Okay, let's unpack this. Homer, we're not just
talking about the author of some old books. No.
I mean, we're talking about the foundational
author of Western literature, the supposed genius
whose works have shaped, well, everything, philosophy,
education, art, for nearly 3 ,000 years. Welcome
to the Deep Dive. Today, we are wrestling with
what is probably the most enduring literary identity
crisis in history. That's a good way to put it.
We're moving well beyond a simple summary of
the Iliad and the Odyssey to really tackle what
scholars call the Homeric question. Which is
this complex, centuries -long debate. Exactly.
A debate about who this man was, if he was a
man at all, and crucially how his poems actually
came to be written down and preserved. Right.
So our mission today is to take this huge, fragmented
academic puzzle. and really distill the consensus
and the controversy for you. Homer is one of
the most influential figures we can name. Oh,
easily. Plato himself called him the one who
has taught Greece. And centuries later, you have
the great Roman poet Virgil, who, I mean, he
built his entire career on Homer's foundation.
You refer to him simply as poet sovereign. Yet.
And here is the central paradox. And this is
why we're deep diving today. Yes. This author
prays so universally whose work is absolutely
foundational to our cultural identity is, in
the view of modern scholarship, largely a fictionalized
figure. It's incredible. His identity is contested.
His birthplace is debated across, what, half
a dozen cities? At least. And the very method
of composition, that moment he went from song
to text, was completely revolutionized by 20th
century research. today from some dense sources.
We've got scholarly analyses covering biographical
traditions, the evolution of academic criticism
from antiquity right up to the latest contemporary
debates on linguistic dating, and the stunning
findings of oral formulaic research. So we're
going to try and figure out not just what Homer
wrote, but how this incredible piece of literary
engineering came to exist. And why the question
of who he was still sparks such furious arguments
today. Let's start, as any good tradition must,
with the monuments themselves. The poems. Because
their scale and their influence are the primary
reasons why this whole mystery matters so profoundly.
So we begin with the two works universally attributed
to the man known as Homer, the Iliad and the
Odyssey. Most people know the general outline,
but let's really nail down the core emotional
and thematic focus of each narrative. Because
they are, as you said, vastly different experiences.
They really are. The Iliad is. It's intensely
focused. It takes place over only a few weeks
during the final year of the decade -long Trojan
War. And geographically, we're pretty much stuck
in one place. Right. We are fixed mostly around
the walls of Troy in the Achaean camp. Its central
theme is menace or rage. Specifically, the rage
of Achilles. The fatal quarrel between the supreme
commander, King Agamemnon, and the greatest warrior,
Achilles. It is a profound, bloody study in the
destructive nature of pride, honor, and of course,
grief. It is so monumental in its seriousness
and that you turn to the Odyssey and the entire
narrative structure just, it flips completely.
It's an epic of travel, of persistence and cleverness.
Precisely. The Odyssey picks up after Troy has
fallen and chronicles the 10 -year journey of
Odysseus, king of Ithaca, as he struggles desperately
to return home. And everything is thrown at him.
Everything. He's punished by the gods, detained
by sorceresses and nymphs. He faces monsters.
It depicts man's struggle and perseverance using
wit and cunning metis instead of the pure force
we see in the Iliad. So the theme is completely
different. It's about return, restoration, overcoming
all this divine interference. Yes. immediately
alerts scholars to the complexity of their origin
is the language itself. Homeric Greek or Epic
Greek. You mentioned earlier, this is not a language
people just spoke on the street. No, not at all.
It's a literary kunspra. An artificial language.
That's right. An artificial language. It's a
purposeful blend of linguistic features taken
from different centuries and different geographic
regions, primarily the Eastern Ionic dialect,
but you also see features of the Aeolic dialect
mixed in. And why is that blend so significant?
Because it essentially proves the poems were
inherited over generations. No single person
speaking in a single place at a single time could
have naturally invented this linguistic cocktail.
I see. So it's the product of an evolving poetic
tradition. Which makes the idea of a singular
one -time author almost impossible. So the language
itself is a composite artifact that tells us
we're dealing with a deep historical process,
not just a sudden flash of genius from one person.
