Homer Biography
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Homer (Greek Ὅμηρος Hómēros) was a
legendary early Greek poet and rhapsode traditionally credited with
authorship of the major Greek epics Ιλιάς Iliad and Οδύσσεια Odyssey.
The comic mini-epic Βατραχομαχία Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse
War"), the corpus of Homeric Hymns, and various other lost or
fragmentary works such as Margites have been attributed to him, but this
is now believed to be unlikely. A few ancient authors credited him with
the entire Epic Cycle, which included further poems on the Trojan War as
well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and his sons.
Tradition held that Homer was blind, and
various Ionian cities are claimed to be his birthplace, but otherwise
his biography is a blank slate. There is considerable scholarly debate
about whether or not Homer was actually a real person, or the name given
to one or more oral poets who sang traditional epic material.
It has repeatedly been questioned whether
the same poet was responsible for both the Iliad and the Odyssey; the
Batrachomyomachia, Homeric hymns and cyclic epics are generally agreed
to be later than these two epic poems.
****
The Homeric Question
Scholars generally agree that the Iliad and
Odyssey underwent a process of standardization and refinement out of
older material beginning in the 8th century BC. An important role in
this standardization 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, however, maintain their
belief in the reality of an actual Homer. So little is known or even
guessed of his actual life, that a common joke has it that the poems
"were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name," and
the classical scholar Richmond Lattimore, author of well regarded poetic
translations to English of both epics, once wrote a paper entitled
"Homer: Who Was She?" Samuel Butler was more specific, theorizing a
young Sicilian woman as author of the Odyssey (but not the Iliad), an
idea further speculated on by Robert Graves in his novel Homer's
Daughter.
In Greek his name is Homēros, which is
Greek for "hostage". There is a theory that his name was back-extracted
from the name of a society of poets called the Homeridae, which
literally means "sons of hostages", i.e., descendants of prisoners of
war. As these men were not sent to war because their loyalty on the
battlefield was suspect, they would not get killed in battles. Thus they
were entrusted with remembering the area's stock of epic poetry, to
remember past events, in the times before literacy came to the area.
Most Classicists would agree that, whether
there was ever such a composer as "Homer" or not, the Homeric poems are
the product of 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 consist of regular, repeating phrases; even entire verses repeat.
Could the Iliad and Odyssey have been oral-formulaic poems, composed on
the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses
and phases? Milman Parry and Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate
oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic
poetry in an exclusively oral culture. The crucial words are "oral" and
"traditional." Parry started with "traditional." The repetitive chunks
of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his
predecessors, and they were useful to the poet in composition. He called
these chunks of repetitive language "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 in the 6th century BC or earlier.
More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical
text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the
Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC).
Historical Aspects of the Poems
Another significant question regards the
tales' possible historical basis. The commentaries on the Iliad and the
Odyssey written in the Hellenistic period began exploring the textual
inconsistencies of the poems. Modern classicists continue the tradition.
The excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in
the late 19th century began to convince scholars there was a historical
basis for the Trojan War. Research (pioneered by the aforementioned
Parry and Lord) into oral epics in Serbo-Croatian and Turkic languages
began to convince scholars that long poems could be preserved with
consistency by oral cultures until someone bothered to write them down.
The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and others,
convinced scholars of a linguistic continuity between 13th century BC
Mycenaean writings and the poems attributed to Homer.
****
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URL of Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer
Date Article Copied:
December 18, 2005
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