Rethinking Orality IV: Greek Epic Poetry and Some Storytelling Traditions

The oral storytelling traditions still alive and practiced in Sicily offer valuable ethnographic data for a better understanding of traditional storytelling methods and practices. They also lend themselves to being investigated in comparison to the Greek epic traditions of Archaic and Classical periods, providing highly useful comparative material for better defining certain issues relevant to historical reconstruction (techniques and methods of execution, horizontal and vertical transmission, improvisation, formularity, variation, etc.).The best-known traditional Sicilian storytelling and playtelling practices (e.g. the 'Cunto', the storytelling acted out by puppets, the 'orbi' singing tradition, etc.) are still relatively unknown and unexplored in studies on orality in the ancient world. Instead, they offer a valuable touchstone for reasoning about narration in the Homeric poems and, more generally, about the practices of 'traditional storytelling' in Archaic and Classical Greece, which was dominated by a system of communication based primarily on orality.

These studies stem from the need to open a dialogue between anthropologists, ethnographers, historians of religions and classical philologists. They therefore investigate the forms, modes and functions of traditional narratives from a comparative perspective. The scholars' gaze focus widens to expands to include non-European storytelling traditions, providing, in Weberian terms, models to be applied to historical reconstruction, in full awareness of the sterility of sectorial closures and the need to broaden the interpretative tools of a 'total social fact' such as the Archaic Greek epic.