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The Homeric epics are written in an artificial literary language or 'Kunstsprache' only used in epic hexameter poetry. Homeric Greek shows features of multiple regional Greek dialects and periods, but is fundamentally based on Ionic Greek, in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was composed slightly before the Odyssey, and that Homeric formulae preserve older features than other parts of the poems. Most scholars now agree that the Homeric poems depict customs and elements of the material world that are derived from different periods of Greek history. For instance, the heroes in the poems use bronze weapons, characteristic of the Bronze Age in which the poems are set, rather than the later Iron Age during which they were composed; yet the same heroes are cremated rather than buried . Such helmets were not worn in Homer's time, but were commonly worn by aristocratic warriors between 1600 and 1150 BC.
Homer then expands on these ideas in subsequent clauses; this technique is called parataxis. Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness to the Trojan War; others thought he had lived up to 500 years afterwards. A long history of oral transmission lies behind the composition of the poems, complicating the search for a precise date. At one extreme, Richard Janko has proposed a date for both poems to the eighth century BC based on linguistic analysis and statistics. Homer's epic poems shaped aspects of ancient Greek culture and education, fostering ideals of heroism, glory, and honor. From antiquity to present day, Homeric epics have inspired many famous works of literature, music, art, and film.
Is Odysseus An Epic Hero?
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. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the Classical European tradition. Ancient Greece have always been attributed to the shadowy figure of Homer, little is known of him beyond the fact that his was the name attached in antiquity by the Greeks themselves to the poems.
To return from the cave of Calypso at the end of Rhapsody xii of the Odyssey is to return from the darkness and death of that cave. The same can be said about the return of Odysseus from the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus at the end of Rhapsody ix of the Odyssey. In Rhapsody v of the Odyssey, the Olympians send the god Hermes as their messenger to Calypso, and he tells her that she must allow Odysseus to make his way back home. So she must stop preventing Odysseus from getting started with the master myth of the Odyssey. That master myth is the nostos of Odysseus, which must be not only the hero’s homecoming but also the song about his homecoming.
The Life of the Blind Bard
Starting in around 1928, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, after their studies of folk bards in the Balkans, developed the "Oral-Formulaic Theory" that the Homeric poems were originally composed through improvised oral performances, which relied on traditional epithets and poetic formulas. This theory found very wide scholarly acceptance and explained many previously puzzling features of the Homeric poems, including their unusually archaic language, their extensive use of stock epithets, and their other "repetitive" features. Many scholars concluded that the "Homeric question" had finally been answered.
From this moment on, now that Odysseus has succeeded in making his return from his journeys at sea, he must succeed also in making another kind of return. That is, he must now return to his former social status as king at home in Ithaca. In the course of the twenty years that elapsed since his departure for Troy, however, the hero’s social status at home has been reduced to nothing. Now he must work his way up from the bottom of the social scale, starting from nothing. He starts by being a nobody – that is, by being a somebody who has nothing and is therefore a nobody. This way, his interaction with the suitors of his wife exposes them as lacking in interior moral nobility despite their exterior social nobility (Nagy 1985 §§68–70).
Dramatic Irony In The Odyssey Analysis
Homer's Iliad centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War. The Odyssey chronicles the ten-year journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, back to his home after the fall of Troy. The poems are in Homeric Greek, also known as Epic Greek, a literary language which shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence is Eastern Ionic.
The Greek epic poet credited with the enduring epic tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey is an enigma insofar as actual facts of his life go. Some scholars believe him to be one man; others think these iconic stories were created by a group. A variation on the group idea stems from the fact that storytelling was an oral tradition and Homer compiled the stories, then recited them to memory. The orally transmitted Homeric poems were put into written form at some point between the eighth and sixth centuries BC. Some scholars believe that they were dictated to a scribe by the poet and that our inherited versions of the Iliad and Odyssey were in origin orally-dictated texts.
From the standpoint of Achilles as a character who takes shape within the plot of the overall epic that is the Iliad, the consequences of his decisions in reacting to the subplot of the epic about Meleager are still unclear at the moment when he makes these decisions. From the standpoint of the master Narrator who narrates the plot of the Iliad, on the other hand, the consequences are quite clear, since the master Narration takes shape by way of an interaction between the framed myth about the anger of Meleager and the framing myth about the anger of Achilles . The short-range agenda of Phoenix and Achilles will be transformed into the long-range agenda of the master myth, which will ultimately correspond to what actually happens to Achilles in his own heroic life. In the world of epic, heroes live out their lives by living the myths that are their lives. As Achilles contemplates the decisions he faces in the making of an epic that centers on his own epic actions, he is invited by Phoenix to contemplate the decisions faced by an earlier hero in the making of an earlier epic. As we saw earlier, that hero is Meleager, who figures in an earlier epic called the klea ‘glories’ of heroes (IX 524–525).
Although Odysseus is credited with the epic feat of destroying the city of Troy, as the Odyssey proclaims at the very beginning , his kleos in that epic does not and cannot depend on the story of Troy. By contrast, although Achilles is never credited with the destruction of Troy, since he is killed well before that event takes place, his kleos nonetheless depends on the story of Troy. The name of the Iliad, which equates itself with the kleos of Achilles, means literally ‘the song of Ilion’, that is, the song of Troy (EH §49).
hērōōn ‘the glories of men of an earlier time who were heroes’ (IX 524–525). It is a story about the hero Meleager and his anger against his people, parallel to the framing story about the hero Achilles and his anger against his own people, the Achaeans . So the omniscient Muses are goddesses of total recall, and their absolute power of recall is expressed by an active form of the verb mnē‑ in the sense of ‘remind’ . The master Narrator of the Iliad receives the same absolute power of total recall when he prays to the goddesses to tell him everything about the Achaean forces that sailed to Troy (II 484, 491–492). The expression klea andrōn, which I have translated here as ‘glories of men ’, applies not only to the epic story about Meleager . On the basis of his comparative analysis, Parry found that oral poetry was not restricted to epic, which had seemed, at first, to be the prototypical poetic genre in the prehistory of Greek literature.
These anomalies point to earlier versions of the Iliad in which Ajax played a more prominent role, in which the Achaean embassy to Achilles comprised different characters, and in which Patroclus was actually mistaken for Achilles by the Trojans. Following World War I, the Analyst school began to fall out of favor among Homeric scholars. It did not die out entirely, but it came to be increasingly seen as a discredited dead end.
He noted that Homer often, when describing frequently recurring activities such as eating, praying, fighting and dressing, used blocks of set phrases in sequence that were then elaborated by the poet. The 'Analyst' school had considered these repetitions as un-Homeric, whereas Arend interpreted them philosophically. Parry and Lord noted that these conventions are found in many other cultures. The explanations suggested by modern scholars tend to mirror their position on the overall Homeric question. Even more basically, the same can also be said about the return of Odysseus from Hades at the beginning of Rhapsody xii of the Odyssey.
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