Homer

Introduction
(flourished 9th or 8th century BC?, Ionia? presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey .
Although these two great epic poems of ancient Greece have always been attributed to the shadowy figure of Homer, little is known of him beyond the fact that his was the name attached in antiquity by the Greeks themselves to the poems. That there was an epic poet called Homer and that he played the primary part in shaping the Iliad and the Odyssey—so much may be said to be probable. If this assumption is accepted, then Homer must assuredly be one of the greatest of the world's literary artists.
He is also one of the most influential authors in the widest sense, for the two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture throughout the classical age and formed the backbone of humane education down to the time of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. Indirectly through the medium of Virgil's Aeneid (which was loosely molded after the patterns of the Iliad and the Odyssey), directly through their revival under Byzantine culture from the late 8th century AD onward, and subsequently through their passage into Italy with the Greek scholars who fled westward from the Ottomans, the Homeric epics had a profound impact on the Renaissance culture of Italy. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the classical European tradition.
It was probably through their impact on classical Greek culture itself that the Iliad and the Odyssey most subtly affected Western standards and ideas. The Greeks regarded the great epics as something more than works of literature; they knew much of them by heart, and they valued them not only as a symbol of Hellenic unity and heroism but also as an ancient source of moral and even practical instruction.
Early references

Implicit references to Homer and quotations from the poems date to the middle of the 7th century BC. Archilochus, Alcman, Tyrtaeus, and Callinus in the 7th century and Sappho and others in the early 6th adapted Homeric phraseology and metre to their own purposes and rhythms. At the same time scenes from the epics became popular in works of art. The pseudo-Homeric “Hymn to Apollo of Delos,” probably of late 7th-century composition, claimed to be the work of “a blind man who dwells in rugged Chios,” a reference to a tradition about Homer himself. The idea that Homer had descendants known as “Homeridae,” and that they had taken over the preservation and propagation of his poetry, goes back at least to the early 6th century BC. Indeed, it was not long before a kind of Homeric scholarship began: Theagenes of Rhegium in southern Italy toward the end of the same century wrote the first of many allegorizing interpretations. By the 5th century biographical fictions were well under way; the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heracleitus of Ephesus made use of a trivial legend of Homer's death—that it was caused by chagrin at not being able to solve some boys' riddle about catching lice—and the concept of a contest of quotations between Homer and Hesiod (after Homer the most ancient of Greek poets) may have been initiated in the Sophistic tradition. The historian Herodotus assigned the formulation of Greek theology to Homer and Hesiod and claimed that they could have lived no more than 400 years before his own time, the 5th century BC. This should be contrasted with the superficial assumption, popular in many circles throughout antiquity, that Homer must have lived not much later than the Trojan War about which he sang.
The general belief that Homer was a native of Ionia (the central part of the western seaboard of Asia Minor) seems a reasonable conjecture for the poems themselves are in predominantly Ionic dialect. Although Smyrna and Chios early began competing for the honour (the poet Pindar, early in the 5th century BC, associated Homer with both), and others joined in, no authenticated local memory survived anywhere of someone who, oral poet or not, must have been remarkable in his time. The absence of hard facts puzzled but did not deter the Greeks; the fictions that had begun even before the 5th century BC were developed in the Alexandrian era in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC (when false scholarship as well as true abounded) into fantastic pseudobiographies, and these were further refined by derivative scholars under the Roman Empire. The longest to have survived purports to be by Herodotus himself; but it is quite devoid of objective truth.

