I poemi omerici tra oralità e scrittura

The Homeric poems are a written text that exhibits typical traits of oral poetry. Every attempt to reconstruct the genesis of the Iliad and the Odyssey must start from the two-faced nature of this definition. The Greek epic has its origins in the Mycenaean epic, most likely performed in lyrical forms: in this regard, the paper proposes a poetic-musical inter- pretation of the figurative representations that associate citharodes and birds. After the ‘dark’ centuries, the process of fixing the texts starts around the eighth century B.C. with the introduction of alphabetic writing, but it cannot be understood as an immediate, total and definitive act. The interaction between orality and writing – as shown by the analysis of the formulaic technique and of the historical-cultural contexts, starting with those relating to the earliest surviving examples of writing in the Greek alphabet such as the Nestor’s cup – persists in the following decades through fluid, mixed and variable dialectics (for us, it must be admitted, very difficult to reconstruct). In the seventh century B.C. reference texts are formed. In the second half of the sixth century B.C. and in particular to the Athens of those years the first verifiable traces of a monumental and shared textualization of the epic flow can be traced back.