- Alternate uses, see Homer
(disambiguation).
Homer (Greek Ὅμηρος
Hómēros) was a legendary (or perhaps mythical) early Greek poet
Works and Biography
Homer was 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 claimed to be his
birthplace, but otherwise his biography is a blank slate.
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 oral 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 scholars joke the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name," and the classicist
Richmond Lattimore, author of a good poetic translation to
English of both epics, once called a paper "Homer: Who Was She?"
Similarly, Robert Graves speculated on a female Homer. Samuel Butler was more specific, theorizing a young Sicilian woman as author of
the Odyssey (but not the Iliad).
Historical Aspects of the Poems
Another question is: do the tales have a factual 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 and BBC television producers continue the
tradition.
The excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in the late
19th century began to convince scholars there was an 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
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