Homer

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This article is about the Greek poet Homer and the works attributed to him. For other meanings, see Homer (disambiguation).
"Homeric" redirects here. For other uses, see Homeric (disambiguation).
Homer (Greek Ὅμηρος Homēros)

Idealized portrayal of Homer dating to the Hellenistic period. British Museum.
Lived ca. 8th century BC
Influences rhapsodic oral poetry
Influenced Classics (Western canon)
Homer and His Guide, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). The scene portrays Homer on Mount Ida, beset by dogs and guided by the goatherder, Glaucus. (The tale is told in Pseudo-Herodotus).

Homer (Ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος, Hómēros) is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as of the Homeric Hymns. Today the hymns are considered to be later works but many still regard Homer as the author or compiler of the epics. The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was a historical individual, but some modern scholars are skeptical: G. S. Kirk's comment that "Antiquity knew nothing definite about the life and personality of Homer."[1] represents the general consensus. Some scholars believe that the poems themselves manifestly represent the culmination of many centuries of oral story-telling and a well-developed "formulaic" system of poetic composition, so according to Martin West, "Homer" is "not the name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name."[2]

The date of Homer's existence was controversial in antiquity and is no less so today. Herodotus said that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 BC;[3] but other ancient sources gave dates much closer to the supposed time of the Trojan War.[4] The date of the Trojan War was given as 1194–1184 BC by Eratosthenes, who strove to establish a scientific chronology of events and this date is gaining support because of recent archaeological research.[citation needed]

For modern scholarship, "the date of Homer" refers to the date of the poems' conception as much as to the lifetime of an individual. The scholarly consensus is that "the Iliad and the Odyssey date from the extreme end of the 9th century BC or from the 8th, the Iliad being anterior to the Odyssey, perhaps by some decades",[5] i.e., somewhat earlier than Hesiod,[6] and that the Iliad is the oldest work of western literature. Over the past few decades, some scholars have argued for a 7th-century date. Those who believe that the Homeric poems developed gradually over a long period of time, however, generally give a later date for the poems: according to Nagy, they only became fixed texts in the 6th century.[7]

Alfred Heubeck states that the formative influence of the works of Homer in shaping and influencing the whole development of Greek culture was recognised by many Greeks themselves, who considered him to be their instructor.[8]

Contents

Life and legends

Although "Homer" is a Greek name, attested in Aeolic-speaking areas,[9] nothing definite is known of him; yet rich traditions grew up, or were conserved, purporting to give details of his birthplace and background. Many of them were purely fantastical: the satirist Lucian, in his fabulous True History, makes him out to be a Babylonian called Tigranes, who only assumed the name Homer when taken "hostage" (homeros) by the Greeks.[10] When the Emperor Hadrian asked the Oracle at Delphi who Homer really was, the Pythia proclaimed that he was Ithacan, the son of Epikaste and Telemachus, from the Odyssey.[11] These stories proliferated and were incorporated into a number[12] of Lives of Homer compiled from the Alexandrian period onwards.[13] The most common version has Homer born in the Ionian region of Asia Minor, at Smyrna, or on the island of Chios, and dying on the Cycladic island of Ios.[13][14] A connection with Smyrna seems to be alluded to in a legend that his original name was "Melesigenes" ("born of Meles", a river which flowed by that city), and of the nymph Kretheis. Internal evidence from the poems gives some support to this connection: familiarity with the topography of this area of Asia Minor's littoral obtrudes in place-names and details, and similes evocative of local scenery: the meadow birds at the mouth of the Caystros (Iliad 2.459ff.), a storm in the Icarian sea (Iliad 2.144ff.), and wind-lore (Iliad 2.394ff: 4.422ff: 9.5),[15] or that women of either Maeonia or Caria stain ivory with scarlet (Iliad 4.142).[16]

The association with Chios dates back at least to Semonides of Amorgos who cited a famous line in the Iliad (6.146) as by "the man of Chios". Some kind of eponymous bardic guild, known as the Homeridae (sons of Homer), or Homeristae ('Homerizers')[17] appears to have existed there, variously tracing descent from an imaginary ancestor of that name,[18] or vaunting their special function as rhapsodes or "lay-stitchers" specialising in the recitation of Homeric poetry.