Modern inferences

Modern scholars agree with the ancient sources only about Homer's general place of activity. The most concrete piece of ancient evidence is that his descendants, the Homeridae, lived on the Ionic island of Chios. Yet an east Aegean environment is suggested for the main author of the Iliad by certain local references in the poem; that is, to the peak of Samothrace just appearing over the intervening mass of Imbros when seen from the plain of Troy, to the birds at the mouth of the Cayster near Ephesus, to storms off Icaria and northwest winds from Thrace. East Aegean colouring is fainter in the Odyssey, which is set primarily in western Greece; but the poem's vagueness over the position of Ithaca, for example, is not incompatible with the idea of a poet in Ionia elaborating materials derived from the farther side of the Greek world.
Admittedly, there is some doubt over whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were even composed by the same main author. Such doubts began in antiquity itself and depended mainly on the difference of genre (the Iliad being martial and heroic, the Odyssey picaresque and often fantastic), but they may be reinforced by subtle differences of vocabulary even apart from those imposed by different subjects. Aristotle's conception of the Odyssey as a work of Homer's old age is not impossible; but if the Iliad is the earlier of the two (as seems likely from its simpler structure and the greater frequency of relatively late linguistic forms in the Odyssey), then the Odyssey could have been created after its image, and as a conscious supplement, once the example of monumental composition had been given. In any case the similarities of the two poems are partly due to the coherence of the heroic poetical tradition that lay behind both.
The internal evidence of the poems is of some use in determining when Homer lived. Certain elements of the poetic language, which was an artificial amalgam never exactly reproduced in speech, indicate that the epics were not only post-Mycenaean in composition but also substantially later than the foundation of the first Ionian settlements in Asia Minor of about 1000 BC. The running together of adjacent short vowels and the disappearance of the semivowel digamma (a letter formerly existing in the Greek alphabet) are the most significant indications of this. At the other end of the time scale the development in the poems of a true definite article, for instance, represents an earlier phase than is exemplified in the poetry of the middle and late 7th century. Both stylistically and metrically, the Homeric poems appear to be earlier than the Hesiodic poems, which many scholars place not long after 700 BC. A different and perhaps more precise criterion is provided by datable objects and practices mentioned in the poems. Nothing, except for one or two probably Athenian additions, seems from this standpoint to be later than about 700; on the other hand, the role assigned in the Odyssey to the Phoenicians as traders, together with one or two other phenomena, suggests a date of composition—for the relevant contexts at least—of sometime after 900. A few passages in the Iliad may imply a new form of fighting in close formation, dependent on the development of special armour for foot soldiers (hoplites) after about 750, and references to the Gorgon mask as a decorative motif point in the same direction. It is true that the poems contain many traditional and archaic elements, and their language and material background are a compound of different constituents originating at different dates. It seems, nonetheless, plausible to conclude that the period of composition of the large-scale epics (as distinct from their much shorter predecessors) was the 9th or 8th century, with several features pointing more clearly to the 8th. The Odyssey may belong near the end of this century, the Iliad closer to its middle. It may be no coincidence that cults of Homeric heroes tended to spring up toward the end of the 8th century, and that scenes from the epic begin to appear on pots at just about the same time.

