"The Greeks and Romans always thought that the legendary poet Homer was the greatest author ever. However, we know hardly anything about the man or men who composed the Iliad ... or the Odyssey. At the moment, most scholars agree that these texts were dictated to a writer by a very capable bard, who used older, oral traditions, at the beginning of the eighth century BCE. We do not know to what extent later poets have made additions or changes to the two epics." Source: Livius.
Comment: Homer's a mystery. No one knows who he was, where he came from, when he lived, where he lived, or whether he actually composed the Iliad and Odyssey, the foundation works of western literature. At one point, scholars doubted that he even existed, but the consensus today is that he was a real historical figure who lived in the 8th century BC. As far as I can tell, this consensus is based on just one source--the histories of Herodotus, who wrote that Homer lived around 400 years before his time.
There are other sources which place Homer as far back as the 12th century BC, closer to the time the Trojan War is thought to have taken place. It's all very murky, though. The vague image we have of Homer is based on ancient writers who may or may not be reliable and who contradict each other in various ways. The only point of agreement is that Homer was a blind bard who lived on an island in the Mediterranean:
"According to a hymn written in honour of the god Apollo, [Homer] was a blind man from the island of Chios, in the eastern Mediterranean. Chios was home to a guild of poets, or rhapsodists, called the Homeridai, and seems to be one of the most likely candidates. However, many other Greek cities have also claimed to have been his home..." Source: PBS.
The image of Homer as a stern, bearded man with longish hair (as shown in the video) could be accurate, I suppose, but I have no idea how old these various busts are and his appearance could just be a convention, much like the popular images we have of Jesus and Socrates. Responding to the lack of information available in the ancient sources, scholars have tried to analyze the Iliad and Odyssey for clues about Homer's life, but this had led to more complications and controversy.
Some modern scholars have questioned the idea that the poems were written by the same author. Most argue that they weren't originally written down at all -- something Homer couldn't have done himself if he was blind -- but were the result of a long tradition of oral poets reciting by memory and improvising scenes as they went along. In other words, the poems were a group effort until Homer (or someone) finally put them into writing. If Homer was responsible, he would have had to dictate the poems from memory to someone who knew how to write. This scenario seems to be the standard view among scholars right now.
Another view is that the Iliad was written by one man, the Odyssey by another. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), "most scholars [now] see each [of the poems] as the work of one author. Whether he was the same for both remains uncertain. They have a great deal of common phraseology, but the Odyssey is less archaic in language and more repetitive in content; it views the gods rather differently, and for a few common things it uses different words. Such changes might occur in the lifetime of one person. As nothing reliable is known about Homer, perhaps the question is not important." [Emphasis added]
I wish we knew more about Homer, but at the same time I like the fact that he's still a mystery. Now that the physical wilderness has almost disappeared except for a few unexplored regions at the bottom of the sea, the distant past is one of the few things left that remains unknown and mysterious. The ancient world, in many respects, is still terra incognita and I hope it remains that way. If we knew everything there is to know, we'd find ourselves living in a cognitive prison and life would lose a lot of its fascination.
Personally, I like to think that Homer lived in the 12th century BC, that he wrote both poems himself and that he composed the Iliad when he was younger and the Odyssey when he was older and more experienced. I don't have any evidence to support that, but it doesn't matter. When it comes to Homer, I'm a hopeless Romantic. Even if he was blind and illiterate in real life, I like to picture him back in the 12th century, hunched over a table in a small house on a Greek island somewhere, writing his epics on papyrus scrolls with a reed pen by the light of a torch or a brazier in the middle of the night.
This 2017 lecture is from Dr. Eric Luttrell, an English professor at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. His interesting YouTube channel can be found here and I believe this is his website.
Note: the image of Homer as a blind bard is now considered to be legendary.
"One of literature's oldest mysteries is a step closer to being solved. A new study dates Homer's The Iliad to 762 BCE and adds a quantitative means of testing ideas about history by analyzing the evolution of language." Source: Science Daily (2013).
Note: The researchers in this study "compared the Greek vocabulary in Homer's Iliad to modern Greek, relying on a 200-word lexicon found in every language and contrasting the distantly related Hittite as an indicator of divergence.
