For other uses, see Homer (disambiguation).

Homer (Greek Ὅμηρος Hómēros) was a legendary early Greek poet and rhapsode traditionally credited with authorship of the major Greek epics Ιλιάς Iliad and Οδύσσεια Odyssey. The comic mini-epic Βατραχομυομαχία Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War"), the corpus of Homeric Hymns, and various other lost or fragmentary works such as Margites have been attributed to him, but this is now believed to be unlikely. 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. 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.

It has repeatedly been questioned whether the same poet was responsible for both the Iliad and the Odyssey; the Batrachomyomachia, Homeric hymns and cyclic epics are generally agreed to be later than these two epic poems.

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 BC. 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 BC, but none of these statements has any claim to the character of external evidence.

The extant lives of Homer (edited in Westermanns Vitarum Scriptores Graeci minores) are eight in number, including the piece called the Contest of Hesiod and Homer. The longest is written in the Ionic dialect, and bears the name of Herodotus, but is certainly spurious. In all probability it belongs to the time which was fruitful beyond all others in literary forgeries, viz, the 2nd century of our era. The other lives are certainly not more ancient. Their chief value consists in the curious short poems or fragments of verse which they have preserved, the so-called Epigrams, which used to be printed at the end of editions of Homer. These are easily recognized as Popular Rhymes, a form of folklore to be met with in most countries, treasured by the people as a kind of proverbs. In the Homeric epigrams the interest turns sometimes on the characteristics of particular localities Smyrna and Cyme (Epigr. 4), Erythrae (Epigr. 6, 7), Mt Ida (Epigr. 10), Neon Teichos (Epigr. 1); others relate to certain trades or occupations: potters (Epigr. 14), sailors, fishermen, goat herds, etc. Some may be fragments of longer poems, but evidently they are not the work of any one poet. The fact that they were all ascribed to Homer merely means that they belong to a period in the history of the Ionian and Aeolian colonies when Homer was a name which drew to itself all ancient and popular verse.

Again, comparing the epigrams with the legends and anecdotes told in the Lives of Homer, we can hardly doubt that they were the chief source from which these Lives were derived. Thus in Epigr. 4 we find a blind poet, a native of Aeolian Smyrna, through which flows the water of the sacred Meles. Here is doubtless the source of the chief incident of the Herodotean Life, the birth of Homer Son of the Meles. The epithet Aeolian implies high antiquity, inasmuch as according to Herodotus Smyrna became Ionian about 688 BC. Naturally the Ionians had their own version of the story, a version which made Homer come out with the first Athenian colonists.

The same line of argument may be extended to the Hymns, and even to some of the lost works of the post-Homeric or so-called Cyclic poets. Thus:

1. The hymn to the Delian Apollo ends with an address of the poet to his audience. When any stranger comes and asks who is the sweetest singer, they are to answer with one voice, "the blind man that dwells in rocky Chios; his songs deserve the prize for all time to come." Thucydides, who quotes this passage to show the ancient character of the Delian festival, seems to have no doubt of the Homeric authorship of the hymn. Hence we may most naturally account for the belief that Homer was a Chian.

2. The Siargitesa humorous poem which kept its ground as the reputed work of Homer down to the time of Aristotle began with the words, "There came to Colophon an old man, a divine singer, servant of the Muses and Apollo." Hence doubtless the claim of Colophon to be the native city of Homer a claim supported in the early times of Homeric learning by the Colophonian poet and grammarian Antimachus.

3. The poem called the Cypria was said to have been given by Homer to Stasinus of Cyprus as a daughter's dowry. The connexion with Cyprus appears further in the predominance given in the poem to Aphrodite.

4. The Little Iliad and the Phocais, according to the Herodotean life, were composed by Homer when he lived at Phocaea with a certain Thestorides, who carried them off to Chios and thert gained fame by reciting them as his own. The name Thestorides occurs in Epigr. 5.

5. A similar story was told about the poem called the Taking of Oechalia, the subject of which was one of the exploits of Heracles. It passed under the name of Creophylus, a friend or (as some said) a son-in-law of Homer; but it was generally believed to have been in fact the work of the poet himself.

6. Finally the Thebaid always counted as the work of Homer. As to the Epigoni, which carried on the Theban story, some doubt seems to have been felt.