The poet's name is homophonous with "homêros", meaning, generally, "hostage" (or "surety"), long understood as "he who accompanies; he who is forced to follow", or, in some dialects, "blind".[19] The assonance itself generated many tales relating the person to the functions of a hostage or of a blind man. In regard to the latter, traditions holding that he was blind may have arisen from the meaning of the word both in Ionic, where the verbal form "hómêreuô" has the specialized meaning of "guide the blind",[20] and in the Aeolian dialect of Cyme, where homêros was synonymous with standard Greek tuphlós, meaning 'blind'.[21] The characterization of Homer as a blind bard goes back to some verses in the Delian Hymn to Apollo, the third of the Homeric Hymns,[22] verses later cited to support this notion by Thucydides.[23] The Cumean historian Ephorus held the same view, and the idea gained support in antiquity on the strength of a false etymology deriving his name from ho mê horôn (ὁ μὴ ὁρών: "he who does not see"). Critics have long taken a passage in the Odyssey describing a blind bard, Demodocus, in the court of the Phaeacian king, who recounts stories of Troy to the shipwrecked Odysseus,[24] as self-referential.[25]

Many scholars take the name of the poet to be indicative of a generic function. Gregory Nagy takes it to mean "he who fits (the Song) together".[26] "Hómêréô", another related verb, besides signifying "meet", can mean "(sing) in accord/tune".[27] Some argue that "Homer" may have meant "he who puts the voice in tune" with dancing.[28][29] Marcello Durante links "Homeros" to an epithet of Zeus as "god of the assemblies" and argues that behind the name lies the echo of an archaic word for "reunion", similar to the later Panegyris, denoting a formal assembly of competing minstrels.[30][31]

The Ancient Lives depict Homer as a wandering minstrel, much like Thamyris[32] or Hesiod, who walked as far as Chalkis to sing at the funeral games of Amphidamas.[33] We are given the image of a "blind, begging singer who hangs around with little people: shoemakers, fisherman, potters, sailors, elderly men in the gathering places of harbour towns".[34] The poems themselves give evidence of singers at the courts of the nobility. Scholars are divided as to which category, if any, the court singer or the wandering minstrel, the historic "Homer" belonged.[35]

For more details on this topic, see Ancient accounts of Homer, Life of Homer (Pseudo-Herodotus).

Works attributed to Homer

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Works attributed to Homer

The Greeks of the sixth and early fifth centuries understood by "Homer", generally, "the whole body of heroic tradition as embodied in hexameter verse".[36] Thus, in addition to the Iliad and the Odyssey, there are "exceptional" epics which organize their respective themes on a "massive scale".[37] Many other works were credited to Homer in antiquity, including the entire Epic Cycle. The genre included further poems on the Trojan War, such as the Little Iliad, the Nostoi, the Cypria, and the Epigoni, as well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and his sons. Other works, such as the corpus of Homeric Hymns, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War"), and the Margites were also attributed to him, but this is now believed to be unlikely. Two other poems, the Capture of Oechalia and the Phocais were also assigned Homeric authorship, but the question of the identities of the authors of these various texts is even more problematic than that of the authorship of the two major epics.

Problems of authorship

For more details on this topic, see Homeric Question.

The idea that Homer was responsible for just the two outstanding epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, only won consensus by 350 BC.[38] While many find it unlikely that both epics were composed by the same person, others argue that the stylistic similarities are too consistent to support the theory of multiple authorship. One view which attempts to bridge the differences holds that the Iliad was composed by "Homer" in his maturity, while the Odyssey was a work of his old age. The Batrachomyomachia, Homeric Hymns and cyclic epics are generally agreed to be later than the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Most scholars agree that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent a process of standardisation and refinement out of older material beginning in the 8th century BC. An important role in this standardisation appears to have been played by the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus, who reformed the recitation of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival. Many classicists hold that this reform must have involved the production of a canonical written text.