"Their methods date Homer's language to 762 BCE. The statistical model [according to one of the researchers] 'is completely ignorant to history -- it doesn't know who Homer is and doesn't know Greek.' Accordingly, the potential date ranges from the improbable extremes of 376 BCE to 1157 BCE. But the estimate attaches a robust likelihood to the date, and it ties nicely to Nestor's Cup, a vase dated to 723 BCE that is thought to carry an inscription from The Iliad."
Comment: I have no idea how reliable this study was, but the date the researchers came up with seems to fit (roughly) with the scanty evidence available. For instance, Herodotus, thought to have lived during the late fifth century BC, said that Homer lived 400 years before his time, i.e. sometime during the ninth or eighth centuries BC. And Nestor's Cup, a wine cup discovered on the island of modern Ischia, has been dated to the eighth century BC. If the inscription on the vase is actually from the Iliad, then the epic must have been written before or around the same period when the vase was manufactured.
"Administrators at the University of Reading in England recently cut several lines referring to domestic violence from a classic Greek poem to avoid offending students." Source: The College Fix.
"The 2,000-year-old poem, Types of Women, by Semonides of Amorgos, is taught to first-year classics students at the school and makes reference to silencing women through violence.
"Documents obtained by The UK Daily Mail include a statement by school administrators:
"'The portion of the poem now omitted involved a brief reference to domestic violence,' read the statement. 'That portion has subsequently been removed because, while the text as a whole is vitriolic, that part seemed unnecessarily unpleasant and (potentially) triggering.'"
Comment: I'm amazed that this woke university department teaches Semonides at all. According to Wikipedia, "The first 94 lines [of his poem] describe ten women, or types of women: seven are animals, two are elements, and the final woman is a bee. Of the ten types of women in the poem, nine are delineated as destructive: those who derive from the pig, fox, dog, earth, sea, donkey, ferret, mare, and monkey. Only the woman who comes from the bee is considered to make a good wife [who probably doesn't exist]." The destructive women, variously described as fat, loathsome, amoral, lazy, sex-crazed, etc., are almost impossible to control. They won't stop their "barking" even if you smack them around or knock out their teeth with a stone and can only be subdued with extreme violence.
"Among speakers of Modern Greek, from the Byzantine Empire to modern Greece, Cyprus, and the Greek diaspora, Greek texts from every period have always been pronounced by using the contemporaneous local Greek pronunciation. That makes it easy to recognize the many words that have remained the same or similar in written form from one period to another. Among Classical scholars, it is often called the Reuchlinian pronunciation, after the Renaissance scholar Johann Reuchlin, who defended its use in the West in the 16th century." (Wikipedia)
"Nevertheless, Greek textbooks for secondary education give a summary description of the reconstructed pronunciation of Ancient Greek."
Comment: I don't know how historically accurate they are, but there's something primordial and profound about these reconstructed Greek readings. I guess a lot of this effect depends on the reader, though. Next video is a different (I think) recording of the same material.
"This recitation is trying to find a balance between dramatisation and metrical correctness. I’ve avoided excess on both sides: not to render it as mechanically rhythmic as it usually happens in educational context on all levels and, not over-dramatise it, as is often the case in live performances in larger venues. I hope this is a proper approach for this medium."
Notes: The giant one-eyed Cyclopes are well-known from The Odyssey. "In Homer they are savage and pastoral, and live in a distant country without government or laws," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised). "... But in Hesiod, the Cyclopes ... are divine craftsmen who make Zeus his thunderbolt in gratitude for their release from imprisonment by their father Uranus (Heaven; their mother is Earth). They often appear ... as Hephaestus' workmen, and often again are credited with making ancient fortifications ..."
The Cyclopes were worshiped in parts of the ancient Greek world, but this was apparently limited. According to the OCD, "their only known cult is on the Isthmus of Corinth, where they received sacrifices at their altar."
The cyclopes in Hesiod who forged Zeus's thunderbolt are apparently known as the Elder Cyclops or Kyklopes, according to Theoi Greek Mythology. "The tribe of younger Kyklopes which Odysseus encountered on his travels were a different breed altogether, probably born from the blood of the castrated sky-god Ouranos [Uranus]."
