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Hall of Writers & Poets
Homer
The Iliad, The Odyssey
- fl. c. 8th century BCE
- Writers & Poets · 2 of 12
Hall of Writers & Poets
The Iliad, The Odyssey
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Homer (; Ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος [hómɛːros], Hómēros; possibly born c. 8th century BC) was an ancient Greek poet who is traditionally credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer was highly revered in ancient Greek society and is considered one of the most influential authors in history. The question of Homer's identity and existence—dubbed the "Homeric Question"—continues to be debated, and scholars generally regard the two poems as the works of separate authors.
The Iliad centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War. The Odyssey chronicles the ten-year journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, back to his home after the fall of Troy. The epics depict man's struggle, the Odyssey especially so, as Odysseus perseveres through the punishment of the gods. The poems are in Homeric Greek, also known as Epic Greek, a literary language that shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence is Eastern Ionic. Most researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally. Despite being predominantly known for their tragic and serious themes, the Homeric poems also contain instances of comedy and laughter.
The Homeric poems shaped aspects of ancient Greek culture and education, fostering ideals of heroism, glory, and honor. To Plato, Homer was in simple words the one who "has educated Greece" (τὴν Ἑλλάδα πεπαίδευκεν, tēn Helláda pepaídeuken). In Dante's Divine Comedy, Virgil refers to Homer as "Poet sovereign", king of all poets; in the preface to his translation of the Iliad, Alexander Pope acknowledges that Homer has always been considered the "greatest of poets". From antiquity to the present, Homeric epics have inspired many famous works of literature, music, art, and film.
The questions of by whom, when, where, and under what circumstances the Iliad and Odyssey were composed are the subject of continued scholarship. It is thought that the poems were composed at some point around the late eighth or early seventh century BC. Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity, the most widespread that he was a blind bard from Ionia, a region including the central part of the western coast of Anatolia in present-day Turkey, and the Greek islands of Chios and Samos. Modern scholars consider these accounts to be historically apocryphal or "legendary".
The identity of "Homer" is a mystery, and scholars generally regard the ancient conception of a single author behind the Iliad and the Odyssey as a fictional narrative. During antiquity, biographical details about Homer's life became increasingly mythologized due to his anonymity, and it was believed during that period that he lived after the Trojan War. Contemporary scholars study the life of Homer alongside the Homeric Question, the ongoing academic debate concerning Homer's authorship and the origins, composition, and transmission of the epic poems attributed to him. The two best-known ancient biographies of Homer are the Life of Homer by the Pseudo-Herodotus and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod.
The first early implicit references to Homer in the 7th century BC are in works by Archilochus, Alcman, Tyrtaeus, and Callinus. In most ancient biographies, Homer is depicted as being blind; other biographies, such as that in the Byzantine encyclopedia Suda, described Homer to be descended from one of the Muses, Apollo, Orpheus, Thamyris, Telemachus, or Musaeus. Another tradition from the time of the Roman emperor Hadrian says Epicaste (daughter of Nestor) and Telemachus (son of Odysseus) were the parents of Homer. The poet Pindar is credited with saying that Homer originated from Chios and Smyrna, both of which are also mentioned by other fifth-century writers. Other biographical traditions imagined Homer to have been a rhapsode or singer who performed at religious festivals, was a wandering bard or a composer of other works (the "Homerica"), or that he failed to solve a riddle set by fishermen. According to the Greek historian Ephorus, Homer studied poetry with the bard Phemius and was born in Cyme. Philochorus thought Homer's birthplace to be in Argos; later writers believed Pylos and Athens to have been Homer's birthplace. No one account of Homer's origin became mainstream, but most accounts of his death place its location on Ios.
The two epigrams in the Greek Anthology by Alcaeus of Messene commemorate Homer's death and burial on the island of Ios, emphasizing both the poet's immortal fame and the honor bestowed upon the small island that serves as his tomb.
Today, only the Iliad and the Odyssey are associated with the name "Homer". In antiquity, a large number of other works were sometimes attributed to him, including the Homeric Hymns, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, several epigrams, the Little Iliad, the Nostoi, the Thebaid, the Cypria, the Epigoni, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog–Mouse War"), the Margites, the Capture of Oechalia, and the Phocais. These claims are not considered authentic today and were not universally accepted in the ancient world. As with the multitude of legends surrounding Homer's life, they indicate little more than the centrality of Homer to ancient Greek culture.
The study of Homer is one of the oldest topics in scholarship, dating back to antiquity. Nonetheless, the aims of Homeric studies have changed throughout the millennia. The earliest preserved comments on Homer concern his treatment of the gods, which hostile critics such as the poet Xenophanes of Colophon denounced as immoral. The allegorist Theagenes of Rhegium is said to have defended Homer by arguing that the Homeric poems are allegories. The Iliad and the Odyssey were widely used as school texts in ancient Greek and Hellenistic cultures. They were the first literary works taught to all students. The Iliad, particularly its first few books, was far more intently studied than the Odyssey during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
As a result of the poems' prominence in classical Greek education, extensive commentaries on them developed to explain parts that were culturally or linguistically difficult. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, many interpreters, especially the Stoics, who believed that Homeric poems conveyed Stoic doctrines, regarded them as allegories, containing hidden wisdom. Perhaps partially because of the Homeric poems' extensive use in education, many authors believed that Homer's original purpose had been to educate. Homer's wisdom became so widely praised that he began to acquire the image of almost a prototypical philosopher. Byzantine scholars such as Eustathius of Thessalonica and John Tzetzes produced commentaries, extensions and scholia to Homer, especially in the twelfth century. Eustathius's commentary on the Iliad alone is massive, sprawling over nearly 4,000 oversized pages in a 21st-century printed version and his commentary on the Odyssey an additional nearly 2,000.
