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In the post What is history? I described what the work of a historian is like, the professional who analyses, interprets, and researches the past through the analysis of historical documents. I also spoke about the auxiliary sciences of history, such as archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, and astronomy. The historian has at his/her disposal a series of documents and auxiliary sciences for reconstructing the past. Despite this, historical accuracy is often not achieved. For many reasons.
Who was Homer?
Homer was an aedo, that is, a singer of epic poetry from Ancient Greece, who is credited with authoring the Iliad and the Odyssey, two fundamental works of the Greco-Roman tradition and, therefore, also of the Western tradition.
Despite its enormous importance, little is known about it and much of what is known belongs to the field of legends. He was probably born, lived, and died sometime in the eighth century BC, well before the Classical Period (from 500 BC to 323 BC) of Ancient Greece.
Detailed analyzes conducted on the texts of both works raise the doubt as to whether Homer really existed. There are those who claim that it is a kind of pseudonym under which several unknown authors hide.
For some he was a descendant of Orpheus, a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion, still others claim he was a blind singer who wandered from town to town. For some commentators, his biography could be reconstructed based on the meaning of his name, “hostage,” in Greek.
There are also contradictory opinions regarding the place where he lived: there are those who believe that he lived in the eighth century BC, there are those who date his existence back to the period of the Trojan War and those who claim that he lived around two decades after that event. Even following evidence and assumptions, it is not possible to be sure of anything.
Historical texts from after his time give us indications about his origins, but in some cases the texts themselves contradict each other. Because of this, most Homer biographies in circulation do not contain reliable data about the poet. Based on the linguistic characteristics of his works, current historians confirm that he was born in the Ionian colonial area of Asia Minor.
In antiquity, he was often considered “divine,” imagined to be blind and directly inspired by the muses. Statues were erected and shrines were built in his honor. But who really was Homer? Did he exist? If he existed, did he write the two poems? And if he did not exist, who wrote them?
Where was Homer born?
Current scholars consider it highly likely that the Homeric poems originated in the regions of the island of Chios in the Aegean or Smyrna on the west coast of Turkey. Their Greek, although never spoken, is more typical of the ancient dialects of the west coast of Turkey and the offshore islands than of the dialects of mainland Greece.
In the sixth century BC, several writers described a talented poet from Chios, where there existed a group of performing bards who called themselves 'Homeridae' or 'sons of Homer'. There are references in early sources to Homer being conceived on the island of Ios or in Cyme and being born in Smyrna.
The dialect in which the Iliad and Odyssey were written is considered Asian Greek, specifically Ionic. This, plus frequent mentions of local phenomena such as intense winds blowing from the northwest towards Thrace, suggests, according to scholars, a familiarity with that region that could only mean that Homer came from there.
Dialect coincides with the development and use of language in general, but the Iliad and Odyssey were so popular that this dialect became the norm for much later Greek literature.
When was Homer born?
Judging by the first references to his work, which date back to at least the seventh century BC, it is possible that he was born sometime in the eighth century BC or even the ninth century BC. Assumptions about the date of his birth vary from 750 BC to 1,200 BC, the latter because the Iliad covers the history of the Trojan War. Some scholars have seen fit to place the poet and chronicler closer in time to the actual time of the event. Others believe that the poetic style of his work indicates a much later period.
The Greek historian Herodotus (c. B.C. 484-425 B.C.) placed Homer around 850 B.C. Part of the problem is that he lived before there was a chronological dating system. The Olympic Games of classical Greece marked an era, 776 BC as a starting point for measuring four-year periods for the event. It is difficult to determine a birth date before a calendar exists.
For Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484-425 BC), Homer must have lived shortly after the Trojan War, which must have occurred around the ninth century BC. For Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 540-c.480 BC) Homer had died of bitterness for not being able to solve a riddle formulated by a child.
Many of these fables and assumptions were incorporated into different pseudo-biographies of the bard, written throughout the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, which, in turn, were assimilated and refined by the literati of the Roman Empire. Bard, or aedo, in ancient Europe, was a person in charge of transmitting stories, myths, legends and poems orally, singing the stories of his people in recited poems. He was simultaneously a musician, poet, and historian.