In one version of the myth I've read, the Elder Cyclopes were so frightening that their father locked them away in Tartarus, "the deepest region of the underworld, lower even than Hades," according to the OCD. In another version, they were imprisoned by Cronus, "the youngest of the Titans, sons of Uranus and Gaia ..." (OCD).
According to Wikipedia, "when Cronus came to power as the King of the Titans, he imprisoned the one-eyed Cyclopes and the hundred-armed Hecatonchires in Tartarus and set the monster Campe as its guard. Zeus killed Campe and released these imprisoned giants to aid in his conflict with the Titans."
I've always felt kind of sorry for Polyphemus, the cyclops in The Odyssey. The description of his blinding is absolutely incredible, though. The following excerpt is from the Fagles translation, Book 9: In The One-Eyed Giant's Cave. Click on the embedded player below. It's a lousy reading, but what do you expect? I'm no Wayne June.
The obscure origins of the Christian religion make it a natural subject for "hidden history" conspiracy theories. Dozens, if not hundreds of books have been written over the years, arguing, among other things, that Jesus was a magic mushroom, a solar deity, an Essene or a guerilla fighter sanitized to make him more palatable to the Romans. Some authors claim that Jesus was actually the deified Julius Caesar or that the gospels were propaganda written by the Flavian emperors to help pacify a rebellious province. Whatever the argument, the scarcity of original sources and the ambiguous nature of the evidence leave a lot of room for entertaining speculation.
Very little is known about the original Jesus cult during the first few centuries of its existence. No one really knows when the "official" canonical gospels were written, but the general consensus is that they appeared sometime after the middle to late first century, at least thirty or forty years after Jesus's death. Matthew and Luke are thought to have been written from an earlier account commonly referred to as the "Q document," which as far as I know has never been discovered. Its existence is assumed based on similarities in the manuscripts.
As for Jesus himself, the only independent documentary evidence (from the first few centuries AD) that he even existed consists of a handful of references in Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and a few others. Most of these references, however, are about the Christians as a group, so they don't really support the existence of a historical Jesus. As far as I can tell, the only direct references to Jesus are found in Jewish Antiquities by Josephus and the Annals of Tacitus, but their authenticity has been challenged and Tacitus refers to a Christus (or Chrestus in some translations) rather than a Jesus. They could be insertions made by later Christian writers -- when it comes to ancient sources, you can't take anything for granted. Classical writers weren't very reliable to begin with and the church wasn't above forging references, gospels, apocalypses, epistles and martyr stories in order to market their new religion. For an interesting and extremely detailed description of the "Christian Forgery Mill," see "Forgery In Christianity: A Documented Record Of The Foundations Of The Christian Religion," by Joseph Wheless. Highly recommended.
Video from 2015. I can also recommend Ehrman's book Forged. Very interesting stuff.
Christian origins get even more complicated when you consider all the parallels that exist between Christian doctrine and various Near Eastern fertility cults, Zoroastrianism, astrology, Roman and Egyptian mystery religions and Jewish ascetic, messianic and apocalyptic groups in existence at the time. These parallels aren't very surprising because all of these different movements appeared in the same general landscape, but they provide fertile ground for alternate histories.
Almost everything we know about the rise of Christianity comes from texts and there are a lot of missing sources and "secret doctrines" so popular with conspiracy theorists. Besides the books in the "official" New Testament, there's a huge body of apocryphal literature which reflects the existence of dozens of "heretical" groups like the Gnostics which were gradually suppressed, often by violent means, as the Roman Catholic Church consolidated its control and standardized Christian dogma. More recent discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls fill in some of the historical context, but the general picture is still hazy and confused. "Suppressed gospels" and alternate histories have inspired books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the inspiration for the bestselling Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
The rest of this 2010 interview can be found here.
If Jesus was a real person, he lived during an extremely turbulent period of history. Rome conquered Judea in the first century BC, allying itself with the Maccabees and later using the Herodians as client kings. The Jews revolted in 66 AD and Jerusalem was eventually destroyed around 70 AD by the future emperor Titus, son of Vespasian. Titus took over the suppression of the Jewish revolt, a bloody conflict documented by Josephus in his classic history "The Jewish War," after Vespasian returned to Rome to stake his claim to the throne during the Year Of The Four Emperors in 69 AD.
