Homer
The Greeks traditionally assumed that a single poet named Homer composed both the
Iliad and the Odyssey, but we have no certain information about who composed these
poems or how. Both the Homeric poems were composed in an oral poetic tradition that
preceded the advent of writing. The Homeric poems were by far the most revered and
influential works of literature in the ancient Greek (and Roman) world. They affected
not only literature, both prose and poetry, but established a vision of the Heroic age that
helped shape Greek society itself.
Composition of Homer's Iliad c. 750-725. Composition of Homer's Odyssey c. 743-713.
Identity of “Homer” and Greek Oral Poetry
Greeks of the archaic and classical periods looked upon Homer as their greatest, as well
one of their earliest poets, and various stories grew up about his life. Ancient sources do
not agree on when Homer lived or where he came from. Ancient tradition generally
connected him with Ionia, in particular with Chios and Smyrna, and the linguistic
evidence of the Iliad and the Odyssey would support this, but nothing is certain.
Different poets could have composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. And in the case of these
epics, we cannot even define precisely what we mean by composition: the Homeric
epics were composed in an oral poetic tradition that developed without the use of
writing, but writing (which ultimately put an end to the oral composition of Greek
poetry) has preserved for us these two poems. Did a “Homer” write these poems with
his own hands? Did he dictate them to one or more scribes? Did he teach them, word
for word, to disciples who then memorized and in turn passed them on to other
generations of poets until they could be written down at some later date? Many have
expressed opinions on these matters, but we have no hard evidence as to how these
poems were composed, and we can only base our own conjectures on the rumors
preserved from antiquity and from what we know of other oral traditions that have
been observed in the modern world.
The nature of Homeric epic itself is responsible for our ignorance of who composed
these poems. The Iliad and the Odyssey are products of an oral poetic tradition, which
developed without the use of writing. These poems are composed of metrical formulas:
if the poet wishes to describe the sunrise in a single line, he has a ready made set of
words at his disposal which he can apply. It does not matter if the same formulaic
expression is repeated dozens of times in the course of a poem: the same line, for
example, describes one person speaking to another (“he addressed him speaking
winged words”, kai min phônêsas epea pteroenta prosêuda) at Hom. Il. 1.201, Hom. Il.
2.7, Hom. Il.4.312, Hom. Il.4.369 and at twenty-six other places in the Iliad and the
Odyssey. The aesthetics of Homeric epic, at least on the level of the individual phrase or
line, thus differ markedly from the conventions of modern poetry, which assiduously
avoids repetition and places a very high value on novel turns of phrase. No one ever
taught Greek epic poets not to repeat the same word in a single paragraph.
This complex formulaic system had a functional advantage. In essence, the poet was
fluent in a specialized language, in which meter was another linguistic constraint like
morphology or syntax. The poet had to express all of his ideas in separate, complete
lines six metrical units in length (a meter called “dactylic hexameter”). These
hexameters had a fixed, precise metrical form, and were divided into separate sections
of predictable length, and the epic poet learned how to assemble these formulas into the
framework offered by the dactylic hexameter. The poet in effect learned a special dialect
in which metrical rules were added to the normal linguistic rules of morphology and
syntax. The consequence of this practice was a penchant for formulaic economy: Homeric
poetry tends to use the same formula in the same segment of a line wherever possible.
Thus, the Iliad refers to Diomedes as “Diomedes, good at the war cry” twenty one times
in the Iliad, not because Diomedes’ vocal powers were particularly relevant to the
passage at hand but because the formula boên agathos Diomêdês slipped neatly into the
final segment of the line. Some events could be treated formulaically, and thus
sequences of entire lines describing some conventional activity, like a sacrifice followed
by a feast, might reappear at several points. Other standard organizational patterns
(e.g., how do two heroes engage in a duel? how does one describe a trip to the
underworld?) helped the poet organize these smaller formulas into a larger whole.
This elaborate formulaic system did not just allow poets to compose hexameters
quickly. It rendered singers fluent in a special poetic language, wherein all statements
fitted neatly within the metrical frame of a hexameter. The Greek formulaic system of
the Homeric poems allowed singers to compose hexameters extemporaneously and
gave them analytical tools whereby they could modify their poems in the course of a
performance. If the audience was beginning to drowse, the poet could skip quickly
through a feast scene and get to a fight, or he might particularly emphasize part of a
song which centered around a local hero. The poet could lengthen, shorten, modify, or,
if need be, create a new song according to conventional patterns. The formulaic system
made it easy for the poet to tailor his song to the interests of the audience that watched
him with greater or lesser attention. It was an extraordinarily flexible tool.
