Introduction to Homer
Introduction to Homer  
Podcast: Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Published On: Mon Jan 01 2024
Description: Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan answer the question, "Who is Homer?"We announce a year with Homer! Who is Homer? Was he a real person? Did he write the Iliad and the Odyssey?1.        Who was Homer?The city of Troy is said to have fallen in 1184 B.C.[1] Such a date would place it just prior to ancient Israel’s foray into a monarchy under King Saul and the subsequent zenith of the reign of King David at 1000 B.C. Troy was a well-fortified Greek city-state[2] or polis situated on the west coast of ancient Asia Minor—now predominantly modern-day Turkey—across the Aegean Sea from Greece. It was a city of tremendous wealth and culture. The fall of Troy was already part of the ancient history of Greece during the classical era (400-300s BC). Classical Greek historians generally set the fall of Troy from 1334 to 1150 B.C.[3] The classical historian Herodotus (c. 484-425 BC), who set the date for the fall of Troy at 1250 B.C., opined that Homer lived “four hundred years before my own time, at the most;”[4] thus, he placed Homer at around 850 BC—several hundred years after the Trojan war. Modern scholarship tends to date Homer in the late 700s B.C.[5]Very little is known about Homer the person, except that he was Greek, most likely born in Asia Minor, and was a bard of great mastery, i.e., an oral poet who would compose and perform verses, especially on the histories and great deeds of his people.[6] Various traditions also present him as a slave and as blind.[7] One thinks of the wonderful painting entitled Homer and his Guide by the French painter William Bouguereau (AD 1825—1905).2.        Did Homer write the Iliad?The Iliad, Homer’s poem about the fall of Troy, did not originate as a written epic. It originally consisted of oral poems or rhapsodies memorized and performed by Greek bards in the centuries between the fall of Troy and Homer. Consequently, we should see Homer as an inheritor of a centuries old tradition of oral stories about the Trojan War.[8] The brilliance of Homer was his capacity to compose a written epic out of a myriad of oral traditions spanning several centuries. He most likely wrote the Iliad (or dictated it to a scribe) around 750 B.C.[9] with his sequel, the Odyssey, at 725 B.C.The Iliad, as we know it today, “consists in the Original Greek of 15,693 lines of hexameter verse.”[10] Copies of it existed on papyrus scrolls, and it is arguable that the demarcation of the now twenty-four “books” of the Iliad correspond with the original number of scrolls utilized to record the entire epic.[11] One notable remnant of the oral tradition in the written verse is the use of “ornamental epithets.”[12] Epithets are short descriptive phrases of characters that are found throughout the Iliad, e.g., “lord of war,” “man-killing Hector,” “white armed Hera,” “lord of the war cry,” etc. These phrases provided the bard a certain lattice...