Bust of Homer in the [[British Museum]]
:''For other uses, see
Homer (disambiguation).''
Homer (
Greek Ὅμηρος
Hómēros) was a legendary (or perhaps mythical) early
Greek poet and
rhapsode traditionally credited with authorship of the major Greek
epics Iliad and
Odyssey, the comic mini-epic
Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War"), the corpus of
Homeric Hymns, and various other lost or fragmentary works such as
Margites. A few ancient authors credited him with the entire Epic Cycle, which included further poems on the
Trojan War as well as the
Theban poems about
Oedipus and his sons.
Tradition held that Homer was blind, and various
Ionian cities are claimed to be his birthplace, but otherwise his biography is a blank slate.
It has repeatedly been questioned whether the same poet was responsible for both the
Iliad and the
Odyssey; the
Batrachomyomachia, Homeric hymns and cyclic poems are generally agreed to be later than these two epic poems.
The Homeric Question
It is generally agreed among scholars that the
Iliad and
Odyssey underwent a process of standardization and refinement out of older material beginning in the
8th century BC. An important role in this standardization appears to have been played by the
Athenian tyrant Hipparchus, who reformed the recitation of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival. Many classicists hold that this reform must have involved the production of a canonical written text.
An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the
Iliad and
Odyssey shows that the poems consist of regular, repeating phrases; even entire verses repeat. Could the
Iliad and
Odyssey have been
oral-formulaic poems, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phases?
Milman Parry and
Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of
epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture.
Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis", wherein a non-literate "Homer" dictates his poem to a literate scribe in the
6th century BC or earlier. More radical Homerists, such as
Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the Hellenistic period.
Other scholars, however, maintain their belief in the reality of an actual Homer... So little is known or even guessed of his actual life, that a common joke has it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name," and the classical scholar
Richmond Lattimore, author of a good poetic translation to
English of both epics, once wrote a paper entitled "Homer: Who Was She?".
Samuel Butler was more specific, theorizing a young Sicilian woman as author of the
Odyssey (but not the
Iliad), an idea further speculated on by
Robert Graves in his novel
Homer's Daughter.
In Greek his name is "Homēros" which is Greek for "hostage". There is a theory that his name was back-extracted from the name of a society of poets called the Homeridae, which literally means "sons of hostages", i.e. descendants of prisoners of war. As these men were not sent to war because their loyalty on the battlefield was suspect, they would not get killed in battles. Thus they were entrusted with remembering the area's stock of epic poetry, to remember past events, in the times before literacy came to the area.
Historical Aspects of the Poems
This marble bust of Homer, a Roman copy of a Greek original, is now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, Italy.
See main article Troy.
Another significant question regards the tales' possible historical basis. The commentaries on the
Iliad and the
Odyssey written in the Hellenistic period (
3rd to
1st century BC) began exploring the textual inconsistencies of the poems. Modern classicists continue the tradition.
The excavations of
Heinrich Schliemann in the late
19th century began to convince scholars there was a historical basis for the
Trojan War. Research (pioneered by the aforementioned Parry and Lord) into oral epics in Serbo-Croatian and
Turkic languages began to convince scholars that long poems could be preserved with consistency by oral cultures until someone bothered to write them down. The
decipherment of
Linear B in the
1950s by
Michael Ventris and others convinced scholars of a linguistic continuity between
13th century BC Mycenaean writings and the epic poems attributed to Homer.
External links
eBooks on Project Gutenberg
Category:Ancient Greek writers
Category:Poets
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