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altered the original history. Oral poetry is a very different species from written poetry.6 The way we read it and judge it must be completely different. Composition and performance are not separate; they are simultaneous. And each new composing of the Iliad down the swift generations was on the basis of auditory memory and traditional bardic formulae, each aoidos with set phrases of varying lengths filling out the unremembered hexameters and with set turns of plot filling out unremembered action. And this was over the three or four centuries following the actual war. The Iliad, then, is not so much a reflection of the social life of Troy as it is of several stages of social development from that time up to the literate period. Treated as a sociological document, the objection is sustained. But as a psychological document, the case is quite different. Whence these gods? And why their particular relationship to the individuals? My argument has stressed two things, the lack of mental language and the initiation of action by the gods. These are not archaeological matters. Nor are they matters likely to have been invented by the aoidoi. And any theory about them has to be a psychological theory about man himself. The only other alternative is the following. Objection: Are we not making a great deal out of what might be merely literary style? That the gods are mere poetic devices of the aoidoi to make the action vivid, devices which may indeed go back to the earliest bards of Mycenae? Reply: This is the well-known problem of the gods and their overdetermination of the action. The gods seem to us quite unnecessary. W h y are they there? And the common solution is as above, that they are a poetic device. The divine machinery duplicates natural conscious causations simply to present them in concrete pictorial form, because the aoidoi were without the refinements of language to express psychological matters. 6 See Milman Parry, Collected Papers (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971). I wish to thank both Randall Warner and Judith Griessman for discussion on some of these points.
