Homer - Iliad & Odyssey  Tags: homer illiad odyssey epic_poetry mythology troy greece ithaca  

Homer (Greek Ὅμηρος Homēros)

Idealized portrayal of Homer dating to the Hellenistic period. British Museum.

Myth and classics - UC

Women in Homer's work

Map with locations mentioned

Other GSC LibGuides for Humanities

Rebecca Sewell Homan employeed 23 years by GSC.

Archivist, Bibliographer, and Associate Professor.

MLIS 1980, MEd 2007

Homer, who flourished in the eighth century b.c., was called “the educator of the Greeks” by Plato some four hundred years later. In this century, Werner Jaeger wrote that Homer “became the teacher of all humanity.” There is little disagreement about his importance.

When it comes to such questions, however, as who he was, where he lived, how he came to write, and whether, indeed, he composed and wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey at all, and whether or not these two epic poems were the work of a single author or of two—here we have a great and contentious scholarly tradition. More important for us is the question of the meaning and significance of his work, an understanding of why it has led the canon of our culture’s great books for almost three millenniums, almost impervious to the evolving standards of successive epochs. Here, again, there is no lack of contending interpretations.

Homer’s works are the oldest surviving examples of Greek writing, earlier than inscriptions on pottery or coins, earlier than commercial inventories or tax records, and probably contemporaneous with the first recorded Olympic games in 776 b.c.. Homer signals the emergence of the Greek alphabet, the world’s first system for converting a spoken language into writing. Whether the excellence and importance of his poems led them to be chosen as the first works to be recorded, or whether the alphabet was developed to record his works can be debated. But the stories he told were unquestionably significant to the Greeks.

"Homer." Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia. London: Routledge, 1996. Credo Reference. 29 April 2009 http://www.credoreference.com

       Typical features of folk epic are standardized descriptions, for example of banquets or battles, and stock descriptive epithets that attach themselves to characters or objects, presumably as aids to the reciter's memory. The Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, especially the former, contain such material in abundance: the ‘wine-dark sea’, ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, and so on. It has long been a matter of dispute whether Homerever existed, whether the poems are to be attributed to collective or folk authorship, or whether a single individual was responsible for taking traditional material and putting it into its present form. It is generally agreed, however, that the stories of a crucial episode during the siege of Troy and of Odysseus's wanderings home after the end of the siege were written in Ionia in around the 8c BC. It is also beyond dispute that the influence of the Homeric epics on the whole of Western literature has been enormous.

"Poetry." Chambers Dictionary of World History. London: Chambers Harrap, 2005. Credo Reference. 29 April 2009 http://www.credoreference.com.