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90-514: According to Homer 's Odyssey , the Phlegethon feeds into the river Acheron, alongside the Cocytus. Plato describes it as "a stream of fire, which coils round the earth and flows into the depths of Tartarus ". In Orphic literature , in which there are four rivers of the underworld, the Phlegethon is associated with the element of fire, and the direction east. In Oedipus by Seneca

180-458: A book entitled The Songs of Homer , in which he questions Lord's extension of the oral-formulaic nature of Serbian epic poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina (the area from which the theory was first developed) to Homeric epic. He holds that Homeric poems differ from those traditions in their "metrical strictness", "formular system[s]" and creativity . Kirk argued that Homeric poems were recited under

270-453: A canonical text. The first printed edition of Homer was produced in 1488 in Milan, Italy by Demetrios Chalkokondyles . Today scholars use medieval manuscripts, papyri and other sources; some argue for a "multi-text" view, rather than seeking a single definitive text. The nineteenth-century edition of Arthur Ludwich mainly follows Aristarchus's work, whereas van Thiel's (1991, 1996) follows

360-610: A clear overall design and that they are not merely strung together from unrelated songs. It is also generally agreed that each poem was composed mostly by a single author, who probably relied heavily on older oral traditions. Nearly all scholars agree that the Doloneia in Book X of the Iliad is not part of the original poem, but rather a later insertion by a different poet. Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness to

450-399: A conservative school which admitted more or less freely the absorption of preexisting lays in the formation of the Iliad and Odyssey , and also the existence of considerable interpolations, but assigned the main work of formation to prehistoric times and the genius of a great poet. Whether the two epics were by the same author remained an open question; the tendency of this group of scholars

540-531: A discredited dead end. Starting 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 improvised oral performances, which relied on traditional epithets and poetic formulas. This theory found very wide scholarly acceptance and explained many previously puzzling features of

630-469: A later insertion by a different poet. Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness to the Trojan War ; others thought he had lived up to 500 years afterwards. Contemporary scholars continue to debate the date of the poems. A long history of oral transmission lies behind the composition of the poems, complicating the search for a precise date. It is generally agreed, however, that

720-415: A phrase or idea is repeated at both the beginning and end of a story, or a series of such ideas first appears in the 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 conscious artistic device, a mnemonic aid or a spontaneous feature of human storytelling. Both of the Homeric poems begin with an invocation to

810-490: A process of standardization and refinement out of older material, beginning in the 8th century BC. This process, often referred to as the "million little pieces" design, seems to acknowledge the spirit of oral tradition. As Albert Lord notes in his book The Singer of Tales , poets within an oral tradition, as was Homer, tend to create and modify their tales as they perform them. Although this suggests that Homer may simply have "borrowed" from other bards, he almost certainly made

900-455: A system that gave the reciter much more freedom to choose words and passages to achieve the same end than the Serbian poet, who was merely "reproductive". Shortly afterwards, Eric A. Havelock 's 1963 book Preface to Plato revolutionized how scholars looked at Homeric epic by arguing not only that it was the product of an oral tradition but that the oral-formulas contained therein served as

990-406: A way for ancient Greeks to preserve cultural knowledge across many different generations. In his 1966 work Have we Homer's Iliad ? , Adam Parry theorized the existence of the most fully developed oral poet up to his time, a person who could (at his discretion) creatively and intellectually form nuanced characters in the context of the accepted, traditional story; in fact, Parry altogether discounted

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1080-592: Is Eastern Ionic. Most researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally . Despite being predominantly known for its tragic and serious themes, the Homeric poems also contain instances of comedy and laughter . Homer's epic poems shaped aspects of ancient Greek culture and education, fostering ideals of heroism, glory, and honor. To Plato , Homer was simply the one who "has taught Greece" ( τὴν Ἑλλάδα πεπαίδευκεν , tēn Helláda pepaídeuken ). In Dante Alighieri 's Divine Comedy , Virgil refers to Homer as "Poet sovereign", king of all poets; in

1170-566: Is called parataxis . The so-called ' type scenes ' ( typische Szenen ), were named by Walter Arend in 1933. He noted that Homer often, when describing frequently recurring activities such as eating, praying , fighting and dressing, used blocks of set phrases in sequence that were then elaborated by the poet. The 'Analyst' school had considered these repetitions as un-Homeric, whereas Arend interpreted them philosophically. Parry and Lord noted that these conventions are found in many other cultures. 'Ring composition' or chiastic structure (when

