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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter VII: Sources: Homer, Hesiod & the Tragedians

Homer and the Homeric Question: Iliad and Odyssey as Texts

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey as texts: who Homer was, the Homeric question, Parry and Lord's oral composition, and how the epics were written down and handed on.

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Homer is the name the Greeks gave to the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two oldest surviving works of Greek literature. Most scholars now date the poems to the late eighth or seventh century BCE and believe they grew out of a long tradition of oral poetry, but who "Homer" was, whether one poet composed both epics, and how and when they were written down remain open questions, known together as the Homeric question.

This article treats the epics as texts. The stories themselves are told in The Trojan War, Achilles and Odysseus and the Wanderings of the Odyssey; the Greek gods as Homer portrays them are introduced in Greek Religion and the Mysteries.

The Iliad and the Odyssey in Brief§

The Iliad tells not the whole war at Troy but a few weeks in its tenth year, organised around the anger of Achilles: his quarrel with Agamemnon, his withdrawal from battle, the death of his friend Patroclus, his killing of Hector, and the ransoming of Hector's body by King Priam. The poem announces its theme in its opening line, here in Samuel Butler's public-domain prose translation (1898): "Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans."

The Odyssey follows Odysseus' return home to Ithaca ten years after the fall of Troy, his son Telemachus' search for news, the suitors who besiege his wife Penelope, and Odysseus' revenge. Its structure is more complex, with long flashbacks told by the hero himself. Both poems were divided in antiquity into twenty-four books each, a division usually credited to the scholars of Alexandria. Other epics on the Trojan story, the so-called Epic Cycle (the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad and others), survive only in fragments and later summaries.

Who Was Homer? Ancient Lives and Modern Doubts§

The Greeks treated Homer as the first and greatest of poets, the educator of Greece, but they knew almost nothing about him. Several cities claimed to be his birthplace, Smyrna and the island of Chios most strongly, and a guild called the Homeridai on Chios claimed descent from him. The tradition that he was blind owes much to a passage in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, where the singer describes himself as a blind man from Chios; Thucydides took this as Homer's own voice, though the hymn is now dated later than the epics. The surviving Lives of Homer were composed centuries after the poems and are full of legend.

Herodotus placed Homer and Hesiod about four hundred years before his own time, roughly the mid-ninth century BCE. Modern scholars generally place the Iliad in the second half of the eighth century or the first half of the seventh, and the Odyssey somewhat later, though some argue for later dates. The poems' language supports a long prehistory: it is mainly Ionic but contains Aeolic forms and archaic words that had fallen out of everyday speech, together with memories of Bronze Age objects such as the boar's-tusk helmet.

Already in antiquity some grammarians, the chōrizontes ("separators"), argued that the Iliad and Odyssey had different authors. The question remains open: differences of vocabulary, theology and outlook can be read either as signs of two poets or as the range of one tradition.

The Homeric Question: From Wolf to Oral Composition§

Analysts and Unitarians§

The modern debate began with Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795). Wolf argued that writing was unknown or little used in Homer's time, that poems of such length could not have been composed without it, and that the epics as we have them were assembled later from shorter songs. An ancient tradition, reported by Cicero, that the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos had first arranged Homer's scattered books gave his theory support. Through the nineteenth century the "Analysts" tried to identify the separate layers and authors within the poems, while the "Unitarians" defended the artistic unity of each epic and, usually, a single great poet.

Milman Parry and Albert Lord§

The debate was transformed by the American scholar Milman Parry. In his Paris doctoral thesis of 1928 he showed that the fixed epithets of Homer, such as "swift-footed Achilles" or "rosy-fingered Dawn", form an economical system: for each major character and object there is usually one formula to fill each metrical position. Such a system, he argued, could only be the product of generations of poets composing in performance. Between 1933 and 1935 Parry and his assistant Albert Lord recorded oral epic singers in Yugoslavia, among them Avdo Međedović, who could produce a song of more than twelve thousand lines. After Parry's early death in 1935, Lord published the findings in The Singer of Tales (1960).

