Ως ουδέν γλύκιον ης πατρίδος ουδέ τοκήων γίνεται.
Είς οιωνός άριστος, αμύνεσθαι περί πάτρης.
Homer is perhaps the greatest epic poet of the classical era. He composed (he did not co-write, since the poems were first spread orally and later written down) two major works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, while others are attributed to him, which are in dispute. Along with Hesiod, he was a source of information about the pantheon of the ancient Greeks, while he is the first poet of Western civilization whose works have survived.
Bust of Homer. Roman copy of a Hellenistic original from the 2nd century BCE. (British museum
Ομηρος < (chronological loan) ancient Greek ομηρος < ομοῦ + ἀραρισκό (for persons) ομηρος masculine noun (for things) something held as a guarantee, guarantee
The information we have about Homer. they are few and unclear. His birthplace is claimed by many cities as these two hexameters inform us: "Seven cities are wisely lost by the root of Homer, Kymi, Chios, Kolofon, Smyrna, Pylos, Argos, Athens".
Map of Greece in the universe of the Iliad
Homer was an ancient Greek poet and the first great creator of European and Western literature. He is the poet of the works of the Iliad and the Odyssey, from the first texts of the Historical period of ancient Greece, known as "Homeric Epics". The Iliad consists of approximately 15,000 verses and refers to the 51 decisive days of the Trojan War, which in total lasted, according to legend, 10 years. The Odyssey consists of approximately 12,000 verses and describes Odysseus' ten-year struggle for the nosto (return to his homeland of Ithaca after the capture of Troy).
The language of the texts is Homeric Greek, a literary language with a mixture of features from the Ionic and Aeolian dialects with the main influence of the Eastern Ionian dialect. Many researchers believe that initially the poems were transmitted orally.
The Homeric epics were a very important element of ancient Greek education. For Plato, Homer was the one who "educated Greece". From classical antiquity to the present, the influence of the Homeric epics on Western culture has been great, influencing the creation of some of the greatest works in literature, music, art and cinema.
The question of who, where, when and under what circumstances the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed is a matter of debate. It is generally accepted that the two works were written by different people. It is believed that these two works were composed sometime in the late 8th or early 7th century BC. In classical antiquity there were many accounts of his life and work, of which the most famous and popular was that he was a blind rhapsode from Ionia. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary.
Photograph of a marble bust of Homer in the British Museum. Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic original of the 2nd c. e.g. in Baiae, Italy. The so-called Hellenistic blind type can be paralleled with the forms of the Altar of Pergamum, and the original may have been created for the great library of Pergamum.)
Ancient testimonies about his life and work
We have seven lives of Homer, which come from antiquity. His origin seems to have been from Ionia and legend has it that seven cities argue about his origin, with Smyrna and Chios being the most prevalent. Maion and Kritheida are mentioned as his parents and it is said that his real name was Melisigenis, because he was born near the river Melitas in Smyrna and that he later took the name "Homer", or because he was blind (in Ancient Greek "ὂς μὴ ορῶν" ), or because he was a hostage of the Colophonians in the war with Smyrna.
Another possible version for the etymology of the name ΄Homer is the following: in Hebrew, from the verb amar = to narrate, comes the participle omer = the narrator, the one who narrates.
According to his biographies, he toured reciting his works in Greek cities, gained great fame, but in a competition with Hesiod in Chalkida he did not win a prize, because Hesiod was preferred as a poet who praised peace. Ios is given as his place of death.
The Apotheosis of Homer in sculpture. Marble relief of Archilaos of Priene (3rd century BC, British Museum).
In addition to the Iliad and the Odyssey, in antiquity other epics of the Trojan cycle were attributed to Homer, several religious hymns, the epic parody Batrachomachia and a comic narrative about a dumb hero, Margitis. Two apparently pseudo-inscribed epigrams of the Palatine Anthology are also attributed to Homer (VII 153 and XIV 147).