1260-466: Is described as a river of blood that boils souls. It is in the Seventh Circle of Hell, which punishes those who committed crimes of violence against their fellow men (see Canto XII, 46–48); murderers, tyrants, and the like. By causing hot blood to flow through their violent deeds in life, they are now sunk in the flowing, boiling blood of the Phlegethon. The depth at which each sinner must stand in

1350-658: Is fundamentally based on Ionic Greek , in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was composed slightly before the Odyssey and that Homeric formulae preserve features older than other parts of the poems. The poems were composed in unrhymed dactylic hexameter ; ancient Greek metre was quantity-based rather than stress-based. 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

1440-408: Is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture . The crucial words here are "oral" and "traditional". Parry starts with the former: the repetitive chunks of language, he says, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and were useful to him in composition. Parry calls these chunks of repetitive language "formulas". Many scholars agree that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent

1530-505: The Capture of Oechalia , and the Phocais . These claims are not considered authentic today and were not universally accepted in the ancient world. As with the multitude of legends surrounding Homer's life, they indicate little more than the centrality of Homer to ancient Greek culture. Some ancient accounts about Homer were established early and repeated often. They include that Homer

1620-543: The Bronze Age period of Mycenaean Greece during which Homer's Trojan War is set. The composition of the Iliad , on the other hand, is placed immediately following the Greek Dark Age period. Further controversy surrounds the difference in composition dates between the Iliad and Odyssey . It seems that the latter was composed at a later date than the former because the works' differing characterizations of

1710-573: The Iliad alone is massive, sprawling over nearly 4,000 oversized pages in a 21st-century printed version and his commentary on the Odyssey an additional nearly 2,000. In 1488, the Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles published in Florence the editio princeps of the Homeric poems. The earliest modern Homeric scholars started with the same basic approaches towards the Homeric poems as scholars in antiquity. The allegorical interpretation of

1800-897: The Iliad and the Odyssey 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 , the Nostoi , the Thebaid , the Cypria , the Epigoni , the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog–Mouse War"), the Margites ,

1890-418: The Iliad and the Odyssey are unified poems, in that each poem shows a clear overall design, and that they are not merely strung together from unrelated songs. It is also generally agreed that each poem was composed mostly by a single author, who probably relied heavily on older oral traditions. Nearly all scholars agree that the Doloneia in Book X of the Iliad is not part of the original poem, but rather

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1980-443: The Iliad and the Odyssey in the sixth century BC by literate authors. After being written down, Wolf maintained that the two poems were extensively edited, modernized, and eventually shaped into their present state as artistic unities. Wolf and the "Analyst" school, which led the field in the nineteenth century, sought to recover the original, authentic poems which were thought to be concealed by later excrescences. Within

2070-462: The Muse . In the Iliad , the poet beseeches her to sing of "the anger of Achilles", and in the Odyssey , he asks her to tell of "the man of many ways". A similar opening was later employed by Virgil in his Aeneid . The orally transmitted Homeric poems were put into written form at some point between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE. Some scholars believe that they were dictated to a scribe by

2160-639: The Odyssey during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. As a result of the poems' prominence in classical Greek education, extensive commentaries on them developed to explain parts that were culturally or linguistically difficult. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, many interpreters, especially the Stoics , who believed that Homeric poems conveyed Stoic doctrines, regarded them as allegories, containing hidden wisdom. Perhaps partially because of

2250-574: The Odyssey in which Telemachus went in search of news of his father not to Menelaus in Sparta but to Idomeneus in Crete, in which Telemachus met up with his father in Crete and conspired with him to return to Ithaca disguised as the soothsayer Theoclymenus, and in which Penelope recognized Odysseus much earlier in the narrative and conspired with him in the destruction of the suitors. Most contemporary scholars, although they disagree on other questions about

2340-427: The Trojan War ; others thought he had lived up to 500 years afterwards. Contemporary scholars continue to debate the date of the poems. A long history of oral transmission lies behind the composition of the poems, complicating the search for a precise date. At one extreme, Richard Janko has proposed a date for both poems to the eighth century BC based on linguistic analysis and statistics. Barry B. Powell dates

