Homer

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Bust of Homer in the British Museum

Homer (Greek ὍB.C.E.;ηρος Hómēros) was a legendary early Greek poet and rhapsode traditionally credited with the composition of the Iliad (Ἰλιάς) and the Odyssey (Ὀδύσσεια). He is without a doubt the most influential poet in all of Western literature, his works being, as they are, some of the oldest surviving documents in any language. For all of antiquity and most of modernity, Homer's influence on literature has been unequalled.

Tradition held that Homer was blind, and various Ionian cities are claimed to be his birthplace, but otherwise his biography is a blank slate. There is considerable scholarly debate about whether Homer was actually a real person, or the name given to one or more oral poets who sang traditional epic material.

Regardless, Homer's epics are, without a doubt, the two most influential poems in all of Western literature. Simply put, Homer was the first major poet whose works were written down, and as a result, he takes precedence over all the poetry that has succeeded him. Succeeding poets have made reference to Homer for thousands of years, and any poet writing in the tradition must at some point come to terms with Homer. No other poet has been imitated more, referenced more, or read more than Homer.

Ancient Accounts of Homer

Of the date of Homer probably no record, real or pretended, ever existed. Herodotus (2.53) maintains that Hesiod and Homer lived not more than 400 years before his own time, consequently not much before 850 B.C.E. From the controversial tone in which he expresses himself it is evident that others had made Homer more ancient; and accordingly the dates given by later authorities, though very various, generally fall within the 10th and 11th centuries B.C.E., but none of these statements has any claim to the character of external evidence.

Other than this putative date of birth, the only thing which authors of antiquity agree upon is that Homer was blind, and that he probably lived in the Greek isles of the Mediterranean. Beyond this, nothing of Homer's life is known or even hinted at in his own writings.

Homeric studies

The study of Homer is one of the very oldest topics in all scholarship or science, and goes back to antiquity. Purely in terms of quantity it is one of the largest of all literary sub-disciplines: the annual publication output rivals that on Shakespeare. The aims and achievements of Homeric studies have changed over the course of the millennia; in the last few centuries they have revolved around the process by which the Homeric poems came into existence and were transmitted down to us, first orally, and later in writing.

The Homeric Question

The most pressing question in Homeric studies, and in the scholarly consideration of Homer in general, is now so common that it has become referred to as "The Homeric Question": Simply put, the question is: Did Homer actually exist?

Scholars generally agree that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent a process of standardization and refinement out of older material beginning in the 8th century B.C.E. 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, and that the name "Homer" was later somehow attached to this amalgamation of texts.

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 well regarded poetic translations 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". This has led to the development of 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 were entrusted with remembering Ionia's stock of epic poetry in the times before literacy came to ancient Greece.

Most Classicists would agree that, whether there was ever such a composer as "Homer" or not, the Homeric poems are the product of an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (aoidoi). 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. It has hence been speculated that the Iliad and Odyssey could 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 the exclusively oral cultures. Parry and Lord in particular make reference to their discovery of an exclusively oral tradition found in remote parts of contemporary Yugoslavia, where poet-rhapsodes compose on-the-spot epics using formulas remarkably similar to those found in Homer.

Homeric style

The cardinal qualities of the style of Homer were pointed out quite well by 19th Century poet Matthew Arnold. The translator of Homer, he says, should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author: that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble (On Translating Homer, p. 9).

The peculiar rapidity of Homer is due in great measure to his use of hexameter verse. It is characteristic of early literature that the evolution of the thought, that is, the grammatical form of the sentence is guided by the structure of the verse; and the correspondence which consequently obtains between the rhythm and the grammar, the thought being given out in lengths, as it were, and these again divided by tolerably uniform pauses produces a swift flowing movement, such as is rarely found when the periods have been constructed without direct reference to the meter. That Homer possesses this rapidity without falling into the corresponding faults of being either jerky or monotonous is perhaps the best proof of his unequalled poetical skill. The plainness and directness both of his thought and expression were doubtless qualities of his age.

Rapidity or ease of movement, plainness of expression and plainness of thought, these are not the distinguishing qualities of the other canonical epic poets, Virgil, Dante, and Milton. (Dante mentions Homer in Inferno IV,88, ranking him as Poet sovereign just above Horace, Ovid and Virgil.) On the contrary, these qualities belong rather to the humbler lyrical school for which Homer has been so often claimed. Homer does not have any use for the ornate complexity found in so many later epic poets; he is rough and plain-spoken in a way that is refreshingly contemporary. Moreover, as Arnold suggests, through this roughness there is a certain sense of nobility that shines through—though plain and unadorned and in some cases even redundant, one is still left in awe of the power of Homer's language, of the commanding, noble story that he is able to craft effortlessly, without need of the more advanced tropes and techniques that would develop after his time. It is this powerful style, sustained through every change of idea and subject, that finally separates Homer from all forms of poetry to which he has been compared.

To fully appreciate Homer, it is necessary to recognize the historical connection between the Iliad and Odyssey and the ballad literature which undoubtedly preceded them in ancient Greece. It may even be admitted that the swift-flowing movement, and the simplicity of thought and style, which we admire in the Iliad are an inheritance from these earlier, lost poetic forms. Even Homer's hexameter verse was first used earlier in ancient ballads and songs, only fragments of which now survive.

