"Homeric epic, in other words, was woven into a festival that interlaced public performance, civic regulation, sacred procession, and textile labor, much as threads on a loom are drawn together into a single patterned cloth." I love this essay so much, truly brilliant and touching. I could put here many sentences that struck me while reading, it is a beautiful piece! And it is so relevant to understand the deep connection of weaving, myth, oral transmission, and the fame of heroes!
"The city heard Homer while it watched Athena be clothed in myth." 😭🤧🥹
It’s a beautiful piece! Thank you so much for sharing the link. There’s an article it reminded me of. I’ll find the title and author and pop it in the comments of yours.
Brilliant retelling of Prof. Nagy's ideas about Homer as part of the Panathenaic experience. The story of how the Homeric epics came to be and to retain this form in which we know them today is such a fascinating topic.
“To forget that woven world is not merely to simplify Homer. It is to transform him. The shift from festival performance to freestanding story changes what the epics are allowed to remember and whose labor remains visible within them.” — absolutely wonderful, love your writing style!!
This is so cool! I never thought that story could this be deeply embedded in culture and ritual. I can't help but feel a little sad that not a lot of people know this anymore. Because you're right, while we do try to readapt and capture the original spirit and essence of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, what is it for? Who is it for? Is myth only limited to story? This article clearly draws the line.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. I do feel we have more to learn from the ancients when we are able to draw those lines and see, to whatever extent it’s possible to, their myths as they existed in their world.
There are immediate and obvious objections to this. Homer had no personal connection to Athens and no special affinity for Athena.
It's lovely that Homer was venerated at the Panathenaea in this way, but he was remembered in entirely different ways in cities all across Ionia and mainland Greece.
If there's evidence that Spartans or Ephesians also tied Homer to festivals where robes were woven then I'll gladly concede the point, but it seems like individual poleis had very different concerns based on geography and economics.
My starting question would be, who was Homer? Nagy’s research treats Homer as a Panhellenic tradition, a metonym, not an historical individual. The Panathenaea is perhaps the best documented and eventually most influence performance setting for Homer but not the only one. Building on Douglas Frame, Nagy argues that before Athens, the primary setting for Homeric performance was the Panionia. There’s also evidence that rhapsodes performed Homer in competitive contexts at festivals beyond Athens, e.g. Panionia and Delia, among others. Homer seems to have been performed at smaller feasts and symposia as well. Ancient scholia by Alexandrian scholars mention city editions from Marseilles (Massalia), Chios, Argos, Cyprus, Sinope, Crete, and an “Aeolid” edition, and they sometimes label variant lines specifically as belonging to one of these city texts. The editions themselves are believed to probably reflect either official civic texts or copies known to originate from those cities, preserved in the Library of Alexandria and used as independent witnesses when Alexandrian critics collated variants. When an Alexandrian scholar like Aristarchus reports a reading “in the Chian edition” or “in the Argive edition,” he is categorizing Homeric lines by the city-based textual tradition they represent. So Alexandrian philologists treated Homeric texts as coming from different city-based lineages (Chian, Argive, Massaliote, etc.), and that their work of standardization involved choosing among these competing “civic Homers,” with the Athenian Koine eventually becoming the dominant standard. Nagy’s position is that the Homeric Koine is best understood as the Athenian city edition, even though the scholia do not explicitly call it that.
Having said all this, while many scholars accept Nagy’s broad oral‑traditional framework, yes, others remain skeptical about how far he takes multiformity and fluidity and how far we should go generally in treating “Homer” purely as personified tradition. Personally, I think we can accept that perhaps there was a Homer and that whoever that individual was is lost to history and eventually becomes a metonym for tradition.
Whatever position we take on Homer and the Homeric texts, I stand by what I say here that the texts were performances first and foremost and that taking performance context into account fundamentally changes how we read the surviving “texts.”
It would make sense for Athens to take something that was Pan Ionian initially and do it bigger and better than the poleis of Ionia. But not being a scholar of Greek religion, I would not know how widespread the tradition of bringing the goddess a new cloak was. And that pretty much only works it's your local deity is Athena or maybe Hera. Artemis, Demeter, and the male gods wouldn't want clothes.
