Homer

Greek poet

• Born: c. early eighth century b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Possibly Ionia, Asia Minor (now in Turkey)
• Died: c. late eighth century b.c.e.
• Place of death: Greece

Homer wrote two Greek epic poems that played a crucial role in the birth of classical Greek civilization. These works greatly influenced history, theology, and literature in Greece and in the entire Western world.

Early Life

The Greeks were not sure where Homer (HOH-muhr) was born, when he lived, or even if such a person actually existed. The name “Homer” may simply be a generic term denoting “one who fits a song together.” Still, various sources provide some information about the provenance of the Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611) and the Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614). The language of the poems is Ionic and Aeolic Greek, which points to an East Greek origin. (In antiquity, East Greece included the west coast of Asia Minor and neighboring islands.) Greek tradition named either the island of Chios or the town of Smyrna, both in eastern Greece, as Homer’s birthplace. Chios boasted a guild of rhapsodists who recited the Homeric epics and who claimed, without any proof, to be directly descended from Homer. The geographical references in the poems, particularly in the Iliad, are most specific and correspond to the Ionian area and thus also support an East Greek origin.

Homer’s precise dates are no easier to ascertain than his birthplace. At first sight, twelfth century features in the poems, the Mycenaean geography of the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, and ancient weapons such as Ajax’s great body shield and Odysseus’s curious boar’s tusk helmet seem to suggest that the poems were composed around the time of the Trojan War. However, archaeological discoveries have shown that certain features of weaponry and warfare described in the poems were not in use before 900 to 700 b.c.e. For example, the shield of Achilles in book 18 of the Iliad clearly depicts the law courts and agricultural life of an eighth century city-state, not the twelfth century monarchy of Agamemnon. The internal evidence from the poems points to a poet working in the eighth century but trying to paint a picture of the Mycenaean era more than four hundred years before his own time. The fact that there are virtually no references to events after 700 b.c.e. indicates that the poems must have been completed by that date.

Life’s Work

The obscurity surrounding the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey is partly a product of the conventions of the epic poetic genre itself. An epic poet was expected simultaneously to create and sing a poem on a heroic subject before an audience, without the help of writing. This astonishing feat was possible because generations of epic poets had developed traditional language, phraseology, and motifs with which to tell the stories of the great Greek heroes. Such poetry placed a premium on the ability to create poems orally, not on the development of a unique individual style. Hence, any trace of the personality of the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey has vanished.

Greek epic poets may have sung their songs at the dinner gatherings of the aristocracy, as do the bards in the Odyssey, as well as to members of their own artisan class. How the Iliad and the Odyssey moved from oral performance to their final written forms is not fully understood. The poems are clearly not an assemblage of stories stitched together by a collector. As both poems develop organically around a central theme and exhibit a sophisticated handling of poetic techniques, they are most likely the creations of a single monumental composer at the end of a long poetic tradition.

In creating the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer employed the various conventions of epic style in a skillful and flexible manner, which satisfied both aesthetic expectations and the need for fluent oral composition. The artificial dialect mixture of the poems was created for the epic and was never used by anyone in actual conversation. The mixture of dialect forms gives the language of the poems a unique “epic” quality and provides metrically convenient words for the poets to use in oral composition. Composition is also aided by ornamental epithets that are applied to divinities, people, and objects. Such adjectives not only satisfy metrical demands but also illuminate beautifully the unchanging nature of the heroic world. Thus, ships are “swift” even when standing still, and Odysseus is already “much-suffering” in the Iliad, before starting his ten-year trek home. Even the sequence of events in the poems is structured in a way that helps the poet compose aloud. Frequently repeated traditional scenes, such as arming for battle and sacrificing to the gods, possess a constant order of elements that is easily remembered. This regularity of events creates a strong sense that both nature and human life proceed along a carefully ordered path and makes anomalous behavior such as Achilles’ seem especially jarring.

Even the major plot elements of both the Iliad and the Odyssey are very likely traditional. Both poems employ a “withdrawal-devastation-return” framework with a revenge motif at the end, a format typical of many epic poems. Scholars have found evidence for other earlier Greek epics that contained many of the thematic elements of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, but the Homeric poems are unique in their tight organization around one major theme: the Iliad around the wrath of Achilles, the Odyssey around the homecoming of Odysseus.

The action of the Iliad covers only fifty-three days in the last year of the ten-year siege of Troy, although the poet cleverly inserts references to the events of the previous decade that make the listeners believe they have experienced the entire war. The abduction of the Greek queen Helen by the Trojan prince Paris forms the backdrop for the events of the Iliad, which takes as its subject the wrath of one individual, Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior at Troy, and the devastation it wreaks on him and all heroic society.

The leader of the Greek army, Agamemnon, has taken away Achilles’ concubine after he is forced to give up his own. Achilles responds to this slight by laying down his arms, a correct response according to the heroic code of honor. However, he errs when refusing the fabulous ransom Agamemnon offers him to return to battle. The result is devastation: Patroclus, Achilles’ closest companion, dies at the hands of the Trojan hero Hector while trying to take Achilles’ place. This catastrophe finally goads Achilles to return to battle. He is, however, now fighting not for the Greeks but for personal revenge, a crucial difference. He abandons the civilized humanity of the heroic code and crosses over into inhuman frenzy, which the poet likens to the uncontrollable force of nature. He kills Hector, the embodiment of the civilized humanity that Achilles has left behind. Achilles continues to rage out of control until the gods intervene to persuade him to give Hector’s body back to the aged King Priam. Thus, the Iliad is more than a tale of heroic exploits: It is a profound meditation on life and death, culture and nature, and individualism and society.

