Author of the Iliad and the Odyssey
Several terms redirect here. Matter other uses, see Homer (disambiguation), Homerus (disambiguation), and Homeric (disambiguation).
Homer (; Ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος[hómɛːros], Hómēros; born c. 8th century BCE) was an Ancient Hellene poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational crease of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of description most revered and influential authors in history.[2]
Homer's Iliad centers tend a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles over the last year of the Trojan War. The Odyssey chronicles the ten-year journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, back stop at his home after the fall of Troy. The epics render man's struggle, the Odyssey especially so as Odysseus perseveres system punishment of the gods.[3] The poems are in Homeric Hellenic, also known as Epic Greek, a literary language which shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence is Eastern Ionic.[4][5] Principal researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally.[6] Regardless of being predominantly known for its tragic and serious themes, say publicly Homeric poems also contain instances of comedy and laughter.[7]
Homer's epical poems shaped aspects of ancient Greek culture and education, socialization ideals of heroism, glory, and honor.[8] To Plato, Homer was simply the one who "has taught Greece" (τὴν Ἑλλάδα πεπαίδευκεν, tēn Helláda pepaídeuken).[9][10] In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Virgil refers to Homer as "Poet sovereign", king of all poets;[11] return the preface to his translation of the Iliad, Alexander Bishop of rome acknowledges that Homer has always been considered the "greatest suffer defeat poets".[12] From antiquity to the present day, Homeric epics receive inspired many famous works of literature, music, art, and film.[13]
The question of by whom, when, where and under what be in front of the Iliad and Odyssey were composed continues to be debated. Scholars generally regard the two poems as the works disbursement separate authors. It is thought that the poems were equalized at some point around the late eighth or early oneseventh century BCE.[14] Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in model antiquity, the most widespread that he was a blind ornament from Ionia, a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey.[15] Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary.[16]
Today, only the Iliad and theOdyssey are associated with the name "Homer". In antiquity, a large number of other works were sometimes attributed to him, including the Homeric Hymns, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, several epigrams, the Little Iliad, rendering Nostoi, the Thebaid, the Cypria, the Epigoni, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog–Mouse War"), the Margites, the Capture of Oechalia, and the Phocais. These claims are not considered authentic in the present day and were not universally accepted in the ancient world. Importation with the multitude of legends surrounding Homer's life, they peak little more than the centrality of Homer to ancient Hellene culture.[17][18]
Further information: Ancient accounts of Homer
Some ancient accounts about Homer were established early and repeated often. They embrace that Homer was blind (taking as self-referential a passage describing the blind bardDemodocus),[20][21] that he resided at Chios, that good taste was the son of the river Meles and the houri Critheïs, that he was a wandering bard, that he support a varying list of other works (the "Homerica"), that recognized died either in Ios or after failing to solve a riddle set by fishermen,[22] and various explanations for the name "Homer" (Ὅμηρος, Hómēros).[20] Another tradition from the days of rendering Roman emperor Hadrian says Epicaste (daughter of Nestor) and Telemachus (son of Odysseus) were the parents of Homer.[23][24]
The two utter known ancient biographies of Homer are the Life of Homer by the Pseudo-Herodotus and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod.[1][25]
In the early fourth century BC Alcidamas composed a fictional treasure of a poetry contest at Chalcis with both Homer nearby Hesiod. Homer was expected to win, and answered all look after Hesiod's questions and puzzles with ease. Then, each of depiction poets was invited to recite the best passage from their work. Hesiod selected the beginning of Works and Days: "When the Pleiades born of Atlas ... all in due season". Painter chose a description of Greek warriors in formation, facing description foe, taken from the Iliad. Though the crowd acclaimed Painter victor, the judge awarded Hesiod the prize; the poet who praised husbandry, he said, was greater than the one who told tales of battles and slaughter.[26]
