rasovsky - Odyssey

Although this great epic poem of ancient Greece has always been attributed to the shadowy figure of Homer, little is known of him beyond his being the name attached in antiquity by the Greeks themselves to the poems. There is some doubt over whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were actually composed by the same main author. Nonetheless, that there was an epic poet called Homer and that he played the primary part in shaping the two masterworks -- so much may be said to be probable. If this assumption is accepted, then Homer must assuredly be one of the greatest of the world's literary artists.

He is also one of the most influential authors in the widest sense, for the two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture throughout the classical age and formed the backbone of humane education down to the time of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. The Homeric epics had a profound impact on the Renaissance culture of Italy. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the classical European tradition.

It was probably through their impact on classical Greek culture itself that the Iliad and the Odyssey most subtly affected Western standards and ideas. The Greeks regarded the great epics as something more than works of literature; they knew much of them by heart, and they valued them not only as a symbol of Hellenic unity and heroism but also as an ancient source of moral and even practical instruction.

The general belief that Homer was a native of Ionia (the central part of the western seaboard of Asia Minor) seems a reasonable conjecture for the poems themselves are in predominantly Ionic dialect. Although Smyrna and Chios early began competing for the honor, and others joined in, no authenticated local memory survived anywhere of someone who, oral poet or not, must have been remarkable in his time.

The internal evidence of the poems is of some use in determining when Homer lived. It seems plausible to conclude that the period of composition of the large-scale epics (as distinct from their much shorter predecessors) was the 9th or 8th century B.C.E., with several features pointing more clearly to the 8th. The Odyssey may belong near the end of this century, the Iliad closer to its middle. It may be no coincidence that cults of Homeric heroes tended to spring up toward the end of the 8th century, and that scenes from the epic begin to appear on pots at just about the same time.

One of the most important discoveries of Homeric scholarship, is that the Homeric tradition was oral -- that this was a kind of poetry made and passed down by word of mouth and without the intervention of writing. Indeed Homer's own term for a poet is aoidos, "singer." The Odyssey describes two such poets in some detail: Phemius, the court singer in the palace of Odysseus in Ithaca, and Demodocus, who lived in the town of the semi-mythical Phaeacians and sang both for the nobles in Alcinous' palace and for the assembled public at the games held for Odysseus.

On this occasion he sings of the illicit love affair of Ares and Aphrodite in a version that lasts for exactly 100 Homeric verses. This and the other songs assigned to these singers--for example, that of the Trojan Horse, summarized in the Odyssey--suggest that ordinary aoidoi in the heroic tradition worked with relatively short poems that could be given completely on a single occasion. That is what one would expect, and it is confirmed by the habits of singers and audiences at other periods and in other parts of the world.

What Homer himself seems to have done is to introduce the concept of a quite different style of poetry, in the shape of a monumental poem that required more than a single hour or evening to sing and could achieve new and far more complex effects, in literary and psychological terms, than those attainable in the more anecdotal and episodic songs of his predecessors.

Apparently Homer must have trained as an ordinary aoidos, who began (like most of the present-day Balkan guslari) by building up a repertoire of normal-length songs acquired from already established singers. Every singer in a living oral tradition tends to develop what he acquires. There is an element of improvisation, as well as of memory, in his appropriation of fresh material. But Homer carried the process much further in the making of the monumental Iliad, consisting of more than 16,000 verses, which would take four or five long evenings, and perhaps more, to perform.

An important and difficult question, which affects the accuracy of modern Homeric texts, is that of the date when the epics became "fixed"--which means given authoritative written form, since oral transmission is always to some extent fluid. An alphabetic writing system reached Greece in the 9th or early 8th century BC; before that was a gap of 200 or 300 years, following the collapse of Mycenaean culture and the disappearance of Linear B writing, during which Greece seems to have been non-literate. During that interval, certainly, much of the epic tradition was formed. The earliest alphabetic inscriptions to have survived, a few of them containing brief scraps of hexameter verse, date from about 730 B.C.E.

A Serbian bard with his gussle singing an epic tale much the way Homer did thousands of years earlier.

Therefore, if Homer created the Iliad at some time after 750 B.C.E., he could conceivably have used writing to help him. Some scholars think that he did. Others believe that he may have remained non-literate but dictated the poem to a literate assistant. Still others believe that the poems may have been preserved orally and not too inaccurately at least until the middle years of the following, the 7th, century, when "literature" in the strict sense appeared. There are objections to all three theories, but this much can be generally agreed: that the use of writing was in any case ancillary, that Homer behaved in important ways like a traditional oral poet.

At least partial texts of the epics were probably being used by the Homeridae and by professional reciters known as rhapsodes (who were no longer creative and had abandoned the use of the lyre) by the latter part of the 7th century B.C.E. The first complete version may well have been that established as a standard for rhapsodic competitions at the great quadrennial festival at Athens, the Panathenaea, at some time during the 6th century BCE. Even that did not permanently fix the text, and from then on the history of the epics was one of periodical distortion followed by progressively more effective acts of stabilization. The process continues to this day..

fragment of Odysssey papyrus from 200 BCE