In the very fertile field of Homeric Studies there were published in this, the last year of the 20th century, more than a dozen new dissertations, two dozen new scholarly books and monographs, and over 250 new articles and reviews in scholarly journals-a total of almost 10,000 pages of text (and that does not include reprints, translations, popular literature, conference talks, or the ever-growing corpus of electronic text on the World Wide Web). 1 From the last decade of the 20th century I have personally collected more than 2,200 titles of new books, monographs, and journal articles-a total of over 60,000 pages of text (and I must be missing at least a few!). I estimate that in the last century around a half-million new pages of scholarly text were printed; this adds up to 460 pages of commentary for each page of Homeric text, including the "Homeric" Hymns! And this has gone on year after year for at least the last two centuries, and, though sometimes with somewhat less enthusiasm and prolificacy, for twenty-four centuries before that. There is a very present danger that we as Homeric scholars will fail to keep up with all the new discoveries and insights in our field as a whole. This is inevitable, and we recognize it. We do well if we can manage the bibliographical searching tools for the material published during the 20th century, if we have a grasp of the general flow of scholarship during the 19th, and if we can access and comprehend the commentaries on Homer that have survived from earlier centuries (from the Alexandrian hypomnemata whose vestiges are embedded in the Homeric scholia, to Eustathius' magna opera on both epics, to Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum). Some new and even important discoveries in the field will pass many of us by. But there is another danger, I think, more sinister than this one: that the ever rising inundation of new material will cause us to drift away from those moorings established by the toilsome research of our predecessors. I propose to offer here not something entirely new and imaginative, not something more to add to the mass of material to be mastered, but simply a reminder of some of those moorings from which we seem to have lost our grasp.

The Homeric epics, the two earliest surviving literary works of Western culture, document a tradition that is oral both in composition and transmission. At a very early date, they were attributed to an authorial figure who is really only a symbol standing for a literature of an entire culture. It matters little to us whether a particular ‘singer’ (aoidós) was called H. Even if a ‘H.’ did exist, we can ascribe to him at most part of the literary activity involved in the creation of the Iliad and Odyssey – perhaps the redactional part. Any search for the intervention of individual personalities, of ‘fingerprints’ in the transmitted text will be in vain. Rather, what is reflected in the text is the entire Greek culture of the Archaic period. That culture found both epics an inexhaustible source for practically all aspects of life. In many respects, writing a comprehensive reception history of H. means writing a literary and cultural history of Greece.