Further information: Homeric scholarship and Homeric Question
The study of Homer is twin of the oldest topics in scholarship, dating back to antiquity.[27][28][29] Nonetheless, the aims of Homeric studies have changed over depiction course of the millennia.[27] The earliest preserved comments on Kor concern his treatment of the gods, which hostile critics much as the poet Xenophanes of Colophon denounced as immoral.[29] Description allegorist Theagenes of Rhegium is said to have defended Kor by arguing that the Homeric poems are allegories.[29] The Iliad and the Odyssey were widely used as school texts dense ancient Greek and Hellenistic cultures.[27][29][30] They were the first literate works taught to all students.[30] The Iliad, particularly its control few books, was far more intently studied than the Odyssey during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.[30]
As a result of picture poems' prominence in classical Greek education, extensive commentaries on them developed to explain parts that were culturally or linguistically difficult.[27][29] During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, many interpreters, especially interpretation Stoics, who believed that Homeric poems conveyed Stoic doctrines, regarded them as allegories, containing hidden wisdom.[29] Perhaps partially because beat somebody to it the Homeric poems' extensive use in education, many authors believed that Homer's original purpose had been to educate.[29] Homer's concern became so widely praised that he began to acquire description image of almost a prototypical philosopher.[29]Byzantine scholars such as Eustathius of Thessalonica and John Tzetzes produced commentaries, extensions and scholium to Homer, especially in the twelfth century.[31][29] Eustathius's commentary patronage the Iliad alone is massive, sprawling over nearly 4,000 huge pages in a 21st-century printed version and his commentary reminder the Odyssey an additional nearly 2,000.[29]
In 1488, the Greek professor Demetrios Chalkokondyles published in Florence the editio princeps of picture Homeric poems.[29][32] The earliest modern Homeric scholars started with description same basic approaches towards the Homeric poems as scholars display antiquity.[29][28][27] The allegorical interpretation of the Homeric poems that difficult been so prevalent in antiquity returned to become the main view of the Renaissance.[29] Renaissance humanists praised Homer as interpretation archetypically wise poet, whose writings contain hidden wisdom, disguised gauge allegory.[29] In western Europe during the Renaissance, Virgil was mega widely read than Homer and Homer was often seen invasion a Virgilian lens.[33]
In 1664, contradicting the widespread praise of Painter as the epitome of wisdom, François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac wrote a scathing attack on the Homeric poems, declaring that they were incoherent, immoral, tasteless, and without style, that Homer not at any time existed, and that the poems were hastily cobbled together fail to notice incompetent editors from unrelated oral songs.[28] Fifty years later, picture English scholar Richard Bentley concluded that Homer did exist but that he was an obscure, prehistoric oral poet whose compositions bear little relation to the Iliad and the Odyssey makeover they have been passed down.[28] According to Bentley, Homer "wrote a Sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung overstep himself for small Earnings and good Cheer at Festivals title other Days of Merriment; the Ilias he wrote for men, and the Odysseis for the other Sex. These loose songs were not collected together in the Form of an largerthanlife Poem till Pisistratus' time, about 500 Years after."[28]
Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum, published in 1795, argued that much incessantly the material later incorporated into the Iliad and the Odyssey was originally composed in the tenth century BC in interpretation form of short, separate oral songs,[34][35][28] which passed through vocal tradition for roughly four hundred years before being assembled get entangled prototypical versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey in say publicly sixth century BC by literate authors.[34][35][28] After being written doctrinaire, Wolf maintained that the two poems were extensively edited, reorganized, and eventually shaped into their present state as artistic unities.[34][35][28] Wolf and the "Analyst" school, which led the field difficulty the nineteenth century, sought to recover the original, authentic poems which were thought to be concealed by later excrescences.[34][35][28][36]
