A Quick Overview

We do think that he wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey--the corner stone works of literature in the Western Culture. However some scholars even doubt wither one individual wrote both works or even all of The Odyssey itself.  One camp of thought has suggested that a woman may have been the author especially of the section in which Odysseus finds himself on Phonecia.

The delightful depiction of Princess Nausicaa is one of Homer's most popular and has been universally praised by critics and readers.  Samuel Butler, the Victorian author and translator of Homer, once attempted to prove that Nausicaa was the real writer of the Odyssey, and an intriguing novel, Homer Daughter has been developed from this idea by Robert Graves (Cliffnotes 28).

His Life

His Works

• The Iliad [e-text prose version translated by Samuel Butler]
  From the Ilios links a Graphic novel version of The Iliad.
• The Odyssey [e-text prose version translated by Samuel Butler]
• The Homeric Hymns

Links

Books On Line found on Nord Est

• Homer at Wikipedia
• Homer: The Homeric Hymns (HTML at OMACL)
• Homer: The Iliad (HTML at MIT)
• Homer: The Odyssey (HTML at MIT)

Homer: The Odyssey (HTML at Bartleby)

 75% Ilios Links  [More Like This]
URL: http://satan.object-design.co.jp/~hiromi/link.html
Summary: HELLENIC CULTURE (MAIN PAGE) Hellenic Greek Culture Library of Congress Resources for Greek and Latin Class Here you will find information about the Library's resources for Classical Studies, and links to resources available on the Internet. Greek Mythology The homepage about Greek mythology Welcome to MYTHTEXT:Mythology Site The homepage about mythology from all over the world . Peloponnese.

74% Greek (GR)  [More Like This]
URL: http://www.as.ua.edu/undergrad/c_gr.html
Summary: Introduction to Homer and the grammar and syntax of Homeric Greek, with an emphasis on the Iliad. Prerequisite: GR 101 with a grade of "C" or higher, or language department placement.

 74% Homer, Complete Works  [More Like This]
URL: http://www.culture.gr/2/21/218/218ev/e218ev1.html
Summary: None Available

 74% Untitled [More Like This]
URL: http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/classics/greekcourses.html
Summary: By studying the language's vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, they not only gain appreciation for its intricacies and nuances but also come to understand more about their own language and about language in general. Greek 373 - Greek Historians Readings from the works of Herodotus, the "Father of History," and Thucydides, the first "scientific" historian, provide the backdrop for studying the.

 74% InCase1 [More Like This]
URL: http://edpa.coled.umn.edu/Iconics/Gallery1/incase1.html
Summary: Recounting the early episodes of Greek history, the Homeric epics embodied the wisdom and crystallized the traditions, beliefs, and values that constituted the ancient Greek cultural life style. As significant poetical, aesthetic, historical, and pedagogical works, the Iliad and the Odyssey told Greek generations of that moral climate in which heroes, by combining wisdom and action, sought.

 74% Children's Homer : The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy  [More Like This]
URL: http://www.amazon.com./exec/obidos/ISBN=0020425201/
Summary: Readers who bought Children's Homer : The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy also bought:. Favorite Greek Myths (Dover Children's Thrift Classics); Bob Blaisdell, John Green (Illustrator).

His life

Image Provided by "Nord Est"

He is also one of the most influential authors in the widest sense, for the two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture throughout the classical age and formed the backbone of humane education down to the time of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. Indirectly through the medium of Virgil's Aeneid (which was loosely molded after the patterns of the Iliad and the Odyssey), directly through their revival under Byzantine culture from the late 8th century AD onward, and subsequently through their passage into Italy with the Greek scholars who fled westward from the Ottomans, the Homeric epics had a profound impact  on the Renaissance culture of Italy. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the classical European tradition.

It was probably through their impact on classical Greek culture itself that the Iliad and The Odyssey most subtly affected Western standards and ideas. The Greeks regarded the great epics as something more than works of literature; they knew much of them by heart, and they valued them not only as a symbol of Hellenic unity and heroism but also as an ancient source of moral and even practical instruction.