Like the French epics, such as the Chanson de Roland, Homeric poetry is indigenous, and is distinguished by this fact, and by the ease of movement and the simplicity which result from it, from poets such as Virgil, Dante and Milton. It is also distinguished from them by the comparative absence of underlying motives or sentiment. In Virgil's poetry a sense of the greatness of Rome and Italy is the leading motive of a passionate rhetoric, partly veiled by the chosen delicacy of his language. Dante and Milton are still more faithful exponents of the religion and politics of their time. Even the French epics are pervaded by the sentiment of fear and hatred of the Saracens. But in Homer the interest is purely dramatic. There is no strong antipathy of race or religion; the war turns on no political event; the capture of Troy lies outside the range of the Iliad; the beginning of the war is not the beginning of the poem. Even the heroes are not the chief national heroes of Greece. The interest lies wholly in the picture of human action and feeling, and it is this human picture, and the attention paid to it by Homer, that have made his verses a lasting work of art.

Historicity of the Iliad

Another significant question regards the possible historical basis of the events that take place in Homer's poems. The commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey written in the Hellenistic period 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 B.C.E. Mycenaean writings and the poems attributed to Homer.

It is probable, therefore, that the story of the Trojan War as reflected in the Homeric poems derives from a tradition of epic poetry founded on a war which actually took place. However, it is crucial not to underestimate the creative and transforming power of subsequent tradition: for instance, Achilles, the most important character of the Iliad, associated with Thessaly, has probably been added to a story where the attackers of Troy were from the Peloponnese.

Selected bibliography

Editions

(texts in Homeric Greek)

  • Demetrius Chalcondylas editio princeps, Florence, 1488
  • the Aldine editions (1504 and 1517)
  • Wolf (Halle, 1794-1795; Leipzig, 1804 1807)
  • Spitzner (Gotha, 1832-1836)
  • Bekker (Berlin, 1843; Bonn, 1858)
  • La Roche (Odyssey, 1867-1868; Iliad, 1873-1876, both at Leipzig)
  • Ludwich (Odyssey, Leipzig, 1889-1891; Iliad, 2 vols., 1901 and 1907)
  • W. Leaf (Iliad, London, 1886-1888; 2nd ed. 1900-1902)
  • Merry and Ridciell (Odyssey i.-xii., 2nd ed., Oxford, 1886)
  • Monro (Odyssey xiii.-xxiv. with appendices, Oxford, 1901)
  • Monro and Allen (Iliad), and Allen (Odyssey, 1908, Oxford).
  • D.B. Monro and T.W. Allen 1917-1920, Homeri Opera (5 volumes: Iliad = 3rd edition, Odyssey = 2nd edition), Oxford. ISBN 0198145284, ISBN 0198145292, ISBN 0198145314, ISBN 0198145322, ISBN 0198145349
  • H. van Thiel 1991, Homeri Odyssea, Hildesheim. ISBN 3487094584 1996, Homeri Ilias, Hildesheim. ISBN 3487094592
  • M.L. West 1998-2000, Homeri Ilias (2 volumes), Munich/Leipzig. ISBN 3598714319, ISBN 3598714351
  • P. von der Mühll 1993, Homeri Odyssea, Munich/Leipzig. ISBN 3598714327
  • Ilias in Wikisource
  • Odyssee in Wikisource

English translations

General works on Homer

  • I. Morris and B. Powell 1997, A New Companion to Homer, Leiden. ISBN 9004099891
  • Robert Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer, CUP, Cambridge 2004. ISBN 0521012465
  • A.J.B. Wace and F.H. Stubbings 1962, A Companion to Homer, London. ISBN 0333071131

Influential readings and interpretations

  • E. Auerbach 1953, Mimesis, Princeton (orig. publ. in German, 1946, Bern), chapter 1. ISBN 069111336X
  • M.W. Edwards 1987, Homer, Poet of the Iliad, Baltimore. ISBN 0801833299
  • B. Fenik 1974, Studies in the Odyssey, Wiesbaden ('Hermes' Einzelschriften 30).
  • I.J.F. de Jong 1987, Narrators and Focalizers, Amsterdam/Bristol. ISBN 1853996580
  • G. Nagy 1979, The Best of the Achaeans, Baltimore. ISBN 0801860156

Commentaries

Trends in Homeric scholarship

"Classical" analysis

  • A. Heubeck 1974, Die homerische Frage, Darmstadt. ISBN 3534038649
  • R. Merkelbach 1969, Untersuchungen zur Odyssee (2nd edition), Munich. ISBN 3406032427
  • D. Page 1955, The Homeric Odyssey, Oxford.
  • U. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff 1916, Die Ilias und Homer, Berlin.
  • F.A. Wolf 1795, Prolegomena ad Homerum, Halle. Published in English translation 1988, Princeton. ISBN 0691102473

Neoanalysis

  • M.E. Clark 1986, "Neoanalysis: a bibliographical review," Classical World 79.6: 379-94.
  • J. Griffin 1977, "The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer," Journal of Hellenic Studies 97: 39-53.
  • J.T. Kakridis 1949, Homeric Researches, London. ISBN 0824077571
  • W. Kullmann 1960, Die Quellen der Ilias (Troischer Sagenkreis), Wiesbaden. ISBN 3515002359

Homer and oral tradition

  • E. Bakker 1997, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse, Ithaca NY. ISBN 0801432952
  • J.M. Foley 1999, Homer's Traditional Art, University Park PA. ISBN 0271018704
  • G.S. Kirk 1976, Homer and the Oral Tradition, Cambridge. ISBN 0521213096
  • A.B. Lord 1960, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge MA. ISBN 0674002830
  • M. Parry 1971, The Making of Homeric Verse, Oxford. ISBN 019520560X

Dating the Homeric poems

External links

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