2430-546: The stylometry allows to scan various linguistic units: words, parts of speech, and sounds. Based on the frequencies of Greek letters, a first study of Dietmar Najock particularly shows the internal cohesion of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Taking into account the repetition of the letters, a recent study of Stephan Vonfelt highlights the unity of the works of Homer compared to Hesiod . The thesis of modern analysts being questioned,

2520-487: The "date" of "Homer" should refer to the moment in history when the oral tradition became a written text. At one extreme, Richard Janko has proposed a date for both poems to the eighth century BC based on linguistic analysis and statistics. At the other extreme, scholars such as Gregory Nagy see "Homer" as a continually evolving tradition, which grew much more stable as the tradition progressed, but which did not fully cease to continue changing and evolving until as late as

2610-545: The Analyst school were two camps: proponents of the "lay theory", which held that the Iliad and the Odyssey were put together from a large number of short, independent songs, and proponents of the "nucleus theory", which held that Homer had originally composed shorter versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey , which later poets expanded and revised. A small group of scholars opposed to the Analysts, dubbed "Unitarians", saw

2700-800: The Bronze Age Aegean civilisation , which in many ways resembles the ancient Near East more than the society described by Homer. Some aspects of the Homeric world are simply made up; for instance, the Iliad 22.145–56 describes there being two springs that run near the city of Troy, one that runs steaming hot and the other that runs icy cold. It is here that Hector takes his final stand against Achilles. Archaeologists, however, have uncovered no evidence that springs of this description ever actually existed. The Homeric epics are written in an artificial literary language or 'Kunstsprache' only used in epic hexameter poetry. Homeric Greek shows features of multiple regional Greek dialects and periods, but

2790-497: The Cyclic poems (whose want of unity showed that the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey must be the work of a later time), by one or two indications of imperfect connection, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the authenticity of certain parts. This view is extended by the complicating factor of the period of time now referred to as the " Greek Dark Ages ". This period, which ranged from approximately 1100 to 750 BC, followed

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2880-500: The Form of an epic Poem till Pisistratus ' time, about 500 Years after." Friedrich August Wolf 's Prolegomena ad Homerum , published in 1795, argued that much of the material later incorporated into the Iliad and the Odyssey was originally composed in the tenth century BC in the form of short, separate oral songs, which passed through oral tradition for roughly four hundred years before being assembled into prototypical versions of

2970-506: The Greek polydaidaloi , "many-skilled"). Wolf's speculations were in harmony with the ideas and sentiment of the time, and his historical arguments, especially his long array of testimonies to the work of Peisistratus, were hardly challenged. The effect of Wolf's Prolegomena was so overwhelming, and its determination so decisive, that, although a few protests were made at the time, the true Homeric controversy did not begin until after his death in 1824. The first considerable antagonist of

3060-627: The Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC). The modern debate began with the Prolegomena of Friedrich August Wolf (1795). According to Wolf, the date of writing is among the first questions in the textual criticism of Homer. Having satisfied himself that writing was unknown to Homer, Wolf considers the real mode of transmission, which he purports to find in the Rhapsodists , of whom the Homeridae were an hereditary school. Wolf reached

3150-476: The Homeric poems that had been so prevalent in antiquity returned to become the prevailing view of the Renaissance . Renaissance humanists praised Homer as the archetypically wise poet, whose writings contain hidden wisdom, disguised through allegory. In western Europe during the Renaissance , Virgil was more widely read than Homer and Homer was often seen through a Virgilian lens. In 1664, contradicting

3240-433: The Homeric poems' extensive use in education, many authors believed that Homer's original purpose had been to educate. Homer's wisdom became so widely praised that he began to acquire the image of almost a prototypical philosopher. Byzantine scholars such as Eustathius of Thessalonica and John Tzetzes produced commentaries, extensions and scholia to Homer, especially in the twelfth century. Eustathius's commentary on

3330-563: The Homeric poems, including their unusually archaic language, their extensive use of stock epithets, and their other "repetitive" features. Many scholars concluded that the "Homeric Question" had finally been answered. Meanwhile, the 'Neoanalysts' sought to bridge the gap between the 'Analysts' and 'Unitarians'. The Neoanalysts sought to trace the relationships between the Homeric poems and other epic poems, which have now been lost, but of which modern scholars do possess some patchy knowledge. Neoanalysts hold that knowledge of earlier versions of

