Homer
No one knows whether Homer was a he or she, or
even a real person. The ancient Greeks believed he was a
blind, itinerant bard who was born in Smyrna
(present-day Izmir, Turkey) and lived in Chios (a Greek island
near the coast of Turkey). Chios was famous for its epic
singers and many people on the island called themselves
Homeridae , the descendants of Homer. But these are far from
universally-agreed-upon facts. Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes,
Argos and Athens also claim to be his birthplace
Richard Bentley, an 18th century English critic, claimed the
Odyssey was written for women with the implication being it
might have been written by a woman. To back up this assertion
he pointed out that the epic's portrayal of women was realistic,
while the male characters were wooden and "hopelessly
wrong." The details about shipping, he said, were erroneous (a
boat is once described as having rudders in both ends) and
there seems to be a lot of details about things men usually
don't worry about (there are passages, for example, about
folding laundry carefully). The same idea was more forcefully
put forward in the 19th century by Samuel Butler.
Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography by Alberto Manguel (Atlantic Monthly, 2008)
The Iliad and the Odyssey were
the first and greatest stories in
Western civilization and many of
the events described in them
took place in present-day Turkey.
The 3200- year-old epics were
the basis for Greek religion,
morality and history and
arguably Roman religion,
morality and history too. The
5th-century-B.C. Poet Aeschylus
claimed that all his plays were
merely “slices from
the great banquets of Homer.”
Plato mentioned him 331 times
in his dialogues.
Homer's books were the basis of Greek and
Roman education. Not only did they define
honor and moral conduct for the Greeks, they
were the foundations of Western literature.
Alexander the Great slept with a copy of the
Iliad and traced his maternal ancestry back to
Achilles. Latin translations of the Homeric
classics helped spur the Renaissance and
inspired writers like Dante and Milton to write
in the Homeric style. Today it can argued that
the ancient texts are the sources of the
metaphors that life is a battle (the Iliad ) and
life is a journey (the Odyssey ).
The Iliad is the oldest surviving European
poem. Not a "true story," but based on major
events that may have happened, it describes
the Trojan War between the Trojans and the
Myceneans, which the Trojans lost even
though they fought like "ravening lions."
Consisting of 24 books written in dactylic
hexameter, the Iliad addresses timeless
themes like honor, morality, friendship. the
horror of war, mortality and death.
The Iliad wasn't written down until 500 years after the events it described take place.
Yet it rich Bronze details—helmets covered with boar’s tusks, man-size tower shields
and 30 Mycenaean kingdoms—that no one in Homer’s time would have known about.
Before Homer’s time the story was a poem sung by story tellers who passed it down
orally from generation to generation, no doubt with changes made in the story to keep
audiences on the edges of their seats. It later provided a model for epic works by Virgil,
Dante, and Milton. However the way it was patched together with information from different
historical period makes it difficult to use as an accurate historical source for clearly delineated
historical periods.
The Iliad is set during the Trojan Wars. It is not clear if these wars really took places
and if they did it is not clear how accurate the Iliad ’s account of them are. Based on layers of
soot found at the archaeological site of Troy, indicating that city had been burned, it seems that
ancient Trojans were involved in wars. But the details of these wars is unknown and the soot
layers don’t match up exactly with the time the wars described in he Iliad are said to gave
taken place (around 1200 B.C.). There are also inconsistencies between the time the wars are
said to gave taken place (around 1200 B.C.) and the weapons and military tactics used (which
date to 1150-750 B.C.) It is also clear the some of events in the book did not happened unless
the Greek gods really existed and influenced the war.
According to the Iliad , the Trojan wars were fought around Troy, in present-day northwestern
Turkey between the Troy-based Trojans and the Mycenaeans, who lived in
southern Greece. The Mycenaeans predate the Greeks of classical Greece and they are
sometimes called the Greeks.
The Trojan Wars by Diane Thompson, a study of Troy literature; The War That
Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War by Caroline Alexander.