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Homer ( Greek Ὅμηρος Hómēros) was a legendary (or perhaps mythical) early Greek poet 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 certain 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 SophoclesSophocles ( 4961— 406 BC; Greek: Sigma;οφοκλη&sigmaf was an ancient Greek playwright, dramatist, priest, and politician of Athens. He is known as the second of the three great Greek tragedians; Sophocles was 30 years y.
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 BC9th century BC 8th century BC 7th century BC other centuries) ( 800s BC 790s BC 780s BC 770s BC 760s BC 750s BC 740s BC 730s BC 720s BC 710s BC 700s BC other decades) ( 2nd millennium BC 1st millennium BC 1st millennium AD) Events Golden age in Armenia As. An important role in this standardization appears to have been played by the AthenianAcropolis in central Athens is home to ancient monuments of Athens — a mainstay of its thriving tourism industry Athens ( Greek: Athina is the capital of Greece, and also the capital of the Attica region of Greece. A cosmopolitan modern city, Athens is al tyrantA tyrant (from Greek υ) is a usurper of rightful power, possessing absolute power and ruling by tyranny. In the original Greek meaning "tyrant" carried no ethical censure, a tyrant was anyone who overturned the established government of a city-sta HipparchusHipparchus was one of the sons of Pisistratus who became tyrant of Athens when Pisistratus died in 527 BC. Hipparchus ruled jointly with his brother Hippias. While Hippias was responsible for the political and economic aspects of the tyranny, Hipparchus w, 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 ParryMilman Parry was a classical scholar who between 1933 and 1935 was in Yugoslavia studying the oral traditions among the South Slavs. In the course of his work, he could not help but notice the similarities between the oral poetry he was hearing and the fo and Albert LordAlbert Bates Lord was a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard who, after the untimely death of Milman Parry, carried on that scholar's research into epic literature. He demonstrated the ways in which various great ancient epics from Eu 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 a common joke has it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name," and the classical scholar Richmond Lattimore, author of a good poetic translation to English of both epics, once wrote a paper entitled "Homer: Who Was She?". Samuel Butler was more specific, theorizing a young Sicilian woman as author of the Odyssey (but not the Iliad), an idea further speculated on by Robert Graves in his novel Homer's Daughter .
In Greek his name is "Homeros" which is Greek for "hostage". There is a theory that his name was back-extracted from the name of a society of poets called the Homeridai, which literally means "sons of hostages", i.e. descendants of prisoners of war. As these men were not sent to war because their loyalty on the battlefield was suspect, they would not get killed in battles. Thus they were entrusted with remembering the area's stock of epic poetry, to remember past events, in the times before literacy came to the area.