In this dissertation I demonstrate the virtues of the Homeric poems as scripts for solo performance. To do so I analyze the poems into two separate axes, poiesis and genesis, and show how they are intertwined. Poiesis is the selection and assembly of line, theme, image, speech, episode, or architectonic structure. Genesis is the actualization and circulation of all of this among the poet/performer (bard), hero, audience.

Chapters 1 and 2 give a fresh interpretation of Plato's and Aristotle's treatment of Homeric examples and their imitations of Homer. Plato's dramatic responses to Homer in the Republic and Ion bring into relief the “manyness” of the bard: not only the Protean “becoming” many characters but also a “layering” of presence. Aristotle shows that the bard's performance mode is not an attenuation of dramatic acting but central to the thaumaston, the wondrous, in epic, its “out-of-place” nature (atopia). In Chapter 3 I survey the range of means, from the fully embodied to the fully textual, by which the Homeric script produces atopia and wonder at the source of action. The speech of Phoenix in Iliad 9 (Chapter 4) deploys ring composition, spatial imagery, and a (previously undetected) background myth to produce the uncanny takeover of one character by another. In the opening of Iliad 16 (Chapter 5), another neglected background story invades the plot, and its themes (resurrection, ghosts, the split soul) reinforce the effect that the action is unfolding on more than one plane at once. In Chapter 6 I show how in Odyssey 13 and 14 the bard stages the homecoming of Odysseus by bringing him forward to compose the Cretan Tales out of surrounding objects, traditional stories, and his own inner fears. He merges with one character (Odysseus) only to reveal another (Eumaeus) as a more deeply embedded presence. Two “poiesis interludes” explicate the structural role of background stories brought to light in Chapters 4 and 5. Appendices A and B review external evidence for Homeric performance and explore the role of a staff as a prop.