Homer Overview

We don't know whether or not Homer wrote his poems down. Nor do we know if he alone composed them. The author of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" may have been more than one person, or he may have been only... [more]

We don't know whether or not Homer wrote his poems down. Nor do we know if he alone composed them. The author of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" may have been more than one person, or he may have been only one -- it may even be the case that the distinction, when applied to the ancient Greeks, is meaningless. On the one hand, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are historical chronicles derived from an oral tradition; there is reason to believe that Homer appropriated many of his lines directly and inserted them unaltered into the larger context of his poems. Are the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" therefore comprised solely of citations? Are the texts simply fragments of things said and things heard, an ordering and organizing of pieces of oral history and bits of gossip? But it's hard to diminish Homer so. His work bears the mark of an innovator, a creative originator. The "Iliad" and "Odyssey" exhibit a unity and stylistic consistency that point towards a singular aesthetic sensibility. Homer's style is, indeed, immediately distinguishable: he worked with an unrestrained verbosity, an informal tone, a preponderance of repetitions, and a masterful employment of the simile. In the end, our distinction between the original and the derived may not apply to Homer. As the first poet to unify a fragmented oral tradition into a coherent, lyrical whole, his work is both borrowed and original. Some lines reference a history that was collectively acknowledged, so it's doubtful that Homer felt any need to alter such lines from the form in which he originally heard them. Others, especially his similes, bear the mark of spontaneous invention. Thus Homer is the single voice of ancient Greece who contains within him an entire multitude of other voices. And the world he conveys to us is itself a multiplicity, a world of multiple gods ceaselessly irritating and aggravating each other. Nothing could be more opposed to Christianity, in which a single God presides over the world in infinite perfection. The Greek gods may be infinite, but they are certainly not perfect: each is characterized by his or her distinct set of virtues and vices. Homer's depiction of ancient Greece is therefore the depiction of two worlds, one divine and one mortal, which are nevertheless intimately connected; the intensity of his dramas hinges on the violent intersection of both. This intimate communication between the human and the divine worlds makes Homer's poetry continue to stand out thousands of years later. For who in our own time would have the hubris to dramatize the relations between the gods? Without a rich mythological tradition to support it, such divine drama would come across as the idle fantasy of an excessively enthusiastic mental patient. But ancient Greece had such a tradition, and Homer is its apotheosis. He represents a time in which fact and fiction were inseparably intertwined. [show less]