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.
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