3420-481: The Mediterranean version of "saga". Pseudo-Plutarch suggests that the name comes from a word meaning "to follow" and another meaning "blind". Other sources connect Homer's name with Smyrna for several etymological reasons. 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 singer dictates

3510-463: The Phoenicians align with differing Greek popular opinion of the Phoenicians between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, when their skills began to hurt Greek commerce. Whereas Homer's description of Achilles 's shield in the Iliad exhibits minutely detailed metalwork that characterized Phoenician crafts, they are characterized in the Odyssey as "manifold scurvy tricksters" ( polypaipaloi , parodying

3600-432: The Serbian tradition to an "unfortunate" extent, choosing to elevate the Greek model of oral-tradition above all others. Lord reacted to Kirk and Parry's respective contentions with Homer as Oral Poet , published in 1968, which reaffirmed his belief in the relevance of Serbian epic poetry and its similarities to Homer, and downplayed the intellectual and literary role of the reciters of Homeric epic. In further support of

3690-544: The Trojan story into the background and were then enlarged by successive generations of rhapsodists. Some parts of the Iliad , moreover, seemed to him to be older than the poem on the wrath of Achilles; and thus, in addition to the Homeric and post-Homeric matter, he distinguished a pre-Homeric element. The conjectures of Hermann, in which the Wolfian theory found a modified and tentative application, were presently thrown into

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3780-506: The Wolfian school was Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch , whose writings cover the years between 1828 and 1862 and deal with every side of the controversy. In the earlier part of his Metetemata (1830), Nitzsch took up the question of written or unwritten literature, on which Wolf's entire argument turned, and showed that the art of writing must be anterior to Peisistratus. In the later part of the same series of discussions (1837), and in his chief work ( Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen , 1852), he investigated

3870-535: The Younger , the first singing of the chorus, which mainly describes the plague that has settled in Thebes , includes the line, "Phlegethon has changed his course and mingled Styx with Theban streams." While this is not essential to the plot of the play, the line figuratively serves to suggest Death has become physically present in Thebes . In Dante's Inferno , which is the first part of Divine Comedy , Phlegethon

3960-468: The battlefield was suspect, they would not be killed in conflicts, so they were entrusted with remembering the area's stock of epic poetry, to remember past events, from the time before literacy came to the area. In a similar vein, the word "Homer" may simply be a carryover from the Mediterranean seafarers' vocabulary adoption of the Semitic word base ’MR, which means "say" or "tell". "Homer" may simply be

4050-482: The composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey to sometime between 800 and 750 BC, based on the statement from Herodotus , who lived in the late fifth century BC, that Homer lived four hundred years before his own time "and not more" ( καὶ οὐ πλέοσι ) and on the fact that the poems do not mention hoplite battle tactics, inhumation , or literacy. Martin Litchfield West has argued that the Iliad echoes

4140-402: The conclusion that the Iliad and Odyssey could not have been composed in the form in which we know them without the aid of writing. They must therefore have been, as Bentley has said, a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, loose songs not collected together in the form of an epic poem until about 500 years after their original composition. This conclusion Wolf supports by the character attributed to

4230-596: The days of the Roman emperor Hadrian says Epicaste (daughter of Nestor ) and Telemachus (son of Odysseus ) were the parents of Homer. The two best known ancient biographies of Homer are the Life of Homer by the Pseudo-Herodotus and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod . In the early fourth century BC Alcidamas composed a fictional account of a poetry contest at Chalcis with both Homer and Hesiod . Homer

4320-447: The debate remains open. Most scholars, although disagreeing 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 of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the apparently imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey in relation to the Iliad ." Nearly all scholars agree that

4410-545: The divisions back further to the Classical period. Very few credit Homer himself with the divisions. In antiquity, it was widely held that the Homeric poems were collected and organised in Athens in the late sixth century BCE by Pisistratus (died 528/7 BCE), in what subsequent scholars have dubbed the "Peisistratean recension". The idea that the Homeric poems were originally transmitted orally and first written down during

4500-543: The doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer , the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey , and their historicity (especially concerning the Iliad ). The subject has its roots in classical antiquity and the scholarship of the Hellenistic period , but has flourished among Homeric scholars of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The main subtopics of the Homeric Question are: To these questions