Modern research, and especially those who accept that Homer can be considered a real person, places his life in the 8th c. e.g. and he considers it likely that he was Ionas the rhapsode, a continuation of a centuries-old tradition of heroic narratives, who composed the Iliad around 750 BC. and the Odyssey (if he did compose both works) around 710 BC.
Certain ancient assumptions about the life of Homer were established early on and were reproduced in many later works and by the ancient Greek people. Some of the more popular rumors about Homer are that he was blind (taking as self-referential a passage describing the blind bard Demodocus), that he was born on Chios, that he was the son of the river Melis and the nymph Krithei, that he was a wandering bard , that he composed a varied list of other works, that he died either on Ios or after failing to solve a riddle set for him by some fishermen. There are various opinions regarding the origin of the name Homer.
The two best-known ancient biographies of Homer are Pseudo-Herodotus' Life of Homer and Homer and Hesiod's Struggle.
At the beginning of the 4th century BC Alcidamas composed a fictional account of a poetic contest in Chalkida in which Homer and Hesiod participated. Homer was expected to win and answered all of Hesiod's questions and riddles with ease. Each of the poets was then asked to recite the best passage from their work. Hesiod chose to recite at the pageant the beginning of his Works and Days: "When the Pleiades were born from Atlas... all in due season." Homer chose to recite a passage which spoke of a body of Greek soldiers facing the enemy, taken from the epic Iliad. Although the cheering crowd declared Homer the winner of the poetry recitation contest, the judge awarded Hesiod the prize. For the judge, the works of Hesiod, which praised animal husbandry, were of greater importance than those of Homer, which spoke of battles and slaughters.
The Apotheosis of Homer (Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1827). At his feet are the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Homeric Question
Under the term "Homeric issue" are grouped many questions, related to the authorship, the method of composition and the recording of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In particular, the issues have been raised:
Was Homer a real person? When did he live, how did he compose or write his works and what are they?
Which of the events, places and persons mentioned by Homer have a historical background? After the discovery of the ruins of Troy and Mycenae this question began to gain great weight.
Are the texts available to us today works by the same poet? Some stylistic as well as cultural differences between the two poems make it possible that they were not written by the same author, although this cannot be proven with certainty.
Are the texts unified poetic conceptions or are they composed of various layers? Several have argued that today's texts come from the amalgamation of several sections or an expansion of older ones. Against this "analytical" theory are the "unitarians", who argue that in each one can be distinguished a consistent literary conception and realization by one person. Comparison with oral epics showed that oral poets, using techniques unfamiliar to a literate society, can compose and memorize long poems.
From the oral theory, the question arises what was the contribution of writing to the composition of the poems: were they recorded at the time, composed during recitation, dictated by the poet, or survived orally and recorded later?
Analytical theory
The presence of some contradictions, logical gaps or gaps in the text of the Iliad and the Odyssey led to the assumption that the surviving texts are not unified poetic conceptions but a combination of several works. Proponents of this theory were called "analysts" and his views can be divided into individual trends.
Manuscript of the Iliad. 1450 A.D.
For the Iliad, one of the analytical theories was the expansion theory, mainly supported by Gottfried Hermann (1772-1848) and according to it, there was an old text, an original Iliad, which gradually expanded and took the today's form.
The theory of chants, developed by Karl Lachmann (Karl Lachmann 1793-1851), considered the Iliad to be a collection of shorter epic chants (Lachmann identified about sixteen chants).
Related was the theory of fusion, with Adolph Kirchoff (1826-1908) as the main representative, in which the Iliad was created by combining smaller epics. He attempted a similar analysis for the Odyssey, for which another point of view was formulated, the compiler's theory, i.e. the opinion that there was an original Odyssey, which was later expanded with additions by a compiler, which was inferior in poetic value to the poet of the original project.
Orality and writing
A different direction was given to Homeric research by comparison with the techniques of oral poetry. Millman Parry and Albert Lord, based on the observation that the two epics display stereotyped scenes and expressions, often repeated identically, used their research on the oral heroic poetry of Yugoslavia to illuminate the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey and concluded to the conclusion that the two texts present a similar technique, since they are based on a set of stereotyped shorter or longer phrases (logos) and standardized scenes.
