Homeric analysis has traditionally focused on linguistic, philological, and metrical features of the Greek text. This article proposes a complementary, non-linguistic approach to the analysis of the Iliad, based on the systematic identification of translatable oral scopes and their associated oral characteristics. An “oral scope” is defined as a bardic subspecialty consisting of a traditional set of conceptual patterns that can be expressed across different languages. Such scopes may remain obscured when they contain numerous characteristics, or occur interwoven with other scopes, with a distorted logic, or incomplete. By manually clustering translatable oral characteristics, hidden oral scopes and their historical backgrounds can be revealed. This has resulted in the discovery of 25 hidden Homeric oral scopes and the distinction of at least 776 oral characteristics, documented in an English-language Homeric Traditions Apparatus. The five most prominent oral scopes are the Mycenaean, Aeolian, and Ionian Traditions, and the European War and Narrative Roles that form the European Tradition together. The other hidden oral scopes are stories, story types, type-scenes, and roles. The many results suggest that a translationally oriented, non-linguistic analysis can complement existing linguistic approaches and provide a wealth of new insights. One insightful result is highlighted: the European War Role’s type-scene of setting up the army before the fight.
Blonde, Ward (Tue,) studied this question.