These indications render it probable that the stories connecting Homer with different cities and islands grew up after his poems had become known and famous, especially in the new and flourishing colonies of Aeolis and Ionia. The contention for Homer, in short, began at a time when his real history was lost, and he had become a sort of mythical figure, an eponymous hero, or personification of a great school of poetry.

An interesting confirmation of this view from the negative side is furnished by the city which ranked as chief among the Asiatic colonies of Greece, viz. Miletus. No legend claims for Miletus even a visit from Homer, or a share in the authorship of any Homeric poem. Yet Arctinus of Miletus was said to have been a disciple of Homer, and was certainly one of the earliest and most considerable of the Cyclic poets. His Aethiopis was composed as a sequel to the Iliad; and the structure and general character of his poems show that he took the Iliad as his model. Yet in his case we find no trace of the disputed authorship which is so common with other Cyclic poems. How has this come about? Why have the works of Arctinus escaped the attraction which drew to the name of Homer such epics as the Cypria, the Little Iliad, the Thebaid, the Epigoni, the Taking of Oechalia and the Phocais. The most obvious account of the matter is that Arctinus was never so far forgotten that his poems became the subject of dispute. We seem through him to obtain a glimpse of an early post-Homeric age in Ionia, when the immediate disciples and successors of Homer were distinct figures in a trustworthy tradition when they had not yet merged their individuality in the legendary Homer of the Epic Cycle.

The Homeric Question

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," 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". 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.

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. 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 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 (3rd to 1st century BC).

Historical Aspects of the Poems

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 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 poems attributed to Homer.

References

This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain.

Literature

Commentaries

• Scholia Veneta on the Iliad , ed. Villoison (Venice, 1788);
• 'Scholia in Homeri Iliades ed. Bekker Berlin, 1825-1826).
• The Scholia on the Odyssey, ed. Buttmann (Berlin, 1821), Dindorf (Oxford, 1855)
• Commentary of Eustathius, first printed at Rome in 1542;
• Heynes. Iliad (Leipzig, 1802)
• Nitzsch, Odyssey (books i.-xii., Hanover)
• Negelbach Anmerkungen zur Ilias (Autenrieth, Nuremberg, 1864).

Homeric Question

• Wolf, Prolegomena (Halle, 1795)
• W. Muller, Homerische Vorschule (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1836)
• G. Hermann, De interpolationibus Homeri (1832), De iteratis apud Homerum (1840)
• Lachmann, Betrachtungen über Homers Ilias (2nd ed. Berlin, 1865).

Homeric dialect

• H. L. Ahrens, Griechische Formenlehre (Gottingen, 1852)
• A. Fick, Die homerische Odyssee in der ursprünglichen Sprachform wiederhergestelt (Gottingen, 1883), Die homerische Ilias (ibid., 1886)
• W. Schulze, Quaestiones epicae (Goterslohe, 1892).
• B. Delbrück, Syntactische Forschungen (Halle, 1871-1879)
• Hartel, Homerische Studien (i-vi., Vienna)
• Thumb, Zur Geschichte des griech. Digamma, Indogermanische Forschungen (1898)

Editions

• The editio princeps of Homer, published at Florence in 1488, by Demetrius Chaicondylas
• Aldine editions of 1504 and 1517
• Wolf (Halle, 1794-1795; Leipzig, 1804 1807)
• Spitzner (Gotha, 1832-1836)
• Bekker (Berlin, 1843; Bonn, I858)
• La Roche (Odyssey, 1867-1868; Iliad, 1873-1876, both at Leipzig)
• Ludwich (Odyssey, Leipzig, 1889-1891; Iliad, 2 vols., 1901 and 907)
• 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).

English Translations

• Free eBook of The Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler (1835-1902) at Project Gutenberg
• Free eBook of The Odyssey, translated by Andrew Lang (1844-1912) and S.H. (Samuel Henry) Butcher (1850-1910) at Project Gutenberg
• Free eBook of The Odyssey, translated by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) at Project Gutenberg
• Free eBook of The Iliad, translated by Samuel Butler (1835-1902) at Project Gutenberg
• Free eBook of The Iliad, translated by Andrew Lang (1844-1912) at Project Gutenberg

External links

• Collection of Homer-related links
• Homer of Cumaean origin

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