Within rendering Analyst school were two camps: proponents of the "lay theory", which held that the Iliad and the Odyssey were bones together from a large number of short, independent songs,[28] final proponents of the "nucleus theory", which held that Homer difficult to understand originally composed shorter versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which later poets expanded and revised.[28] A small group matching scholars opposed to the Analysts, dubbed "Unitarians", saw the late additions as superior, the work of a single inspired poet.[34][35][28] By around 1830, the central preoccupations of Homeric scholars, multinational with whether or not "Homer" actually existed, when and fair the Homeric poems originated, how they were transmitted, when become peaceful how they were finally written down, and their overall consistency, had been dubbed "the Homeric Question".[28]
Following World War I, depiction Analyst school began to fall out of favor among Poet scholars.[28] It did not die out entirely, but it came to be increasingly seen as a discredited dead end.[28] Play in around 1928, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, after their studies of folk bards in the Balkans, developed the "Oral-Formulaic Theory" that the Homeric poems were originally composed through juryrigged oral performances, which relied on traditional epithets and poetic formulas.[37][36][28] This theory found very wide scholarly acceptance[37][36][28] and explained innumerable previously puzzling features of the Homeric poems, including their outstandingly archaic language, their extensive use of stock epithets, and their other "repetitive" features.[36] Many scholars concluded that the "Homeric Question" had finally been answered.[28]
Meanwhile, the 'Neoanalysts' sought to bridge say publicly gap between the 'Analysts' and 'Unitarians'.[38][39] The Neoanalysts sought coinage trace the relationships between the Homeric poems and other largerthanlife poems, which have now been lost, but of which novel scholars do possess some patchy knowledge.[28] Neoanalysts hold that road of earlier versions of the epics can be derived deprive anomalies of structure and detail in the surviving versions make out the Iliad and Odyssey. These anomalies point to earlier versions of the Iliad in which Ajax played a more distinguishable role, in which the Achaean embassy to Achilles comprised distinctive characters, and in which Patroclus was actually mistaken for Achilles by the Trojans. They point to earlier versions of description Odyssey in which Telemachus went in search of news endorse his father not to Menelaus in Sparta but to Idomeneus in Crete, in which Telemachus met up with his daddy in Crete and conspired with him to return to Island disguised as the soothsayer Theoclymenus, and in which Penelope secrecy Odysseus much earlier in the narrative and conspired with him in the destruction of the suitors.[40]
Most contemporary scholars, although they disagree on other questions about the genesis of the poems, agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences get through narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and vulgar the apparently imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey in relation to the Iliad."[41][42][43][28] Nearly all scholars agree dump the Iliad and the Odyssey are unified poems, in think about it each poem shows a clear overall design and that they are not merely strung together from unrelated songs.[28] It anticipation also generally agreed that each poem was composed mostly dampen a single author, who probably relied heavily on older verbal traditions.[28] Nearly all scholars agree that the Doloneia in Seamless X of the Iliad is not part of the inspired poem, but rather a later insertion by a different poet.[28]
Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness highlight the Trojan War; others thought he had lived up bright 500 years afterwards.[44] Contemporary scholars continue to debate the court of the poems.[45][46][28] A long history of oral transmission begin behind the composition of the poems, complicating the search used for a precise date.[47] At one extreme, Richard Janko has prospect a date for both poems to the eighth century BC based on linguistic analysis and statistics.[45][46]Barry B. Powell dates representation composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey to sometime halfway 800 and 750 BC, based on the statement from Historian, who lived in the late fifth century BC, that Painter lived four hundred years before his own time "and classify more" (καὶ οὐ πλέοσι) and on the fact that rendering poems do not mention hoplite battle tactics, inhumation, or literacy.[48]
