Homer

The identity of "Homer" is a mystery, and scholars generally regard the ancient conception of a single author behind the Iliad and the Odyssey as a fictional narrative. During antiquity, biographical details about Homer's life became increasingly mythologized due to his anonymity and it was believed during that period that he lived after the Trojan War. Contemporary scholars study the life of Homer alongside the Homeric Question, the ongoing academic debate concerning Homer's authorship and the origins, composition, and transmission of the epic poems attributed to him. The two best-known ancient biographies of Homer are the Life of Homer by the Pseudo-Herodotus and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. The first early implicit references to Homer in the 7th century BC are in works by Archilochus, Alcman, Tyrtaeus, and Callinus. The poet Pindar is credited with saying that Homer originated from Chios and Smyrna, both of which are also mentioned by other fifth-century writers. Other biographical traditions imagined Homer to have been a rhapsode or singer who performed at religious festivals, was a wandering bard or a composer of other works (the "Homerica"), or that he failed to solve a riddle set by fishermen. According to the Greek historian Ephorus, Homer studied poetry with the bard Phemius and was born in Cyme. Philochorus thought Homer's birthplace to be in Argos; later writers believed Pylos and Athens to have been Homer's birthplace. No one account of Homer's origin became mainstream, but most accounts of his death place its location on Ios. ==Works attributed to Homer==

Today, only the Iliad and the Odyssey are associated with the name "Homer". In antiquity, a large number of other works were sometimes attributed to him, including the Homeric Hymns, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, several epigrams, the Little Iliad, the Nostoi, the Thebaid, the Cypria, the Epigoni, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog–Mouse War"), the Margites, the Capture of Oechalia, and the Phocais. These claims are not considered authentic today and were not universally accepted in the ancient world. As with the multitude of legends surrounding Homer's life, they indicate little more than the centrality of Homer to ancient Greek culture. == History of Homeric scholarship ==

Ancient . The study of Homer is one of the oldest topics in scholarship, dating back to antiquity. Nonetheless, the aims of Homeric studies have changed throughout the millennia. They were the first literary works taught to all students. The earliest modern Homeric scholars started with the same basic approaches towards the Homeric poems as scholars in antiquity. In 1664, contradicting the widespread praise of Homer as the epitome of wisdom, François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac wrote a scathing attack on the Homeric poems, declaring that they were incoherent, immoral, tasteless, and without style, that Homer never existed, and that the poems were hastily cobbled together by incompetent editors from unrelated oral songs. Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum, published in 1795, argued that much of the material later incorporated into the Iliad and the Odyssey was originally composed in the tenth century BC in the form of short, separate oral songs, is the oldest dating back to the 5th century BC, crafted 300 years after Homer composed the Odyssey. Discovered in Persepolis and housed at the National Museum of Iran, the other three are kept at the Vatican Museum and Capitoline Museum in Rome. Within the Analyst school were two camps: proponents of the "lay theory", which held that the Iliad and the Odyssey were put together from a large number of short, independent songs, The Neoanalysts sought to trace the relationships between the Homeric poems and other epic poems, which have now been lost, but of which modern scholars do possess some patchy knowledge. Neoanalysts have traditionally reconstructed specific lost poems as sources for the Iliad and Odyssey, but more recent scholarship has sought to reframe such neoanalytical arguments within the oral context of early Greek epic, exploring how the Iliad and Odyssey draw on established mythological traditions in general (such as the story of Achilles' death). Contemporary Although most contemporary scholars disagree on other questions about the genesis of the poems, they agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey about the Iliad". Nearly all scholars agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey are unified poems, in that each poem shows a clear overall design and that they are not merely strung together from unrelated songs. Contemporary scholars continue to debate the date of the poems. At one extreme, Richard Janko has proposed a date for both poems to the eighth century BC based on linguistic analysis and statistics. Barry B. Powell dates the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey to sometime between 800 and 750 BC, based on the statement from Herodotus, who lived in the late fifth century BC, that Homer lived four hundred years before his own time "and not more" () and on the fact that the poems do not mention hoplite battle tactics, inhumation, or literacy. Martin Litchfield West has argued that the Iliad echoes the poetry of Hesiod and that it must have been composed around 660–650 BC at the earliest, with the Odyssey up to a generation later. ==Historicity of the Homeric epics and Homeric society==