Homer as an oral poet

But even if his name is known and his date and region can be inferred, Homer remains primarily a projection of the great poems themselves. Their qualities are significant of his taste and his view of the world, but they also reveal something more specific about his technique and the kind of poet he was. It has been one of the most important discoveries of Homeric scholarship, associated particularly with the name of an American scholar, Milman Parry, that the Homeric tradition was an oral one—that this was a kind of poetry made and passed down by word of mouth and without the intervention of writing. Indeed Homer's own term for a poet is aoidos, “singer.” The Odyssey describes two such poets in some detail: Phemius, the court singer in the palace of Odysseus in Ithaca, and Demodocus, who lived in the town of the semi-mythical Phaeacians and sang both for the nobles in Alcinous' palace and for the assembled public at the games held for Odysseus. On this occasion he sings of the illicit love affair of Ares and Aphrodite in a version that lasts for exactly 100 Homeric verses. This and the other songs assigned to these singers—for example, that of the Trojan Horse, summarized in the Odyssey—suggest that ordinary aoidoi in the heroic tradition worked with relatively short poems that could be given completely on a single occasion. That is what one would expect, and it is confirmed by the habits of singers and audiences at other periods and in other parts of the world (the tradition of the poet-singers of Muslim Serbia has provided the most fruitful comparison so far). Whatever the favoured occasion for heroic song—whether the aristocratic feast, the religious festival, or popular gatherings in tavern or marketplace—a natural limitation on the length of a poem is imposed by the audience's available time and interest as well as by the singer's own physique and the scope of his repertoire. Such relatively short songs must have provided the backbone of the tradition inherited by Homer, and his portraits of Demodocus and Phemius are likely to be accurate in this respect. What Homer himself seems to have done is to introduce the concept of a quite different style of poetry, in the shape of a monumental poem that required more than a single hour or evening to sing and could achieve new and far more complex effects, in literary and psychological terms, than those attainable in the more anecdotal and episodic songs of his predecessors.
Poetic techniques
It can be asked how one can be so confident in classing Homer himself as an oral singer, for if he differed from Phemius or Demodocus in terms of length, he may also have differed radically in his poetic techniques. The very nature of his verse may provide a substantial part of the answer. The style of the poems is “formulaic”; that is, they rely heavily on the use not only of stock epithets and repeated verses or groups of verses—which can also be found to a much lesser extent in a literate imitator like Virgil—but also on a multitude of fixed phrases that are employed time and time again to express a similar idea in a similar part of the verse. The clearest and simplest instance is the so-called noun-epithet formulas. These constitute a veritable system, in which every major god or hero possesses a variety of epithets from which the choice is made solely according to how much of the verse, and which part of it, the singer desires to use up. Odysseus is called divine Odysseus, many-counseled Odysseus, or much-enduring divine Odysseus simply in accordance with the amount of material to be fitted into the remainder of the hexameter (six-foot) verse. A ship is described as black, hollow, or symmetrical not to distinguish this particular ship from others but solely in relation to the qualities and demands of the rhythmical context. The whole noun-epithet system is both extensive and economical—it covers a great variety of subjects with very little exact reduplication or unnecessary overlap. It would seem that so refined and complex a system could not be the invention of a single poet but must have been gradually evolved in a long-standing tradition that needed both the extension and the economy for functional reasons—that depended on these fixed phrase units because of its oral nature, in which memory, practice, and a kind of improvising replace the deliberate, self-correcting, word-by-word progress of the pen-and-paper composer. Admittedly, the rest of Homer's vocabulary is not as markedly formulaic as its noun-epithet aspect (or, another popular example, as its expressions for beginning and ending a speech). Many expressions, many portions of sentences are individually invented for the occasion, or at least so it seems. Even so, there is a strongly formulaic and ready-made component in the artificial language that was used by Homer, including its less conspicuous aspects such as the arrangement of particles, conjunctions, and pronouns.
It looks, therefore, as though Homer must have trained as an ordinary aoidos, who began (like most of the present-day Yugoslav guslari) by building up a repertoire of normal-length songs acquired from already established singers. The greatest heroic adventures of the past must already have been prominent in any repertoire, especially the Panhellenic adventures of the Seven Against Thebes, the Argonauts, and the Achaean attack on Troy. Some aspects of the Trojan War might already have been expanded into songs of unusual length, though one that was still manageable on a single occasion. Yet the process was presumably carried much further in the making of the monumental Iliad, consisting of more than 16,000 verses, which would take four or five long evenings, and perhaps more, to perform. This breakthrough into the monumental, which made exceptional and almost unreasonable demands of audiences, presupposes a singer of quite exceptional capacity and reputation—one who could impose the new and admittedly difficult form upon his listeners by the sheer unfamiliar genius of his song. The 8th century BC was in other respects, too, an era of cultural innovation, not least in the direction of monumentality, and huge temples (like the early temple of Hera in Samos) and colossal funerary vases (like the mixing bowls and amphorae in the so-called Geometric style from the Dipylon cemetery in Athens) may have found a literary analogue in the idea of a vast poetical treatment of the Trojan War. But in an important sense Homer was building upon a tendency of all known oral heroic poetry toward elaboration and expansion. The singer does not acquire a song from another singer by simple memorization. He adjusts what he hears to his existing store of phrases, typical scenes, and themes, and he tends to replace what is unfamiliar to him with something he already knows, or to expand it by adding familiar material that it happens to lack. Every singer in a living oral tradition tends to develop what he acquires. There is an element of improvisation, as well as of memory, in his appropriation of fresh material; and judging by the practice of singers studied from the middle of the 19th century onward in Russia, Serbia, Cyprus, and Crete the inclination to adjust, elaborate, and improve comes naturally to all oral poets.

Cumulative poetic structure
Homer must have decided to elaborate his materials not only in quality but also in length and complexity. All oral poetry is cumulative in essence; the verse is built up by adding phrase upon phrase, the individual description by adding verse upon verse. The whole plot of a song consists of the progressive accumulation of minor motifs and major themes, from simple ideas (such as “the hero sets off on a journey” or “addresses his enemy”) through typical scenes (such as assemblies of men or gods) to developed but standardized thematic complexes (such as episodes of recognition or reconciliation). Homer seems to have carried this cumulative tendency into new regions of poetry and narrative; in this as in other respects (for example, in his poetical language) he was applying his own individual vision to the fertile raw material of an extensive and well-known tradition.
The result is much more complex than with an ordinary traditional poem. Understanding the origin and essential qualities of the Iliad or the Odyssey entails trying to sort out not only the separate components of the pre-Homeric tradition but also Homer's own probable contributions, whether distinguishable by their dependence on the monumental idea or by their apparent novelty vis-à-vis the tradition as a whole or by other means. Dialectal and linguistic components must be identified as far as possible—survivals of the Mycenaean language, for example, or words used exclusively in the Aeolian cities of the west coast of Asia Minor, or Athenian dialect forms introduced into the poems after the time of Homer; so must specific references to armour, clothing, houses, burial customs, political geography, and so on, that are likely to be assignable to the Late Bronze Age, the Early Iron Age, or the period of Homer's own activity—at the very least to be taken as relatively early or late within the whole range of the poetic tradition down to Homer. These are the tasks of modern Homeric scholarship. Yet such different forms and ideas in Homer are not conveniently separated into distinct sections of the text, which can therefore be assigned to early or late phases of composition. On the contrary, they may coexist in a single (artificial) linguistic form or a single descriptive phrase. Any member of the tradition, not least Homer himself, may, moreover, have chosen to archaize on one occasion, to innovate on another. One result is that the epics are dubious authorities for the assessment of historical events like the attack on Troy or the status of workers, just as they are ambiguous sources for early Greek grammar or theology. Another is that they are not bound to a single worldview or period or mode of perception; rather, they unite judgments and experiences never seen together in “real” life into a whole that is literary but nevertheless revealing of the underlying structure of human existence.