It was a chaotic time of civil wars and bloody revolutions. The Jewish population in Jerusalem was either massacred, enslaved or scattered around the world (the Diaspora) and the temple was destroyed. The Jews (some of them, anyway) were in almost constant rebellion against the Romans and their puppet rulers in Judea during Jesus' lifetime and the desert was crawling with self-proclaimed messiahs. The idea that a religion like Christianity, preaching peace, forgiveness and universal brotherhood, would appear in this context is surprising, to say the least. "Render unto Caesar" could be seen as treason and collaboration to a population living under a brutal occupation. The Jews were waiting for a military messiah, a descendant of King David who would lead them out of bondage, not some hippy claiming to be the Son of God, which they would have considered blasphemy.
This secular background has inspired a series of books arguing that the real Jesus was actually a military messiah, a guerrilla fighting the Roman occupation. I read several of these books years ago, but I can't remember their titles. The best summation of the argument can probably be found in two chapters written by the anthropologist Marvin Harris in his book "Cows, Pigs, Wars And Witches". Both chapters ("Messiahs" and "The Secret Of The Prince Of Peace") fill in the historical context and argue that Jesus was a revolutionary transformed into a peaceful messiah by later writers in order to protect their underground resistance movement from the Romans. This is plausible enough as far as it goes, but the theory discounts the actual message of the gospels. If there's a hidden message in the New Testament, there's also a surface message which can't simply be dismissed as a kind of cover story designed to conceal an ancient conspiracy.
Speaking of conspiracies, Joseph Atwill's book "Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy To Invent Jesus" argues that Christianity was actually the invention of the Flavian Emperors -- Vespasian, Titus and Domitian -- the same Romans who crushed the Jewish rebellion. Faced with the problem of Jewish resistance in the province and elsewhere, the Flavian court (which included the turncoat Josephus) invented the story of a "peaceful messiah" as a form of counter-propaganda to the more militant religious doctrines causing so much trouble in Judea. According to Atwill, the gospels also include a coded message which reveals that the figure of Jesus in the New Testament is actually Titus -- a kind of Roman inside joke. This hidden message can supposedly be unraveled by reading the gospels together with Josephus' account of the war and deciphering the parallels. Atwill's book makes an interesting read and I particularly like his idea that the gospels were a form of early propaganda designed to pacify a rebellious population. Unfortunately, his argument depends on the numerous parallels which are supposed to exist between the gospels and Josephus and these are obscure, to say the least.
"Jesus Was Caesar" by Franceso Carotta also uses parallels to make its argument that Jesus Christ is actually "the historical manifestation of Divus Julius," i.e., the Divine Julius Caesar. The basic idea is that the Christian religion is a modified version of the cult of the Divine Caesar and that the gospels are a mythologized biography of Caesar from the time of the Roman Civil War to his assassination. In other words, the gospels are seen once again as a kind of code which can only be interpreted by reading them in conjunction with other books. Caesar was made an Imperial God after his death, but his cult disappeared around the time that Christianity emerged. "On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult, on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure: intriguing mirror images." Intriguing, yes, but is it actually true? Who knows? Like Atwill's book, whether you accept it or not depends on how strong these "mirror images" actually are.
"The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross" by John Allegro takes a different approach. This is a fascinating, scholarly and difficult book. Allegro believes that Christianity originated in a very ancient Near Eastern fertility cult centered around the use of the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria. If I understand Allegro's argument correctly (and I'm not sure I do), Christianity evolved as a kind of "false front" to protect the truth about the cult and its practices from the Romans, and its sacred texts are supposed to be full of references to the magic mushroom. Once again, Christianity is seen as a code to be deciphered, an esoteric, multi-layered conspiracy. This is an excellent book, but Allegro bases his theory almost entirely on linguistic arguments, "deciphering the names of gods, mythological characters...and plant names..." by tracing them back to their Sumerian roots, and the average reader will have a hard time verifying or even following his arguments. Still, if there's nothing to this, how do you explain the mushrooms in Christian iconography? For example, a fresco in the Chapel of Plaincouralt, France, shows Adam and Eve standing next to what definitely appears to be a giant mushroom. That's kind of peculiar, to say the least.