Exactly. And, you know, despite the... deeply
tragic, serious, and monumental themes, our sources
remind us that the poems contain the full spectrum
of human experience. There's humor in there.
Yes. There are moments of high comedy and laughter,
often involving the gods, which gives the audience
a moment of relief from the constant threat of
death and divine wrath. It's this emotional and
structural depth that really cemented their immense
legacy. Well, it's almost impossible to overstate
the cultural impact these two works had. They
weren't just popular entertainment, not by a
long shot. They were the absolute core of ancient
Greek culture and education. They were the curriculum.
They were famously the first literary works taught
to every single student. If you wanted to teach
a child what it meant to be Greek, you taught
them Homer. They fostered the foundational ideals,
concepts like Cleos. Undying glory gained through
heroic action. Antima. The honor or value accorded
to a man in society. All of these were defined
by the behavior of Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus.
They were the moral compass, the historical memory,
and the literary textbook all rolled into one
scroll. And that influence is literally unbroken.
You mentioned Virgil. Yes. Dante referred to
Homer as the master of all masters. Virgil built
the Aeneid as a conscious Roman response and
successor to the Greek epics. And today. If you
look at literature, music, or film today, the
patterns of the quest, the journey home, the
internal struggle with rage, they are all traceable
directly back to these two poems. Even in modern
translations, right? critically acclaimed work
by Emily Wilson, we are still wrestling with
the absolute weight and relevance of these stories.
We are. So this magnitude of influence means
that the question of who actually composed them
isn't some obscure academic inquiry. No, it's
fundamental. It's fundamental to understanding
the origins of Western identity. And, you know,
given that profound significance, you would expect
a library full of reliable biographies. Instead.
Instead, we have the opposite. The complete opposite.
That's the irony, isn't it? For the world's most
influential poet, we know essentially nothing
certain about him. Which brings us to the central
insight of modern scholarship. The ancient conception
of a single historical biographical author named
Homer is likely a sophisticated fictional narrative.
Yes. His anonymity, coupled with the desire to
celebrate the works, led to the increasing mythologization
of his life. We can actually track this myth
-making through the various biographical traditions
that just proliferated across the Greek world.
The most widespread one, the one that everyone
pictures, portrays Homer as a blind bard. Right,
a figure of reverence whose physical impairment
suggests an internal, deeper vision. And he's
typically placed in Ionia, which is the central
coastal region of Anatolia. But the moment you
try to pin down any specific fact... The whole
narrative just dissolves into contradiction.
It does. The debate over his birthplace is probably
the most famous example. It became a point of
civic pride for cities all across the Greek world.
Seven different cities claimed him. Pindar, a
5th century BC poet, credits Chios and Smyrna.
But then you also have claims from Argos, Pylos,
Colophon, or Athens. Right, and our sources emphasize
that No single account ever achieved mainstream
acceptance. This lack of agreement isn't a sign
that historians just lost the record. No, it's
a sign that the records were never reliable in
the first place. It's proof that people were
retroactively applying a biography to an anonymous
masterpiece. And the more you look at the details,
the more purely fictional they seem. The accounts
of his parentage, for example. They're just wildly
varied. Oh, they strain credulity entirely. The
biographical accounts, which were compiled much
later, needed to ensure Homer had a suitably
divine or heroic pedigree. Of course. So he's
sometimes claimed to be descended from one of
the muses or from the god Apollo or from mythological
figures like Orpheus. But there's one that's
even more spectacular than that. Yes, the one
found in some traditions dating back to Roman
imperial times. It claimed his parents were Epicast,
the daughter of Nestor, and Telemachus, the son
of Odysseus. Wait, wait. So the man who sings
the story of Odysseus' journey home is, in this
version, the grandson of the hero. Yes. Uniting
the poet and the heroic subject lineally. Precisely.
It's the ultimate act of myth -making. It elevates
the poet to the same status as the figures he
chronicles, making him a character in his own
epic history. It's the Greeks essentially deciding
that the poet must be as great as his poetry.
That's a perfect way to put it. And then we get
the strange, almost low -stakes anecdotes that
contrast so sharply with the monumental subject
matter. Yes, alongside the high -flown genealogy,
we have these small, grounded legends. The tradition
that he died on the island of Eos is perhaps
the most common location for his death. But the
most bizarre story is the riddle he supposedly
failed to solve. Ah, the fisherman's riddle.
