Ancient World Review

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.

The Iliad (Books 1-6), The Epic Cycle & The History Of The Trojan War

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.

Homeric Epics Written Around 762 BC?

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.

Readings From The Odyssey In Reconstructed Ancient Greek

"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 particular recording (of the first rhapsody) is available from AncientGreek.eu, which provides audio recordings of ancient Greek texts. I'm not sure who the reader is, but he explained the approach he took with this particular recording:

"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."

The Cyclopes

Clip from the 1958 classic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad with widescreen stop-motion animation by the legendary Ray Harryhausen.

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 clip above is from the best dramatization of the Odyssey I've seen so far -- the 1997 British-American miniseries starring Armand Asante. If you haven't seen this, you should check it out.

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.

Cyclops Blinding The Odyssey

Zenodotus - First Librarian Of The Library Of Alexandria

"Zenodotus ... was a Greek grammarian, literary critic, Homeric scholar, and the first librarian of the Library of Alexandria. A native of Ephesus and a pupil of Philitas of Cos, he lived during the reigns of the first two Ptolemies, and was at the height of his reputation about 280 BC." (Wikipedia)

"Zenodotus was the first superintendent of the Library of Alexandria and the first critical editor ... of Homer. In 284 BC the Ptolemaic court appointed Zenodotus as first Director of the library and also the official tutor to the royal children. His colleagues in the librarianship were Alexander of Aetolia and Lycophron of Chalcis, to whom were allotted the tragic and comic writers respectively, Homer and other epic poets being assigned to Zenodotus."

Note: Zenodotus is a very obscure figure, but his editorial work apparently had a big impact on the content of Homer's epic poems. "After comparing different manuscripts of Homer, he deleted doubtful lines, transposed others, made emendations [corrections, changes], and divided the Iliad and the Odyssey into 24 books each," according to Britannica Academic (source currently locked). His work was criticized and other editors came out with their own editions, which raises the question of how much the original version -- if there was an original -- was tampered with back then.

Zenodotus' editorial revisions "represented the first scientific attempt to get back to the original Homeric text by the collation of several manuscripts," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary. "He marked lines of the genuineness of which he felt doubt with a newly-invented sign, the obelus [Zenodotus apparently invented this sign, still used today]. Some modern critics have accused him of altering the text drastically; more recent research suggests that this picture of an arbitrary and subjective manipulator of the text is unfair."

Resolving this question is probably impossible without access to the manuscripts that Zenodotus used for his comparisons. His work does prove that there were different versions of the Iliad and Odyssey floating around in the third-century BC.  I suppose if those versions could be traced back to their authors it might be possible to eventually discover if there were original versions of the poems, but any scholar wandering down that rabbit hole will probably never be heard from again.

The Palace Of Nestor

Note: "[The mythological] Nestor ... was king of Pylos and went with Menelaus around Greece to assemble the heroes ready for the expedition against Troy, then himself accompanied them with 90 ships," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed revised). "Homer portrays him as a highly respected elder statesman, the archetypal wise old man, but one still strong and valiant in battle."

According to Ancient Greek Journey, "there was for a long time debate as to whether [Nestor's] palace was in Elis, near Olympia, as  Homer describes in the Iliad  or by the shore, as described in the Odyssey, but in 1939 Carl Blegen found the remains of a Mycenaean palace 10 miles north of modern Pylos at Epano Englianos, and this is now believed to be Nestor's.  Excavations were stopped during the war and restarted in 1952 continuing until 1966. About one thousand Linear B tablets found here were an important factor in the deciphering of the script by Michael Ventris in 1952, and thus making the connection between the Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations."

Archaeologist Claims To Have Found 'Agamemnon's Throne'

"A Greek archaeologist believes he has found a fragment of the lost throne of the rulers of Mycenae, famous from ancient myth and the story of the Trojan War." Source: Archaeology News Network.

Imaging The Iliad: A Digital Renaissance

Notes: "The manuscript Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 [= 822], known to Homeric scholars as the Venetus A, is the oldest complete text of the Iliad in existence. It was acquired by the Greek Cardinal Basileus Bessarion in the 15th century CE and donated together with his entire collection of Greek manuscripts to the Republic of Venice, thereby forming the Marciana library’s initial collection. It is vellum, and was constructed at the end of the 10th century CE." Source: The Homer Multitext.

According to History of Information, the Venetus A manuscript "is regarded by some as the best text of the epic poem. It also contains several layers of annotations, glosses, and commentaries known as the 'A scholia.'  These are thought to preserve editorial comments made by scholars at the Royal Library of Alexandria, as well as scholia accumulated by late antique annotators and philologists until the manuscript was written at Constantinople during the Macedonian Renaissance. The manuscript, also includes a summary of the early Greek Epic Cycle which is considered the most important source of information on those lost poems."

Image of Folio 12r of Ventus A from History of Information.

Related: Images of Homeric Manuscripts from the Biblioteca Marciana (PDF)

Grading 4 Rival Translations Of The Iliad

"A good way of getting a sense of the values and priorities of the Iliad’s many translators is to compare how they translate a given passage." Source: The New Yorker (2011)

Comment: I read the Fagles translations of Homer and thought they were fantastic. The first sighting of the cyclop's island in the Odyssey is particularly vivid and the final scene where Odysseus takes revenge on the suitors who have been hounding his wife and plundering his kingdom is more than a little vicious and chilling. I haven't read Lattimore or Mitchell and the one time I looked at Pope's classic translation, it was way too dated to get into, but that's just me. At the moment, I'm reading Lombardo's translation of the Iliad and I really like his straightforward, colloquial style. The introduction by Sheila Murnaghan is a nice piece of work as well.

The clip below is from the 1997 TV adaptation of The Odyssey staring Armand Assante, the best film version of the story I've seen so far. Highly recommended.