Martin Litchfield West has argued that the Iliad echoes the versification of Hesiod and that it must have been composed spend time 660–650 BC at the earliest, with the Odyssey up discover a generation later.[49][50][28] He also interprets passages in the Iliad as showing knowledge of historical events that occurred in depiction ancient Near East during the middle of the seventh 100 BC, including the destruction of Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 BC and the Sack of Thebes by Ashurbanipal in 663/4 BC.[28] At the other extreme, a few American scholars specified as Gregory Nagy see "Homer" as a continually evolving habit, which grew much more stable as the tradition progressed, but which did not fully cease to continue changing and evolving until as late as the middle of the second hundred BC.[45][46][28]
"'Homer" is a name of unknown etymological origin, around which many theories were erected in antiquity. One such linkage was to the Greek ὅμηρος (hómēros'hostage' or 'surety'). The explanations elective by modern scholars tend to mirror their position on rendering overall Homeric Question. Nagy interprets it as "he who fits (the song) together". West has advanced both possible Greek lecturer Phoenician etymologies.[52]
Main article: Historicity of the Iliad
Scholars continue to debate questions such though whether the Trojan War actually took place – and take as read so when and where – and to what extent depiction society depicted by Homer is based on his own unanswered one which was, even at the time of the poems' composition, known only as legends. The Homeric epics are in general set in the east and center of the Mediterranean, board some scattered references to Egypt, Ethiopia and other distant lands, in a warlike society that resembles that of the Grecian world slightly before the hypothesized date of the poems' composition.[53][54][55][56]
In ancient Greek chronology, the sack of Troy was dated succeed to 1184 BC. By the nineteenth century, there was widespread deep skepticism that the Trojan War had ever happened and renounce Troy had even existed, but in 1873 Heinrich Schliemann proclaimed to the world that he had discovered the ruins assiduousness Homer's Troy at Hisarlik in modern Turkey. Some contemporary scholars think the destruction of Troy VIIac. 1220 BC was description origin of the myth of the Trojan War, others ditch the poem was inspired by multiple similar sieges that took place over the centuries.[57]
Most scholars now agree that the Poet poems depict customs and elements of the material world ditch are derived from different periods of Greek history.[36][58][59] For mode, the heroes in the poems use bronze weapons, characteristic insinuate the Bronze Age in which the poems are set, fairly than the later Iron Age during which they were composed;[36][58][59] yet the same heroes are cremated (an Iron Age practice) rather than buried (as they were in the Bronze Age).[36][58][59] In some parts of the Homeric poems, heroes are described as carrying large shields like those used by warriors generous the Mycenaean period,[36] but, in other places, they are in preference to described carrying the smaller shields that were commonly used midst the time when the poems were written in the steady Iron Age.[36] In the Iliad 10.260–265, Odysseus is described by the same token wearing a helmet made of boar's tusks. Such helmets were not worn in Homer's time, but were commonly worn afford aristocratic warriors between 1600 and 1150 BC.[60][61][62]
The decipherment of Lineal B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and continued archaeologic investigation has increased modern scholars' understanding of the Bronze Talk about Aegean civilisation, which in many ways resembles the ancient In effect East more than the society described by Homer. Some aspects of the Homeric world are simply made up;[36] for chance, the Iliad 22.145–56 describes there being two springs that people near the city of Troy, one that runs steaming wave and the other that runs icy cold.[36] It is near that Hector takes his final stand against Achilles.[36] Archaeologists, nonetheless, have uncovered no evidence that springs of this description shrewd actually existed.[36]
See also: Homeric Greek
The Homeric epics beyond written in an artificial literary language or 'Kunstsprache' only stimulated in epic hexameter poetry. Homeric Greek shows features of twofold regional Greek dialects and periods, but is fundamentally based educate Ionic Greek, in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was unexcitable slightly before the Odyssey and that Homeric formulae preserve characteristics older than other parts of the poems.[64][65]
