Homer

For the ancient Greeks, Homer was simply “the poet”. They credited him with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two oldest and most admired works of Greek literature, and treated these poems as the basis of education, the source of shared stories about gods and heroes, and a model of language and morality.

Yet almost nothing about Homer’s life is known. Ancient “Lives of Homer” were written centuries after the poems and contradict each other. Several cities claimed to be his birthplace, including Smyrna (modern İzmir), Chios, Colophon, Cyme, Argos and Athens. Most accounts say he was blind and that he died on the small island of Ios. On Chios a family or guild of reciters called the Homeridae (“sons of Homer”) claimed to descend from him.

Modern scholars regard these biographies as legend. Some doubt that a single historical Homer ever existed; others think a brilliant poet, or perhaps two, shaped the poems we have out of a long tradition. The name “Homer” is best understood as the label the Greeks attached to the source of their greatest epics.

The Iliad is set in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy (Ilion, which gives the poem its name). It does not tell the whole war. Instead it focuses on a few weeks and one theme, announced in its first word: mēnis, “wrath”. The opening line may be translated: “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.”

The story begins when Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army, takes the captive woman Briseis from Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior. Deeply insulted, Achilles withdraws from the fighting and asks his mother, the sea-goddess Thetis, to persuade Zeus to let the Trojans win until the Greeks realise how much they need him. The Trojans, led by Hector, son of King Priam, drive the Greeks back to their ships.

Achilles’ closest friend, Patroclus, puts on Achilles’ armour and goes into battle, and Hector kills him. Mad with grief, Achilles returns to the fight, kills Hector and drags his body behind his chariot. In the final book, old King Priam goes secretly by night to Achilles’ tent to beg for his son’s body. The two enemies weep together for their losses, and Achilles gives the body back. The poem ends not with the fall of Troy but with Hector’s funeral.

The Iliad is full of battle, but it is not simply a celebration of war. It shows the suffering of both sides with great sympathy: Hector saying goodbye to his wife Andromache and baby son, the grief of parents, and the knowledge that Troy will fall and its women will be enslaved.

The Odyssey follows Odysseus, king of the island of Ithaca, famous for his cunning (it was he who thought of the Trojan Horse). It opens: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns.” Ten years after the fall of Troy he still has not returned home. His wife Penelope is surrounded by suitors who feast in his palace and press her to remarry, and his son Telemachus sets out to seek news of his father.

The poem is cleverly structured. We first meet Odysseus on the island of the nymph Calypso, who has kept him for seven years. Released at last, he is shipwrecked and reaches the land of the Phaeacians, where he tells the story of his adventures: the Cyclops Polyphemus, the witch-goddess Circe, a journey to the land of the dead, the Sirens, the monsters Scylla and Charybdis, and the loss of all his companions after they eat the sacred cattle of the Sun.

The Phaeacians bring him home to Ithaca. Disguised as a beggar, he tests the loyalty of his household, is recognised by his old dog Argos and his nurse Eurycleia, and with Telemachus and loyal servants kills the suitors. Penelope, as clever as her husband, tests him with the secret of their marriage bed before accepting that he has truly come home.

Where the Iliad is a poem of war and fate, the Odyssey is a poem of survival, hospitality, disguise and homecoming. It is also the ancestor of countless adventure stories.

Both epics are composed in dactylic hexameter, a six-beat line based on patterns of long and short syllables. They are full of repeated phrases: “rosy-fingered Dawn”, “swift-footed Achilles”, “the wine-dark sea”. These repetitions puzzled readers for centuries.

The American scholar Milman Parry explained them in his doctoral work in Paris in 1928. He showed that the epithets and phrases form a precise system: for each hero or object, in each grammatical case, there is usually one phrase that fits a given part of the line. Such a system could not be the invention of one poet; it had been built up over generations by singers who composed while performing.

To test the idea, Parry and his assistant Albert Lord recorded living oral poets in Yugoslavia in the 1930s. These singers, who performed with a one-stringed instrument called the gusle, could compose long songs in performance using formulas and typical scenes; one of them, Avdo Međedović, produced a song of more than 12,000 lines. Lord later set out the theory in The Singer of Tales (1960).

The oral-formulaic theory transformed the study of Homer. It showed that the Iliad and Odyssey come from a tradition of singers (aoidoi) like Phemius and Demodocus, who appear in the Odyssey itself. It also raised a new question: if the tradition was oral, how and when did these particular poems come to be written down?

