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Thought clusters in early greek oral poetry

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Notes

  1. This article is a revised version of a paper presented by C. A. Sowa at the meetings of the American Philological Association in San Francisco, December 1969. Work on this project was first begun by the authors at the American Philological Association's Summer Institute in Computer Applications to Classical Studies at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana in 1969. The project was also facilitated by a grant to C. A. Sowa from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1970–1971. The authors would also like to thank Professor Winifred Asprey and the computer center of Vassar College for the use of their computing facilities.

  2. The theories of oral composition of Parry and Lord are now generally accepted for theIliad andOdyssey; see Albert B. Lord,The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). For Hesiod and theHymns, see James A. Notopoulos, “The Homeric Hymns as Oral Poetry,”American Journal of Philology 83, 4 (October 1962), 337–368; Patricia G. Preziosi, “The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, an Oral Analysis,”Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 71 (1966), 171–204; H. Berkley Peabody,Hesiod's Works and Days: An Example of the Ancient Greek Oral Style, diss. Harvard, 1961 (the contents of this dissertation are soon to appear in much expanded form asThe Winged Word, to be published by the State University of New York Press); and the forthcoming book by C. A. Sowa,Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns.

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  3. W. Arend, “Die Typischen Szenen Bei Homer,”Problemata 7 (Berlin, 1933), and C. A. Sowa, forthcoming.

  4. “Modulation” is the term used by Lord in theSinger of Tales to describe the process by which one theme passes over into another, related theme. In chapters 8 and 9, he shows how this principle applies to theIliad andOdyssey.

  5. “Cicero's Picture of Marius,”Wiener Studien 73 (1960), 83–122; “The Picture of Marius in Valerius Maximus,”Rheinisches Museum 105 (1962), 289–337; “Content Analysis: Construing Literature as History,”Mosaic 1, 1 (University of Manitoba Press, October 1967), 22–38; and “The Changing Picture of Marius in Ancient Literature,”Proceedings of the African Classical Association 10 (Salisbury, 1967), 5–22. Since then, he has also published a bookContent Analysis (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1972).

  6. The text used was Thomas W. Allen's edition of 1912 (corrected 1946) in the Oxford Classical Text series. The machine-readable text and dictionary are available to interested persons from the American Philological Association's Data Bank, care of Dr. Stephen V. F. Waite, Kiewit Computational Center at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. For purposes of keypunching, the following conversion rules were used for representing Greek letters by means of Roman letters: Wherever an exact equivalent exists, it is used, except thatxi is represented by C. For the others,eta is represented by H,theta by Q,iota subscript by J,phi by F,khi by X,psi by Y, andomega by W; a diaeresis is represented by &. The text as we used it did not indicate accents, breathings, or capital letters. When mentioning stems in this paper, we shall give them in this code.

  7. Since the dictionary has been transferred to tape, we can, of course, space out the information to allow as many columns as we want.

  8. Etymological information used in creating the dictionary was taken from P. Chantraine,Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Grecque (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968); H. Frisk,Griechisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1960–1970); A. Meillet and J. Vendryes,Traité de Grammaire Comparée des Langues Classiques (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 3rd ed., 1960); H. G. Liddell and Robert Scott,A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 9th ed., 1940).

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  9. R. M. Needham and K. Sparck-Jones, “Keywords and Clumps,”Journal of Documentation 20, 4 (March 1964). The clump formula we used is discussed in K. Sparck-Jones and D. Jackson, “Current Approaches to Classification and Clump-finding at the Cambridge Language Research Unit,”The Computer Journal 10 (1967), 29–37. Variations on the formulas for computing connections are discussed in P. E. Jones and R. M. Curtice, “A Framework for Comparing Term Association Measures,”American Documentation 18 (1967), 153–161. The formula for computing clumps using the bias function is discussed in A. G. Dale and N. Dale, “Some Clumping Experiments for Associative Information Retrieval,”American Documentation 16 (1965), 5–9.

  10. Slightly different results might be obtained by using other units as contexts: the oral formula (the exact nature and scope of which is still in debate), the syllable (or themora, equivalent in length to one short syllable), the colon (a group of syllables bounded by caesura), the half-line (apparently a more ancient unit in the hexameter than the full line), the sentence or clause (where enjambement makes it different from the line or half-line). On the relationship between these units see H. B. Peabody, op. cit. (note 2), and the forthcoming book by Michael N. Nagler,Tradition and Spontaneity: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer.

  11. This phenomenon is discussed at greater length in C. A. Sowa,Traditional Themes, and C. A. Sowa, “Verbal Patterns in Hesiod's Theogony,”Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 68 (1964), 331–332.

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  12. For outlines of elements of these themes see Appendix I of Sowa,Traditional Themes.

  13. The meaning of this passage is actually not completely certain. The words {ie146-1}, formed from the prefix {ie146-2} “under,” plus TEM, and {ie146-3}, formed of ULH and TEM, may mean “an herb cut off at the bottom” and “an herb cut in the woods,” as we have translated them, or they may refer to a type of worm, “a borer,” supposed to cause toothache or teething pains.

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Authors
  1. Cora Angier Sowa
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  2. John F. Sowa
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Additional information

Cora Angier Sowa received her doctorate in classical philology from Harvard in 1967 and is the author of the forthcoming Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns.John F. Sowa is an advisory engineer at IBM.

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Sowa, C.A., Sowa, J.F. Thought clusters in early greek oral poetry. Comput Hum 8, 131–146 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02402131

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