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The Olympic Games of classical Greece marked an epoch, with 776 BC as a starting point by which to measure out four-year periods for the event. In short, it is difficult to give someone a birth date when he was born before there was a calendar. Our certified Educators are real professors, teachers, and scholars who use their academic expertise to tackle your toughest questions. There are questions about the Homeric parádeigma, which I translate for the moment by way of Latin exemplum ‘example’, following the lead of earlier inquiries.
The listeners must be sophoi ‘skilled’ in understanding the message encoded in the poetry. Britannica is the ultimate student resource for key school subjects like history, government, literature, and more. The dialect that The Iliad and The Odyssey are written in is considered Asiatic Greek, specifically Ionic. That fact, paired with frequent mentions of local phenomena such as strong winds blowing from the northwest from the direction of Thrace, suggests, scholars feel, a familiarity with that region that could only mean Homer came from there. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers.
The Presence Of God And The Gods In Homer's Odyssey
Perhaps the best way to look at this question is to analyze some of the underlying assumptions. First, the "homeric" works that have been transmitted to us, includingiliad,odysseyand thehomeric hymns, were not originally written works, nor did they have singular authors. Instead, they were elements of "oral epos", a body of traditions encapsulated in poetic form that were performed orally.
Whereas all myths count as muthoi in Homeric poetry, including the epic master myth told by the master Narrator himself, a master myth told in other media need not be called a muthos. Not all muthoi count as myths in the positive sense of the word muthos as used in Homeric poetry. Whereas the singular ‘truth’ of Pindar’s lyric highlights the integrity of Ajax, the multiple ‘myths’ of Homer’s epic shade it over.
Did Homer write the Odyssey?
Meanwhile, the 'Neoanalysts' sought to bridge the gap between the 'Analysts' and 'Unitarians'. The Neoanalysts sought to trace the relationships between the Homeric poems and other epic poems, which have now been lost, but of which modern scholars do possess some patchy knowledge. Neoanalysts hold that knowledge of earlier versions of the epics can be derived from anomalies of structure and detail in the surviving versions of the Iliad and Odyssey.
He is the first source to look for information on Greek myth and religion. Much speculation surrounds when Homer was born because of the dearth of real information about him. Guesses at his birth date range from 750 BC all the way back to 1200 BC, the latter because The Iliad encompasses the story of the Trojan War, so some scholars have thought it fit to put the poet and chronicler nearer to the time of that actual event. But others believe the poetic style of his work indicates a much later period. Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), often called the father of history, placed Homer several centuries before himself, around 850 BC.
The Life of the Blind Bard
Perhaps partially because of the Homeric poems' extensive use in education, many authors believed that Homer's original purpose had been to educate. Homer's wisdom became so widely praised that he began to acquire the image of almost a prototypical philosopher. Byzantine scholars such as Eustathius of Thessalonica and John Tzetzes produced commentaries, extensions and scholia to Homer, especially in the twelfth century. Eustathius's commentary on the Iliad alone is massive, sprawling over nearly 4,000 oversized pages in a twenty-first century printed version and his commentary on the Odyssey an additional nearly 2,000. One such empirical approach to Homeric poetry is provided by the discipline of archaeology . The external dating criteria provided by the existing archaeological evidence point to many centuries of evolution for the oral poetic tradition that culminated in the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey.
Most researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally. Another empirical approach to Homeric poetry is provided by the discipline of art history. The evolving traditions of visual arts, going as far back as the middle of the second millennium BCE and even beyond, can be compared as parallel to the evolving traditions of the verbal arts as represented by Homeric poetry. A most dramatic illustration is the cross section provided by the miniature frescoes of Thera .
Is Odysseus An Epic Hero?
So, for Odysseus to get his own kleos, which is the story of his homecoming to Ithaca in the Odyssey, he must get over the kleos of Achilles, which is the story of Troy in the Iliad. In other words, he must get on with his nostos, which is not only his homecoming to Ithaca but also the song about this homecoming. That is the essence of the master myth of the Odyssey (BA 1999 Preface §§16–18; 2§§10-18). As we see from such contrasts between lyric master myths that are seen and epic myths that are just heard, not all myths qualify as the truth in any single telling of myths.
Virtually every biographical aspect ascribed to Homer is derived entirely from his poems. Homer is thought to have been blind, based solely on a character in The Odyssey, a blind poet/minstrel called Demodokos. A long disquisition on how Demodokos was welcomed into a gathering and regaled the audience with music and epic tales of conflict and heroes to much praise has been interpreted as Homer’s hint as to what his own life was like. As a result, many busts and statues have been carved of Homer with thick curly hair and beard and sightless eyes. In antiquity, it was widely held that the Homeric poems were collected and organised in Athens in the late sixth century BC by Peisistratos (died 528/7 BC), in what subsequent scholars have dubbed the "Peisistratean recension".