Today it is partially accepted that the techniques on which the composition of the two epics was based are the techniques of oral poetry as they had been developed in previous centuries. The tradition fed their poet with a special artificial dialect, with elements of various times and regions and many synonyms, which can be used in different metrical positions, a set of logotypes, corresponding to specific positions of the verse, typical scenes and standardized wider episodes. The contribution of writing to the composition or recording of the Iliad and Odyssey is difficult to determine, and several hypotheses have been advanced: the poet may have used writing to make a plan of the structure and connection of various episodes, or he may have dictated to someone the poem. It is certain that in the following centuries the epics were preserved at least in the oral tradition and were recited, but we have no tangible evidence, only strong indications of whether there was a consolidated written text.
Silver drachm with head of Apollo left and Homer seated right, Smyrna, 1st century BC.
But as we know after the decipherment of Linear B' by Michael Ventris during his lecture on June 23, 1953 in London, it was proved that GGB was not only a purely Greek language of the Middle Minoan period (MM) around 1850 BC but a descendant of the Linear Script A' and the pictorial one, about which we know only the "terminus ante quem" and not the "terminus post quem". Given that during the MM period and after it had spread throughout Greece we can say with certainty that the Greek language was spoken and written in the Aegean area at least 500 to 700 years before the conventional date when Homer composed his two great epics . However, on the basis of the question of the age of the Greek language, the Doric dialect (Doris) is also involved, which is characterized by archaisms that do not appear in the Linear script and the question of their "descent" or "return" to the Greek area from North before being normalized to linear graphs.
We must note here that no text has been found, either historical or literary or even a letter from one city to another written in a dialect before Homer, but perhaps we should consider its existence at least very likely, since the analogies with other contemporaries peoples make it highly probable that they used writing for such purposes. So scientific research does not rule out, but on the contrary accepts that writing existed in Greece long before the time of Homer with a gap of 400 years (1150-750 BC) between the last inscriptions in GGB and the inscriptions in an alphabetic system. So it is reasonable to assume that there may have been some transfer as we have found to be done from pictorial to Linear. A radical but scientifically interesting point of view was recently formulated by Barry Powell (Barry B. Powell) in his book Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (Cambridge: 1991) that the Greek alphabet was invented with the main purpose of recording the Homeric epics.
From the 6th c. e.g. there is also evidence of a professional association of rhapsodes, called "Homirides", who recited some version of the epics, but we do not know if they had any written text in their possession. The contribution of Peisistratos, who is said to have established recitations of Homer at the Panathenaic festival based on a fixed text (the so-called "peisistrateia correction"), is considered important in the matter of consolidating the Homeric text.
Language and measure
The meter of the Iliad and Odyssey is dactylic hexameter verse. Its basis is the dactyl pous, i.e. a unit consisting of one long syllable and two short syllables (which can be replaced by one long syllable). Each verse consists of six feet. The first five are fingers and the sixth consists of two syllables, the first necessarily long and the second indifferent. In total a finger verse can consist of twelve to seventeen syllables. There is a strong semantic pause around the middle of the verse, as well as smaller ones, which divide the verse into up to four small semantic units.
Homer's language is artificial, never spoken, but understood by the entire Greek-speaking world. Its material comes from various dialects and time periods. The basis is the Ionian dialect as it was formed in the 8th century. e.g. on the coast of Asia Minor. There are still many Aeolian elements but also older types dating back to the Mycenaean era. Doric evidence is absent, while some Attic types may be later additions. The existence of many synonymous types that came from various dialects or periods provided metrical conveniences to the poet, since depending on the position of the verse he could use one of many semantically equivalent words. For example, the personal pronoun σοῦ had equivalent forms σεῖο, σεθεν, σεο, σεῦ, τεοῖο.