Parry and Lord's work established that Homeric style is rooted in oral composition, but it did not settle how the monumental poems came to be fixed in writing. Lord suggested that a singer dictated them to a scribe; others, such as Martin West, have argued for a poet who used writing to build a long poem out of oral tradition; Gregory Nagy has proposed an "evolutionary" model in which the poems became gradually more fixed through repeated performance, perhaps reaching their final shape in sixth-century Athens. Each view has supporters, and caution is appropriate.

From Performance to Text: Writing, Athens and Alexandria§

The Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician script probably in the first half of the eighth century BCE, and a clay cup from Pithekoussai in the Bay of Naples, dated around 740–720 BCE, already bears a hexameter verse playing on the famous cup of Nestor. Writing was therefore available in Homer's period, though how it was used for long poems is unknown.

For centuries the poems lived chiefly in performance. Professional reciters, the rhapsodes, performed them at festivals, and a rule attributed to the Peisistratids required them to recite the epics in order at the Panathenaia, described in Greek Sacrifice, Festivals and Temples. Many scholars think an Athenian text took shape in the sixth century, which would explain some Attic features in our version.

In Hellenistic Alexandria, scholars of the great Library produced the first critical editions. Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and, above all, Aristarchus of Samothrace (second century BCE) compared copies, marked suspect lines with critical signs and wrote commentaries. Early papyri from Egypt contain extra lines not found in later copies, and after Aristarchus' time these "wild" texts disappear, suggesting that a standard text had prevailed. Homer is by far the most common author among literary papyri found in Egypt.

Manuscripts, Printing and Translation§

The poems survived the Middle Ages in Byzantium, where Homer remained central to education. The most important manuscript of the Iliad, the tenth-century Venetus A in the Marciana Library in Venice, preserves marginal notes (scholia) that report the judgements of the Alexandrian critics; its publication by Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison in 1788 helped inspire Wolf's work. Medieval Western Europe knew the Trojan story mainly through Latin summaries and romances. The first printed edition of Homer in Greek appeared in Florence in 1488, edited by Demetrios Chalkokondyles.

Translations then carried Homer into modern languages: George Chapman's English version (completed 1616), which moved Keats to write his sonnet of 1816; Alexander Pope's rhymed Iliad (1715–20) and Odyssey (1725–26); and prose versions by Andrew Lang and his collaborators and by Samuel Butler at the end of the nineteenth century. Butler opened his Odyssey (1900): "Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy." The later history of Homeric myth in art and literature is traced in Greek Myth after Antiquity.

Homer, History and the Bronze Age§

How much history lies behind the epics is a separate question. Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Hisarlik in north-western Turkey from 1870 onwards identified the site with Troy, and later excavators have found a substantial Bronze Age city there; Hittite texts mention a place called Wilusa and a people called Ahhiyawa, which many scholars connect with Ilios and the Achaeans. Yet the society Homer describes is a blend of different periods, and historians such as Moses Finley argued that it reflects mainly the world of the tenth and ninth centuries BCE, while others see it as closer to the poet's own eighth century. Few scholars today treat the Iliad as a record of a specific war, and few dismiss it as pure invention; the evidence is weighed in The Trojan War: Myth and Archaeology.

Homer's influence on Greek religion was also immense, though indirect. As Herodotus put it, Homer and Hesiod gave the Greeks the names, honours and forms of their gods, and the epic picture of anthropomorphic, quarrelsome deities shaped both worship and its philosophical critics. The tragic poets drew constantly on Homer and the Cycle, as described in Greek Tragedy and Myth.

Frequently asked questions§

Did Homer really exist?§

Nobody knows. The ancient biographies are legendary; some scholars think "Homer" stands for a tradition of oral poets, others that one outstanding poet, or two, gave the epics their final form.

What is the Homeric question?§

It is the set of problems about the authorship, composition and transmission of the Homeric epics: whether Homer existed, whether one poet wrote both poems, how far they depend on oral tradition, and when and how they were written down. Wolf's Prolegomena of 1795 began the modern debate.

When were the Iliad and the Odyssey written?§

Most scholars date them to the late eighth or seventh century BCE, with the Odyssey somewhat later than the Iliad. Some argue for a date in the sixth century for the fixing of the written text in Athens; precise dating is not possible.

Were the Homeric poems composed orally?§

The work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord showed that their formulaic style comes from a long tradition of oral composition in performance. Whether the final monumental poems were themselves composed orally, dictated or written with the help of writing is still debated.

Sources and further reading§