Digital Rights Network

The first work of western literature, the Iliad, and indeed the second, the Odyssey, are usually attributed to someone called Homer. Modern Classical scholarship agrees that if such a person existed, he did not make up the poems from scratch and write them down. At most he was a 'master compositor' who collated traditional material; perhaps he was no more than the first bard who knew how to write; perhaps he was an invention of later Greeks.

If there was no individual claiming authorship, how do we come to have these enormous and masterful poems? Research carried out in the 1950s among the illiterate guzlari of Serbia showed that bards in oral cultures are capable of memorising and reproducing epics of comparable length. They do not memorise word for word, rather they inherit a template of stock phrases, lines, scenes and story-patterns that they recombine in performance. A good bard recombines imaginatively, adds pertinent details, and can even produce 'special effects' by knowing or incongruous use of formulae. Because a formulaic phrase is certain to fit the metre, it buys the bard time to retrieve the next line from the memory bank.

In other words, a bard has access to the source code for the poems. In the case of 'Homer', the code had been developed and refined over the five centuries or so that elapsed between the sack of Troy and the writing down of the Iliad. Apt or useful phrases were preserved, less good ones discarded, and this on-going collaboration eventually enabled the composition of an epic of some 15,000 lines. There was no conception of ownership of the material; the Public Domain was all there was. In a pre-literate society, memory is too precious to belong to anyone. Memory and knowledge are sacred:

Now tell me, Muses who live on Olympos, for you are divine, you are always present and you know all things, whereas we hear only the report and cannot know the thing itself...
Iliad 2.484-6