Remind us of the details. The legend says Homer
encountered some fishermen and failed to answer
their riddle, which led to his death from shame
or despair. And the riddle was? The riddle was,
we left whatever we caught and carry whatever
we didn't. The answer, which the blind bard supposedly
couldn't figure out, was lice. Lice. The man
who crafted the Rage of Achilles is defeated
by the common, messy reality of tiny human parasites.
The contrast is extraordinary, isn't it? It grounds
him in the world of rhapsodes, these traveling
performers, who would have faced all kinds of
petty humiliation and common concerns. And that
contrasts so sharply with the divine parentage
claims. Right, this huge yawning gap between
the mythical, demigod -like figure and the obscure...
obscure, possibly impoverished traveling rhapsode
is what modern scholarship has spent two centuries
dissecting. And this centrality of the figure
meant that Homer's name became a magnet for every
work of perceived literary excellence. Which
brings us to the catalog of works we call the
Homerica. Works attributed to Homer in antiquity,
but definitively rejected today. And they demonstrate
that Homer was more than a man. He was a literary
brand name. The list is extensive. It shows how
much the Greeks wanted to credit him with. Besides
the two main epics, many people in antiquity
attributed the Homeric hymns to him. Which are
beautiful, sophisticated invocations to the gods.
Absolutely. And then there's the contest of Homer
and Hesiod, which details a fictional poetic
competition. And the more popular epics, known
collectively as the epic cycle. which filled
in the gaps around the Iliad, like the Cypria
and the Little Iliad. Exactly. And my favorite
example of the brand name is that comic mini
-epic, the Trachomaiomachia. The Frog -Mouse
War. The Frog -Mouse War. It's a parody, a miniature
epic that describes a mock -heroic battle between
frogs and mice, all cast in the monumental language
of the Iliad. The fact that the Greeks decided,
the poet who wrote the definition of glory, also
wrote a high -style parody about vermin. Tells
you everything. It tells you that Homer was simply
the designation for best -in -class epic poetry.
And this whole historical process, the total
collapse of the biography coupled with the massive
scale and influence of the poems, it forced scholars
to shift focus entirely. Right. They realized
they would never find the man, so they had to
look for the author in the text. And that crucial
shift ushers in the Homeric question. The Homeric
question isn't just one debate. It's a centuries
-long academic war over composition, transmission,
and unity. It's the quest to understand how these
poems came into our possession. And when criticism
first started, the question wasn't who wrote
Homer, but what Homer wrote. Right. The earliest
preserved critiques, dating back to the 7th century
BC, were deeply moral. They focused on Homer's
controversial treatment of the gods. Who in the
Iliad are often petty, adulterous, deceptive,
and violent. Critics like the poet Xenophanes
of Colophon famously denounced this portrayal
as immoral. He argued that the gods should be
depicted as paragons of virtue, not flawed humans.
And this created an immediate theological crisis
for a society that revered the poems as foundational
texts. Which led almost immediately to the defense
of Homer. And this set the stage for over a thousand
years of interpretation. Right. This defense
came from the allegorists, like the Agenes of
Regium. They argued the poems weren't meant to
be taken literally. So the Battles of the Gods
were really allegories for battles between cosmic
forces or moral concepts. Exactly. The Agenese
famously proposed that the war between Achilles
and Hector was an allegory for the battle between
the dry and the wet elements. Wow. And that allowed
the poems to survive religious critique, positioning
them as complex repositories of hidden wisdom,
not just narrative history. This allegorical
reading then cemented their place in education.
Absolutely. The Iliad and Odyssey became staple
school texts throughout the Hellenistic and Roman
periods, which led to the necessary creation
of these massive scholarly commentaries to explain
the historical, cultural, and linguistic difficulties
to students who lived centuries later. The Stoic
philosophers really ran with this, didn't they?
They widely regarded the poems as allegories
conveying their own ethical and philosophical
doctrines. They did, and this completely transformed
Homer's image from a simple bard into a prototypical,
almost divine philosopher. And this monumental
approach to interpreting and preserving Homer,
it peaked during the Byzantine era. Particularly
with the scholars of the 12th century. And you
have to understand, this wasn't just casual book
collecting. This was a profound act of intellectual
preservation that saved the works for the West.