4590-479: The early-born rose-fingered Dawn came to light', 'thus he/she spoke'), simile , type scenes, ring composition and repetition. These habits aid the extemporizing bard, and are characteristic of oral poetry. For instance, the main words of a Homeric sentence are generally placed towards the beginning, whereas literate poets like Virgil or Milton use longer and more complicated syntactical structures. Homer then expands on these ideas in subsequent clauses; this technique

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4680-511: The epics can be derived from anomalies of structure and detail in the surviving versions of the Iliad and Odyssey . These anomalies point to earlier versions of the Iliad in which Ajax played a more prominent role, in which the Achaean embassy to Achilles comprised different characters, and in which Patroclus was actually mistaken for Achilles by the Trojans. They point to earlier versions of

4770-432: The genesis of the poems, agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the apparently imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey in relation to the Iliad ." Nearly all scholars agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey are unified poems, in that each poem shows

4860-434: 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. The study of Homer is one of the oldest topics in scholarship, dating back to antiquity. Nonetheless, the aims of Homeric studies have changed over the course of the millennia. The earliest preserved comments on Homer concern his treatment of the gods, which hostile critics such as

4950-535: The later Iron Age during which they were composed; yet the same heroes are cremated (an Iron Age practice) rather than buried (as they were in the Bronze Age). In some parts of the Homeric poems, heroes are described as carrying large shields like those used by warriors during the Mycenaean period , but, in other places, they are instead described carrying the smaller shields that were commonly used during

5040-536: The later additions as superior, the work of a single inspired poet. By around 1830, the central preoccupations of Homeric scholars, dealing with whether or not "Homer" actually existed, when and how the Homeric poems originated, how they were transmitted, when and how they were finally written down, and their overall unity, had been dubbed "the Homeric Question". Following World War I , the Analyst school began to fall out of favor among Homeric scholars. It did not die out entirely, but it came to be increasingly seen as

5130-426: The learned mythological writers (like the scriptor cyclicus of Horace ) was first cleared up by Welcker. Wolf had argued that, had the cyclic writers known the Iliad and Odyssey which we possess, they would have imitated the unity of structure which distinguishes these two poems. The aim of Welcker's work was to show that the Homeric poems had influenced both the form and the substance of epic poetry. Thus arose

5220-458: The medieval vulgate. Others, such as Martin West (1998–2000) or T. W. Allen , fall somewhere between these two extremes. Him with that falchion in his hand behold, ⁠Who comes before the three, even as their lord. That one is Homer, Poet sovereign; This is a partial list of translations into English of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . Homeric Question The Homeric Question concerns

5310-421: The middle of the second century BC. Martin Litchfield West has argued that the Iliad echoes the poetry of Hesiod , and that it must have been composed around 660-650 BC at the earliest, with the Odyssey up to a generation later. He also interprets passages in the Iliad as showing knowledge of historical events that occurred in the ancient Near East during the middle of the seventh century BC, including

5400-477: The myth of the Trojan War, others that the poem was inspired by multiple similar sieges that took place over the centuries. Most scholars now agree that the Homeric poems depict customs and elements of the material world that are derived from different periods of Greek history. For instance, the heroes in the poems use bronze weapons, characteristic of the Bronze Age in which the poems are set, rather than

5490-416: The other extreme, a few American scholars such as Gregory Nagy see "Homer" as a continually evolving tradition, 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 century BC. "'Homer" is a name of unknown etymological origin, around which many theories were erected in antiquity. One such linkage

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5580-403: The piece his own when he performed it. The 1960 publication of Lord's book, which focused on the problems and questions that arise in conjunction with applying oral-formulaic theory to problematic texts such as the Iliad , the Odyssey and even Beowulf influenced nearly all subsequent work on Homer and oral-formulaic composition. In response to his landmark effort, Geoffrey Kirk published

5670-420: The poem to a literate scribe in the 6th century BC or earlier. Sources from antiquity are unanimous in declaring that Peisistratus , the tyrant of Athens , first committed the poems of Homer to writing and placed them in the order in which we now read them. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy , contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems did not exist until established by Alexandrian editors in