The flexibility of formulaic composition, however, had a powerful side effect on poetic
form. The Homeric epics ultimately were memorized as precisely as any religious text,
but Greek formulaic epic, when still a living phenomenon, assumed that each singer
would learn the outlines of a song, not a word-for-word version. A good poet would
create his own distinct version of a song and would probably modify over time, adding
his own embellishments and emphasis. The system of oral composition assumed that a
song had no particular existence separate from any one performance.
If poems existed only in performance and had no fixed form, there was no particular
reason to preserve the personality of any one poet. Of course, some poets undoubtedly
earned greater reputations during their lifetimes, and they undoubtedly exploited this
prestige as far as possible, but their prestige was tied to their physical ability to recreate,
in performance, their songs. In the oral tradition, once a poet had passed from the scene
forever, his songs were naturally gone with him. There was little cause, other than
sentiment, to recall the particulars of his life and career.
Within a generation or so after writing began to record poetry, the personal history and
identity of poets began to emerge. Hesiod, for example, who composed non-epic
hexametrical poetry and whose poetry dates somewhat later than the Iliad and the
Odyssey, specifically includes his name and several details of his life in his poetry. Other
types of poetry besides epic also flourished in Greece from time immemorial. The first
“lyric poet” (i.e., someone who wrote songs that were to be sung accompanied by music
of the lyre) whose work survives to us, Archilochus of Paros, became a celebrity in
ancient times: his poetry fascinated his audience both because of its quality and because
of what it revealed (or purported to reveal) about his personal life. But whoever
composed the Iliad and the Odyssey came at the beginning of a tremendous shift from
the oral culture to one based on writing. As already noted, we cannot even be sure
whether the Iliad and the Odyssey by one poet or by two. Two of the most successful
pieces of literature ever composed are, for all practical purposes, anonymous.
Composition of the Iliad and Odyssey
We have no solid evidence by which to date the Iliad and the Odyssey. The best current
estimate, based on analysis of linguistic features of the poems ([Janko, 1982] 228-231)
have concluded that the Iliad was composed between 750 and 725 and the Odyssey
between 743 and 713, but the grounds for this assumption do not allow for any great
certainty.
Even the idea of “composition” is problematic. Oral poets had been at work in Greece
continuously since the Bronze Age, and at least four centuries separated the
composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey from whatever historical events may ultimately
lie behind the story of the Trojan War. Our epic preserves some memory of things
centuries old: it includes descriptions of several objects which had not existed since the
Bronze Age: the tower shield of Ajax (Hom. Il. 7.219), the boar's tusk helmet (Hom. Il.
10.261-265) and the cup of Nestor (Hom. Il. 11.632-5). But generations of singers had
each developed their own versions of these tales, and we cannot point to a single
episode or even line of poetry in either the Iliad or the Odyssey which we can say was
composed for the poems as we have them. Everything in both of these vast poems was
“traditional,” in that any single line could be seen as a formula. Even if a particular line
or phrase reappears nowhere else in the Iliad and Odyssey, we cannot be sure that this
turn of phrase had not existed for generations. The most convincing discussion of the
problem ([Morris, 1986]) argues that the Homeric poems may preserve isolated
elements that are very old, but that it presents us with an aristocratic, idealized view of
the 8th century BC. The poems, in this perspective, are less an analysis of the past than
an ideological attempt to justify the values of a threatened dominant class. While the
aristocrats of the eighth century lost much of their influence, the values of the Homeric
poems came to exert a wide appeal in Greek society and became a common object
which Greeks from throughout the scattered Greek world shared.
However many poets roamed the valleys and islands of Greece, the Iliad and the
Odyssey seem both of them to have been wholly different from anything else that
survived. What little we know of non-Homeric epic suggests that the Iliad and the
Odyssey, though constructed out of the same materials as other poems, nevertheless
constituted achievements which had no parallel and which exerted a tremendous hold
on the Greek imagination. Aristotle praised the Iliad and the Odyssey in comparison to
non-Homeric epic (Aristot. Poet. 1459a20-1459b16), and the surviving fragments of
these works suggest that they were less tightly organized, relied more on fantastic
effects and were generally flatter in tone than the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Importance and Influence of the Homeric Poems
The great scholars who developed the Library at Alexandria from the third through the
second century B.C. laid the systematic groundwork for the texts of the Iliad and the
Odyssey that we use today, but roughly the same amount of time which separated Iliad
from the period which it describes separated the composition of our Iliad from the
founding of the Library at Alexandria. In the meantime, the Homeric poems were
already major works of literature in the classical period and they exerted an enormous
impact on Greek thought throughout the archaic and classical periods.
From the moment the Homeric epics appear in recorded Greek tradition, they occupy a
place apart from other literature. Other Greek authors view them as classics and they
provide the foundation on which Greeks developed their canon of literary texts.