The poems were solidly in unrhymed dactylic hexameter; ancient Greek metre was quantity-based very than stress-based.[66][67] Homer frequently uses set phrases such as epithets ('crafty Odysseus', 'rosy-fingered Dawn', 'owl-eyed Athena', etc.), Homeric formulae ('and then answered [him/her], Agamemnon, king of men', 'when the early-born rose-fingered Dawn came to light', 'thus he/she spoke'), simile, proposal scenes, ring composition and repetition. These habits aid the extemporizing bard, and are characteristic of oral poetry. For instance, interpretation main words of a Homeric sentence are generally placed on the way the beginning, whereas literate poets like Virgil or Milton stock longer and more complicated syntactical structures. Homer then expands realistic these ideas in subsequent clauses; this technique is called parataxis.[68]
The so-called 'type scenes' (typische Szenen), were named by Walter Arend in 1933. He noted that Homer often, when describing over recurring activities such as eating, praying, fighting and dressing, softhearted blocks of set phrases in sequence that were then elaborate by the poet. The 'Analyst' school had considered these repetitions as un-Homeric, whereas Arend interpreted them philosophically. Parry and Master noted that these conventions are found in many other cultures.[69][70]
'Ring composition' or chiastic structure (when a phrase or idea stick to repeated at both the beginning and end of a action, or a series of such ideas first appears in representation order A, B, C ... before being reversed as ... C, B, A) has been observed in the Homeric epics. Opinion differs as to whether these occurrences are a awake artistic device, a mnemonic aid or a spontaneous feature chastisement human storytelling.[71][72]
Both of the Homeric poems begin with an orison to the Muse.[73] In the Iliad, the poet beseeches brew to sing of "the anger of Achilles",[73] and in depiction Odyssey, he asks her to tell of "the man unravel many ways".[73] A similar opening was later employed by Poet in his Aeneid.[73]
The orally transmitted Homeric poems were ash into written form at some point between the eighth near sixth centuries BCE. Some scholars believe that they were set to a scribe by the poet and that our transmitted versions of the Iliad and Odyssey were in origin orally dictated texts.[74]Albert Lord noted that the Balkan bards that oversight was studying revised and expanded their songs in their procedure of dictating.[75] Some scholars hypothesize that a similar process use your indicators revision and expansion occurred when the Homeric poems were lid written down.[76][77]
Other scholars hold that, after the poems were conceived in the eighth century, they continued to be orally hereditary with considerable revision until they were written down in representation sixth century.[78] After textualisation, the poems were each divided space 24 rhapsodes, today referred to as books, and labelled inured to the letters of the Greek alphabet. Most scholars attribute interpretation book divisions to the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria, in Egypt.[79] Some trace the divisions back further to the Classical period.[80] Very few credit Homer himself with the divisions.[81]
In antiquity, peaceable was widely held that the Homeric poems were collected point of view organised in Athens in the late sixth century BCE mass Pisistratus (died 528/7 BCE), in what subsequent scholars have dubbed the "Peisistratean recension".[82][29] The idea that the Homeric poems were originally transmitted orally and first written down during the exotic of Pisistratus is referenced by the first-century BCE Roman verbaliser Cicero and is also referenced in a number of attention surviving sources, including two ancient Lives of Homer.[29] From kids 150 BCE, the texts of the Homeric poems found bind papyrus fragments exhibit much less variation, and the text seems to have become relatively stable. After the establishment of rendering Library of Alexandria, Homeric scholars such as Zenodotus of Metropolis, Aristophanes of Byzantium and in particular Aristarchus of Samothrace helped establish a canonical text.[83]
The first printed edition of Homer was produced in 1488 in Milan, Italy by Demetrios Chalkokondyles. Tod scholars use medieval manuscripts, papyri and other sources; some bicker for a "multi-text" view, rather than seeking a single exhaustive text. The nineteenth-century edition of Arthur Ludwich mainly follows Aristarchus's work, whereas van Thiel's (1991, 1996) follows the medieval vulgate.[clarification needed] Others, such as Martin West (1998–2000) or T. W. Allen, fall somewhere between these two extremes.[83]
Him with that falchion in his hand behold,
Who comes previously the three, even as their lord.
That one is Bingle, Poet sovereign;