Other scholars still support the idea that Homer was a real person. Since nothing is known about the life of this Homer, the common joke, also recycled in disputes about the authorship of plays ascribed to Shakespeare, has it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name," [1] [2]. Samuel Butler argued that a young Sicilian woman wrote the Odyssey (but not the Iliad), an idea further pursued by Robert Graves in his novel Homer's Daughter and Andrew Dalby in Rediscovering Homer.[39]

Independent of the question of single authorship is the near-universal agreement, after the work of Milman Parry,[40] that the Homeric poems are dependent on an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (aoidoi). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems contain many formulaic phrases typical of extempore epic traditions; even entire verses are at times repeated. Parry and his student Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in a predominantly oral cultural milieu, the key words being "oral" and "traditional". Parry started with "traditional": the repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and were useful to him in composition. Parry called these repetitive chunks "formulas".

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 between the 8th and 6th centuries. The Greek alphabet was introduced in the early 8th century, so it is possible that Homer himself was of the first generation of authors who were also literate. More radical Homerists like Gregory Nagy contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BCE).

Homeric studies

Main article: Homeric scholarship
Reconstitution of the world described by the Odyssey

The study of Homer is one of the oldest topics in scholarship, dating back to antiquity. The aims and achievements of Homeric studies have changed over the course of the millennia. In the last few centuries, they have revolved around the process by which the Homeric poems came into existence and were transmitted down to us—first orally and later in writing.

Some of the main trends in modern Homeric scholarship have been, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Analysis and Unitarianism (see Homeric Question), schools of thought which emphasized on the one hand the inconsistencies in, and on the other the artistic unity of, Homer; and in the 20th century and later Oral Theory, the study of the mechanisms and effects of oral transmission, and Neoanalysis, which is the study of the relationship between Homer and other early epic material.

Homeric dialect

Main article: Homeric Greek

The language used by Homer is an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with admixtures from certain other dialects, such as Aeolic Greek. It later served as the basis of Epic Greek, the language of epic poetry, typically in dactylic hexameter.

Homeric style

Aristotle remarks in his Poetics that Homer was unique among the poets of his time, focusing on a single, unified theme or action in the epic cycle.[41]

The cardinal qualities of the style of Homer are well articulated by Matthew Arnold:

[T]he translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author:—that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and finally, that he is eminently noble.[42]

The peculiar rapidity of Homer is due in great measure to his use of hexameter verse. It is characteristic of early literature that the evolution of the thought, or the grammatical form of the sentence, is guided by the structure of the verse; and the correspondence which consequently obtains between the rhythm and the syntax, the thought being given out in lengths, as it were, and these again divided by tolerably uniform pauses, produces a swift flowing movement, such as is rarely found when periods are constructed without direct reference to the metre. That Homer possesses this rapidity without falling into the corresponding faults, that is, without becoming either fluctuant or monotonous, is perhaps the best proof of his unequalled poetic skill. The plainness and directness, both of thought and of expression, which characterise him were doubtless qualities of his age, but the author of the Iliad (similar to Voltaire, to whom Arnold happily compares him) must have possessed this gift in a surpassing degree. The Odyssey is in this respect perceptibly below the level of the Iliad.

Statue of Homer outside the Bavarian State Library in Munich.

Rapidity or ease of movement, plainness of expression, and plainness of thought are not distinguishing qualities of the great epic poets, Virgil, Dante,[43] and Milton. On the contrary, they belong rather to the humbler epico-lyrical school for which Homer has been so often claimed. The proof that Homer does not belong to that school, and that his poetry is not in any true sense ballad poetry, is furnished by the higher artistic structure of his poems and, as regards style, by the fourth of the qualities distinguished by Arnold, the quality of nobleness. It is his noble and powerful style, sustained through every change of idea and subject, that finally separates Homer from all forms of ballad-poetry and popular epic.

Like the French epics, such as the Chanson de Roland, Homeric poetry is indigenous and, by the ease of movement and its resultant simplicity, distinguishable from the works of Dante, Milton and Virgil. It is also distinguished from the works of these artists by the comparative absence of underlying motives or sentiment. In Virgil's poetry, a sense of the greatness of Rome and Italy is the leading motive of a passionate rhetoric, partly veiled by the considered delicacy of his language. Dante and Milton are still more faithful exponents of the religion and politics of their time. Even the French epics display sentiments of fear and hatred of the Saracens; but, in Homer's works, the interest is purely dramatic. There is no strong antipathy of race or religion; the war turns on no political events; the capture of Troy lies outside the range of the Iliad; and even the protagonists are not comparable to the chief national heroes of Greece. So far as can be seen, the chief interest in Homer's works is that of human feeling and emotion, and of drama; indeed, his works are often referred to as "dramas".