But even if his name is known and his date and region can be inferred, Homer remains primarily a projection of the great poems themselves. Their qualities are significant of his taste and his view of the world, but they also reveal something more specific about his technique and the kind of poet he was. It has been one of the most important discoveries of Homeric scholarship, associated particularly with the name of an American scholar, Milman Parry, that the Homeric tradition was an oral one--that this was a kind of poetry made and passed down by word of mouth and without the intervention of writing. Indeed Homer's own term for a poet is aoidos, "singer."

The Odyssey describes two such poets in some detail: Phemius, the court singer in the palace of Odysseus in Ithaca, and Demodocus, who lived in the town of the semi-mythical Phaeacians and sang both for the nobles in Alcinous' palace and for the assembled public at the games held for Odysseus. On this occasion he sings of the illicit love affair of Ares and Aphrodite in a version that lasts for exactly 100 Homeric verses. This and the other songs assigned to these singers--for example, that of the Trojan Horse, summarized in the Odyssey--suggest that ordinary aoidoi in the heroic tradition worked with relatively short poems that could be given completely on a single occasion. That is what one would expect, and it is confirmed by the habits of singers and audiences at other periods and in other parts of the world (the tradition of the poet-singers of Muslim Serbia has provided the most fruitful comparison so far). Whatever the favored occasion for heroic song--whether the aristocratic feast, the religious festival, or popular gatherings in tavern or marketplace--a natural limitation on the length of a poem is imposed by the audience's available time and interest as well as by the singer's own physique and the scope of his repertoire. Such relatively short songs must have provided the backbone of the tradition inherited by Homer, and his portraits of Demodocus and Phemius are likely to be accurate in this respect. What Homer himself seems to have done is to introduce the concept of a quite different style of poetry, in the shape of a monumental poem that required more than a single hour or evening to sing and could achieve new and far more complex effects, in literary and psychological terms, than those attainable in the more anecdotal and episodic songs of his predecessors.

Poetic techniques.

It can be asked how one can be so confident in classing Homer himself as an oral singer, for if he differed from Phemius or Demodocus in terms of length, he may also have differed radically in his poetic techniques. The very nature of his verse may provide a substantial part of the answer.  The style of the poems is "formulaic"; that is, they rely heavily on the use not only of stock epithets and repeated verses or groups of verses--which can also be found to a much lesser extent in a literate
imitator like Virgil--but also on a multitude of fixed phrases that are employed time and time again to express a similar idea in a similar part of the verse.

The clearest and simplest instance is the so-called noun-epithet formulas. These constitute a veritable system, in which every major god or hero possesses a variety of epithets from which the choice is made solely according to how much of the verse, and which part of it, the singer desires to use up. Odysseus is called divine Odysseus, many-counseled Odysseus, or much-enduring divine Odysseus simply in accordance with the amount of material to be fitted into the remainder of the hexameter (six-foot) verse. A ship is described as black, hollow, or symmetrical not to distinguish this particular ship from others but solely in relation to the qualities and demands of the rhythmical context. The whole noun-epithet system is both extensive and economical--it covers a great variety of subjects with very little exact reduplication or unnecessary overlap. It would seem that so refined and complex a system could not be the invention of a single poet but must have been gradually evolved in a long-standing tradition that needed both the extension and the economy for functional reasons--that depended on these fixed phrase units because of its oral nature, in which memory, practice, and a kind of improvising replace the deliberate, self-correcting, word-by-word progress of the pen-and-paper composer.

Admittedly, the rest of Homer's vocabulary is not as markedly formulaic as its noun-epithet aspect (or, another popular example, as its expressions for beginning and ending a speech). Many expressions, many portions of sentences are individually invented for the occasion,  or at least so it seems. Even so, there is a strongly formulaic and ready-made component in the artificial language that was used by Homer, including its less conspicuous aspects such as the arrangement of particles, conjunctions, and pronouns.