Scholars continue to debate questions such as whether the Trojan War took place – and if so when and where – and to what extent the society depicted by Homer is based on his own or one which was, even at the time of the poems' composition, known only as legends. The Homeric epics are largely set in the east and center of the Mediterranean, with some scattered references to Egypt, Ethiopia and other distant lands, in a warlike society that resembles that of the Greek world slightly before the hypothesized date of the poems' composition. In ancient Greek chronology, the sack of Troy was dated to 1184 BC. By the nineteenth century, there was widespread scholarly skepticism that the Trojan War had ever happened and that Troy had even existed, but in 1873 Heinrich Schliemann announced to the world that he had discovered the ruins of Homer's Troy at Hisarlik in modern Turkey. Some contemporary scholars think the destruction of Troy VIIa 1220 BC was the origin of the myth of the Trojan War, others that the poem was inspired by multiple similar sieges that took place over the centuries. Most scholars now agree that the Homeric poems depict customs and elements of the material world that are derived from different periods of Greek history. For instance, the heroes in the poems use bronze weapons, characteristic of the Bronze Age in which the poems are set, rather than the later Iron Age during which they were composed; The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and continued archaeological investigation has increased modern scholars' understanding of the Bronze Age Aegean civilisation, which in many ways resembles the ancient Near East more than the society described by Homer. Some aspects of the Homeric world are simply made up; for instance, the Iliad 22.145–56 describes two springs run near the city of Troy, one that runs steaming hot and the other that runs icy cold. It is here that Hector takes his final stand against Achilles. Archaeologists, however, have uncovered no evidence that springs of this description ever actually existed. ==Style and language==

'' (painted 1509–1510) by Raphael, depicting Homer wearing a crown of laurels atop Mount Parnassus, with Dante Alighieri on his right, in red, and Virgil on his left, in green. The Homeric epics are written in an artificial literary language or "Kunstsprache" only used in epic hexameter poetry. Homeric Greek shows features of multiple regional Greek dialects and periods but is fundamentally based on Ionic Greek, in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was composed slightly before the Odyssey and that Homeric formulae preserve features older than other parts of the poems. The poems were composed in unrhymed dactylic hexameters; the ancient Greek metre was quantity-based rather than stress-based. Homer frequently uses set phrases such as epithets ("crafty Odysseus", "rosy-fingered Dawn", "owl-eyed Athena", etc.), Homeric formulae ("and then answered [him/her], Agamemnon, king of men", "when the early-born rose-fingered Dawn came to light", "thus he/she spoke"), simile, type scenes, ring composition and repetition. These habits aid the extemporizing bard and are characteristic of oral poetry. For instance, the main words of a Homeric sentence are generally placed towards the beginning, whereas literate poets like Virgil or Milton use longer and more complicated syntactical structures. Homer then expands on these ideas in subsequent clauses; this technique is called parataxis. The so-called "type scenes" (), were named by Walter Arend in 1933. He noted that Homer often, when describing frequently recurring activities such as eating, praying, fighting and dressing, used blocks of set phrases in sequence that were then elaborated by the poet. The "Analyst" school had considered these repetitions as un-Homeric, whereas Arend interpreted them philosophically. Parry and Lord noted that these conventions are found in many other cultures. "Ring composition" or chiastic structure (when a phrase or idea is repeated at both the beginning and end of a story, or a series of such ideas first appears in the order A, B, C ... before being reversed as ... C, B, A) has been observed in the Homeric epics. Opinion differs as to whether these occurrences are a conscious artistic device, a mnemonic aid or a spontaneous feature of human storytelling. Both of the Homeric poems begin with an invocation to the Muse. In the Iliad, the poet beseeches her to sing of "the anger of Achilles", and in the Odyssey, he asks her to tell of "the man of many ways". A similar opening was later employed by Virgil in his Aeneid. == Textual transmission ==

'' (1885) by Lawrence Alma-Tadema The orally transmitted Homeric poems were put into written form at some point between the eighth and sixth centuries BC. Some scholars believe that they were dictated to a scribe by the poet and that the current versions of the Iliad and Odyssey were in origin orally dictated texts. Albert Lord noted that the Balkan bards that he was studying revised and expanded their songs in their process of dictating. Some scholars hypothesise that a similar process of revision and expansion occurred when the Homeric poems were first written down. Other scholars hold that, after the poems were created in the eighth century, they continued to be orally transmitted with considerable revision until they were written down in the sixth century. After textualisation, the poems were each divided into 24 rhapsodes, today referred to as books, and labelled by the letters of the Greek alphabet. Most scholars attribute the book divisions to the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria, in Egypt. Some trace the divisions back further to the Classical period. Very few credit Homer himself with the divisions. In antiquity, it was widely held that the Homeric poems were collected and organised in Athens in the late sixth century BC by Pisistratus (died 528/527 BC), in what subsequent scholars have dubbed the "Peisistratean recension". The first printed edition of Homer was produced in 1488 in Milan, Italy by Demetrios Chalkokondyles. Today scholars use medieval manuscripts, papyri and other sources; some argue for a "multi-text" view, rather than seeking a single definitive text. The nineteenth-century edition of Arthur Ludwich mainly follows Aristarchus's work, whereas van Thiel's (1991, 1996) follows the medieval vulgate. Others, such as Martin West (1998–2000) or T. W. Allen, fall somewhere between these two extremes. == See also ==