History and the Iliad

Main article: Historicity of the Iliad
Greece according to the Iliad.

The excavations of Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik in the late 19th century provided initial evidence to scholars that there was a historical basis for the Trojan War. Research into oral epics in Serbo-Croatian and Turkic languages, pioneered by the aforementioned Parry and Lord, began convincing scholars that long poems could be preserved with consistency by oral cultures until they are written down.[40] The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris (and others) convinced many of a linguistic continuity between 13th century BC Mycenaean writings and the poems attributed to Homer.

It is probable, therefore, that the story of the Trojan War as reflected in the Homeric poems, derives from a tradition of epic poetry founded on a war which actually took place. It is crucial, however, not to underestimate the creative and transforming power of subsequent tradition: for instance, Achilles, the most important character of the Iliad, is strongly associated with southern Thessaly, but his legendary figure is interwoven into a tale of war whose kings were from the Peloponnese. Tribal wanderings were frequent, and far-flung, ranging over much of Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean.[44] The epic weaves brilliantly the disiecta membra (scattered remains) of these distinct tribal narratives, exchanged among clan bards, into a monumental tale in which Greeks join collectively to do battle on the distant plains of Troy.

Hero cult

The Apotheosis of Homer, by Archelaus of Priene. Marble relief, possibly of the 3rd century BC, now in the British Museum.

In the Hellenistic period, Homer was the subject of a hero cult in several cities. A shrine, the Homereion, was devoted to him in Alexandria by Ptolemy IV Philopator in the late 3rd century BC. This shrine is described in Aelian's 3rd century work Varia Historia. He describes how Ptolemy "placed in a circle around the statue [of Homer] all the cities who laid claim to Homer" and mentions a painting of the poet by the artist Galaton, which apparently depicted Homer in the aspect of Oceanus as the source of all poetry.

A marble relief, found in Italy but thought to have been sculpted in Egypt, depicts the apotheosis of Homer. It shows Ptolemy and his wife or sister Arsinoe III standing beside a seated poet, flanked by figures from the Odyssey and Iliad, with the nine Muses standing above them and a procession of worshippers approaching an altar, believed to represent the Alexandrine Homereion. Apollo, the god of music and poetry, also appears, along with a female figure tentatively identified as Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses. Zeus, the king of the gods, presides over the proceedings. The relief demonstrates vividly that the Greeks considered Homer not merely a great poet but the divinely-inspired reservoir of all literature.[45]

Homereia also stood at Chios, Ephesus, and Smyrna, which were among the city-states that claimed to be his birthplace. Strabo (14.1.37) records a Homeric temple in Smyrna with an ancient xoanon or cult statue of the poet. He also mentions sacrifices carried out to Homer by the inhabitants of Argos, presumably at another Homereion.[46]

Transmission and Publication

Though evincing many features characteristic of oral poetry, the Iliad and Odyssey were at some point committed to writing. The Greek script, adapted from a Phoenician syllabary around 800 BCE, made possible the notation of the complex rhythms and vowel clusters that make up hexameter verse. Homer's poems appear to have been recorded shortly after the alphabet's invention: an inscription from Ischia in the Bay of Naples, ca. 740 BCE, appears to refer to a text of the Iliad; likewise, illustrations seemingly inspired by the Polyphemus episode in the Odyssey are found on Samos, Mykonos and in Italy in the first quarter of the seventh century BCE. We have little information about the early condition of the Homeric poems, but Alexandrian editors stabilized the text in the second century BCE, from which all modern texts descend.

In late antiquity, knowledge of Greek declined in Latin-speaking western Europe and, along with it, knowledge of Homer's poems. It was not until the fifteenth century AD that Homer's work began to be read once more in Italy. By contrast it was continually read and taught in the Greek speaking Eastern Roman Empire where the majority of the classics also survived. The first print edition appeared in 1488.