Give us a sense of the scale of this work, especially
with Eustathius of Thessalonica. Eustathius'
commentary is just breathtaking in its physical
magnitude. Our sources detail that his commentary
on the Iliad alone sprawls over nearly 4 ,000
oversized pages in modern printed editions. 4
,000 pages? On just the Iliad? Just the Iliad.
His Odyssey commentary adds almost 2 ,000 more.
This scale demonstrates the monumental effort
required to stabilize, explain, and defend the
text against medieval critics and the shifting
cultural landscape. So that work ensured that
the tradition survived intact until the Renaissance.
So Homer survives for 2 ,000 years as the revered,
wise, and singular poet. Then in the modern era,
that reverence collapses into radical skepticism
and the questions start getting harsh. Starting
with a scathing attack in the 17th century. Right.
The attack came in 1664 from Francois Hedelin,
the Abbe d 'Aubignac. He was an extreme outlier
at the time, but he launched a critique that
would prove to be. Well, very prescient. He argued
the poems were incoherent, immoral, and entirely
without the structural genius later critics claimed.
Eh, his conclusion was radical. Homer never existed.
Just flat out didn't exist. And the epics were
merely a disorganized pile of shorter songs,
hastily cobbled together by incompetent editors
who lacked artistic vision. So that was the first
major shot fired in the Homeric question. And
the attack was refined about 50 years later by
the English scholar Richard Bentley. Bentley
was slightly more forgiving. He agreed a poet
named Homer probably existed, but he was an obscure
oral poet. He said he wrote a sequel of songs
and rhapsodies to be sung by himself for small
earnings and good cheer at festivals. That's
a key distinction there. Bentley saw them as
a sequel of songs, suggesting they were intended
to be performed sequentially. but not necessarily
edited into a cohesive, massive epic until much,
much later. So he's separating the singer from
the editor. Exactly. Bentley suggested they weren't
collected and unified into the epic form we recognize
until the time of Pisistratus, the Athenian tyrant,
some 500 years after they were first sung. So
the idea that the text we read is the result
of later assembly, not original composition,
was now firmly established. And this leads us
to the formalization of the entire debate, driven
by Friedrich August Wolf in 17... This is the
moment the analyst school was born. It formalized
the debate with a powerful, comprehensive argument.
His core claim was that the material began as
short, separate oral songs, possibly composed
as early as the 10th century BC. And what was
his proof? He pointed to the structural anomalies,
the mixed dialects, and the repetitive elements
as proof of their composite origin. We talked
about the mixed dialect, the Kunstsprache. Why
did that lead him to this conclusion? Because
for Wolfe, the mixture of ionic and aeolic and
the presence of archaic forms alongside later
language proved that the material had been inherited
and modified over hundreds of years by successive
bards in different regions. So it's like linguistic
archaeology. It is. He concluded that the material
passed through oral tradition for four centuries
before being assembled into prototypical written
versions in the 6th century BC by literate authors.
And, crucially, he argued these texts were then
extensively edited and sh**. So, Wolf's theory
created the entire academic struggle of the 19th
century. Everyone trying to recover the original,
authentic, shorter poems that were hidden beneath
the excrescences or later editions made by editors.
And the analysts split into two dominant sub
-theories over how the assembly occurred. First,
we had the lay theory. which treated the epics
like a patchwork quilt right the lay theorists
argued the poems were simply built from a huge
number of short independent and often unrelated
songs or lays they focused on identifying the
seams and inconsistencies in the narrative where
these separate songs were crudely joined together
okay and the other thing then you had the more
moderate position the nucleus theory which suggested
that homer did compose a shorter primary version
of the iliad and odyssey a core nucleus yes which
subsequent poets then expanded in terms Right.
But both camps, the lay theorists and the nucleus
theorists, fundamentally rejected the Unitarian
view. The idea that these were the works of a
single inspired genius composing one cohesive
narrative. Exactly. So for over a century. The
debate raged. Was it one genius or a series of
clumsy editors stitching fragments together?
