Homerus
Homer
The father of Western literature
b. c. 8th century BC
Nothing certain is known about Homer. The ancient world believed he was a blind poet from Ionia — seven cities claimed his birthplace — who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey sometime in the eighth century BC. Modern scholarship has debated endlessly whether he was one man, two men, a woman, a committee, or a convenient fiction. The Homeric Question, as it is called, has consumed more scholarly energy than almost any other problem in the humanities.
What is certain is that the poems exist, and that they are the foundation stones of Western literature. The Iliad, set in the final year of the Trojan War, is a poem about rage — the rage of Achilles, and its catastrophic consequences for Greeks and Trojans alike. It is also, improbably, a poem of extraordinary tenderness: Hector's farewell to his wife and infant son, Priam's journey to ransom his son's body, the similes drawn from the peaceful world of farmers and shepherds that stand in heartbreaking contrast to the battlefield.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's ten-year journey home from Troy, and of his wife Penelope's struggle to maintain their household against the suitors who have invaded it. Where the Iliad is a poem of war, the Odyssey is a poem of homecoming, identity, and storytelling itself — Odysseus is the first great narrator in Western literature, and much of the poem consists of stories within stories.
The poems were composed in an oral tradition, using a formulaic style of composition that allowed the poet to compose in performance: the 'wine-dark sea,' the 'rosy-fingered dawn,' the 'swift-footed Achilles' are not clichés but building blocks of an immensely sophisticated oral art. Whether Homer was the last and greatest of a long line of oral poets, or the first to commit the tradition to writing, remains debated. What is beyond debate is that these poems have shaped every subsequent attempt to tell stories in the Western world.
Works (3)
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