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HOMER, ALASKA - USA
Homer (Greek Ὅμηρος Hómēros) was a legendary (or perhaps mythical) early
Greek poet
Works and Biography
Homer was traditionally credited with authorship of the major Greek epics
Iliad and Odyssey, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse
War"), the corpus of Homeric Hymns, and various other lost or fragmentary
works such as Margites. 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.
Some believe that that cetain works
attributed to him were written by others. The main works in question are the
Odyssey, Batrachomyomachia, and the Homeric hymns. The Oedipus plays are
attributed to Sophocles.
The Homeric Question
It is generally agreed among scholars 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.
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.
Exactly when these oral 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.
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 scholars joke
the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name,"
and the classicist Richmond Lattimore, author of a good poetic translation
to English of both epics, once called a paper "Homer: Who Was She?" Samuel
Butler was more specific, theorizing a young Sicilian woman as author of the
Odyssey (but not the Iliad). Robert Graves speculated on Butler's Sicilian
female Homer, in his novel Homer's Daughter.
Historical Aspects of the Poems
Another question is: do the tales have a factual basis? The commentaries on
the Iliad and the Odyssey written in the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st
century BC) began exploring the textual inconsistencies of the poems. Modern
classicists and BBC television producers continue the tradition.
The excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in the late 19th century began to
convince scholars there was an 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 epic poems attributed to Homer.
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