Homer's appearance
The word homeros, as we have already said, could mean 'hostage' in Greek, so some imagined that he was a captive. But it could also mean blind. It is believed that he was blind, based solely on one character in the Odyssey, Demodokos a blind poet/minstrel.
A long dissertation on how Demodokos was welcomed into a meeting and regaled the audience with music and epic tales of conflicts and heroes was interpreted as a hint from Homer about what his own life was like. Hence, many busts and statues of him were sculpted with blind eyes, thick curly hair, and beard.
It is possible that this blindness was a myth invented to explain the fact that Homeric poems originally evolved in oral form, before the development of writing in Greece, being performed and transmitted from bard to bard. Like the blind poet Demodocus in the Odyssey, a bard would have sung the poems before an audience, repeating set passages and phrases, such as "Divine Odysseus", to satisfy the poetic meter.
The Homeric Question
Homer is a mystery. Did he really live or is he a completely invented character? The Greek epic poet is an enigma when it comes to the facts of his life. Some scholars believe he was one man; others feel that because storytelling was an oral tradition, these iconic stories were created by a group rather than a single author. He compiled the stories and then recited them from memory. All this speculation about who he was inevitably led to what is known as the Homeric Question, often considered the greatest literary mystery.
Started in Antiquity and still unfinished, it is one of the oldest debates in history. Different scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as François Hédelin, Giambattista Vico, Friedrich August Wolf, Adolf Kirchhoff, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and many others, made this question their main academic concern.
The figure of Homer is, therefore, a combination of reality and legend. He is usually described as a blind poet who sometime in the eighth century BC began traveling the Hellenic world. On his travels, he recited his epic poems to anyone who would listen him. His spectators were both commoners and nobles.
Ancient sources reconstructed seven biographies written by different authors and titled Lives of Homer. The two best-known biographies are those attributed to Herodotus, Plutarch or probably Hesiod.
Who wrote these two works?
Homer is considered the greatest poet in Western culture. But did he really write the Iliad and the Odyssey? In fact, the poems are not the work of an isolated genius, but the end point of a long oral tradition of epic poetry. In the Iliad, a war poem, part of the events of Achilles at the siege of Troy is narrated.
In the Odyssey, a poem about the journey, Odysseus's return to his homeland of Ithaca, and his revenge on the nobles who threatened his wife, Penelope. Homer's world is complex and varied, as it mixes older elements with others from the 'Hellenic Middle Ages', the time in which the poems were composed.
Based on certain noticeable differences in the use of language in the two poems, philologists such as Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) have suggested the possibility of each text having a different author. If so, it could be a collective and not a single author.
The lyric poet Pindar (c. 518-438 BC) told of the existence of the homeridai (sons of Homer, in Greek), an ancient Ionian clan formed by Homer's descendants and responsible for popularizing his works in the rest of Greece.
If we add to this that the word homeros could be a distortion of the Ionic word homaros, translatable as hostage, it could be that these homeridai were actually a group of prisoners of war, old or crippled (blind, for example) who worked as reciters of local epic poetry. Lucian of Samosata (125-181 AD) claimed that Homer was a Babylonian hostage taken by Greece, hence his name.
Was Homer a man? Was it a group or lineage of poets? Was he a woman? Samuel Butler, a late 19th century novelist, was convinced that the author of the Odyssey was a woman. However, for most people in Antiquity, the two epics were products of a single, male mind.
To answer these questions, scholars were divided into two camps. One of them believes that multiple authors wrote the poems, due to their length, anachronisms and the use of different literary techniques and variants of the Greek language present in both works. The other group argues that the author took responsibility for creating the work after having collected and synthesized oral stories.
How were the two works developed? There is greater consensus among researchers who agree on the fact that texts, whether the work of a single author or a community, are the result of a compilation of popular oral compositions of the time. Compositions passed down from generation to generation and written in the Iliad and Odyssey under the name Homer.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, most written texts were lost. During the Middle Ages, monasteries were responsible for translating and copying Greco-Latin texts. It is estimated that there were at least eight hundred authors in Ancient Rome, but we only know one hundred and forty. The task of tracing and outlining the works and authors of Antiquity is extremely difficult. Furthermore, it is laborious to determine the authority of many famous works. The author Aristarchus of Samothrace believes that Homer wrote the Iliad as a young man and the Odyssey in his old age.
