Homer

Homer is as much a subject of myth and mystery as the legendary warriors who populate his poems. His work, "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad" are regarded as the greatest legacy of classical Greek literature. Nothing is known of the man himself, but it is thought he lived at some time in the 8th Century B.C.in Asia Minor.

In the centuries before they gained literacy, the Greeks used oral poetry to entertain, teach, and memorialize the deeds of the past. By using Dactylic Hexameter and formal poetic form, wandering rhapsodes were aided in memorizing large passages.

Homer is thought to have been an exceptional rhapsode who began collecting, codifying, and refining the oral traditions and recording them. Homer's powerful yet subtle imagery illuminates the nature of heroism, the relationship between men and the gods, and between men themselves. His character's actions transcends the Classical world and achieve a timeless universality. The best translations of the text strive for clarity of language without sacrificing the beauty and rhythmic nature of the poetry.

The epic style of poetry influenced countless authors through subsequent ages, from the Roman Virgil, to the Italian Dante, and the English John Milton. Homer's lyric imagery, sweeping multi-layered plot arcs, and heroic characterizations have had an even broader influence and remain the foundation of western literature.

"The Iliad"

The poems use the Trojan War, when heros from across ancient Greece rallied together to fight against their counterparts in Troy, as a backdrop. The ever-meddling gods cause the dispute and remain active in its resolution. (Paris is promised Helen, the wife of Menelaus, by Aphrodite. He kidnaps her and the war begins.) Although Achilles, the heroic ideal and greatest warrior of the Greeks, is absent for much of the Iliad, it is his pride and defection which remains the central drama. He fights with Agemmonon in the first chapter and refuses to enter the battle because of his hubris and anger. Only the death of his friend Patroclus forces him back into the battle, allowing the Greeks to win and peace to be restored.

"The Odyssey"

When the "The Odyssey" begins, Troy has been burnt, Paris is dead, and the Greeks return home, victorious but few in number. The poem centers on Odysseus, the strategist who broke the deadlock of the conflict by creating the Trojan Horse, and his long journey home to save his wife and son from avaricious suitors. His offense to the god Posieon delays his journey as does his overweening hubris. After ten years of remarkable adventures, he arrives home to his wife Penelope and son, punishes her suitors, and restores his kingdom.

Debates over Homer's authorship of the various works and even his very existence have raged since antiquity. Scholars now unanimously rule out the Homeric Hymns and Batrachomyomachia as later derivative works, and signs of a deep oral tradition behind the Illiad and Odyssey (see below) are often taken to cast doubt on the existence of any individual author for them.

The two epics appear to date back to at least the 8th century BC, and were first written down at the command of the Athenian ruler Pisistratus, who feared they were being forgotten. He made a law: any singer or bard who came to Athens had to recite all they knew of Homer for the Athenian scribes, who recorded each version and collated them into what we now call the Iliad and Odyssey.

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 oro-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 a exclusively oral culture.

Seen this way, Homer's distinction is that his performance was recorded. There may have been hundreds of lyric poets in Homer's day, who performed hundreds of versions of the epics, but only one of these was committed to writing and survived to this day.

All in all, the belief in the reality of an actual "Homer" may have more scholarly adherents now than in the 19th century. 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).

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 link

• A good collection of sites on the web is at The Homer Homepage

• Homer, the Greek epic poet.
• a home run in the game baseball
• Homer Simpson, a character in The Simpsons television cartoon
• Homer Simpson, a character in The Day of the Locust
• Several place names in the United States of America, including:
  • Homer, Alaska
  • Homer, Michigan
  • Homer, New York
  • Homer City, Pennsylvania
  • Homer Township, Michigan

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