Hidden Christian history covers a huge amount of territory. I've only summarized three books, but there are literally hundreds of them available and I've only scratched the surface. For example, "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S argues that Christianity was "created by members of various secret societies, mystery schools and religions in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion." Her book "Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled" explores the use of solar symbolism in world religions, arguing that Jesus is actually a sun deity. Whether you buy any of these various theories is irrelevant. The whole period is so interesting that they're worth reading just for their wealth of background information.
Trying to separate truth from fiction in these theories is an almost impossible task unless you want to spend the rest of your life tracking down sources and doing your own research. The problem comes when you step back and look at all the books that are out there -- all the different theories. One book, taken by itself, can be very convincing, but when you take them all together, it's obvious that they contradict each other in hundreds of different ways and the net effect is literary white noise -- a flood of information, speculation, questionable evidence and mutually exclusive conclusions. In this sense, the hidden history of Christianity is like the JFK assassination: an intractable mystery. The record's too sketchy and complex to come to any solid conclusions, but it doesn't really matter. Most people, as usual, will end up believing exactly what they want to believe and what they were raised to believe.
The most basic question about Jesus is whether he actually existed. Most of these theories about "who he really was" simply melt away if he's just another mythical character like all the other gods of the ancient world.
Was Nero the victim of an ancient smear campaign? Of course he was. Just to take one example, the famous story that he set fire to Rome and then played the lyre while watching the city burn is an obvious fabrication.
Here's the Roman historian Suetonius's description of what happened:
"Pretending to be disgusted by the drab old buildings and narrow, winding streets of Rome, he brazenly set fire to the city; and though a group of ex-consuls caught his attendants, armed with tow and blazing torches, trespassing on their property, they dared not interfere. He also coveted the sites of several granaries, solidly built in stone, near the Golden House; having knocked down their walls with siege-engines, he set the interiors ablaze. This terror lasted for six days and seven nights, causing many people to take shelter in monuments and tombs. Nero's men destroyed not only a vast number of apartment blocks, but mansions which had belonged to famous generals and were still decorated with their triumphal trophies; temples, too, vowed and dedicated by the kings, and others during the Punic and Gallic wars -- in fact, every ancient monument of historical interest that had hitherto survived. Nero watched the conflagration from the Tower of Maecenas, enraptured by what he called 'the beauty of the flames'; then put on his tragedian's costume and sang The Sack of Ilium from beginning to end." -- from "Nero", paragraph 38, Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars.
This is an entertaining story, but it's pure fiction. In fact, this account of Nero's crime is so outlandish that it's almost comical.
Just think about it. According to Suetonius and other sources, Nero sent his flunkies out to burn the city because he wanted to clear land to build his Golden Palace, aka the Domus Aurea, a "vast landscaped palace ... in the heart of Rome." (Wikipedia) This would be like an American president sending out his personal staff to burn down the neighborhoods around the White House so he could build a gigantic complex of mansions and pleasure gardens.
Nero's men weren't subtle about their arson, either. If Suetonius is to be believed, they ran completely amok for six days and seven nights, using siege engines to knock down walls and torching apartment blocks and other buildings that were presumably swarming with people. The chaos and panic this would have caused can easily be imagined. That would be bad enough, of course, but Nero also destroyed monuments and tombs and temples and "mansions which had belonged to famous generals."
This wholesale destruction would have attracted some attention, to say the least.
Rome was a big city at the time, but it wasn't that big and Nero's orgy of destruction supposedly went on for an entire week, right out in the open. Everybody would have known what was happening and who was responsible. According to Suetonius, a group of ex-consuls, no less, caught Nero's men setting fires but were afraid to do anything about it. In other words, they knew who the arsonists worked for.
The point is that none of this was a secret. When it was all over, everyone from the patricians in the Roman government to the ordinary plebs on the street would have known that Nero was responsible. He would have been universally condemned, but that isn't what happened:
"The Great Fire of Rome was an urban fire in July of the year AD 64. It caused widespread devastation in the city on 19 July, before being brought under control after six days. Differing accounts [emphasis added] either blame Emperor Nero for initiating the fire or credit him with organizing measures to contain it and provide relief for refugees." Wikipedia.