The poems describe a heroic age of powerful kings, rich palaces and bronze weapons. This picture partly remembers the Mycenaean civilisation of the Late Bronze Age (about 1600–1100 BCE), whose palaces at Mycenae, Pylos and elsewhere collapsed around 1200 BCE. Some details are genuinely old, such as the boar’s-tusk helmet described in the Iliad, which archaeologists have found in Mycenaean graves, and the Catalogue of Ships, which lists places that may reflect an early geography.

But much in the poems belongs to later times. Heroes cremate their dead, as was common in the early Iron Age, and the social world of the poems, with its chieftains, assemblies and gift-exchange, resembles the Greek world of the 10th to 8th centuries BCE. The poems are best seen as a mixture of memories and practices from many periods, blended by generations of singers.

The 8th century BCE, when the poems probably began to take their final form, was a time of rapid change in Greece. Population grew, new city-states formed, Greeks founded settlements across the Mediterranean, the great sanctuaries at Olympia and Delphi flourished, and the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet. Writing made it possible, for the first time, to record long poems.

Was there a Trojan War? The site of Troy is generally identified with the mound of Hisarlik in north-west Turkey, excavated by Heinrich Schliemann from the 1870s and later by Carl Blegen and Manfred Korfmann. It was a substantial city that was destroyed more than once in the Late Bronze Age. Hittite texts mention a place called Wilusa, which many scholars connect with (W)ilios. Whether a real war lies behind the legend remains debated.

Honour and mortality. Homeric heroes seek kleos, “glory”, the fame that will be sung after they die. Achilles knows he must choose between a long, obscure life and a short, glorious one. The Iliad asks what glory is worth when set against friendship, love and life itself; in the Odyssey, the ghost of Achilles says he would rather be a poor labourer on earth than king of all the dead.

Gods and humans. The Olympian gods take sides, quarrel and intervene, sometimes comically. Yet fate and the limits of human life remain serious. The poems show a world in which humans are responsible for their choices even while the gods act through them.

Hospitality (xenia). The Odyssey is built around the rules of guest-friendship: how hosts should welcome strangers and how guests should behave. The Cyclops, who eats his guests, and the suitors, who abuse Odysseus’ house, are the great violators of these rules, and both are punished.

Intelligence and identity. Odysseus survives by cunning, disguise and storytelling. The Odyssey is full of lies and tests, and it asks how a person can be recognised: by a scar, a bow, the secret of a bed. The poem’s interest in storytelling itself—Odysseus narrates four books of his own adventures—has made it central to modern discussions of narrative.

According to an ancient tradition, the Athenian ruler Peisistratus (d. 528/527 BCE) had the Homeric poems collected and put in order, and the poems were recited in full at the Panathenaic festival in Athens. Scholars debate whether this “Peisistratean recension” was a real event, but Athens clearly played a major role in the poems’ early written history.

In the Hellenistic period, scholars at the Library of Alexandria—Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and above all Aristarchus of Samothrace—compared copies, marked lines they suspected, and established a standard text. The division of each poem into 24 books, labelled with the letters of the Greek alphabet, is usually credited to them.

Hundreds of papyrus fragments of Homer, mostly from Roman Egypt, show that the poems were the most copied texts in the Greek world. The most important medieval manuscript of the Iliad is the Venetus A, written in the 10th century and now in Venice, whose margins preserve notes (scholia) from the Alexandrian scholars. It was published by the French scholar Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison in 1788.

Knowledge of Greek faded in western Europe during the Middle Ages, although Homer was always read in Byzantium. In the 14th century Petrarch and Boccaccio sponsored a Latin translation, and in 1488 Demetrios Chalkokondyles published the first printed edition (editio princeps) in Florence.

In ancient Greece Homer was the foundation of education. Children learned to read with his verses, and his stories provided the shared background for tragedy, vase painting and philosophy. Herodotus said that Homer and Hesiod had given the Greeks their picture of the gods. Philosophers argued with him: Xenophanes criticised the poets for showing gods who steal and deceive, and Plato’s Socrates wanted to banish or censor poetry in his ideal city, while Aristotle in his Poetics treated Homer as the model of unified plot.

