If indeed Homeric poetry-as recorded by the Homeric textual tradition-reflects a system derived from oral poetry, then the value judgments of an editor need to be responsive to the multiple value judgments represented by that system as it evolves through time. But what about the “value judgments” of the ancient world? In this case, a more suitable term is “reception.” The problem is, West does not take into account the history of Homeric reception. West applies the term “value judgments” only to the critical stances of modern editors and their readers. The point is, rather, that the modern value judgments of the editor need to be responsive to changes in the ancient value judgments about Homeric poetry throughout the historical continuum of the Homeric tradition.
It is not that a diachronic perspective avoids “passing any value judgments,” as West claims. In any piece of oral poetic composition, the act of composition and the act of its performance are aspects of the same process, so that every new performance is the occasion for a new composition, a recomposition. And the basic difference is this: oral composition, unlike textual composition, is fluid and multiform. By contrast, researchers like Lord who studied living oral poetic traditions as well as ancient texts understood the differences between oral and textual composition. Researchers who study ancient texts without knowing the facts of oral composition are not accustomed to thinking in terms of fluidity because they think of the text of any piece of poetic composition as something rigid and uniform. From one point of view each performance is an original. I believe that once we know the facts of oral composition we must cease trying to find an original of any traditional song. It seems to us necessary to construct an ideal text or to seek an original, and we remain dissatisfied with an ever-changing phenomenon. We find it difficult to grasp something that is multiform. Our real difficulty arises from the fact that, unlike the oral poet, we are not accustomed to thinking in terms of fluidity. The Homer Multitext project, which is an ongoing online multitext edition of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, fills such a need. I went on to say: “If indeed a multitext format is needed for editing medieval texts like the songs of Jaufré Rudel, then perhaps the need is even greater in the case of ancient Greek drama and epic” (Nagy 1996:31). In a study concerning the textual traditions of medieval French and Provençal songs composed by troubadours, Pickens (1994:61) refers to the “multitext format” of his 1978 edition of the songs of the Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel, describing it as “the first widely recognized edition attempting to incorporate a procedure to account for re-creative textual change.” In a study of my own concerning the textual traditions of ancient Greek poetry, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (Nagy 1996 online second edition 2009, at ), I noted the need for such a “multitext format” in editing the surviving ancient Greek poetic texts of epic and drama. The term originates from the work of Rupert Pickens, a specialist in medieval literature. This concept of a Homer Multitext is based on the more fundamental concept of a multitext edition.
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