Some contemporary scholars agree that the two works were the result of a long tradition of oral narratives, popularly transmitted from generation to generation. This, however, does not deny that it was Homer who gave them their most recognized form, structure, and composition, which served as the basis for the transcriptions and translations that emerged over the centuries.
Although, since Antiquity, Homer's great contribution to giving form and structure to these diverse and traditional stories has been recognized, the question still remains as to how they were transcribed and who coined the “definitive” version and with what criteria of authority.
According to many historians and writers, Homer was the first to open the doors of literary creation in the West. Furthermore, he revealed Greek mythology, and it is thanks to him that we can have an idea of Greek society at the time in which he lived. When we talk about Homer, we refer to the birth of Western literature, a historical and ethnographic source, an example to follow, as a great sage of his time.
The debate became more heated again in the 18th century when a French writer, François Hédelin (the abbé D'Aubignac) and the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, independently, came to formulate a radical hypothesis: the two poems are the result of long work of anonymous Greek singers and not of an isolated genius. Homer, therefore, would never have existed.
Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a series of scholars began to highlight linguistic differences between the different parties, inconsistencies from the point of view of use and content, contradictions in the narration of facts and attributions of authorship of the poems to various authors.
Homer, then, becomes only the last or most important poet who gave a definitive arrangement to the material of other poets. But, even in this period, there is no shortage of scholars who see a true Homer as the author of the two poems, highlighting in them internal correspondences and refined compositional architectures that can only be the result of a unitary literary work.
Many authors
In 1928, a young American scholar, Milman Parry, began research in the Balkan Peninsula, among Serbian and Croatian singers, and discovered an extraordinary series of analogies between Homeric texts and the songs of those peoples. Songs written by itinerant poets, who often did not even know how to write, deal with themes and motifs of war and adventure. They repeat typical scenes such as the duel or the sacrifice to the gods, often described with the same words as in the Homeric poems.
Finally, a determining element, there is the constant use of fixed expressions to indicate typical characters and moments, especially at the end of the lines. These expressions are not functional to the context (ships are always "fast" even when they are anchored in the port), but they serve the poet to conclude the verse in an effortless way and they represent a particularly important help in memorizing the songs. They are true formulas.
Parry's hypothesis is therefore that the Homeric poems are what remains of the tradition of Greek poetry composed orally and recited to an audience of listeners in the courts of archaic aristocracies or at city festivals, such as scenes described in the Iliad and in the Odyssey.
The theory of orality resolves the Homeric question as previously posed. Homer can no longer be considered the author of the two poems, which constitute the point of arrival of a long and anonymous oral tradition of aedos, written only from the sixth century BC. However, the mystery and, at the same time, the charm of two extraordinary works that seem so intimately balanced that sometimes they really make you think of an inspired creation.
The word aedo comes from the Greek aoidós, which means “singer.” It was used in Ancient Greece to name a profession like that of medieval bards, itinerant artists who recited the great mythological epics of local tradition, accompanied by a typical stringed instrument called a zither. Homer was the most important and best known of the ancient aedos.
The aedos sang for the aristocracy, in their courts or banquets, or also at polis meetings and events. Their songs consisted of short poems that relate a specific anecdote or episode, as is the case with the Homeric Hymns dedicated to a god or a specific mythological personality. Or larger songs, too extensive to be recited in a single day, as was probably the case with the Iliad.
Much of what is known about the lives of the aedos, paradoxically, is known thanks to Homer. In his works (especially in the Odyssey) the profession is highlighted through the characters of Demodocus, aedo of the court of King Alcinous, and Phemius, aedo of the court of Ithaca. The more moved they were by their singing, the greater the reward received by the aedo.
Some of his ancient biographers claim that Homer constructed the character Phemius from the royal aedo who taught him the trade and who was also his mother's husband. Supposedly, after the death of his stepfather, Homer dedicated himself to his job as head of an aedos school, before becoming blind due to some illness.