Stabilizing the text

An important and difficult question, which affects the accuracy of modern Homeric texts, is that of the date when the epics became “fixed”—which means given authoritative written form, since oral transmission is always to some extent fluid. An alphabetic writing system reached Greece in the 9th or early 8th century BC; before that was a gap of 200 or 300 years, following the collapse of Mycenaean culture and the disappearance of Linear B writing (with each sign generally representing a syllable), during which Greece seems to have been nonliterate. During that interval, certainly, much of the epic tradition was formed. The earliest alphabetic inscriptions to have survived, a few of them containing brief scraps of hexameter verse, date from about 730 BC. Therefore, if Homer created the Iliad at some time after 750 BC, he could conceivably have used writing to help him. Some scholars think that he did. Others believe that he may have remained nonliterate (since literacy is not normally associated with oral creativity) but dictated the poem to a literate assistant. Still others believe that the poems may have been preserved orally and not too inaccurately at least until the middle years of the following, the 7th, century, when “literature” in the strict sense appeared in the poetry of Archilochus. There are objections to all three theories, but this much can be generally agreed: that the use of writing was in any case ancillary, that Homer behaved in important ways like a traditional oral poet. Some scholars are convinced that certain of the more subtle effects and cross-references of Homer's poetry would be impossible without the ability to consult a written text. That is doubtful; certainly the capacities even of ordinary oral poets in this direction are constantly surprising to habitual literates.
At least it may be accepted that partial texts of the epics were probably being used by the Homeridae and by professional reciters known as rhapsodes (who were no longer creative and had abandoned the use of the lyre) by the latter part of the 7th century BC. The first complete version may well have been that established as a standard for rhapsodic competitions at the great quadrennial festival at Athens, the Panathenaea, at some time during the 6th century BC. Even that did not permanently fix the text, and from then on the history of the epics was one of periodical distortion followed by progressively more effective acts of stabilization. The widespread dissemination of the poems consequent upon the growth of the Athenian book trade in the 5th century and the proliferation of libraries after the 4th was followed by the critical work of the Alexandrian scholar Aristarchus of Samothrace in the 2nd century BC, and much later by the propagation of accurate minuscule texts (notably the famous manuscript known as Venetus A of the Iliad), incorporating the best results of Greco-Roman scholarship, in the Byzantine world of the Middle Ages. Rare portions of either poem may have been added after, but not long after, the main act of composition; the night expedition that results in the capture of the Trojan spy Dolon and that fills the 10th book of the Iliad, some of the underworld scenes in the 11th book of the Odyssey, and much of the ending of the Odyssey after line 296 of the 23rd book (regarded by Aristarchus as its original conclusion) are the most probable candidates on the grounds of structure, language, and style.
Even apart from the possibilities of medium-scale elaboration, the Iliad and the Odyssey exemplify certain of the minor inconsistencies of all oral poetry, and occasionally the composer's amalgamation of traditional material into a large-scale structure shows through. Yet the overriding impression is one of powerful unity.