But the Unitarians, those who argued for superior
artistic unity, they never fully gave up. And
they were finally vindicated, in a way, by a
paradigm shift in the 20th century. The true
breakthrough came after World War I, when scholarship
moved out of the library and into the field.
Right. This was the pivotal work of Millman Perry
and later his student Albert Lord. And this is
the foundation of the oral formulaic theory.
They went to study living traditions, specifically
folk bards in the Balkans, in what was then Yugoslavia.
Why was that fieldwork so crucial? It was crucial
because they needed to understand composition
without literacy. They observed bards composing
massive, thousands of line epics entirely from
memory, improvising them anew at every single
performance. Which provided the crucial parallel
for Homer. It did. Perry and Lorde concluded
that the Homeric poems were composed through
the same process, improvised oral performance.
And this theory was so widely accepted because
it immediately explained those puzzling features
that the analysts had used to argue for fragmentation.
The massive redundancy, the stock epithets, the
repetitive phrases. Right. The analysts saw those
as signs of bad, lazy composition. But the oral
formulaic theory proved they weren't lazy. They
were essential tools for an extemporizing bard.
Of course. If you are composing 15 ,000 lines
on the fly, you don't have time to invent a new
phrase every time the sun rises or a warrior
speaks. You need a set phrase that fits the dactylotexameter
meter instantly. Swift -footed tillies, rosy
-fingered dawn, gray -eyed Athena. Those formulas
are the building blocks of rapid, high -quality
improvisation. So Perry and Lorde explain the
how the mechanics of composition. But the who
and when remained fuzzy. And that led to the
most recent school of thought, neoanalysis. Neoanalysis
attempts to reconcile the Unitarian emphasis
on artistic unity with the analyst's recognition
of traditional inherited elements. So they're
trying to Briggs the gap. They are. They accept
that the final poems are unified, but they seek
to trace the relationship between the surviving
works and the lost poems of the wider epic cycle.
And their method is fascinating because they
use structural flaws and anomalies in the text
as historical evidence. That's the critical insight.
Instead of discarding the anomalies as later
editorial mistakes, the neo -analysts use them
to reconstruct knowledge of earlier versions
of the myths that the bards were working with.
So the mistakes are clues. They argue that these
strange gaps or contradictions are residual signs
of the older, inherited tradition fighting against
the final poet's desire for a unified narrative.
Give us a specific example of an anomaly they
point to in the text. Okay. In the Iliad, they
look at Ajax, the second greatest Achaean warrior.
His role in the main poem is oddly diminished
compared to his prominence in earlier myths.
Or consider the scene of the embassy sent to
Achilles to beg him to rejoin the fight. Neo
-analysts find evidence suggesting that in earlier
versions, different characters composed that
embassy. And in the Odyssey, what are the anomalies
there? We see indications that Penelope, Odysseus'
wife, may have recognized him much earlier in
the narrative and even conspired with him against
the suitors. Which would contradict the famous
scene where she tests him at the very end. It
would. These are moments where the massive shifting
tradition poked through the carefully constructed
final version. So after all this analysis, centuries
of argument and fieldwork, what is the modern
consensus regarding the identity and origin of
the poems? What can we say for sure? Well, we
have several key contemporary agreements. First
and foremost, based on detailed linguistic analysis,
differences in narrative manner, theology, ethics,
vocabulary, and geographical perspective. Most
scholars agree that while the poems are internally
unified, the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced
by the same primary author. So we have two geniuses
composing in the same tradition, perhaps separated
by a generation or two. Not one blind bard. Not
Homer, but Homers. A collective genius, maybe.
A collective genius, if you like. The second
agreement is almost universal. The Delonia. Book
10 of the Iliad. Book 10 of the Iliad, which
details a night raid, is almost certainly a later
insertion by a different poet, added to the main
text well after its initial composition. It just
breaks the narrative flow and is stylistically
distinct. That's fascinating. A 4 ,000 -year
-old game of spot the forgery. Yeah. Now, since
we can't rely on biography, we have to rely entirely
on linguistic and historical clues for dating.
And the scholarly estimates here vary wildly.
