Homer

“Homer” is the name the Greeks gave to the poet of the The Iliad and the The Odyssey — the two epics that stand at the beginning of Greek, and so of Western, literature. For the Greeks he was simply “the Poet”. His poems taught them their gods, their heroes, their history, their language of honour and grief; schoolboys memorized him; philosophers quoted, interpreted, attacked and allegorized him; and every later poet — Virgil, Dante, Milton, Joyce, Derek Walcott — measured himself against him.

And yet we do not know whether Homer existed.

The Homeric Question

What the ancients believed

Ancient Greeks imagined Homer as a blind wandering singer from Ionia, the Greek-speaking coast of what is now Turkey. Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Ithaca, Argos, Athens and others claimed him; “seven cities” competed for the honour. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo describes “a blind man who dwells in rocky Chios”, and ancient readers took this as his self-portrait. Herodotus dated him about four hundred years before his own time — the ninth century BCE.

The modern debate

In 1795, the German scholar Friedrich August Wolf, in his Prolegomena ad Homerum, argued that the epics could not have been composed by a single poet without writing, and must have been assembled from shorter songs. This launched two centuries of debate between analysts, who split the poems into layers by different hands, and unitarians, who defended a single master poet.

The question was transformed in the 1920s and 1930s by the American scholar Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord. Parry showed that Homer’s language is built from formulas — “swift-footed Achilles”, “rosy-fingered Dawn”, “the wine-dark sea”, “grey-eyed Athena” — whose metrical shape fits particular positions in the hexameter line. Parry and Lord then recorded illiterate oral singers (guslari) in Yugoslavia, who could compose and perform epics of many thousands of lines in performance, using exactly such formulas and typical scenes. They concluded that the Homeric poems come from a long tradition of oral composition.

The current view

Most scholars now hold that:

• The Iliad and Odyssey grew from centuries of oral poetry going back to the Mycenaean age (c. 1600–1100 BCE) — the poems preserve memories of bronze weapons, boar’s-tusk helmets and palaces long vanished.
• They reached something like their present form in the eighth or seventh century BCE, probably through one or two exceptionally gifted poets — perhaps dictating to a scribe as the Greek alphabet spread.
• The Iliad is probably somewhat older than the Odyssey; whether the same poet composed both has been debated since antiquity.
• The text was fixed further in Athens in the sixth century (the “Peisistratean recension”) and edited by Alexandrian scholars (Zenodotus, Aristarchus) in the third and second centuries BCE, who divided each poem into twenty-four books.

So “Homer” may be best understood as the name of a tradition that culminated in a genius — or in two.

Did the Trojan War happen?

The story the epics presuppose — a Greek expedition led by Agamemnon of Mycenae against the city of Troy (Ilion) in north-west Asia Minor, to recover Helen, wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, who had run off with the Trojan prince Paris — was regarded by the Greeks as history. In 1870, the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann began excavating the mound of Hisarlık in Turkey and found a series of cities stacked one on another, one of which (Troy VI or VIIa, c. 1300–1180 BCE) was destroyed around the time the Greeks dated the war. Hittite documents mention a city called Wilusa (Ilion?) and a people called Ahhiyawa (Achaeans?). Most historians think the legend preserves a memory of real conflicts in the late Bronze Age, magnified by centuries of song.

The two poems

	Iliad	Odyssey
Subject	The wrath of Achilles during a few weeks in the tenth year of the Trojan War	The ten-year homecoming of Odysseus after the war
Length	~15,700 lines, 24 books	~12,100 lines, 24 books
First word	Mēnin — “wrath”	Andra — “the man”
Hero	Achilles, the greatest warrior, who chooses glory and death	Odysseus, the man of many turns, who chooses home and mortality
World	The battlefield; war, honour, grief	The sea, islands, monsters, a household in disorder
Ending	A funeral	A reunion and a fragile peace
Mood	Tragic	Romance, adventure, comedy, revenge

See The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Homer’s world

Heroes and honour

The Homeric hero lives by a code of honour (timē) and glory (kleos — literally “what is heard”, fame in song). Honour is public and measurable — in prizes, gifts, the best portion of meat, a seat of honour. To be dishonoured is a kind of death. The hero’s excellence (aretē) is mainly prowess in battle and counsel. Sarpedon, a Trojan ally, gives the classic statement of the heroic bargain (Iliad 12): if we could live forever, I would not fight; but since death comes for us in ten thousand forms, let us go forward and win glory, or give it to others.

Gods

Homer’s gods — Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares, Hermes — are immortal, powerful, beautiful, and morally capricious: they take sides, quarrel, deceive each other, sleep together, and laugh. Above even Zeus stands fate (moira). The contrast between the gods’ easy, deathless lives and human suffering is one of the poems’ deepest sources of pathos: “So the gods have spun the thread for wretched mortals: that we live in grief, while they themselves are without cares” (Iliad 24). Later philosophers — Xenophanes, then Plato — attacked Homer for portraying the gods as immoral.