For listeners of the Odyssey in the classical period of the fifth century BCE, this Ithaca of Odysseus was the island then known as Ithakē. In earlier periods, on the other hand, the Ithaca of Odysseus may well have been what is now the western peninsula of the island now known as Kefalonia. This peninsula, now known as Paliki, had once been an island west of Kefalonia , and such a prehistoric Ithaca would fit the Homeric description of the hero’s home as the westernmost of all the other islands nearby (Odyssey ix 25–26). Achilles is pictured as singing the klea andrōn ‘glories of heroes’ while accompanying himself on a lyre he plundered when he captured the native city of that greatest singer of lamentations in the Iliad, Andromache (IX 186–189). The kleos of Achilles is a form of song that dwells on the hatred and the fury, the love and the sorrow – and on the power of song in expressing all these intensely lyrical feelings.
The age of epic heroes is a sacred world of myth that must be set apart from the everyday world of the present. The mythology of epic heroes must distance itself from the present by holding on to a remote past far removed from the world of listeners hearing the glories of heroes. To hold on to such a past, this mythology must show not only that an age of heroes existed once upon a time but also, just as important, that such an age does not exist any more. It must privilege what is past over what is present, and it must remake that past into a sacred age of heroes. What must mean more than anything else to Achilles is not only Patroklos himself but also the actual meaning of the name Patrokleēs , which conveys the idea of the klea andrōn. For Achilles, the words klea andrōn represent the master myth in the actual process of being narrated in the epic of the Iliad.
The myths that Pindar’s song marks as ‘false’ have to do with things heard and not seen (Olympian 1.46–48). As I argue in the companion piece, “Lyric and Greek Myth,” such myths are ‘false’ not because they are myths but only because they are myths that differ from the master myth privileged by Pindar, and that master myth is notionally the only myth that can be ‘true’ at the moment of telling it. While the myths that are ‘false’ can merely be heard, details from the alternative myth that is ‘true’ can actually be visualized, that is, literally seen (Olympian 1.26–27). The epic failure of Ajax is a foil for the epic success of Odysseus, which is made possible by the poetic craft of Homer’s Odyssey. Just as the craftiness of Odysseus prevents Ajax from inheriting the armor of Achilles, so also the craft of Homer prevents Ajax from inheriting the epic status of being called ‘the best of the Achaeans’ after the death of Achilles. In the Odyssey, that epic status is earned by Odysseus through his own epic experiences after the death of Achilles (BA 2§§12–18).
After the return of Odysseus from Hades, he finds his way to the island of the Phaeacians, where he starts the process of rebuilding his epic identity from nothing by retelling for them all his experiences since he left Troy. This retelling, which extends from the beginning of Rhapsody ix to the end of Rhapsody xii, is coterminous with the telling of the Odyssey up to the point where Odysseus leaves the cave of Calypso. Then, after Odysseus finishes his narration, he leaves the island of the Phaeacians and finally comes back home to Ithaca, where his narration is taken over by the master Narrator of the Odyssey.
Just as the framing epic about the anger of Achilles is technically a speech-act, a muthos, so too is the framed epic about the anger of Meleager. Conversely, just as the framed epic about Meleager is a poetic recollection of the klea ‘glories’ of heroes of the past, so too is the framing epic about Achilles. That framing epic, which is the Iliad, is a poetic recollection by the Muse whom the master Narrator invokes to sing the story of the anger of Achilles . As the narrator of a framed epic, Phoenix does not have to invoke the goddesses of memory, the Muses, since the Narrator of the framing epic has already invoked them for him. Homer’s Iliad tells a modern audience much about the lives of the Ancient Greeks and the text’s survival for a prolonged period of time after its original conception demonstrates the extent to which memory was a vital belief and social custom of the Ancient Greeks. Audiences are also introduced to the archetype of the hero and how that manifests in a patriotic but collective group when mythologizing is used during times of strife to raise morale in people.
If "blind," it may have to do more with the portrayal of the Odyssean blind bard called Phemios than the poem's composer. He is thought to have been blind, and so is known as the blind bard, just as Shakespeare, calling on the same tradition, is known as the bard of Avon. Lord ByronLord Byron is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and is best known for his amorous lifestyle and his brilliant use of the English language.
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