Ah, I see. While the Panathenaea is still the best-attested civic tradition of offering a specially woven garment to a goddess, it also seems to have been done at Elis/Olympia and Argos (peplos for Hera), Sparta/Amyklai (chiton for Apollo), and there are a broader set of sanctuaries in places like Tanagra and other Boeotian and Delian sites where textiles appear as recurring dedications to Demeter, Kore, Artemis, and related goddesses.
Understanding Homer in Nagy’s terms, as a fabric of song, it seems reasonable to argue that Homeric poetry carries its own performance regime “within” itself. The epics stage singers and songs, employ ring‑composition and formulaic diction suited to live delivery, and draw on a shared vocabulary in which weaving figures as a master image for song making. Helen, Andromache, and Penelope control or reshape narrative through their textiles, as recent studies of “woven words” in the Iliad have emphasized. So the act of weaving inside the story doubles the poet’s own weaving of the story. When a historical festival like the Panathenaia pairs cyclic Homeric performance with the dedication of a peplos, it is not inventing a new association but actualizing, in cult practice, a nexus that the epics themselves already imagine: garments are among the most privileged gifts to gods, and song is conceived as a woven offering in its own right.
This is more reasonable, thanks for explaining. I think my initial question, why Athens and why weaving? is a good one, but you've answered it with evidence that it isn't just Athens and there were Ionian precursors.
Absolutely wonderful, so enlightening!
Thank you, so happy you found it so!
"Homeric epic, in other words, was woven into a festival that interlaced public performance, civic regulation, sacred procession, and textile labor, much as threads on a loom are drawn together into a single patterned cloth." I love this essay so much, truly brilliant and touching. I could put here many sentences that struck me while reading, it is a beautiful piece! And it is so relevant to understand the deep connection of weaving, myth, oral transmission, and the fame of heroes!
"The city heard Homer while it watched Athena be clothed in myth." 😭🤧🥹
Thank you so much, Mariana! It’s so beautiful to me to think about how Homer is part of this whole world of experiences <3
Thoughtful and instructive writing which makes the works of Homer more vivid and enhances our understanding of the ancient world . Thank you
So happy you enjoyed it and found it interesting, Alison! Thank you for reading :)
I recently wrote a very closely related piece: https://ksbernstein.substack.com/p/the-shroud-and-the-nightingale?r=r7xq6&utm_medium=ios
It’s a beautiful piece! Thank you so much for sharing the link. There’s an article it reminded me of. I’ll find the title and author and pop it in the comments of yours.
Thank you.
I love the idea of Illiad/Odyssey being a woven hymnos and Penelope controlling time by weaving and unweaving at her loom. Beautiful read!
So happy you enjoyed it! Are there any topics or questions you’d be interested to see us cover?
Brilliant retelling of Prof. Nagy's ideas about Homer as part of the Panathenaic experience. The story of how the Homeric epics came to be and to retain this form in which we know them today is such a fascinating topic.
Thank you for your kind words! It really is, fascinating and awe-inspiring.
“To forget that woven world is not merely to simplify Homer. It is to transform him. The shift from festival performance to freestanding story changes what the epics are allowed to remember and whose labor remains visible within them.” — absolutely wonderful, love your writing style!!
Thank you so much for your kind words, and I’m very happy you enjoyed it :)
This is so cool! I never thought that story could this be deeply embedded in culture and ritual. I can't help but feel a little sad that not a lot of people know this anymore. Because you're right, while we do try to readapt and capture the original spirit and essence of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, what is it for? Who is it for? Is myth only limited to story? This article clearly draws the line.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. I do feel we have more to learn from the ancients when we are able to draw those lines and see, to whatever extent it’s possible to, their myths as they existed in their world.
There are immediate and obvious objections to this. Homer had no personal connection to Athens and no special affinity for Athena.