Why would there be differing accounts of what happened if Suetonius's version of events is correct? Remember, some of Nero's arsonists were supposedly caught in the act. This wasn't a covert operation. If Nero really did order his people to "brazenly" attack and burn his own city, it wasn't exactly deniable.
Nero himself was in Antium when the fire started. According to Wikipedia, "[h]e returned to the city and took measures to bring in food supplies and open gardens and public buildings to accommodate refugees." Curiously, he wasn't lynched on the spot after committing such an atrocity. On the contrary, he was given credit, at least in some sources, for his relief efforts.
Nero, like Caligula, was the victim of an ancient smear campaign, but that doesn't mean he was a good emperor. He wasn't, but even though Rome apparently rejoiced at his death (according to Suetonius), he was still popular with part of the population when he was finally overthrown and murdered during the revolt of Vindex and Galba in 68 AD. Even Seutonius concedes as much:
"...there were people who used to lay spring and summer flowers on his grave for a long time, and had statues made of him, wearing his fringed toga, which they put up on the Rostra; they even continued to circulate his edicts, pretending he was still alive and would soon return to confound his enemies. What is more, King Vologaesus of Parthia, on sending ambassadors to ratify his alliance with Rome, particularly requested the Senate to honor Nero's memory. In fact, twenty years later, when I was a young man, a mysterious individual came forward claiming to be Nero; and so magical was the sound of his name in the Parthians' ears that they supported him to the best of their ability, and only handed him over with great reluctance." -- "Nero," from paragraph 57.
People don't usually put up statues to honor deranged lunatics who attack and burn their own capital cities. For the real story, at least as far as it can be reconstructed, check out The Great Fire of Rome by Stephen Dando-Collins. Highly recommended.
Comment: One of the more plausible theories about how Christianity developed came from the late John Allegro, author of The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. According to Allegro, Christianity evolved from the beliefs of the ancient Essenes,"a sect of Second Temple Judaism that flourished from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE, which some scholars claim seceded from the Zadokite priests." (Wikipedia) The Essenes, of course, are thought to have maintained the library of ancient manuscripts now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
There are a lot of similarities between Essenism and Christianity -- communal meals and the ritual use of baptism, for instance -- and the Essenes already had small communities located around the Mediterranean world in the first century AD.
"[The Essenes] are styled Essæi by Philo, who derives it from hosios, 'holy', and Essæi and Esseni by Josephus. Their numbers according to both authors were about 4000 and their chief place of residence along the west side, but away from the shore, of the Dead Sea. They also dwelt in other, but mostly secluded, parts and small towns of Palestine; yet some were found in cities. The sect arose about 150 B.C. (the first-named Essene is Judas, 110 B.C.) and disappeared towards the end of the first century A.D." Source: Catholic Encyclopedia.
Allegro's theory is that these scattered Essene groups evolved into the earliest Christian congregations after the Romans defeated the Jews in the First Jewish-Roman War, capturing Jerusalem and destroying the Second Temple. If Christianity first appeared in these Essene communities, it would explain the relatively rapid spread of Christian congregations in the first century after Jesus' supposed crucifixion.
This is an interesting and plausible theory and, unlike a lot of theories about how Christianity began, Allegro's evolutionary model is straightforward and based on documentary evidence that doesn't require a lot of convoluted textual interpretation to decipher. The similarities between Essenism and Christianity do exist, but there's a lot of disagreement (naturally) as to how close the similarities are and what they actually mean. Allegro is infamous for writing "The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross," but even if you don't buy that particular theory he was a serious scholar and "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth" is definitely worth checking out. Highly recommended.
Beowulf is a dark, violent and primordial work -- a classic example of the mythic hero archetype which forms the basis for so many popular and enduring stories. I can recommend Heaney's readable translation. The Chickering dual-language version is also highly regarded -- many think that this translation captures more of the feel of the original Old English -- but there are many other translations available, including one by the great J.R.R. Tolkien, and the differences between them can be dramatic.
