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Homer

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      Homer ( Greek Ὅμηρος Hómēros)
   Bust of Homer in the British Museum
   Born ca. 8th century BC

   Homer ( Greek Ὅμηρος Hómēros) was a legendary early Greek poet and
   aoidos ("singer") traditionally credited with the composition of the
   Iliad and the Odyssey. The poems are often dated to the 8th or 7th
   century BC; whether Homer himself was a historical individual who lived
   during this period is debated by scholars.

Identity and authorship

   Homer and His Guide, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)
   Enlarge
   Homer and His Guide, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)

   Tradition holds that Homer was blind, and various Ionian cities claim
   to be his birthplace, but otherwise there is not a lot known about
   Homer's life. There is no concrete evidence that shows that Homer was a
   real person.

   Greek Homēros means "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 "of hostages," i.e., descendants of
   prisoners of war. These men were not sent to war because their loyalty
   on the battlefield was suspect, hence 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.

   It has repeatedly been questioned whether the same poet was responsible
   for both the Iliad and the Odyssey. While many find it unlikely that
   the Odyssey was written by one person, others find that the epic is
   generally in the same writing style, and is too consistent to support
   the theory of multiple authors. The Batrachomyomachia, Homeric hymns,
   and cyclic epics are generally agreed to be later than the Iliad and
   the Odyssey. Most accounts of the "Illiad" and the "Odyssey" are
   generally accepted to be written by Homer.

   Homer was even at one time credited with the entire Epic Cycle, which
   included further poems on the Trojan War as well as the Theban poems
   about Oedipus and his sons. Other works, such as the corpus of Homeric
   Hymns, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War,"
   Βατραχομυομαχία), and the Margites were also attributed to him, but
   this is now believed to be unlikely.

   Most scholars generally agree 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.

   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," . Samuel Butler argued that a
   young Sicilian woman wrote the Odyssey (but not the Iliad), an idea
   further pursued by Robert Graves in his novel Homer's Daughter.

   Most Classicists would agree that, whether or not there was ever such a
   composer as "Homer," 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. 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. The crucial words are
   "oral" and "traditional." Parry started with "traditional." The
   repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the
   singer-poet from his predecessors, and they were useful to the poet in
   composition. He called these chunks of repetitive language "formulas."

   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 between the 8th and 6th centuries. The Greek alphabet
   was introduced in the early 8th century, so that it is possible that
   Homer himself was of the first generation of rhapsodes that were also
   literate. 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 ( 3rd to 1st century BC).

Ancient accounts of Homer

   The Homère Caetani bust at the Louvre, a 2nd century Roman copy of a
   2nd century BC Greek original.
   Enlarge
   The Homère Caetani bust at the Louvre, a 2nd century Roman copy of a
   2nd century BC Greek original.

   Many passages in archaic and classical Greek poets and prose authors
   mention Homer or allude to him, and the eight preserved Lives of Homer
   purport to give the poet's birthplace and background. Modern
   scholarship, however, generally concludes that these accounts give no
   solid evidence on which to base a theory of Homer's identity.

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.

   Some of the main trends in modern Homeric scholarship have been, in the
   19th and early 20th centuries, Analysis and Unitarianism (see Homeric
   question), which were schools of thought that emphasised on the one
   hand the inconsistencies, on the other the artistic unity, in Homer;
   and in the 20th century and later Oral Theory, which is the study of
   the mechanisms and effects of oral transmission, and Neoanalysis, which
   is the study of the relationship between Homer and other early epic
   material.

Homeric dialect

   The language used by Homer is an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with
   admixtures from certain other dialects, such as Aeolic Greek. It later
   served as the basis of Epic Greek, the language of epic poetry,
   typically in dactylic hexameter.

Homeric style

   The cardinal qualities of the style of Homer have been well articulated
   by Matthew Arnold: "the translator of Homer," he says, "should above
   all be penetrated by a sense of the 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, page 9).

   The peculiar rapidity of Homer is due in great measure to his use of
   the hexameter verse. It is characteristic of early literature that the
   evolution of the thought, or 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 syntax, 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 metre. That Homer possesses this rapidity without
   falling into the corresponding faults, that is, without becoming either
   fluctuant or monotonous, is perhaps the best proof of his unequalled
   poetical skill. The plainness and directness, both of thought and of
   expression, which characterize Homer were doubtless qualities of his
   age; But the author of the Iliad (similar to Voltaire, to whom Arnold
   happily compares him) must have possessed this gift in a surpassing
   degree. The Odyssey is in this respect perceptibly below the level of
   the Iliad.
   Statue of Homer outside the Bavarian State Library in Munich.
   Enlarge
   Statue of Homer outside the Bavarian State Library in Munich.