They really do. They range from the late 9th
century BC deep into the 7th century BC. On the
early end, you have scholars like Richard Jenko
who propose an 8th century BC date based on linguistic
statistics. And this aligns with the ancient
historian Herodotus' claim that Homer lived 400
years. years before his time. What material clues
support this early dating? Barry B. Powell, who
supports an early 8th century date, say 800 -750
BC, argues based on absence. What's missing?
The poems conspicuously lack mention of certain
Iron Age military and social practices. For example,
there is no mention of hoplite tactics. And for
context, hoplite tactics were the signature military
development of the later Iron Age. Massed infantry
formations, shield lock to shield, where the
individual heroics of the Mycenaean Age gave
way to collective discipline. Exactly. The fact
that the Homeric heroes fight individually, using
chariot transport rather than massed infantry,
suggests the core tradition predates the development
of these revolutionary tactics. Powell also notes
the absence of mentions of widespread literacy.
But others argue for a much later composition
date, suggesting the text was finalized much
deeper into the Iron Age. Martin Litchfield West
is a key figure here. He suggests a later dating
for the Iliad, perhaps 660 -650 BC. with the
Odyssey composed a generation later. And his
reasoning. West points to sophisticated structural
elements and potential echoes of Hesiod's slightly
later poetry. More controversially, he suggests
the poet demonstrates knowledge of major historical
events that occurred in the mid -7th century
BC. Such as what? West argues the poet may have
known about the destruction of Babylon in 689
BC by the Assyrian king Sennacherib and possibly
the sack of Thebes in 664 -663 BC. If that's
true, it puts... And then there's the view that
Homer wasn't a static point in time at all. Right,
that the tradition was continually dynamic. Who
advocates for that. That's the view advocated
by Gregory Nagy. He proposes that Homer was not
a fixed author, but a continually evolving tradition.
It certainly began stabilizing when it was first
written down, but Nagy suggests the tradition
of performance and modification continued, though
gradually diminishing. until as late as the middle
of the 2nd century BC. Right when the Alexandrian
scholars formalized the text. Exactly. This perspective
transforms Homer from a single man into a vast
cultural performance that took hundreds of years
to complete. So, whether the poems were finalized
in the 8th or 7th century BC, the fact remains
that they were the product of a living, evolving
oral tradition. This means the poet or poets
had an incredibly specific, technical, and sophisticated
toolkit built purely for live performance. This
is literary engineering at its finest. Let's
get into that toolkit. The language itself is
the first tool, the kunsprash. We've touched
on it, but it's a purposeful amalgam of dialects,
ionic being the base, but it's tailored specifically
for one purpose. Epic hexameter poetry. It's
an artificial language that serves the meter
perfectly. It does. And the meter, dactylic hexameter,
is the rhythmic backbone. For the listener, what
exactly does that mean? How does it sound? Dactylic
hexameter is a quantity -based meter, not a stress
-based meter like most English poetry. A dactyl
is a metrical foot of one long syllable followed
by two short syllables. Think of a drumbeat.
Long, short, short. Exactly. The poet uses six
of these feet per line. The structure is unvarying,
which is incredibly demanding. And this demanding
structure necessitates the specific oral devices
that Perry and Lorde identified. Right, the things
that allow the bard to fill the line instantly.
where we get the famous epithets. The set phrases.
Exactly. These phrases like crafty Odysseus,
rosy -fingered Dawn, or cloud -gatherer Zeus
are pre -packaged linguistic units of specific
lengths. They aren't ornamental filler. No, they're
metric building blocks. Right. They allow the
poet to summon a character or object while ensuring
the line retains its perfect rhythm. Beyond just
the epithets, you have the Homeric formulae,
entire repeated lines or half -lines that signal
transition. or recurring actions. These formulae
are critical time savers during improvisation.
Think of lines like, and then answered him, Agamemnon,
king of men, or when the early born rose finger
dawn came to light. They're instantly deployable.
And they're essential for keeping the performance
flowing rapidly without taxing the memory or
compromising the meter. And syntactically, the
poet uses parataxis, which is actually a simpler
structure than we might expect from later literate
poets. That's right. Unlike Virgil or Milton,
who use these massive complex sentences with
multiple subordinate clauses, hypotaxis Homer
employs parataxis. An additive cumulative style.