The Iliad
The Iliad is not merely a distillation of the whole protracted war against Troy but simultaneously an exploration of the heroic ideal in all its self-contradictoriness—its insane and grasping pride, its magnificent but animal strength, its ultimate if obtuse humanity. The poem is, in truth, the story of the wrath of Achilles, the greatest warrior on the Greek side, that is announced in its very first words; yet for thousands of verses on end Achilles is an unseen presence as he broods among his Myrmidons, waiting for Zeus's promise to be fulfilled—the promise that the Trojans will set fire to the Achaean ships and force King Agamemnon to beg him to return to the fight. Much of the poetry between the first book, in which the quarrel flares up, and the 16th, in which Achilles makes the crucial concession of allowing his friend Patroclus to fight on his behalf, consists of long scenes of battle, in which individual encounters alternate with mass movements of the opposing armies. The battle poetry is based on typical and frequently recurring elements and motifs, but it is also subtly varied by highly individualized episodes and set pieces: the catalog of troop contingents, the formal duels between Paris and Menelaus and Ajax and Hector, Helen's identifying of the Achaean princes, Agamemnon inspecting his troops, the triumph of Diomedes, Hector's famous meeting back in Troy with his wife Andromache, the building of the Achaean wall, the unsuccessful embassy to Achilles, the night expedition, Hera's seduction of Zeus and Poseidon's subsequent invigoration of the Achaeans. Patroclus' death two-thirds of the way through the poem brings Achilles back into the fight, although not before the recovery of Patroclus' body, the making of new divine armour for Achilles, and his formal reconciliation with Agamemnon. In book 22 he kills the deluded Hector; next he restores his heroic status by means of the funeral games for Patroclus; and in the concluding book Achilles is compelled by the gods to restore civilized values and his own magnanimity by surrendering Hector's body to King Priam.

The Odyssey
The Odyssey tends to be blander in expression and sometimes more diffuse in the progress of its action, but it presents an even more complex and harmonious structure than the Iliad. The main elements are the situation in Ithaca, where Penelope, Odysseus' wife, and their young son, Telemachus, are powerless before her arrogant suitors as they despair of Odysseus' return from the siege of Troy; Telemachus' secret journey to the Peloponnese for news of his father, and his encounters there with Nestor, Menelaus, and Helen; Odysseus' dangerous passage, opposed by the sea-god Poseidon himself, from Calypso's island to that of the Phaeacians, and his narrative there (from book 9 to book 12) of his fantastic adventures after leaving Troy, including his escape from the cave of the Cyclops, Polyphemus; his arrival back in Ithaca, solitary and by night, at the poem's halfway point, followed by his meeting with his protector-goddess Athena, his elaborate disguises, his self-revelation to the faithful swineherd Eumaeus and then to Telemachus, their complicated plan for disposing of the suitors, and its gory fulfillment. Finally comes the recognition by his faithful Penelope, his recounting to her of his adventures, his meeting with his aged father, Laertes, and the restitution, with Athena's help, of stability in his island kingdom of Ithaca. (See also Greek literature: Epic narrative.)
Homer's influence seems to have been strongest in some of the most conspicuous formal components of the poems. The participation of the gods can both dignify human events and make them seem trivial—or tragic; it must for long have been part of the heroic tradition, but the frequency and the richness of the divine assemblies in the Iliad, or the peculiarly personal and ambivalent relationship between Odysseus and Athena in the Odyssey, probably reflect the taste and capacity of the main composer. The many-sidedness of battle, the equivocal realism of death in a hundred forms, must have been developed among Homer's predecessors but can never before have been deployed with such massive and complex effect. In the extended similes the strain of heroic action is relieved by the illuminating intrusion of a quite different and often peaceful contemporary world, in images developed often almost longingly beyond the immediate point of comparison. These similes, in their placing and their detail at least, surely depend on the main composer. And yet, beyond such general intuitions as these, the attempt to isolate his special contributions often becomes self-defeating. The Iliad and the Odyssey owe their unique status precisely to the creative and therefore unanalyzable confluence of tradition and design, the crystalline fixity of a formulaic style and the mobile spontaneity of a brilliant personal vision. “Homer” implies, above all, this fusion.
The result is an impressive amalgam of literary power and refinement. The Iliad and the Odyssey, however, owe their preeminence not so much to their antiquity and to their place in Greek culture as a whole but to their timeless success in expressing on a massive scale so much of the triumph and the frustration of human life. Although all literature must be engaged with that to some degree, epic poems are not where one most expects to find it. But these poems rise above the immediate concerns of heroic battle or the struggle against gods and nature or against monstrous forces, and they do so with the help of a poetical language of great simplicity and subtlety, a rugged and surprisingly variable narrative technique, and a nucleus of remarkable tales set around the Trojan War and its aftermath. Their greatest power lies, perhaps, in their dramatic quality because much of each poem consists of conversation and speeches, in which rhetoric is kept firmly under control and the individual characters emerge as they confront each other and the gods with advice, inquiry, request, resignation, and passion. Achilles, Hector, Menelaus, Ajax, Odysseus, and the others acquire a kind of heroic glow that even Greek tragedy later found hard to emulate. That is the result, in part, of the very archaism of these age-old tales, which the special techniques of monumental composition never attempted to conceal; but it also depends on something that overlaps that archaism, namely a sheer mythic quality imparting to these tales something of the universal validity to which all great literature aspires and which Homer achieved consistently and with an apparent ease that must be deceptive.



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