See also

Homeric topics

Notable Modern Homeric Scholars

Notes

  1. ^ G. S. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary,volume 1, 1985, Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-28171-7
  2. ^ West, Martin (1999). "The Invention of Homer". Classical Quarterly 49 (364). 
  3. ^ Herodotus 2.53.
  4. ^ Graziosi, Barbara (2002). The Invention of Homer. Cambridge. pp. 98–101. 
  5. ^ Vidal-Naquet, Pierre (2000). Le monde d'Homère. Perrin. p. 19. 
  6. ^ M. L. West (1966). Hesiod's Theogony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 40, 46. 
  7. ^ Nagy, Gregory (2001). Homeric Poetry and Problems of Multiformity: The "Panathenaic Bottleneck. 96. Classical Philology (journal). pp. 109–119. 
  8. ^ Heubeck, Alfred; West, Stephanie; Hainsworth, J. B. (1988). A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 3. 
  9. ^ Silk, Michael (1987). Homer: The Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 5. 
  10. ^ Lucian, Verae Historiae 2.20, cited and tr.Barbara Graziosi‚Inventing Homer:The Early Reception of Epic,’ Cambridge University Press, 2002 p.127
  11. ^ Parke, Herbert W. (1967). Greek Oracles. pp. 136–137 citing the Certamen, 12. 
  12. ^ There were seven in addition to an account of a bardic competition between Homer and Hesiod.F.Stoessl,'Homeros'in Der Kleine Pauly: Lexikon der Antike in fünf Bänden, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, München 1979, Bd.2, p.1202
  13. ^ a b Kirk, G.S. (1965). Homer and the Epic: A Shortened Version of the Songs of Homer. London: Cambridge University Press. pp. 190. 
  14. ^ Homêreôn was one of the names for a month in the calendar of Ios. H.G. Liddell, R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev.ed.Sir Henry Stuart-Jones, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968 ad loc
  15. ^ Kirk, op.cit.pp.191f.; G.S.Kirk,The Songs of Homer, Cambridge University Press, 1962 pp.272ff.))
  16. ^ Barry B. Powell, ‘Did Homer sing at Lefkandi?’, Electronic Antiquity, July 1993, Vol. 1, No. 2.
  17. ^ Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, p.307
  18. ^ "The probability is that 'Homer' was not the name of a historical Greek poet but the imaginary ancestor of the Homeridai; such guild-names in -idai and -adai are not normally based on the name of an historical person". M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997 p. 622. West hazards a conjectural Phoenician prototype for Homer's name, "*benê ômerîm" ("sons of speakers"), id est professional tale-tellers.
  19. ^ P. Chantraine, dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, Klincksieck, Paris, 1968, vol.2 (3-4) p.797 ad loc.
  20. ^ H.G.Liddell, R.Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. ed. Sir Henry Stuart-Jones, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968 ad loc.
  21. ^ Pseudo-Herodotus, Vita Homeri1.3 in Thomas W. Allen, Homeri Opera, Tomus V,(1912) 1946 p.194. Cf. Lycophron, Alexandra, l.422
  22. ^ Homeric Hymns 3:172-3
  23. ^ Thucidides, The Peloponnesian War 3:104
  24. ^ Odyssey, 8:64ff.
  25. ^ Barbara Graziosi,Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic,’ Cambridge University Press, 2002 p.133
  26. ^ Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1979 pp296-300
  27. ^ M.L. West (ed.), Hesiod Theogony,Clarendon Press, Oxford 1966 on line 39, p.170
  28. ^ Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, ibid., p.
  29. ^ Filippo Càssola (ed.) Inni Omerici, Mondadori, Milan, 1975 p. xxxiii
  30. ^ Marcello Durante, 'II nome di Omero', in Rendiconti Accademia Lincei, XII, 1957 pp. 94-111
  31. ^ Marcello Durante, Sulla preistoria della tradizione poetica greca,Edizioni dell'Ateneo, Rome 1971 2 vols. vol. 2 pp. 185-204, esp. pp. 194ff.
  32. ^ Iliad, 2.595
  33. ^ Hesiod, Works and Days, 654-5; Martin P. Nilsson, Homer & Mycenae(12933) University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972 pp. 207ff.
  34. ^ Joachim Latacz, Homer: His Art and His World, tr. James P. Holoka, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1996, p. 29
  35. ^ Barbara Graziosi, ibid. esp. p.134
  36. ^ Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic', 4th ed. ibid. p. 93
  37. ^ William G. Thalman, Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Greek Epic Poetry, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1984 p. 119
  38. ^ Gilbert Murray: The Rise of the Greek Epic, 4th ed. 1934, Oxford University Press reprint 1967 p. 299
  39. ^ Mary Ebbott "Butler's Authoress of the Odyssey: gendered readings of Homer, then and now," (Classics@: Issue 3).
  40. ^ a b Adam Parry (ed.) The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1987.
  41. ^ Aristotle, Poetics, 1451a 16-29. Cf. Aristotle, "On the Art of Poetry" in T.S. Dorsch (tr.), Aristotle, Horace, Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1965 ch. 8 pp. 42-43
  42. ^ Matthew Arnold, 'On Translating Homer' (Oxford Lecture, 1861) in Lionel Trilling (ed.) The Portable Matthew Arnold,(1949) Viking Press, New York 1956 pp. 204-228, p. 211
  43. ^ Dante has Virgil introduce Homer, with a sword in hand, as poeta sovrano (sovereign poet), walking ahead of Horace, Ovid and Lucan. Cf. Inferno IV, 88
  44. ^ Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1907, pp. 182f., slightly expanded in the 4th. ed.(1934) 1960 pp. 206ff.
  45. ^ Morgan, Llewelyn, 1999. Patterns of Redemption in Virgil's Georgics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 30.
  46. ^ Zanker, Paul, 1996. The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, Alan Shapiro, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Selected bibliography

