Homer

[[Image:Homer_British_Museum.jpg|thumb|right|Bust of Homer in the British Museum]] :''For other uses, see Homer (disambiguation).'' Homer (Greek language Ὅμηρος ''Hómēros'') was a legendary (or perhaps mythical) early Greek literature poet and rhapsode traditionally credited with authorship of the major Greek epics ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey'', the comic mini-epic ''Batrachomyomachia'' ("The Frog-Mouse War"), the corpus of Homeric Hymns, and various other lost or fragmentary works such as Margites. A few ancient authors credited him with the entire Epic Cycle, which included further poems on the Trojan War as well as the Thebes, Greece poems about Oedipus and his sons. Tradition held that Homer was blind, and various Ionian cities are claimed to be his birthplace, but otherwise his biography is a blank slate. It has repeatedly been questioned whether the same poet was responsible for both the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey''; the ''Batrachomyomachia'', Homeric hymns and cyclic poems are generally agreed to be later than these two epic poems. ==The Homeric Question== It is generally agreed among scholars that the ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey'' underwent a process of standardization and refinement out of older material beginning in the 8th century BC. An important role in this standardization appears to have been played by the Athens tyrant Hipparchus (son of Pisistratus), who reformed the recitation of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaea. Many classicists hold that this reform must have involved the production of a canonical written text. An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey'' shows that the poems consist of regular, repeating phrases; even entire verses repeat. Could the ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey'' have been oral-formulaic poems, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phases? Milman Parry and Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture. Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis", wherein a non-literate "Homer" dictates his poem to a literate scribe in the 6th century BC or earlier. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the Hellenistic period. Other scholars, however, maintain their belief in the reality of an actual Homer... So little is known or even guessed of his actual life, that a common joke has it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name," and the classical scholar Richmond Lattimore, author of a good poetic translation to English language of both epics, once wrote a paper entitled "Homer: Who Was She?". Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was more specific, theorizing a young Sicilian woman as author of the ''Odyssey'' (but not the ''Iliad''), an idea further speculated on by Robert Graves in his novel ''Homer's Daughter''. In Greek his name is "Homēros" which is Greek for "hostage". There is a theory that his name was back-extracted from the name of a society of poets called the Homeridae, which literally means "sons of hostages", i.e. descendants of prisoners of war. As these men were not sent to war because their loyalty on the battlefield was suspect, they would not get killed in battles. Thus they were entrusted with remembering the area's stock of epic poetry, to remember past events, in the times before literacy came to the area. ==Historical Aspects of the Poems== ''See main article Troy.'' Another significant question regards the tales' possible historical basis. The commentaries on the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'' written in the Hellenistic period (3rd century BC to 1st century BC) began exploring the textual inconsistencies of the poems. Modern classicists continue the tradition. The excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in the late 19th century began to convince scholars there was a historical basis for the Trojan War. Research (pioneered by the aforementioned Parry and Lord) into oral epics in Serbo-Croatian and Turkic languages began to convince scholars that long poems could be preserved with consistency by oral cultures until someone bothered to write them down. The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and others convinced scholars of a linguistic continuity between 13th century BC Mycenae writings and the epic poems attributed to Homer. ==External links== * [http://www.gpc.edu/~shale/humanities/literature/world_literature/homer.html Collection of Homer-related links] * [http://www.geocities.com/protoillyrian/homer Homer of Cumaean origin] ===eBooks on Project Gutenberg=== * * * * * Ancient Greek writers Poets Greek literature bs:Homer la:Homerus li:Homeros ms:Homer simple:Homer

Homer

Quoth the article:

The poems appear to go back to at least the eighth century B.C.E., and were first written down at the command of the :Athens ruler :Pisistratos, who feared that they were being forgotten. He made a law that any bard or singer who came to Athens must recite as much as he knew of Homer for the Athenian scribes, who recorded each version and collated them into what we now know as the ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey.'' Homer is also rumored to have written a third, comic, epic, but if it ever existed, no fragments of it have been found.

I'm suspicious of these statements. Do you have any sources to cite? There is nothing wrong with putting speculative theories and even rumors in here, but we should cite sources in that case to maintain good scholarship. -- User:hajhouse :No, I don't have sources to cite: this is what I learned when I studied classical Greek, 20-odd years ago. Only the last sentence counts as rumor, I think. I'll see if I can find something, but it may take a while before I get to this. --User:Vicki Rosenzweig ::Apparently the tradition that Pisistratus commissioned the writing down of the Homeric epics has been deleted from the article, but has crept back in with attribution to Pisistratus's son Hipparchus instead, which seems to me even more questionable. Since it's back in, anyway, I was thinking of changing the attribution back to Pisistratus, since as far as I know, the entire story is only supported by an ancient tradition, and the tradition specifies Pisistratus, not Hipparchus. --User:Arkuat 06:26, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC) :::IMO mentioning tradition is fine, so long as it is clearly identified as a tradition. These are the sorts of things you learn when you study Homer. — User:Bobby D. Bryant 09:10, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC) :A short comic epic attributed to Homer in antiquity, ''Batrachomyomachia'', still survives, but modern scholars think it is a later work in the Homeric style. — User:Bobby D. Bryant 09:10, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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