The Odyssey tells the story of the return of Odysseus to his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, on the island of Ithaca after ten years of fighting at Troy. It is the only surviving story of many that narrated the experiences of the Greek heroes returning home after the Trojan War. Odysseus’s return itself took ten years, but, by using a technique seen in the Iliad, the poet compresses the time frame of the Odyssey into forty days in the tenth year of the journey, while casting many backward glances over the events of the preceding decade.

While the poem centers on the return of Odysseus from Troy, the content of the Odyssey is thematically more diverse than that of the Iliad, and its structure is correspondingly more complex. It contains four major themes: the journey of Odysseus on his way home, replete with fantastic monsters, beguiling sorceresses, and a trip to the underworld; a parallel journey of Telemachus, who is now twenty years old and trying to grow to adulthood despite an absent father; Odysseus’s actual return to Ithaca and his winning back of home and wife; and his revenge, aided by his son and faithful retainers, on the suitors who were vying for Penelope’s hand. The amalgamation of all these elements into a coherent whole is most skillfully accomplished. Frequent changes of scene and an exciting narrative of his adventures by Odysseus create suspense and keep the plot moving quickly.

The Odyssey paints a vivid picture of life in Greece. It focuses on the city-state Ithaca and, in particular, on the nuclear family represented by Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus. It also includes moving portraits of slaves and other nonaristocratic characters. The center of attention, however, is always Odysseus, who is not a tragic hero such as Achilles or Hector. He is a survivor who lives by his wits and his tongue. He confronts death on a daily basis but is never in danger of dying before accomplishing his goals. In later Greek literature, Odysseus became a symbol of persuasion, trickery, and deceit.

The Iliad and the Odyssey thus focus intently on the role of the individual in society. This theme is rooted in the events of the eighth century, the very beginnings of classical Greek society. The great Mycenaean Greek kingdoms had collapsed by 1150 b.c.e. for reasons that are not understood but that probably included intense internecine warfare. The absence of the palace bureaucracies forced small, separate groups of people to fend for themselves but ultimately allowed them to grow from 1150 to 800 b.c.e. into the city-states of classical Greece.

The ninth and eighth centuries, during which the heroic epic tradition probably took shape, saw the formation of many city-states composed of individual households, much like that of Odysseus and in contrast to the extended Mycenaean family of the Trojan king Priam seen in the Iliad. Each member of such a household bore a great responsibility for its maintenance and, by extension, that of the city-state. Hence, the Iliad and the Odyssey devote much attention to the crucial question of the proper behavior of individuals in society.

An awareness of the common Greek heritage shared by all the city-states sprang up alongside the growth of the different separate political units. The Olympic Games, to which every city sent athletes, were founded in 776 b.c.e. The Panhellenic oracle at Delphi began dispensing political as well as personal advice around the same time. The Homeric epics, which record an expedition of many Greek heroes united against a common enemy, may be seen as both an affirmation of the connections between all the Greeks and support for the hero-founders of the new city-states.

Significance

Homer bequeathed to the West the beginnings of its literature. Countless works have been inspired and influenced by the epics, in which may be found the seeds of narrative, comedy, and tragedy. The sheer genius of the Iliad and the Odyssey becomes obvious in comparison with other epic poems that have survived from ancient Greece. Fragments of other epics, known collectively as the Epic Cycle, indicate that the Homeric epics were the originals around which the poems of the cycle were fashioned. These other poems were much shorter and, judging from the scanty remains, inferior in scope and style.

Homer also gave both history and religion to the ancient Greeks, and through them to Western civilization. Little has been said here about the gods mentioned in the poems, because humans are so clearly the focus of the poet’s interest. The gods, who have the same emotions and social structure as the struggling mortals, appear frequently as mirrors for human activities and emotions, but there is one essential difference. The gods will never die, whereas death is the inevitable portion of every hero. Heroic life is merely a brief and shining prelude to a long and shadowy afterlife in Hades. Immortality for humans is obtainable only in heroic song. The gods’ immortality underscores the mortality of the heroes, adding emphasis and pathos. The gods watch avidly the events unfolding on the Trojan plain, but they cannot rescue anyone—even their own offspring—from death when it is fated.

Bibliography

Clarke, Howard. The Art of the “Odyssey.” Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. General introduction to the Odyssey, with a chapter comparing the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Pengiun, 2003. Fagles’s verse translation is accompanied by a long and detailed introduction by Bernard Knox. Includes glossary and textual notes.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Poetic translation includes introduction by D. S. Carne-Ross and bibliographical references.

Kirk, G. S. The Songs of Homer. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1962. The standard introduction to the Homeric poems, focusing on their language and composition. Illustrated.

Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans. Rev. ed. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Sophisticated and stimulating analysis of the hero in Greek civilization and how the language of Greek epic defines his role.

Powell, Barry B. Homer. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. A concise introduction by a professor of classics writing with students in mind. Considers the Homeric question by reference to recent scholarship. Good bibliography.

Schein, Seth. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s “Iliad.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. An introduction to a literary interpretation of the Iliad. Explores questions of mortality, the gods, and heroism in detail. Excellent references.

Snodgrass, Anthony. Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Economic and social history of the age in which the epics were composed, based on the archaeological evidence. Well illustrated.

Wace, Alan J. B., and Frank H. Stubbings, eds. A Companion to Homer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1962. Essays on language, transmission of the text, and especially the archaeological evidence pertaining to the Homeric poems, by authorities in each field. Slightly dated but still authoritative. Illustrated, with many references.