Who was Homer? The question will almost certainly never be answered, and might in fact be unanswerable. It's hard to imagine any documents or remains turning up that will even provide a list of candidates. From our perspective Iron Age Greece was a long time ago. Long, long, loooooong time. If things weren't properly recorded there's not much we can do about it now.
Which in a way makes it even more incredible that the Iliad and Odyssey have survived all this time and inspired so many. Whoever he, she, or they (as in multiple people) were, the author could scarcely have dreamed that their work would survive multiple collapses and rebuildings of civilization.
2 comments:
Who was the author of the Iliad and Odyssey is an interesting subject and one that's been discussed by historians and scholars of Greek history pretty often. It seems to me very like the arguments that arise when intellectuals disagree that Shakespeare could have written all the plays and sonnets that have been attributed to him.. and that was only 500 years ago.
What seems to me a logical argument in regard to Homer's epic poems is that there was in antiquity a group who were bards. I think we talked about the Hindu Vedas and how they were memorized and passed down for a very long time before they were written and established in permanent form. It's reasonable that elements of the Iliad and Odyssey were stories passed along by bards.
The whole of the Iliad covers one small period of one cycle of stories. It’s the work of a literate poet, Homer, steeped in the bardic traditions of the illiterate past. People do like to deny that there were some extremely intelligent people who lived long ago..
A neat article from the British Museum:
https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/who-was-homer
We certainly know more about Shakespeare than we do about Homer. And of course based on what we do know a lot of scholars have argued he couldn't have written his works, because he was a man of the middle classes. Incredible.
India is an onion with a lot of layers. Hindi and many other languages are Indo-European, which hints at cultural influence from a western point. Others are entirely unrelated. So there seem to have been a lot of different groups interacting there since prehistory. Aside from Homer's works and the Vedas the Grimm's fairy tales are also based on oral tradition. The Brothers themselves made a lot of aesthetic choices, though.
That's a very good article. Interesting to remember that Greece if you mean "Greek-speaking territory" has shifted a lot over the millennia. There's a blind poet actually in the Odyssey. Whether this is a portrait of the literally blind author or the blindness is a metaphor, Homer seems to be recognizing himself as part of the story, which makes it more modern than one might guess.
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