   Rapidity or ease of movement, plainness of expression, and plainness of
   thought are not the distinguishing qualities of the great epic poets,
   Virgil, Dante, and Milton (Dante in fact mentions Homer in Inferno
   IV,88, ranking him as 'Poet sovereign' just above Horace, Ovid and
   Virgil). On the contrary, they belong rather to the humbler
   epico-lyrical school for which Homer has been so often claimed. The
   proof that Homer does not belong to that school, and that his poetry is
   not in any true sense ballad-poetry is furnished by the higher artistic
   structure of his poems, and, as regards style by the fourth of the
   qualities distinguished by Arnold, the quality of nobleness. It is his
   noble and powerful style, sustained through every change of idea and
   subject, that finally separates Homer from all forms of ballad-poetry
   and popular epic.

   It may be recognized that there is an historical connection between the
   Iliad and Odyssey and the ballad literature which undoubtedly preceded
   them in Greece. It may even be admitted that the swift-flowing
   movement, and the simplicity of thought and style, which are greatly
   admired in the Iliad, are an inheritance from the earlier lays, such as
   the reference to Achilles and Patroclus singing to the lyre in their
   tent; even the hexameter verse may be assigned to them. But between
   earlier days and the time of Homer we must place the cultivation of
   epic poetry as an art. The pre-Homeric days doubtless furnished the
   elements of such poetry, but they must have been refined somewhat
   before they gave way to poems like the Iliad and Odyssey.

   Like the French epics, such as the Chanson de Roland, Homeric poetry is
   indigenous, and by the ease of movement and its resulting simplicity,
   is distinguishable from the works of Dante, Milton, and Virgil. It is
   also distinguished from the works of the above artists 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 display
   sentiments of fear and hatred of the Saracens; but in Homer's works,
   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, and even the heroes portrayed are
   not comparable to the chief national heroes of Greece. So far as can be
   seen, the chief interest in Homer's works is that of human feeling and
   emotion, and of drama - indeed, Homer's works are oft referred to as
   'dramas.'

History and the Iliad

   Another significant question regards the possible historical basis of
   the 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 provide evidence to scholars that 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 others of a linguistic continuity between 13th century BC
   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.

Hero cult

   The Apotheosis of Homer, by Archelaus of Priene. Marble relief,
   possibly of the 3rd century BC, now in the British Museum.
   Enlarge
   The Apotheosis of Homer, by Archelaus of Priene. Marble relief,
   possibly of the 3rd century BC, now in the British Museum.

   In the Hellenistic period, Homer was the subject of a hero cult in
   several cities. A shrine devoted to Homer or Homereion was built in
   Alexandria by Ptolemy IV Philopator in the late 3rd century BC. This
   shrine is described in Aelian's 3rd century work Varia Historia. He
   described how Ptolemy had "placed in a circle around the statue [of
   Homer] all the cities who laid claim to Homer" and mentions a painting
   of the poet by the artist Galaton, which apparently depicted Homer in
   the aspect of Oceanus as the source of all poetry.

   A marble relief, found in Italy but thought to have been sculpted in
   Egypt, depicts the apotheosis of Homer. It shows Ptolemy and his
   wife/sister Arsinoe III standing beside a seated Homer. The poet is
   shown flanked by figures from the Odyssey and Iliad, with the nine
   Muses standing above them and a procession of worshippers approaching
   an altar, believed to represent the Alexandrine Homereion. Apollo, god
   of music and poetry, also appears, along with a female figure
   tentatively identified as Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses. Zeus, the
   king of the gods, presides over the proceedings. The relief
   demonstrates vividly how the Greeks considered Homer not just a great
   poet, but the divinely inspired source of all literature.

   Homereia also stood at Chios, Ephesus and Smyrna, which were among the
   city-states that claimed to be the birthplace of Homer. Strabo
   (14.1.37) records a Homeric temple in Smyrna with an ancient xoanon or
   cult statue of the poet. He also mentions sacrifices carried out to
   Homer by the inhabitants of Argos, presumably at another Homereion.
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