One Thousand and One Conjectures

The Homeric epics are built from formulas — prefabricated metrical phrases like 'swift-footed Achilles' — and their manuscript witnesses disagree with one another in thousands of places. The surprising connection is that the formula system itself was the variant factory: a line…

Ancient walls, potsherds, and school exercises carry Homer quoted from memory, while the manuscript witnesses of Homer disagree line by line. The surprising connection is that mass memory was a population-scale stabilizer of the written text: a passage carried in thousands of…

Singers of oral epic stretched or shrank a song to fit the night, and the natural places to cut or add are the seams between type-scenes — arming, feasting, sacrifice, journey. The surprising connection is that the papyrus and codex witnesses of…

Before roughly the mid-second century BCE, Homeric papyri run 'wild' — extra lines everywhere — and then the tradition abruptly narrows toward the vulgate. The surprising connection is that the discarded material was not junk but the tradition's self-healing tissue: the early…

Homeric speeches are framed by little stock verses — 'then in answer spoke swift-footed Achilles' — that readers skim. The surprising connection is that these gearshift lines were the tradition's load-bearing joints: for the singer they switch between narration and impersonation, for…

Variants come in types: re-performance from memory adds and drops whole lines and swaps formulas, while copying by eye slips at the level of letters. The surprising connection runs across three millennia: the earliest Homeric witnesses should share a variant-type profile with…

Epic catalogues — the roll of ships, the muster of heroes and home towns — read like databases embedded in poetry. The surprising connection is that they were the performance's occasional module: adjustable praise inventories tuned to whoever's region or ancestors mattered…