Our discussion of the Encomium of Helen intrigued me, since I recently did a little work on Greek authorship in a paper I wrote on the history of copyright. I’m far from an expert in this area, and ended up relying heavily on Havelock’s Preface to Plato and The Muse Learns to Write. I wrote a post on it on my blog, and thought I'd cross-post some of it here to see what you folks think.
I agree that Gorgias most likely did see himself as a solitary author of this text, and quite possibly as an originary author. I’m not so sure that he might have felt entirely proprietary about it. Undeniably, he views this as not just any encomium, but as a Gorgias encomium. However, it seems to me that pragmatic aspects of text distribution in oral-aural cultures also come into play here. The Greek alphabet was still under development during the late Greek Dark Ages (c. 700 BC) and early Attic period (600 - 400 BC), and was accessible to only a few privileged scholars. Homer’s works (and others of the period) were written for oral recitation; indeed, oral recitation was the storyteller’s only hope for immortality. Professional castes responded to this need: Greek mnemones (memorizers) existed as late as the fifth century B.C., and the rhapsodes (rhapsodists, or professional recitors) are thought to have continued longer than that. Ong devotes special consideration in Orality and Literacy to the persistent Homeric oral tradition, noting that "the narrator of the Iliad and the Odyssey is lost in the oral communalities: he never appears as 'I'" (159). The proprietary author would have been a nearly impossible construct, since the literature of the period was dependent on oral distribution for preservation.
Havelock examines the developing written preservation of these works, noting the existence of a few copies of the Homeric texts "for school use" ("Preface to Plato," 47). These 'authorized versions' remained rare, as teachers and rhapsodists used the texts "as a reference to correct [their] memory, but taught it orally to the population at large who memorized but never read it" (48). The students, in turn, perpetuated the oral recitation of the works. Like anything repeated endlessly, the epics and poetics were adapted slightly with each retelling, thus muddying the concept of a single author.
I’m certainly not a scholar of antiquities, classics, or Attic literacies, and most of what I know on the subject comes from Havelock and Ong. I’m merely a rhetorician interested in the conceptualization of intellectual property in oral-aural and newly literate cultures. Comments and corrections are welcome.