5760-424: The poems contain many regular and repeated phrases; indeed, even entire verses are repeated. Thus according to the theory, the Iliad and Odyssey may have been products of oral-formulaic composition , composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phrases. Milman Parry and Albert Lord have pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures,

5850-527: The poems were created in the eighth century, they continued to be orally transmitted with considerable revision until they were written down in the sixth century. After textualisation, the poems were each divided into 24 rhapsodes, today referred to as books, and labelled by the letters of the Greek alphabet . Most scholars attribute the book divisions to the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria , in Egypt. Some trace

5940-429: The poet Xenophanes of Colophon denounced as immoral. The allegorist Theagenes of Rhegium is said to have defended Homer by arguing that the Homeric poems are allegories . The Iliad and the Odyssey were widely used as school texts in ancient Greek and Hellenistic cultures. They were the first literary works taught to all students. The Iliad , particularly its first few books, was far more intently studied than

6030-457: The poet and that our inherited versions of the Iliad and Odyssey were in origin orally dictated texts. Albert Lord noted that the Balkan bards that he was studying revised and expanded their songs in their process of dictating. Some scholars hypothesize that a similar process of revision and expansion occurred when the Homeric poems were first written down. Other scholars hold that, after

6120-486: The poetry of Hesiod and that it must have been composed around 660–650 BC at the earliest, with the Odyssey up to a generation later. He also interprets passages in the Iliad as showing knowledge of historical events that occurred in the ancient Near East during the middle of the seventh century BC, including the destruction of Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 BC and the Sack of Thebes by Ashurbanipal in 663/4 BC. At

6210-446: The possibilities of modern textual criticism and archaeological answers have added a few more: On the Greek side: On the Trojan side: The very forefathers of text criticism, including Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), Richard Bentley (1662–1742) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) already emphasized the fluid-like, oral nature of the Homeric canon. This perspective, however, did not receive mainstream recognition until after

6300-420: The preface to his translation of the Iliad , Alexander Pope acknowledges that Homer has always been considered the "greatest of poets". From antiquity to the present day, Homeric epics have inspired many famous works of literature, music, art, and film. The question of by whom, when, where and under what circumstances the Iliad and Odyssey were composed continues to be debated. Scholars generally regard

6390-600: The reign of Pisistratus is referenced by the first-century BCE Roman orator Cicero and is also referenced in a number of other surviving sources, including two ancient Lives of Homer . From around 150 BCE, the texts of the Homeric poems found in papyrus fragments exhibit much less variation, and the text seems to have become relatively stable. After the establishment of the Library of Alexandria , Homeric scholars such as Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and in particular Aristarchus of Samothrace helped establish

6480-619: The river is determined by the level of violence they caused in life; Dante sees Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great up to their eyebrows. Centaurs patrol the circle, firing arrows at those who try to rise above their allotted level in the river. Dante and Virgil cross Phlegethon with help from Nessus . Homer This is an accepted version of this page Homer ( / ˈ h oʊ m ər / ; Ancient Greek : Ὅμηρος [hómɛːros] , Hómēros ; born c.  8th century BCE )

6570-412: The sack of Troy was dated to 1184 BC. By the nineteenth century, there was widespread scholarly skepticism that the Trojan War had ever happened and that Troy had even existed, but in 1873 Heinrich Schliemann announced to the world that he had discovered the ruins of Homer's Troy at Hisarlik in modern Turkey. Some contemporary scholars think the destruction of Troy VIIa c. 1220 BC was the origin of

6660-474: The scenes in Olympus (348–429, 493–611). The second book forms a second lay, but several passages, among them the speech of Odysseus (278–332), are interpolated. In the third book, the scenes in which Helen and Priam take part (including the making of the truce) are pronounced to be interpolations; and so on. New methods try also to elucidate the question. Combining information technologies and statistics,

6750-423: The seminal work of Milman Parry in the early 20th century. Now most classicists agree that, whether or not there was ever such a composer as Homer, the poems attributed to him are to some degree dependent on oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (or ἀοιδοί , aoidoi ). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that

6840-495: The shade by the more trenchant method of Karl Lachmann , who (in two papers read to the Berlin Academy in 1837 and 1841) sought to show that the Iliad was made up of sixteen independent lays, with various enlargements and interpolations, all finally reduced to order by Peisistratus. The first book, for instance, consists of a lay on the anger of Achilles (1–347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis (430–492) and