Death

Homeric heroes have no consoling afterlife. The dead are shadows (psychai) in the gloomy house of Hades, without strength or mind. When Odysseus visits the underworld, the shade of Achilles tells him: “I would rather be a hired labourer on earth, working for a poor man with no land, than be king over all the perished dead” (Odyssey 11). Death is final; that is why the poems value life — and glory, the one thing that outlives it.

Style

Hexameter and formulas

Both poems are composed in dactylic hexameter — lines of six feet, each a dactyl (long-short-short) or spondee (long-long) — a grand, rolling rhythm. Their language is an artificial “Homeric dialect” mixing forms from different regions and centuries, never spoken by anyone, built for singing.

Epithets — “swift-footed Achilles”, “Hector of the shining helmet”, “Odysseus of many wiles”, “ox-eyed Hera”, “the wine-dark sea” — recur constantly, fitting the metre and giving the poems their ceremonial, timeless texture.

Similes

Homer’s extended similes are among his greatest glories. A warrior’s charge is compared to a lion falling on cattle, a forest fire, a river in flood; the Greek army to flocks of birds, swarms of flies around milk pails, leaves on the trees — “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of men” (Iliad 6). The similes open windows from the battlefield onto peaceful scenes of farming, sailing and herding — the world the warriors have lost.

Type-scenes and repetition

Arming, feasting, sacrifice, arrival of a guest, assembly — recurrent “type-scenes” are told in similar words each time, as in oral poetry. Messages are repeated word for word. What seems monotonous on the page is, in performance, music.

Ring composition

Episodes are often framed in concentric patterns (A–B–C–B–A), and the Iliad as a whole has a ring structure: it begins with a father begging for his child’s return and a quarrel, and ends with a father begging for his son’s body and a reconciliation.

Homer and philosophy

• The educator of Greece. Plato calls Homer “the educator of Hellas” (Republic 606e) — then argues he must be banished. In Book X of the The Republic, poets imitate appearances, stir pity and grief, and portray gods behaving badly; only hymns to gods and praises of good men may remain. Plato’s dialogues nonetheless quote Homer over a hundred times. See Plato.
• Aristotle’s model. In the Poetics, Aristotle praises Homer for unity of action — he did not tell the whole Trojan War, but chose one action — and for letting characters speak.
• Allegory. Stoics and Neoplatonists read Homer allegorically: Odysseus’s voyage as the soul’s journey home to the divine; the Sirens as the temptations of pleasure.
• Heraclitus reportedly said Homer should be flogged; Xenophanes complained that he ascribed to the gods “theft, adultery and deceiving one another”.
• Modern philosophers: Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (1940) read it as the purest picture of how force turns people into things. Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), read Odysseus as the prototype of the calculating, self-mastering bourgeois individual. Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity (1993) defended Homeric ethics of shame and responsibility against the “progressivist” view that the Greeks lacked a moral self.

Reception

Homer was the core of Greek education for a thousand years. Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BCE) rewrote both poems for Rome — the first six books an Odyssey, the last six an Iliad. In the Latin Middle Ages the Greek text was lost to the West; Dante knew Homer only by reputation, placing him in Limbo as “Homer, sovereign poet”. Petrarch owned a Greek manuscript he could not read. The Renaissance recovered him: the first printed edition (1488), George Chapman’s translation (1598–1616), which inspired Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, Alexander Pope’s heroic-couplet translation (1715–26), the Romantic cult of Homer as natural genius.

In the twentieth century, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) mapped the Odyssey onto a single day in Dublin; C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka” taught that the journey matters more than arrival; Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) carried Homer to the Caribbean; Christopher Logue’s War Music, Alice Oswald’s Memorial (1,700 lines naming the dead of the Iliad), Madeline Miller’s novels The Song of Achilles and Circe, and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (told by the captive Briseis) retold him. Emily Wilson’s 2017 Odyssey was the first English translation by a woman.

Key terms

Kleos

Glory, fame — "what is heard" in song; the hero's only immortality.

Timē

Honour, publicly measured — prizes, gifts, precedence.

Aretē

Excellence — in Homer, chiefly prowess in battle and counsel.

Mēnis

Wrath — the divine-scale anger of Achilles, the first word of the Iliad.

Xenia

Guest-friendship — the sacred obligations between host and guest.

Using Homer in conversation

• On mortality and generations: “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of men.”
• On glory versus life: Achilles’ choice — a short glorious life or a long obscure one — and his shade’s regret in the underworld.
• On force and war: Simone Weil — force turns a person into a thing.
• On temptation: Odysseus tied to the mast to hear the Sirens.