It's lovely that Homer was venerated at the Panathenaea in this way, but he was remembered in entirely different ways in cities all across Ionia and mainland Greece.
If there's evidence that Spartans or Ephesians also tied Homer to festivals where robes were woven then I'll gladly concede the point, but it seems like individual poleis had very different concerns based on geography and economics.
My starting question would be, who was Homer? Nagy’s research treats Homer as a Panhellenic tradition, a metonym, not an historical individual. The Panathenaea is perhaps the best documented and eventually most influence performance setting for Homer but not the only one. Building on Douglas Frame, Nagy argues that before Athens, the primary setting for Homeric performance was the Panionia. There’s also evidence that rhapsodes performed Homer in competitive contexts at festivals beyond Athens, e.g. Panionia and Delia, among others. Homer seems to have been performed at smaller feasts and symposia as well. Ancient scholia by Alexandrian scholars mention city editions from Marseilles (Massalia), Chios, Argos, Cyprus, Sinope, Crete, and an “Aeolid” edition, and they sometimes label variant lines specifically as belonging to one of these city texts. The editions themselves are believed to probably reflect either official civic texts or copies known to originate from those cities, preserved in the Library of Alexandria and used as independent witnesses when Alexandrian critics collated variants. When an Alexandrian scholar like Aristarchus reports a reading “in the Chian edition” or “in the Argive edition,” he is categorizing Homeric lines by the city-based textual tradition they represent. So Alexandrian philologists treated Homeric texts as coming from different city-based lineages (Chian, Argive, Massaliote, etc.), and that their work of standardization involved choosing among these competing “civic Homers,” with the Athenian Koine eventually becoming the dominant standard. Nagy’s position is that the Homeric Koine is best understood as the Athenian city edition, even though the scholia do not explicitly call it that.
Having said all this, while many scholars accept Nagy’s broad oral‑traditional framework, yes, others remain skeptical about how far he takes multiformity and fluidity and how far we should go generally in treating “Homer” purely as personified tradition. Personally, I think we can accept that perhaps there was a Homer and that whoever that individual was is lost to history and eventually becomes a metonym for tradition.
Whatever position we take on Homer and the Homeric texts, I stand by what I say here that the texts were performances first and foremost and that taking performance context into account fundamentally changes how we read the surviving “texts.”
It would make sense for Athens to take something that was Pan Ionian initially and do it bigger and better than the poleis of Ionia. But not being a scholar of Greek religion, I would not know how widespread the tradition of bringing the goddess a new cloak was. And that pretty much only works it's your local deity is Athena or maybe Hera. Artemis, Demeter, and the male gods wouldn't want clothes.
Happy to do so, and thank you for the questions and conversation.
Ah, I see. While the Panathenaea is still the best-attested civic tradition of offering a specially woven garment to a goddess, it also seems to have been done at Elis/Olympia and Argos (peplos for Hera), Sparta/Amyklai (chiton for Apollo), and there are a broader set of sanctuaries in places like Tanagra and other Boeotian and Delian sites where textiles appear as recurring dedications to Demeter, Kore, Artemis, and related goddesses.
Understanding Homer in Nagy’s terms, as a fabric of song, it seems reasonable to argue that Homeric poetry carries its own performance regime “within” itself. The epics stage singers and songs, employ ring‑composition and formulaic diction suited to live delivery, and draw on a shared vocabulary in which weaving figures as a master image for song making. Helen, Andromache, and Penelope control or reshape narrative through their textiles, as recent studies of “woven words” in the Iliad have emphasized. So the act of weaving inside the story doubles the poet’s own weaving of the story. When a historical festival like the Panathenaia pairs cyclic Homeric performance with the dedication of a peplos, it is not inventing a new association but actualizing, in cult practice, a nexus that the epics themselves already imagine: garments are among the most privileged gifts to gods, and song is conceived as a woven offering in its own right.
This is more reasonable, thanks for explaining. I think my initial question, why Athens and why weaving? is a good one, but you've answered it with evidence that it isn't just Athens and there were Ionian precursors.