This means that both the Iliad and the Odyssey, particularly voluminous works, were composed for oral recitation, that is, without the support of writing. That is why they are structured in verses, because the rhyme more easily evokes the following verses in the poet's memory. This also raises the question of when and how it was first transcribed or recorded in writing.
The terms aedo and rhapsode should not be confused, although both are of ancient Greek origin and refer to a type of popular reciter. The aedos recited their own compositions, accompanying themselves with musical instruments, while the rhapsodes memorized existing compositions and recited them with the help of a cane to mark the rhythm, tapping on the floor.
The birth of the epic
In Greece, for many centuries, nobles have gathered to feast around the fireplace. Alongside them sit friends and guests, but also a singer: the bard. Accompanied by the zither, he begins to narrate deeds of kings and heroes, wars, and journeys. The bard, who is a singer and poet, chooses stories from the vast repertoire of myths that tradition has given him, transmitting from father to son the memory of a legendary past. Thus, the epic is born.
The Homeric poems, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, describe scenes in which bards enliven aristocratic courts with their singing. By highlighting the principles of the heroic world, loyalty, virtue and cunning, the epic indicates the values that society should inspire. Through the narration of mythical events, she builds an ideal bridge between those ancient heroes and the powerful aristocratic families of archaic Greece. The description of the battles exploits and adventures of its protagonists aims to teach everyone the art of war, but also how to build a ship or how to prepare a sacrifice.
The epic concerns everything and everyone. For this reason, it was defined as a “tribal encyclopedia” or a “culture book.” In this sense, the Homeric poems are to the ancient Greeks what the Bible is to the Jewish people. For subsequent Greek poetry and then for much of European literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey will always be the present model, the point of reference for everyone, from the citizen to the priest.
Homer's works
The importance of Homer's work was well understood by his heirs, who found in it the source of inspiration for the great plays of classical Greek theater and a source of mythological stories for the formation of citizenship.
The Homeric epics are among the oldest and most popular literary works to survive. Initially composed to be sung, their relevance transcends the context of ancient Greek culture, as they were also part of the cultural heritage of the Roman Empire and, therefore, of the Christian world and the imagination of the Renaissance. Both works have been appreciated, translated, and studied throughout almost three thousand years of history, which makes Homer one of humanity's greatest authors.
In any case, his work played a fundamental role in the Greco-Roman tradition, considered the artistic, moral, and literary cradle of the West. They continue to be edited, read, and studied, and have inspired the work of hundreds of artists from diverse cultures and expressive genres.
The Iliad
The Iliad gets its title from the name Ilion, which the Greeks gave to the city of Troy. It is a long epic poem of 15,693 verses organized into twenty-four different songs, throughout which what happened during the fifty-one days of the last year of the Trojan War is told. Especially related to Achilles, one of the greatest heroes of ancient Greek tradition.
In the conflict, the invading Greek army, the resistant Trojan troops, and the Olympian gods themselves face each other, who are on opposite sides. In the struggle of humans, the gods saw the opportunity to settle their own disputes, protect their favorite heroes, and punish those who disrespected them.
The Odyssey
It is an epic poem of twenty-four songs, a precursor to all the adventure novels that have been written in history. The Odyssey narrates the misadventures of Odysseus, king of Ithaca (christened Ulysses by the Romans), on his long journey home. The plot begins when the war ends, and the Trojan forces are defeated.
When Odysseus and his crew undertake the difficult return by boat and suffer all kinds of calamities. Over ten years of adventures and losses, Odysseus fights to return to his queen, Penelope, who barely resists the siege of her suitors, who consider the king dead and aspire to the throne.
The Homeric Hymns
The Homeric Hymns receive their name because in Antiquity they were attributed to Homer (or, according to other opinions, to the Homeridai). It is a set of 32 to 34 short epic poems, quite different from each other, in which the story of the main Olympian gods and other important personalities of Greek mythology is told.
These hymns were to be recited by the aedos as a prelude (proem) to a longer epic poem. Some have a few verses, others reach five hundred, but are composed in the same metrical style as Homer's other plays. According to Hesiod, they are the oldest texts in Greek literature.
To reduce Homer's work to just the Iliad and the Odyssey would be to minimize his production. Nowadays, other works are attributed to him. For example, the minor comic epic called: Batracomiomachia (The fight between frogs and mice). Furthermore, he is believed to have written other literary fragments, such as Margite.