6930-516: The society depicted by Homer is based on his own or one which was, even at the time of the poems' composition, known only as legends. The Homeric epics are largely set in the east and center of the Mediterranean , with some scattered references to Egypt , Ethiopia and other distant lands, in a warlike society that resembles that of the Greek world slightly before the hypothesized date of the poems' composition. In ancient Greek chronology,

7020-510: The structure of the Homeric poems, and their relation to the other epics of the Trojan cycle. These epics had in the meantime been made the subject of a work which, for exhaustive learning and delicacy of artistic perception, has few rivals in the history of philology : the Epic cycle of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker . The confusion which previous scholars had made between the ancient post-Homeric poets (such as Arctinus of Miletus and Lesches ) and

7110-529: The ten-year journey of Odysseus , king of Ithaca , back to his home after the fall of Troy. The epics depict man's struggle, the Odyssey especially so as Odysseus perseveres through punishment of the gods. The poems are in Homeric Greek , 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

7200-596: The theory that Homer is really the name of a series of oral-formulas, or equivalent to "the Bard" as applied to Shakespeare, the Greek name Homēros is etymologically noteworthy. It is identical to the Greek word for "hostage". It has been hypothesized 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

7290-484: The time when the poems were written in the early Iron Age. In the Iliad 10.260–265, Odysseus is described as wearing a helmet made of boar's tusks . Such helmets were not worn in Homer's time, but were commonly worn by aristocratic warriors between 1600 and 1150 BC. The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and continued archaeological investigation has increased modern scholars' understanding of

7380-419: The two poems as the works of separate authors. It is thought that the poems were composed at some point around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity , the most widespread that he was a blind bard from Ionia , a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary . Today, only

7470-495: The widespread praise of Homer 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 never existed, and that the poems were hastily cobbled together by incompetent editors from unrelated oral songs. Fifty years later, the English scholar Richard Bentley concluded that Homer did exist but that he

7560-455: The writings of Nitzsch. As the word "interpolation" implies, Hermann did not maintain the hypothesis of a conflation of independent lays. Feeling the difficulty of supposing that all ancient minstrels sang of the wrath of Achilles or the return of Odysseus (leaving out even the capture of Troy itself), he was led to assume that two poems of no great compass, dealing with these two themes, became so famous at an early period as to throw other parts of

7650-412: Was an Ancient Greek poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey , two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature . Homer is considered one of the most revered and influential authors in history. Homer's Iliad centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War . The Odyssey chronicles

7740-532: Was an obscure, prehistoric oral poet whose compositions bear little relation to the Iliad and the Odyssey as they have been passed down. According to Bentley, Homer "wrote a Sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small Earnings and good Cheer at Festivals and 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

7830-509: Was blind (taking as self-referential a passage describing the blind bard Demodocus ), that he resided at Chios , that he was the son of the river Meles and the nymph Critheïs , that he was a wandering bard, that he composed a varying list of other works (the "Homerica"), that he died either in Ios or after failing to solve a riddle set by fishermen, and various explanations for the name "Homer" ( Ὅμηρος , Hómēros ). Another tradition from

7920-477: Was expected to win, and answered all of Hesiod's questions and puzzles with ease. Then, each of the 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". Homer chose a description of Greek warriors in formation, facing the foe, taken from the Iliad . Though the crowd acclaimed Homer victor,

8010-449: Was to the Greek ὅμηρος ( hómēros ' hostage ' or ' surety ' ). The explanations suggested by modern scholars tend to mirror their position on the overall Homeric Question. Nagy interprets it as "he who fits (the song) together". West has advanced both possible Greek and Phoenician etymologies. Scholars continue to debate questions such as whether the Trojan War actually took place – and if so when and where – and to what extent

8100-652: Was towards separation. Regarding the use of writing, too, they were not unanimous. Karl Otfried Müller , for instance, maintained the view of Wolf on this point, while strenuously combating the inference which Wolf drew from it. The Prolegomena bore on the title-page the words "Volumen I", but no second volume ever appeared; nor was any attempt made by Wolf himself to compose it or carry his theory further. The first important steps in that direction were taken by Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann , chiefly in two dissertations, De interpolationibus Homeri ( Leipzig , 1832), and De iteratis apud Homerum (Leipzig, 1840), called forth by

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