The other issue,as much as number and gender of authors is what would cause an oral tradition to be committed to the page and who would benefit. Think about the context in which this event could have happened. Singers (male,female or eunich, singly or in multiples, no matter.) independently travel from village to village in the countryside singing the history of the people. In the seventh century bce Solon has Homer recited at the Panathenaic Festivals. Bards from all the Greek world come to compete and hear and learn. Athens (under Pisistratos perhaps?) has this Homer committed to paper, metaphorically speaking. Athens then holds the definative Homer; makes the official copies; bards who deviate or embellish are "less" than Homer, now located in Athens. The oral tradition fades. Athens establishes control of patrimony through the written word. In effect demonstrating controlling media is an old art.

This may be a bit off-topic, but in the debate about men writing from a woman's point of view, how about a few words on James Joyce and Ulysses?

Given the nature of what is posted on a regular basis, even in an "intellectual" publication like Salon, I wonder at the ferocity of the responses to a review of a book that even deals with subjects of antiquity, authorship and historical veracity...

I realize that putting ones work out for the public seems, to some, to be an invitation for evisceration, but it is, on the whole, rather unseemly.

I welcome this discussion on textual authority--if even on the non-Ivy level as it may be--for the sole reason that it is not the political scandal, ideological chest-pounding, horror of the moment story.

At least, it didn't seem to be until the comments.

what you are saying -- but inserting a judgment as subjective as "writing that sounds like it came from a woman" into an argument is just a basic conversation ender. And anyway, it's an issue to take up with the argument I was arguing against. The problem, though, is that you're implying that there is a point beyond which one gender has no access to insight into the other, that that point is permanent and knowable, that that you know what it is. In fact, if there is evidence anywhere that a male writer shows more insight into a woman character or a group of women characters (which is where you seem to locate that point of inaccessiblilty) than you think is natural or probable or possible, it proves that either the point of inaccessibility doesn't exist, or that you don't know where it is. (Defoe keeps springing to mind, and, of course, Shakespeare -- I'm sure you've read "A Midsummer Night's Dream.") All these arguments are only dealing with probabilities, anyway. Any categorical statement we make about them is going to be vulnerable and useless as an argument. After all, the beginning point of the whole discussion is the improbability of a male writer writing as well as the Homeric poet(s) did about women. You can just about reduce that to an absurdity if you back that premise up to this one, which would be hard to deny and yet is relevant -- the statistical improbability of any writer writing well about anything.

Does it change anything? Does it prove that women, even women 2400 years ago, are smart? Did we need this story to tell us that? WE all know that Socrates and Plato were pederasts. Does that mean anything? Why don't we reject their works because they were the Original Members of NAMBLA?

The work itself is all that matters. Not the author. Whether it's Homer, some broad, or 1,000 monkeys with 1,000 typewriters.

Dear Salon,

Samuel Butler was actually the first to argue that the poet of the Odyssey was a woman. His book is titled, The Authoress of the Odyssey and it was published in 1897.

As for whether or not there really was a Homer, and whether he wrote or composed poems orally, when he lived, if he was a real person... all that has long been the subject of scholarly debate. In fact, already in antiquity there many who felt that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed by two different authors. These scholars were known as xorizontes, or “separatists.” Josephus (ca. A.D. 70-100) was actually the first to suggest that Homer was illiterate. His view was ignored until it was resuscitated in 1767 by Robert Wood in his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer. Wood was followed by other controversial studies such as F.A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum of 1795, in which he argued that the Iliad and Odyssey were comprised of shorter lays that where stitched together by a bard. Wolf gave birth to what is now known in the Classics business as “The Homeric Question.” After Wolf there was a fairly wide-ranging free-for-all in Classics’ circles about what parts of the Iliad and Odyssey were different lays by many different authors, as well as what was really the core story (the “Ur-Iliad”). There developed two camps: the “analysts” (multiple authors) and the “unitarians” (single authorship) and they are still fighting it out today. In 1928 Milman Parry then published his study on the mechanics of oral composition, demonstrating to the satisfaction of most scholars that Homeric poetry was oral in nature. Since that time, Parry’s thesis has just been fine-tuned for the most part.

Today, probably the world’s leading scholar on “The Homeric Question” is Gregory Nagy at Harvard. He has several books on the subject, one entitled Homeric Questions. In short, there is nothing groundbreaking in Dalby’s book (as the article describes it) and his work will not “shake up the academy” -- these are long-enduring controversies. If, however, Dalby can spark more general interest in the subject, then kudos to him for that.

There's a difference between "writing that is sympathetic to women" and writing that sounds like it came from a woman.

Women aren't always sympathetic towards one another. I mean, The Devil Wears Prada, for example. The narrator only feels sympathy for herself.

The manner in which women display lack of sympathy towards one another is different from the way men tend to portray their own lack of sympathy towards women.

I think that's part of what people are sensing in Homer, especially in the exchange between Helen and Aphrodite towards the end.