Historical reality, gods, and heroes
In the Homeric poems, the different historical realities during which they were developed overlap. Two worlds are identified, often juxtaposed: that of the Mycenaean civilization and that of the so-called Hellenic Middle Ages. The first constitutes the heroic backdrop in which the exploits of the Trojan War and the “returns” of the Greeks to their homeland are historically located (13th century BC-12th century BC); the second is the most recent phase in which the poems assumed their more or less definitive form (9th century BC-8th century BC).
For example, the use of chariot fighting, the use of bronze weapons and specific shields or helmets, and the title of king attributed to heroes are of very ancient Mycenaean origin. However, the description of most of the social and political forms - such as assemblies or family servitude - and of all the scenes contained therein, is a true reservoir of information about the most archaic and, for us, dark, era of the Greeks.
Even the religious conceptions and character of the protagonists are affected by the long and differentiated elaboration of the poems. The gods are represented both as absolute sovereigns of human destinies and as quarrelsome beings, but always subject to a superior and immutable destiny. There is no solution to the problem of the relationship between God and man, which is made up of distance, love, and envy. Only in the Odyssey does the individual seem capable of having a more decisive impact on his own destiny.
The character of the main characters is fixed by the myth and is not delineated in any way. There is no intention to describe the psychology or inner world of the heroes, who act sometimes out of impulse, sometimes out of duty, other times aware of their own already sealed destiny.
In the Iliad, love is almost absent and there are few female figures. This is different in the Odyssey, where the woman moves through that area of more striking affections and feelings that is denied to male characters.
Homer's death and burial
Just as the details of Homer's life are unknown, so are the exact conditions of his death. However, there is a greater degree of agreement among experts: Homer died and was buried on the Greek island of Ios, in the Cyclades archipelago, in the Aegean Sea. However, there are different stories about the conditions of his death.
The traditional story states that as a young man he consulted the oracle and death was predicted for him. It would be on an island and following a riddle. Years later, Homer met a group of Acadian children returning from fishing and asked them how their work had been. The children, wanting to make fun of the old man, answered him with a riddle: “Those of us who fish we throw away; Those who didn’t, we brought home,” referring to the lice on their heads. There are three versions of what happened:
In the most widespread version, Homer was unable to understand the enigma, felt the fulfillment of his prophecy and imminent death and sank into depression. Little by little, he stopped eating, became ill and in the end the prophecy was fulfilled.
Another version states that Homer arrived on Ios already extremely ill, on a ship that ran aground on the coast. There he met the children and received the riddle, which he immediately understood as the sign of his imminent death.
The third version says that Homer arrived on Ios, where he received the riddle from the fishermen's children and, obsessed with answering it and escaping his youthful prophecy, he walked distractedly, slipped, and hit his head on the rocks.
Over the centuries, several legends have emerged about the discovery of Homer's tomb. Previously it was claimed that it had been found near Plakoto, while in the 18th century the Dutch explorer Pasch van Krienen claimed to have found it in another region of the island and to have taken the earthenware with the epitaph to the Italian city of Livorno, where mysteriously disappeared.
Homer's contribution to Western culture
Despite all these debates, we cannot deny that Homer and his works are the pillars of Western literature. Anyone who studies literature or art history knows that Homer is the first name in the literary canon. He was often a point of reference in Antiquity, which is why the Aeneid (the great epic about the Roman Empire, written by Vergil) is a kind of rewriting of his works.
There are few humanistic disciplines that escape Homer's work. From literature to philosophy, through archeology and history, he is cited by everyone as a source of inspiration or as a historical reference for the study of Ancient Greece.
We can say that Homer shaped Greek society at the end of the archaic era (eighth century BC). A society based on war, where slavery and sacrifices to the gods existed. He also describes courts of justice and a society with certain fundamental ethical values regarding women, the elderly, beggars, and the corpses of enemies.
In conclusion, we are faced with an author who has managed to survive time. An author whose reading remains essential, in the classroom or outside. Homer, whatever his identity, or even if he existed, will always be the great epic poet of Antiquity.
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