Homer, 1663. Work of Rembrandt
Logos and typical scenes
From the oral epic tradition Homer had inherited a set of stereotypical material which he adapted according to the needs of each case. The smallest formal unit is short phrases, consisting of a noun and an adjective. Depending on the position of the verse, various combinations arise such as Pallas Athena, Glaukopis Athena, Thea Glaukopis Athena. Sometimes formal adjectives are used even when the semantic context does not allow their use. Larger logos are used to indicate the beginning and end of a speech, the movement of a hero, or the events of battles.
In addition to expressive stereotypes, there were also standardized sequences of actions to describe extended events such as a sacrifice, a supplication, the reception of a guest, a meal, a duel. For example the narrative of an excellence, i.e. a series of exploits of a hero, is based on a certain pattern: first the hero's equipment is described, when the battle begins the protagonist kills some enemies in single combat and then attacks the enemy army which he puts to flight . As soon as the hero is wounded, the pursuit is interrupted, but by prayer to a god he is healed, returns to the battle, and duels with the chief of the enemies. He kills him and a battle ensues between the two factions for the body, which is finally obtained by the friends of the deceased through divine intervention. Despite the standardization, whenever typical scenes appear there are differences in details as needed.
Reading Homer (1885) by Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Extensive similes
A special feature of the Homeric technique, which seems to have been absent from the earlier epics, is the extensive similes. These similes are extensions of short similes: for example the simple simile "attacked like a lion" can be extended to the image of a wounded and furious lion attacking its hunters, to the image of a lion devouring the sheep of a frightened shepherd, or to image of the animal trying to protect its young from hunters. The world of similes is the world of everyday experience, which is familiar to the listener/reader, and aims to help the reader's imagination perceive something by comparing it with an image from their immediate experience. The subjects from which the similes are derived are natural phenomena (storms, lightning and thunder, fires), hunting, wild animal attacks, and everyday activities such as weaving, carpentry, pastoral and rural life.
The extended similes are not mere embellishments. Already the ancient commentators had pointed out that there might be many points of contact between the terms being compared. A second, more important one may be hidden behind the direct meaning of the comparison: for example, when Odysseus, at the end of the rhapsody of the Odyssey, arrives shipwrecked in the land of the Phaeacians, he lies down under a pile of leaves and is likened to the hiding of a torch to ashes, to keep it burning. The immediate comparison is the covering of Odysseus and the flame, but the deeper meaning is that Odysseus is trying to keep the spark of life alive. Sometimes a simile may foreshadow the future, as when the Trojans see Achilles dragging the dead Hector in his chariot, and their lamentation is likened to that of the inhabitants of a burning city, as it actually was later.
Transmission of Homer's texts
The Homeric poems, which were passed down from generation to generation orally, were recorded in writing sometime between the eighth and sixth centuries BC. Some scholars believe that a scribe actually recorded the poem as the poet spoke to him, and that the Iliad and Odyssey were actually oral texts that a scribe transferred into written form. Albert Lord noted that the Balkan bards he studied in his works revised and expanded their songs by dictating to someone to record them in writing. Some scholars hypothesize that when the Homeric epics were first recorded in written form, they were expanded and revised, and thus began to diverge from the oral form from which they originated.
Other scholars argue that after the creation of the poems in the eighth century, they continued to be reproduced from generation to generation (with several differences from the original of the 8th century BC) until they were recorded in written form in the 6th century BC. After being recorded in a written text, the poems were each divided into 24 rhapsodies, which take their names from the letters of the Greek alphabet. Most scholars attribute the division of the text into 24 rhapsodies to the philologists of Alexandria in Egypt. Some scholars believe that the 24 rhapsodies were composed sometime in the classical period. Very few believe that the rhapsodies were Homer's invention.
Detail of Parnassus (painted 1509–1510), painting by Raphael. The painting depicts Homer wearing a crown of laurels atop Parnassus, with Dante Alighieri on his right and Virgil on his left.