Yes. Main words are generally placed toward the
beginning of the sentence, followed by subsequent
simpler clauses that expand on the idea. This
is far easier for a performing poet to manage.
Why is that? Because they don't have to hold
a complicated interlocking grammatical structure
in their memory while they improvise the main
narrative thread. It speeds up the live composition
dramatically. It's a structure that supports
memory. Speaking of memory, the tyxene is another
powerful mnemonic device. Type scenes, identified
by Walter Ehrend in 1933, are essentially blocks
of set phrases or conventional descriptions used
for frequently recurring activities. So every
time a hero eats a meal or puts on his armor.
Or prays or sacrifices an animal, the bard deploys
a pre -established sequence of events and phrases.
So the bard isn't inventing the menu every time
Odysseus sits down to eat. No. They are deploying
the established eating sequence, which they can
then elaborate upon or shorten as the meter requires.
It creates a sense of stability and familiarity
for the audience. And critically, it saves the
poet's cognitive load for the unique dramatic
elements of the story, like the dialogue or the
specific combat action. And finally, there is
the subtle architecture of ring composition.
This is a beautiful structural device, also known
as chiastic structure. The poet begins a section
with an idea or theme, eh? develops through points
B and C, and then concludes the section by returning
to C, B, and A, framing the entire episode. Like
bookends. Exactly. For instance, a speech might
begin and end with the same address to the gods.
There is a scholarly debate over whether this
is a conscious, high artistic device, or primarily
a powerful mnemonic loop. A loop that signals
to the performing poet when an episode is complete.
and also aids the audience's memory. Regardless,
the fact that these poems, built on improvisation,
exhibit such sophisticated architecture proves
they were not clumsy compilations. No, they were
works of immense artistic skill, honed over generations.
And they adhere to tradition right from the very
start, with the invocation. Yes, both epics begin
with a prayer to the muse, asking for the inspiration
and the memory needed to tell the story. The
Iliad asks her to sing of the anger of Achilles.
And the Odyssey asks her to tell of the man of
many ways. It's an instant declaration of the
poem's high purpose and its reliance on divine
guidance. So when we move from the poet's toolkit
to the world they describe, we enter a kind of
blended historical reality. The historicity debate
remains fierce. Did the Trojan War actually happen?
Well, the 19th century discovery by Heinrich
Schleiman of the ruins at Hisarlik in modern
Turkey, identified as the likely site of Troy,
certainly lent huge credence to the myth. And
scholars today often link the myth to a real
historical event. Yes, to the historical destruction
of Troydavia around 1220 BC, an event that would
have remained in the collective memory of the
succeeding Greek generations. But regardless
of whether a single historical event inspired
the core, Scholars agree that the Homeric poems
depict an anachronistic society. It's a blending
of customs and material elements derived from
radically different periods of Greek history.
Specifically, the Mycenaean Bronze Age and the
later Iron Age when the poems are being sung.
It's a historical collage, yes. For Bronze Age
elements, the hearers consistently use bronze
weapons, fitting the Mycenaean period in which
the poem is set. And there are other more specific
details. Extremely specific details that confirm
ancient memory, like the description of the helmet
Odysseus wears, which is made of boar's tusks.
Such helmets were characteristic aristocratic
Mycenaean pieces, commonly worn between 1600
and 1150 BC. Long before the poems were committed
to writing. And the heroes also use the huge
body -sized shields typical of Mycenaean warriors.
But the Iron Age, the age of the bard, creeps
in and updates those details. It does. The same
heroes who fight with bronze swords are often
cremated, their bodies burned, which was the
standard funerary practice of the Iron Age Greeks.
Whereas burial, or inhumation, was the Bronze
Age custom. Correct. The poet also occasionally
references heroes using smaller, round shields,
which became common in the early Iron Age when
the oral tradition was reaching its peak. This
confirms that the bards were inheriting material
from a much older, more glamorous era, but they
were unconsciously updating some practices to
suit the contemporary understanding of their
audience. It's a living tradition that reflects
both the past and the present. And we have to
remember that these are works of art. not historical
documentation. Absolutely. And archaeologists
have looked for this. So that detail was inserted
purely for dramatic, poetic effect. climax of
the duel in a memorable, almost supernatural
landscape. Okay, so we have these vast, sophisticated,
evolving oral poems. The final step is understanding
the massive logistical feat of getting them out
of the memory of a bard and onto a scroll. We
know the core process. The orally transmitted
poems were put into a stable written form at
some point between the 8th and 6th centuries
BC. And the shift from oral to written is often
argued to have occurred via dictation. Dictation
theory suggests the current massive versions
originated as texts dictated by the primary bard
who held the entire tradition in his memory to
a scribe. And critically, Albert Lord's studies
of Balkan bards showed something interesting
about that process. They did. He showed that
these poets often revised and expanded their
songs during the process of dictation, knowing
they were creating a permanent, fixed version.