In 1488, the Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles published in Florence the editio princeps of the Homeric poems. The earliest modern Homeric scholars started with the same basic approaches towards the Homeric poems as scholars in antiquity. The allegorical interpretation of the Homeric poems that had been so prevalent in antiquity returned to become the prevailing view of the Renaissance. Renaissance humanists praised Homer as the archetypically wise poet, whose writings contain hidden wisdom, disguised through allegory. In Western Europe during the Renaissance, Virgil was more widely read than Homer and Homer was often seen through a Virgilian lens.
In 1664, contradicting the widespread praise of Homer as the epitome of wisdom, François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac wrote a scathing attack on the Homeric poems, declaring that they were incoherent, immoral, tasteless, and without style, that Homer never existed, and that the poems were hastily cobbled together by incompetent editors from unrelated oral songs. Fifty years later, the English scholar Richard Bentley concluded that Homer did exist but that he was an obscure, prehistoric oral poet whose compositions bear little relation to the Iliad and the Odyssey as they have been passed down. According to Bentley, Homer "wrote a Sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small Earnings and good Cheer at Festivals and other Days of Merriment; the Ilias he wrote for men, and the Odysseis for the other Sex. These loose songs were not collected together in the form of an epic Poem till Pisistratus' time, about 500 Years after".
Giambattista Vico analysed Homer and other ancient writings in his philological treatise The New Science (1744) and concluded that Homer was not one man, but many, or an amalgam of other writers. Vico writes "he was a purely ideal poet who never existed as a particular man" and that "Homer was an idea or a heroic character of Grecian men insofar as they told their histories in song".
Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum, published in 1795, argued that much of the material later incorporated into the Iliad and the Odyssey was originally composed in the tenth century BC in the form of short, separate oral songs, which passed through oral tradition for roughly four hundred years before being assembled into prototypical versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the sixth century BC by literate authors. After being written down, Wolf maintained that the two poems were extensively edited, modernized, and eventually shaped into their present state as artistic unities. Wolf and the "Analyst" school, which led the field in the nineteenth century, sought to recover the original, authentic poems that were thought to be concealed by later excrescences.
Within the Analyst school were two camps: proponents of the "lay theory", which held that the Iliad and the Odyssey were put together from a large number of short, independent songs, and proponents of the "nucleus theory", which held that Homer had originally composed shorter versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which later poets expanded and revised. A small group of scholars opposed to the Analysts, dubbed "Unitarians", saw the later additions as superior, the work of a single inspired poet. By around 1830, the central preoccupations of Homeric scholars, dealing with whether or not "Homer" actually existed, when and how the Homeric poems originated, how they were transmitted, when and how they were finally written down, and their overall unity, had been dubbed "the Homeric Question".
Following World War I, the Analyst school began to fall out of favor among Homeric scholars. It did not die out entirely, but it came to be increasingly seen as a discredited dead end. Starting in around 1928, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, after they studied folk bards in the Balkans, developed the "Oral-Formulaic Theory" that the Homeric poems were originally composed through improvised oral performances, which relied on traditional epithets and poetic formulas. This theory found very wide scholarly acceptance and explained many previously puzzling features of the Homeric poems, including their unusually archaic language, their extensive use of stock epithets, and their other "repetitive" features. Many scholars concluded that the "Homeric Question" had finally been answered.
Meanwhile, the "Neoanalysts" sought to bridge the gap between the "Analysts" and "Unitarians". The Neoanalysts sought to trace the relationships between the Homeric poems and other epic poems, which have now been lost, but of which modern scholars do possess some patchy knowledge. Neoanalysts hold that knowledge of earlier versions of the epics can be derived from anomalies of structure and detail in the surviving versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. These anomalies point to earlier versions of the Iliad in which Ajax played a more prominent role, in which the Achaean embassy to Achilles comprised different characters, and in which Patroclus was mistaken for Achilles by the Trojans. They point to earlier versions of the Odyssey in which Telemachus went in search of news of his father not to Menelaus in Sparta but to Idomeneus in Crete, in which Telemachus met up with his father in Crete and conspired with him to return to Ithaca disguised as the soothsayer Theoclymenus, and in which Penelope recognized Odysseus much earlier in the narrative and conspired with him in the destruction of the suitors. Neoanalysts have traditionally reconstructed specific lost poems as sources for the Iliad and Odyssey, but more recent scholarship has sought to reframe such neoanalytical arguments within the oral context of early Greek epic, exploring how the Iliad and Odyssey draw on established mythological traditions in general (such as the story of Achilles' death).
Although most contemporary scholars disagree on other questions about the genesis of the poems, they agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey about the Iliad". Nearly all scholars agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey are unified poems, in that each poem shows a clear overall design and that they are not merely strung together from unrelated songs. It is also generally agreed that each poem was composed mostly by a single author, who probably relied heavily on older oral traditions. Nearly all scholars agree that the Doloneia in Book X of the Iliad is not part of the original poem, but rather a later insertion by a different poet.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Homer”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.