In antiquity, it was widely known that the Homeric poems were collected and organized into written form in the late 6th century BC. by the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos (died 528/7 BC). Peisistratus' edition of the Homeric epics became known by later Homeric scholars as the "Peisistratian Revocation" Many believe that the Homeric poems were passed down orally from generation to generation and then recorded in written form during the tyranny of Peisistratus. This is what Cicero, the Roman orator of the first century BC, also believes. The same view is also mentioned in many other extant sources including two Lives of Homer. Around 150 BC, a relative uniformity seems to have begun to prevail in the texts of the Homeric poems, for copyists often made their own alterations. After the establishment of the Library of Alexandria, Homeric scholars such as Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and especially Aristarchus of Samothrace helped to further edit the text of the Homeric epics.
In 1488, a printing press in Milan, Italy printed Homer's work for the first time. Today scholars use medieval manuscripts, papyri, and other sources to study and analyze Homer's text. Some support the view of reading "multiple texts", rather than looking for a single source to analyze the Homeric epics. The 19th century German East Prussian philologist Arthur Ludwig's edition is based on the work of Aristarchus, while that of van Til (1991 and 1996) is based on the medieval vulgate genre. Others, such as Martin West (1998-2000) or T.W. Otherwise, they combine elements of the work of Aristarchus and the medieval vulgate genre in the way they published and studied the Homeric work.
Works attributed to Homer
Today it is recognized that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by Homer, or he ordered someone to record them in written form. In antiquity, mainly for commercial reasons, many works were attributed to Homer which he had never written, such as the Homeric Hymns, the Battle of Homer and Hesiod, the Little Iliad, the Nostoi, the Thebaid, the Cypriot Epics, the Epic of the Descendants , the Vatrachomyomachia, the Margitis epic, the Oichalia halos epic and Fokaida. These claims are not considered genuine. Even many ancients doubted them. The central position that Homer had in ancient Greek culture was primarily the reason for the creation of many myths and legends about Homer's life.
Style and language
The Homeric epics are written in an artificial literary language, which is used only in epic hexameter poetry. Homer's Greek has many features that refer to various dialects of the Greek language, but is based primarily on the Ionian dialect of the Greek language, according to the tradition that Homer was from Ionia. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was composed before the Odyssey and that the linguistic patterns in the Homeric texts retain several older features.
Page from the First Printed Edition (Editio Princeps) of the Collected Works of Homer edited by Dimitrios Chalkokondylis. Florence, 1489. National Library of France
The Homeric poems were composed in dactylic hexameter without rhyme. The ancient Greek meter was based on the quantity and not on the stress of the words. Homer often uses specific phrases in his texts (e.g. "wicked Odysseus", "rosy Ios", "cuckoo Athena", etc.). similes, repetition and dialogue. These habits aid the exorcist bard and are well-known elements of oral poetry. For example, the main words of a sentence in Homer's texts are generally placed at the beginning of a sentence and have a simpler syntax, while literate writers such as Virgil or Milton use longer and more complex syntactic structures. Homer then expands on his ideas in the following sentences, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Excerpt from Townley's Homer, 11th century manuscript. The writings above and to the right of the verses of the Homeric epic are comments on the content of the text.
The so-called "typical scenes" (typische Szenen) is a term coined by the German Homer scholar Walter Arendt in 1933. He noted that Homer, when talking about activities such as eating, praying, fighting, and dressing, used to use specific phrases in a specific order, which the poet then elaborated. The "Analyst" school considers these views anti-Homeric while Arendt interpreted the views described above from a philosophical point of view. Parry and Lord noted that these conventions are also witnessed in other cultures.
In Homer there are also appearances of the criss-cross pattern, that is, a phrase or an idea is repeated at the beginning and at the end of a sentence, initially in the order A, B, C and then presenting them in the order C, B, A. Opinions differ as to whether these incidents are a conscious artistic device, a mnemonic aid, or a spontaneous feature of human narrative.
The Homeric epics begin with an invocation to the Muse. In the Iliad, the poet invokes her by asking her to sing of "Achilles' anger" and in the Odyssey, he invokes her to sing of "many man." In the Aeneid, Virgil invokes the Muse.