The Romans adopted Homer as a classic. The first known Latin literary work was a translation of the Odyssey by Livius Andronicus in the 3rd century BCE, and Virgil’s Aeneid consciously reworks both poems, its first half an Odyssey of wandering and its second half an Iliad of war.

In modern times Homer has been translated into most of the world’s languages. Writers have repeatedly returned to him: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) retells the Odyssey as a single day in Dublin; the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) transposes Homeric themes to St Lucia; recent translators and novelists have given new voice to the women of the poems, such as Penelope and the enslaved Trojan women.

Outside Europe, Homer is often compared with other great epic traditions—the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Shahnameh—which share features such as traditional oral composition, heroic codes and the relationship between gods and mortals. Comparing them helps show both what is universal in epic and what is distinctive about the Greek poems.

The “Homeric Question” is the cluster of problems about who composed the poems, how and when. Already in antiquity some scholars, called the chorizontes (“separators”), argued that the Iliad and Odyssey were by different poets. The modern debate began with Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), which argued that the poems were assembled from shorter, originally oral songs and that writing came late.

Nineteenth-century “Analysts” tried to separate the poems into layers by different authors, pointing to inconsistencies such as a character killed in one book who reappears later. “Unitarians” replied that such slips are natural in a long work and that the poems show a single controlling design. The debate remained unresolved.

Parry and Lord shifted the terms of the debate: the poems are traditional, oral-derived compositions. But this raised new questions. Albert Lord and later scholars such as Richard Janko proposed that a master singer dictated the poems to a scribe, producing a fixed text around the 8th century. Gregory Nagy proposed an “evolutionary model”, in which the poems gradually became fixed through centuries of performance, with no single moment of composition. Others, such as Martin West, emphasised a literate poet working with writing in the 7th century.

Most scholars today accept that the poems grew from a long oral tradition and that each has a remarkable unity of design. Many think the Odyssey is somewhat later than the Iliad. Whether “Homer” was one person, two, or the name of a tradition remains open.

Ancient dates for Homer varied widely. Herodotus placed Homer about 400 years before his own time, that is, around the mid-9th century BCE; others made Homer a contemporary of the Trojan War. Modern dating relies on internal and external evidence.

Linguistic evidence: Homeric Greek combines forms from different periods and dialects. Statistical studies of the rate at which certain older forms were replaced by newer ones, such as those by Richard Janko, suggest an order Iliad, Odyssey, then Hesiod, and a date in the 8th century for the Iliad. Critics note that an artificial poetic language can preserve old forms deliberately, so such methods give relative rather than exact dates.

Archaeological and historical evidence: references to objects and practices, such as armour, temples and cult images, have been used to argue for 8th- or 7th-century dates, with Martin West arguing for the mid-7th century for the Iliad. An inscribed clay cup from Pithekoussai in Italy (“Nestor’s Cup”, late 8th century BCE) jokes about “the cup of Nestor”, and some scholars read it as an allusion to a famous cup in the Iliad, though this is debated. Scenes from the Trojan saga in vase painting become common in the 7th century BCE.

Textual evidence: quotations by 5th- and 4th-century authors, early papyri with “wild” extra lines, and the Alexandrian scholia show that the text was still somewhat fluid before the Hellenistic period, which supports models that allow gradual fixation. The honest conclusion is that the poems probably reached something like their current shape between about 750 and 650 BCE, with continuing adjustments afterwards.

The surviving ancient Lives of Homer, including one falsely attributed to Herodotus and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, date in their present form to the Roman period, though they draw on older material. They tell of Homer’s birth, travels, blindness, poetry and death, often by inventing episodes from lines in the poems.

Blindness is a good example. In the Odyssey the blind singer Demodocus is loved by the Muse, and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo ends with a “blind man who lives in rocky Chios”; ancient readers took these as self-portraits of Homer. Modern scholars see the blind bard as a traditional image of the inspired poet, not biographical evidence.

The competing birthplace claims also reveal more about later Greek cities than about Homer: claiming Homer brought prestige. The name itself has been explained by ancient and modern writers as meaning “hostage” or connected with a word for “blind”, but these etymologies are uncertain.

Methodologically, the lives are valuable as evidence for how Greeks imagined poets and for the reception of Homer, but they cannot be used to reconstruct a life. What can be said with confidence is only that by the 6th century BCE the Greeks associated the Iliad and Odyssey with a revered poet named Homer, whom they placed in Ionia.