Regardless of when the poems were actually written down, most people in the classical
period encountered Homeric poetry in performance. The text of a poem should be
compared with a modern score of music or perhaps the script of a play, rather than with
a novel or poem designed from the start to be read. Professional singers, called
rhapsodes, specialized in performing these poems, and one of Plato's dialogues (Plat.
Ion), depicts a rhapsode describing his craft. Herodotus describes these singers at work
in Sikyon during the rule of the tyrant Kleisthenes, in the early sixth century (Hdt.
5.67.1). According to a dialogue attributed to Plato (Plat. Hipparch. 228b), Hipparchos,
son of the tyrant Peisistratos, first formally introduced Homeric poetry into Athens and
instituted the custom, which still prevailed when this dialogue was composed, of
having a series of rhapsodes recite the “epic poetry” of Homer from start to finish.
At the same time, however, individual Greeks who were not professional singers also
studied the poems of Homer intensively and were expected to know substantial
portions of the Iliad and Odyssey by heart. Quotations from Homer are, for example,
scattered throughout the dialogues of Plato, and we can see that well-educated Greeks
(or at least the members of Athenian society who composed much of our surviving
literature) would casually allude to Homer on any and all occasions. Knowledge of
Homeric poetry was something which Greeks shared and which helped define what it
meant to be Greek. Herodotus, in a much-discussed passage (Hdt. 2.53), claims that the
poetry of Homer and Hesiod largely defined for the Greeks who their gods were and
what roles the gods filled.
Some papyrus fragments preserved in the dry climate of Egypt do survive which shed
light upon the text of the Homeric poems before Alexandrian scholarship went to work
collecting and freezing a single, definitive version of the poems. In these so-called “wild
papyri” there are many extra lines and noticeable additions, but for the most part they
do not in fact differ substantively from the texts that we now read. Our texts of the Iliad
and the Odyssey have faithfully preserved many dialectical and linguistic peculiarities
which had vanished from the Greek language for centuries. Both in overall content and
in wording our texts seem to provide a fairly good picture of what an audience might
have heard in a performance of the eighth century.
For traditions of Homer's life, see [Lefkowitz, 1981] 12-24.> For brief introductions to
Homer, see [Easterling, 1985] 42-52, 721-724; [Kirk, 1985] 1-16. For the dating of Homer,
see [Janko, 1982] 228-31. A group of scholars has recently translated into English
Friedrich August Wolf's 1795 book, Prolegomena to Homer, which framed the “Homeric
Question,” i.e., did a single poet compose the Iliad and the Odyssey ([Wolf, 1985]). On
Homer and Oral Poetry, [Lord, 1960] 141-197, and [Parry, 1971] remain the starting
point. [Morris, 1986] argues that the Homeric poems reflect the world of the eighth
centuries, and on this he updates, but does not replace, [Finley, 1954].
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Atchity, Kenneth, Ron Hogart, and Don Price, ed. Critical Essays on Homer. Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1987. viii+245.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Homer's Odyssey: Edited and with and Introduction. New York:
Chelsea House, 1988. vii+167.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Homer's The Iliad: Edited and with an introduction. New York:
Chelsea House, 1987. vii+160.
Crane, Gregory. Calypso: Backgrounds and Conventions of the Odyssey. Athenaums
Monografien: Altertumswissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988. 191: 190.
Edwards, Mark W. Homer: Poet of the Iliad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987. x+341.
Griffin, Jasper. Homer: The Odyssey. Landmarks of World Literature. Cambridge:
Cambrige University Press, 1987. vi+107.
Janko, Richard. Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns: Diachronic Development in Epic Diction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. xvi+322.
Kirk, G. S. The Iliad: A Commentary: Books 1-4. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985. 1:
Martin, Richard P. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Myth
and Poetics. Ed. Gregory Nagy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. xv+265.
Murnaghan, Sheila. Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987. ix+197.
Nagler, Michael N. Spontaneity and Tradition : a Study in the Oral Art of Homer.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974. xxv+236.
Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. xvi+392.
Nagy, Gregory. Pindar's Homer: the Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1990. 523.
Parry, Adam, ed. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Peradotto, John. Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey. Martin
Classical Lectures. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 193.
Scully, Stephen. Homer and the Sacred City. Myth and Poetics. Ed. Gregory Nagy.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. xi+230.
Silk, M. S. Homer: the Iliad. Landmarks of World Literature. Cambrige: Cambrige
University Press, 1987. vii+116.
Tracy, Stephen V. The Story of the Odyssey. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990. xiv+160.
Whitman, Cedric H. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1958. xii+365.
Willcock, Malcolm M. A Commentary on Homer's Iliad. London: Macmillan, 1970.
xxviii+228.