Historicity of Homeric epics and Homeric society
Scholars continue to question whether the Trojan War is a real event – and if so where and when it took place – and to what extent the society that Homer depicts is based on the society in which he lived or a society that even at the time composed the Homeric epics was known only in the form of legends. The Homeric epics take place largely in the eastern and central Mediterranean basin. There are some scattered references in Egypt, Ethiopia, and other distant lands, to a martial society resembling that of the Greek world shortly before the supposed date of composition of the Homeric poems.
In the dating system of the ancient Greeks, the fall of Troy is set in 1184 BC. Until the nineteenth century, many scholars doubted that the Trojan War had taken place or even that Troy existed, but in 1873 Henry Schliemann announced that he had found the ruins of Homeric Troy at Hissarlik in modern Turkey. Some modern scholars believe that the destruction of Troy around 1220 BC. was the event from which the myth of Troy began, while others believe that the inspiration for the creation of the epic/poem took place from the various sieges of the city over the centuries.
The current prevailing view among scholars is that Homer's poems (or epics) depict customs and elements of the material world that come from different periods of Greek history. For example, the heroes of the Homeric epics wear and use bronze weapons like those of the Bronze Age in which the poems take place. In contrast, Homer's poems were composed during the Iron Age. However the heroes of the Homeric epics are cremated (an Iron Age practice) rather than buried (as was the case in the Bronze Age). In some parts of the Homeric epics, the heroes used large shields like those used by warriors during the Mycenaean period, while in other parts of the Homeric epics the heroes are described as wearing smaller shields, like those commonly used by warriors during the Mycenaean period. time when the Homeric epics were written, i.e. in the early Iron Age. In the Iliad, specifically verses 10.260-265, Odysseus is described as wearing a toothed helmet. Braces were not worn by warriors in Homer's time, but primarily by aristocratic warriors in the period from 1600 to 1150 BC.
The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and ongoing archaeological research have increased the available knowledge we have of the Aegean culture. From the available evidence we can understand that the civilization of the Aegean had more similarities with the civilization of the Near East than with the society described by Homer. Some aspects of the Homeric world have been constructed by the poet for aesthetic reasons. For example, in verses 22.145-56 of the Iliad, it is described that two springs flowed near Troy, one of which flowed water at steam temperatures and the other ice water. Archaeologists have found no evidence of the existence of these springs, although it is said that Hector's final battle with Achilles took place in these springs.
History of the study of Homer
In ancient times
The study of Homer's works is continuous and has been taking place since ancient times. However, due to the very long history of the study of Homer for scientific data, the goals of Homer studies have changed over the centuries. The earliest surviving commentaries on Homer concern his treatment of the gods. Poets such as Xenophanes considered Homer's comments about the gods immoral. The allegorist Theagenes of Rhegius is said to have defended Homer by arguing that the Homeric epics are allegorical in nature. The Iliad and the Odyssey have been popular subjects taught in the educational institutions of the classical and Hellenistic eras. Every student attending an ancient Greek school learned Homer. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the Iliad, especially its early rhapsodies, was much more closely studied than the Odyssey.
Due to the prominent position of the poems in the educational system of the ancient Greeks, extensive commentary on the Homeric epics also began to exist, in order to interpret the parts of the epics that were difficult to understand or to their cultural elements. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, many interpreters, especially the Stoics, considered the Homeric epics to be allegorical texts with hidden wisdom because they argued that the Homeric epics carried Stoic ideals. Many writers believed that the original purpose of Homer was to educate the Greeks about the Trojan War and Odysseus, considering the enormous importance that Homer had on the educational system of the ancient Greeks. Homer's wisdom was so highly praised that Homer had begun to take on the image of an early philosopher. Byzantine scholars such as Efstathios of Thessaloniki and Ioannis Tzetzis, especially in the 12th century, extensively commented and analyzed the Homeric epics. Eustathius' commentaries on the Iliad are enormous, occupying nearly 4,000 oversized pages in a twenty-first-century print edition. Eustathius' comments on the Odyssey are close to 2,000 pages.