So the act of writing them down may have been
the moment of their final grand monumental expansion.
Indeed, it was a stabilization process. This
brings us to the famous ancient belief regarding
the final collection and organization, the Pisistratian
recension. Explain the significance of Pisistratus
here. Pisistratus was a tyrant. a ruler of Athens
in the late 6th century BC, known for being a
great patron of the arts. The widely held ancient
belief, referenced by figures like Cicero, was
that Piscistratus was responsible for collecting
the long, sprawling oral tradition and having
it organized into a single, cohesive, written
format. An essential step to transitioning the
poem from a flexible oral script into a fixed
literary text. And once it was textualized and
organized in Athens, the text needed to be standardized.
That task fell to the scholars of the Hellenistic
world. Primarily in Alexandria, centuries later.
Yes. This is where the poems were given the formal
structure we recognize today. They were each
divided into 24 sections, or rhapsodes, which
we now call books, and labeled with the letters
of the Greek alphabet. And this division and
standardization is mostly attributed to the Hellenistic
scholars in Alexandria. People like Xenodetus
of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and the
most influential of them all, Aristarchus of
Samothrace. It was these scholars, working around
150 BC, who helped establish the canonical, relatively
stable text based on existing papyrus fragments.
They established a textual baseline that modern
scholarship still refers to. And it's fascinating
that today, modern textual scholarship often
works with medieval manuscripts and existing
papyri, often arguing for... or a multi -text
view. What does that mean, a multi -text view?
It means scholars acknowledge that we may never
find a single definitive original text. Instead,
they study how the text changed across different
traditions, looking at major editions like those
of Lydwitch, who closely followed Aristarchus,
or Van Thiel, who followed the medieval Vulgate.
So it underscores that even in its fixed state,
the text carries a history of its layered, evolving
origins. The text itself is a record of its own
composition. It's an incredible journey. from
an improvised song in the 8th century BC to Eustathius'
6 ,000 pages of commentary in the 12th century
AD. We've journeyed from the bloody ground of
Troy through the fictional biographies, the analytical
dissection of the poems, and the revolutionary
findings of the oral bards in the Balkans. The
central learning for you, our listener, is that
Homer is less a singular man. and more a vast
shifting cultural tradition. It is, yes. A tradition
that encompasses the history of warfare, layers
of myth, sophisticated poetic engineering, the
formulas, type scenes, and ring composition,
and critically, centuries of rigorous academic
questioning that constantly redefined the identity
of the author. Indeed. We know the figure of
Homer survived the intense scrutiny of the analysts,
and even when scholars agreed that the poems
weren't composed in one sitting by one man, they
still recognize the power, the unity, and the
brilliant artistic design of the works that were
eventually assembled. We established that the
Iliad and Odyssey likely had different primary
authors, that the text evolved over hundreds
of years, was edited, and wasn't truly finalized
until centuries after it was initially sung.
And yet the name Homer persists. It does. So
here's the final provocative thought for you
to chew on. If the figure known as Homer, whose
individual identity remains a mystery, taught
Greece and inspired every great poet who followed.
And yet we accept that his masterpiece was likely
composed by different primary authors and shaped
by successive generations of bards, scribes,
and even political patrons like Pisistratus.
Should we view Homer... Not as a single genius
poet, but as a collective, powerful literary
process. What does it mean for the foundation
of Western literature to be simultaneously attributed
to one solitary genius and assembled by a succession
of thousands of voices across centuries? It means
the poem is bigger than any single poet. And
that the deep dive continues. Thanks for joining
us on the deep dive. We'll see you next time.