Homer

Homer is the name the ancient Greeks gave to the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two oldest surviving works of Greek literature and the foundation of the whole Western literary tradition. Whether Homer was a real individual, one poet or two, or a name attached to a long tradition of oral singers is one of the oldest debates in scholarship, known as the Homeric Question. Most scholars date the poems to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, and the dates given here are only a rough guide to that period.

The Greeks of the classical age had no reliable information about Homer, and the "lives" of him that circulated in antiquity are legends. The most common picture was of a blind singer from Ionia, the Greek-speaking coast of Asia Minor in today's Turkey, and the nearby islands. Many cities claimed to be his birthplace, Smyrna and the island of Chios most strongly, and a tradition placed his grave on the small island of Ios. A guild of reciters on Chios, the Homeridae, claimed descent from him. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, thought Homer had lived about four hundred years before his own time, roughly the ninth century BCE. Other works were also attributed to Homer in antiquity, including the Homeric Hymns, a comic mock-epic about a war between frogs and mice, and several lost epics on the Trojan cycle, but these attributions were doubted even then and are rejected today.

The Iliad, of about 15,700 lines, is set during the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of Troy. It does not tell the whole war but a few weeks of it, beginning with the quarrel between the Greek commander Agamemnon and his greatest warrior, Achilles, who withdraws from the fighting in anger. The consequences unfold through great battle scenes until Achilles' friend Patroclus is killed by the Trojan prince Hector, and Achilles returns to kill Hector in revenge. The poem ends not with the fall of Troy but with Hector's father, King Priam, coming to Achilles' tent to beg for his son's body, and the two enemies weeping together. Its subjects are honour, rage, grief and mortality.

The Odyssey, of about 12,100 lines, follows Odysseus, king of Ithaca, on his ten-year journey home after the war. It tells of his encounters with the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the Sirens and the land of the dead, and of his faithful wife Penelope and son Telemachus at home, besieged by suitors who want his kingdom. The poem ends with his return in disguise and his slaughter of the suitors. It is more varied in tone than the Iliad, full of storytelling, disguise and cunning, and its hero survives by intelligence rather than strength.

Both poems are in dactylic hexameter, a six-beat line, and in a literary dialect, Homeric Greek, that mixes mainly Ionic forms with Aeolic ones and words from different periods, a language no one ever spoke in daily life.

Doubts about Homer began in the seventeenth century, when the French writer François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac, argued that he had never existed. In 1795 the German scholar Friedrich August Wolf proposed that the poems had been composed orally in shorter pieces and only assembled into their present form, centuries later, by editors working with writing. For much of the nineteenth century the dominant "Analyst" scholars tried to separate the original layers of the poems from later additions, while "Unitarians" defended them as the work of a single artist.

The debate was transformed in the 1920s and 1930s by the American scholar Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord. Studying illiterate epic singers in Yugoslavia, they showed how poets in an oral tradition compose long poems during performance using a store of ready-made phrases and type scenes. The repeated epithets of Homer, such as "swift-footed Achilles" and "rosy-fingered Dawn", fitted this model exactly. Most scholars now accept that the Iliad and the Odyssey grew out of centuries of oral poetry. They still disagree about how the poems reached their final form: whether a single brilliant poet, perhaps using the newly adopted Greek alphabet, composed or dictated each poem; whether the texts became fixed gradually through repeated performance; and whether the same person composed both. Many scholars think the Odyssey is somewhat later than the Iliad and the work of a different poet. Ancient sources report that an official text was established in Athens under the tyrant Peisistratus in the sixth century BCE, for recitation at the Panathenaic festival, though how much this story can be trusted is disputed.

The poems look back to a heroic age that Greeks placed long before their own time, which modern scholars associate with the Late Bronze Age world of Mycenaean Greece. Excavations at Hisarlik in north-western Turkey, begun by Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s, uncovered a city with many layers, one or more of which was destroyed around the twelfth or thirteenth century BCE, and Hittite documents mention a place called Wilusa that may be Troy. Some details in the poems, such as the boar's-tusk helmet, preserve real memories of the Mycenaean period, but the society they describe mixes elements from several centuries, including the poets' own. Whether a Trojan War like Homer's ever took place cannot be shown; most historians think the story may preserve memories of real conflicts, much transformed by the tradition.

For the Greeks, Homer was more than a poet. His works were the core of education across the Greek world, memorised by schoolboys and quoted as authorities on gods, war and conduct; Plato called him the educator of Greece, even as he proposed to banish poets from his ideal city for spreading false ideas about the gods, part of a long critique in ancient Greek philosophy that began with Xenophanes. Alexander the Great was said to sleep with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. Scholars at the library of Alexandria edited the texts and divided each poem into the 24 books still used today.

Virgil modelled the Aeneid on both poems, and through him Homer shaped Roman and medieval literature, although the Greek texts themselves were little known in western Europe until the fifteenth century; Dante Alighieri placed Homer in Limbo as the sovereign poet without having read him. The first printed edition appeared in Florence in 1488. Since then the poems have been translated countless times and retold in works from James Joyce's Ulysses to modern novels and films. They remain the starting point of literature in Greece and of the culture of ancient Greece as a whole.