Beowulf was apparently written during a transitional stage between Christianity and paganism in Scandinavia. According to the University of Cork (the original article seems to have vanished), "the heroic elegiac poem ... is a reflection of many Anglo-Saxon ideals and concepts. This work was written after the Anglo-Saxons were already Christianized, yet the pagan traditions that had dominated their lives were still present in their minds. Overall, Beowulf contains many pagan themes and concepts, but yet it also contains many clear references to Christianity. It is an Anglo Saxon work with a peculiar spiritual atmosphere."
If you ask me, Beowulf gets its power and atmosphere from its pagan element, not from Christianity.
The Mystery Of Homer
"The Greeks and Romans always thought that the legendary poet Homer was the greatest author ever. However, we know hardly anything about the man or men who composed the Iliad ... or the Odyssey. At the moment, most scholars agree that these texts were dictated to a writer by a very capable bard, who used older, oral traditions, at the beginning of the eighth century BCE. We do not know to what extent later poets have made additions or changes to the two epics." Source: Livius.
Comment: Homer's a mystery. No one knows who he was, where he came from, when he lived, where he lived, or whether he actually composed the Iliad and Odyssey, the foundation works of western literature. At one point, scholars doubted that he even existed, but the consensus today is that he was a real historical figure who lived in the 8th century BC. As far as I can tell, this consensus is based on just one source--the histories of Herodotus, who wrote that Homer lived around 400 years before his time.
There are other sources which place Homer as far back as the 12th century BC, closer to the time the Trojan War is thought to have taken place. It's all very murky, though. The vague image we have of Homer is based on ancient writers who may or may not be reliable and who contradict each other in various ways. The only point of agreement is that Homer was a blind bard who lived on an island in the Mediterranean:
"According to a hymn written in honour of the god Apollo, [Homer] was a blind man from the island of Chios, in the eastern Mediterranean. Chios was home to a guild of poets, or rhapsodists, called the Homeridai, and seems to be one of the most likely candidates. However, many other Greek cities have also claimed to have been his home..." Source: PBS.
The image of Homer as a stern, bearded man with longish hair (as shown in the video) could be accurate, I suppose, but I have no idea how old these various busts are and his appearance could just be a convention, much like the popular images we have of Jesus and Socrates. Responding to the lack of information available in the ancient sources, scholars have tried to analyze the Iliad and Odyssey for clues about Homer's life, but this had led to more complications and controversy.
Some modern scholars have questioned the idea that the poems were written by the same author. Most argue that they weren't originally written down at all -- something Homer couldn't have done himself if he was blind -- but were the result of a long tradition of oral poets reciting by memory and improvising scenes as they went along. In other words, the poems were a group effort until Homer (or someone) finally put them into writing. If Homer was responsible, he would have had to dictate the poems from memory to someone who knew how to write. This scenario seems to be the standard view among scholars right now.
Another view is that the Iliad was written by one man, the Odyssey by another. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), "most scholars [now] see each [of the poems] as the work of one author. Whether he was the same for both remains uncertain. They have a great deal of common phraseology, but the Odyssey is less archaic in language and more repetitive in content; it views the gods rather differently, and for a few common things it uses different words. Such changes might occur in the lifetime of one person. As nothing reliable is known about Homer, perhaps the question is not important." [Emphasis added]
I wish we knew more about Homer, but at the same time I like the fact that he's still a mystery. Now that the physical wilderness has almost disappeared except for a few unexplored regions at the bottom of the sea, the distant past is one of the few things left that remains unknown and mysterious. The ancient world, in many respects, is still terra incognita and I hope it remains that way. If we knew everything there is to know, we'd find ourselves living in a cognitive prison and life would lose a lot of its fascination.
Personally, I like to think that Homer lived in the 12th century BC, that he wrote both poems himself and that he composed the Iliad when he was younger and the Odyssey when he was older and more experienced. I don't have any evidence to support that, but it doesn't matter. When it comes to Homer, I'm a hopeless Romantic. Even if he was blind and illiterate in real life, I like to picture him back in the 12th century, hunched over a table in a small house on a Greek island somewhere, writing his epics on papyrus scrolls with a reed pen by the light of a torch or a brazier in the middle of the night.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient Literature, Commentary, Greece, Homer, Videos | Permalink