Homer

Life

Almost nothing is known about Homer, and it is not certain that a single person of that name existed. Ancient Greek tradition held that he was a blind poet from Ionia, on the coast of what is now Turkey, and several cities, Chios and Smyrna among them, claimed him. The dates given in catalogs, roughly the eighth to seventh century BC, reflect the period in which the Iliad and the Odyssey are thought to have taken the form in which we have them, rather than any record of a life.

Modern scholarship treats the two poems as the product of a long oral tradition in which professional singers composed and recomposed heroic songs in performance, using fixed phrases and scenes. Whether a single poet of genius shaped that material into the Iliad and the Odyssey, whether two different poets were responsible, and when the poems were first written down are all open questions. The debate is old enough to have a name, the Homeric Question.

What can be said is that by the sixth century BC the poems were recited at Athenian festivals in something like their present form, that they were the foundation of Greek education for the rest of antiquity, and that other poems once attributed to Homer, including the Homeric Hymns, are now thought to be by other hands.

Literary significance

The Iliad and the Odyssey are the oldest surviving works of European literature and the starting point of its epic tradition. Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost all answer to them directly. The poems also supplied Greek tragedy with most of its stories and the Greeks generally with their picture of their gods and heroes.

The two epics differ in temper. The Iliad is a tragedy of anger and mortality set in a few weeks of the Trojan War. The Odyssey is a story of return, with a wider range of settings, more humor and a hero who wins by intelligence. Between them they established the conventions, the epithets, the similes, the catalogs and the councils of gods, that later poets borrowed or rebelled against.

Where to start

The Odyssey, in Samuel Butler’s prose translation, is the easier of the two and is in this library. The Iliad, also in Butler’s prose version, is here as well for readers who want the war before the homecoming.