a word) of the Iliad but before the standardized Hellenistic text which we have. (Murray attempted to do the something of the same sort of discerning of layers in The Rise of the Greek Epic, but because he wrote assuming textual composition, before Parry, his work is interesting for odd details but is not particularly useful, because of its mistaken premises.) show less