It looks, therefore, as though Homer must have trained as an ordinary aoidos, who began (like most of the present-day Yugoslav guslari) by building up a repertoire of normal-length songs acquired from already established singers. The greatest heroic adventures of the past must already have been prominent in any repertoire, especially the Panhellenic adventures of the Seven Against Thebes, the Argonauts, and the Achaean attack on Troy. Some aspects of the Trojan War might
already have been expanded into songs of unusual length, though one that was still manageable on a single occasion. Yet the process was presumably carried much further in the making of the monumental Iliad, consisting of more than 16,000 verses, which would take four or five long evenings, and perhaps more, to perform. This breakthrough into the monumental, which made exceptional and almost unreasonable demands of audiences, presupposes a singer of quite exceptional capacity and reputation--one who could impose the new and admittedly difficult form upon his listeners by the sheer unfamiliar genius of his song. The 8th century BC was in other respects, too, an era of cultural innovation, not least in the direction of monumentality, and huge temples (like the early temple of Hera in Samos) and colossal funerary vases (like the mixing bowls and amphorae in the so-called Geometric style from the Dipylon cemetery in Athens) may have
found a literary analogue in the idea of a vast poetical treatment of the Trojan War. But in an important sense Homer was building upon a tendency of all known oral heroic poetry toward elaboration and expansion. The singer does not acquire a song from another singer by simple memorization. He adjusts what he hears to his existing store of phrases, typical scenes, and themes, and he tends to replace what is unfamiliar to him with something he already knows, or to expand it
by adding familiar material that it happens to lack. Every singer in a living oral tradition tends to develop what he acquires. There is an element of improvisation, as well as of memory, in his appropriation of fresh material; and judging by the practice of singers studied from the middle of the 19th century onward in Russia, Serbia, Cyprus, and Crete the inclination to adjust, elaborate, and improve comes naturally to all oral poets.

Cumulative poetic structure.

Homer must have decided to elaborate his materials not only in quality but also in length and complexity. All oral poetry is cumulative in essence; the verse is built up by adding phrase upon phrase, the individual description by adding verse upon verse. The whole plot of a song consists of the progressive accumulation of minor motifs and major themes, from simple ideas (such as "the hero sets off on a journey" or "addresses his enemy") through typical scenes (such as assemblies of
men or gods) to developed but standardized thematic complexes (such as episodes of recognition or reconciliation).

Homer seems to have carried this cumulative tendency into new regions of poetry and narrative; in this as in other respects (for example, in his poetical language) he was applying his own individual vision to the fertile raw material of an extensive and well-known tradition.

The result is much more complex than with an ordinary traditional poem. Understanding the origin and essential qualities of the Iliad or the Odyssey entails trying to sort out not only the separate components of the pre-Homeric tradition but also Homer's own probable contributions, whether distinguishable by their dependence on the monumental idea or by their apparent novelty vis-à-vis the tradition as a whole or by other means. Dialectal and linguistic components must be identified as
far as possible--survivals of the Mycenaean language, for example, or words used exclusively in the Aeolian cities of the west coast of Asia Minor, or Athenian dialect forms introduced into the poems after the time of Homer; so must specific references to armour, clothing, houses, burial customs, political geography, and so on, that are likely to be assignable to the Late Bronze Age, the Early Iron Age, or the period of Homer's own activity--at the very least to be taken as relatively early or late within the whole range of the poetic tradition down to Homer. These are the tasks of modern Homeric scholarship.

Yet such different forms and ideas in Homer are not conveniently separated  into distinct sections of the text, which can therefore be assigned to early or late phases of  composition. On the contrary, they may coexist in a single (artificial) linguistic form or a single  descriptive phrase. Any member of the tradition, not least Homer himself, may, moreover, have  chosen to archaize on one occasion, to innovate on another. One result is that the epics are dubious authorities for the assessment of historical events like the attack on Troy or the status of workers, just as they are ambiguous sources for early Greek grammar or theology. Another is that they are not bound to a single worldview or period or mode of perception; rather, they unite judgments and experiences never seen together in "real" life into a whole that is literary but nevertheless revealing of the underlying structure of human existence.

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