Editions

(texts in Homeric Greek)

Interlinear translations

    • The Iliad of Homer a Parsed Interlinear, Handheldclassics.com (2008) Text ISBN 978-1607252986

English translations

Main article: English Translations of Homer

This is a partial list of translations into English of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

General works on Homer

Influential readings and interpretations

  • E. Auerbach 1953, Mimesis, Princeton (orig. publ. in German, 1946, Bern), chapter 1. ISBN 0-691-11336-X
  • M.W. Edwards 1987, Homer, Poet of the Iliad, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-3329-9
  • B. Fenik 1974, Studies in the Odyssey, Wiesbaden ('Hermes' Einzelschriften 30).
  • M.I. Finley, The World of Odysseus 1954, rev. ed. 1978.
  • I.J.F. de Jong 1987, Narrators and Focalizers, Amsterdam/Bristol. ISBN 1-85399-658-0
  • G. Nagy 1980, "The Best of the Achaeans", Baltimore. ISBN 978-0801860157

Commentaries

Trends in Homeric scholarship

"Classical" analysis
  • A. Heubeck 1974, Die homerische Frage, Darmstadt. ISBN 3-534-03864-9
  • R. Merkelbach 1969, Untersuchungen zur Odyssee (2nd edition), Munich. ISBN 3-406-03242-7
  • D. Page 1955, The Homeric Odyssey, Oxford.
  • U. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff 1916, Die Ilias und Homer, Berlin.
  • F.A. Wolf 1795, Prolegomena ad Homerum, Halle. Published in English translation 1988, Princeton. ISBN 0-691-10247-3
Neoanalysis
  • M.E. Clark 1986, "Neoanalysis: a bibliographical review," Classical World 79.6: 379-94.
  • J. Griffin 1977, "The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer," Journal of Hellenic Studies 97: 39-53.
  • J.T. Kakridis 1949, Homeric Researches, London. ISBN 0-8240-7757-1
  • W. Kullmann 1960, Die Quellen der Ilias (Troischer Sagenkreis), Wiesbaden. ISBN 3-515-00235-9
  • Rainer Friedrich, Formular Economy in Homer. The Poetics of the Breaches (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), Pp. 159 (Hermes Einzelschriften, 100).
Homer and oral tradition

Dating the Homeric poems

External links

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Persondata
NAME Homer
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ὅμηρος
SHORT DESCRIPTION Author
DATE OF BIRTH ca. 8th century BC
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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