He's a he.
D'uh
Posted on 07/02/2006 7:46:38 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Historian and linguist Andrew Dalby is challenging the accepted gender of one of the most influential writers of all time -- the poet who created the Greek epics The Iliad and The Odyssey in the seventh century BC. Dr Dalby said: "There is no direct evidence of the poet's identity and therefore no justification for the customary assumption that the two epics were composed by a man." Women have a long tradition worldwide as makers of oral literature, he said, citing Sappho, the best-known female poet of ancient Greece, and Enheduanna, the woman mentioned on a Sumerian tablet who thus became the first named poet in the world. Dr Dalby, whose study Rediscovering Homer will be published in September, said: "It is possible, even probable, that this poet was a woman. As a working hypothesis, this helps to explain certain features in which these epics are better -- more subtle, more complex, more universal -- than most others." ...Anthony Snodgrass, emeritus professor of classical archaeology at Cambridge University, said The Odyssey could have been written by a woman because it is about "a world at peace in general terms, with domesticity, fidelity ... endurance and determination rather than aggression". But he added: "The idea of a woman writing The Iliad and not being bored out of her mind by the endless fighting and killings is a bit more far-fetched." The issue, he said, lay in whether the same person wrote both poems. "Most of us now believe the same person did."
(Excerpt) Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au ...
Each to his/her own. Many of us like his books; but, truth to tell, I haven't read then in a very long time.
I've only read the one. I managed to finish it, but honestly there was no hope for me to enjoy it given the way it treated my hero out of time, Octavian. If I had read another of his works before that I may have been a fan. As it is, circumstances are such that I feel a splanchnic reaction to the mere mention of Graves.
Guess it is possible that Homer was female. I personally doubt it.
Possibly he/she was a hermaphrodite. LOL
NOt only that, but women in ancient Greece didn't go around to parties singing ballads. At about 16 years of age a girl would be married off to a man about twice her age, and from that time on, she would be a virtual prisoner in her home, much like Muslim women nowadays in the most conservative areas of Afghanistan. Shopping was done by servants or slaves. The only adult women who would be found out-and-about were prostitutes.
the next thing you know, some "scholar" will have decided Homer was homo........
He's a he.
D'uh
I realize I'm preaching to the choir, but there is a teachable moment here, albeit on a different topic, namely Logic.
The argument goes:
A. Homer was a creator of oral literature.
B. Some creators of oral tradition are women. ("Women have a long tradition worldwide as makers of oral literature.")
C. Therefore: Homer was a woman.
The basic flaw in this syllogism is "undistributed middle." That is to say, one goes from an absolute statement to a relative one and then makes an absolute conclusion, which can't be warranted.
We are dummies to give this even the time of day, except we all get to sound smart.
What I find curious is that gays are so willing to embrace these relationships, which were pederasty -- essentially unequal and abusive relationships -- as commmonplace and accepted homosexuality, yet complain that pederasty isn't homosexuality when it's applied to modern adult males having sex with boys. They can't have it both ways. Either what the Greeks were doing and what those abusive Catholic priests were doing to boys was homosexual behavior or both aren't. Pick one.
You and I may be the only ones who still think so but "Gender" refers to grammar and synax and not to people. The quality under discussion is Homer's sex
In other words, all of these strict rules that kept women confined at home were for their own benefit, because the men in the outside world were so nasty!
Try this. Ask a friend about a person, who has weighed all the evidence and considered it carefully and then decided he doesn't like a particular ethnic group, if that person is prejudiced.
Even if someone is wrong, if he's weighed all the evidence, he didn't pre-judge.
Most people in America cannot define correctly either "Prejudice" or "discrimination"
"It is possible, even probable, that this poet was a woman."
I'll give you possible, but probable? Uh-uh!
Men were "bards" ( the name given to those who performed these very long epics at dinners and public events ); women NEVER were.
Bards were either the originators of these poems or those who learned and later performed them; sometimes adding bits and pieces to them.
A part of what you say is true...sort of; however, unlike THE ILLIAD, it is all about the relationship between Odysseus and his men, Odysseus and women, and Odysseus and the gods. Lastly, it is about Odysseus and his kingdom. There are a vast number of romance elements and "feelings" in it, which are not present in THE ILLIAD. And also, unlike THE ILLIAD, war and battles don't take center stage.
Whoever they were. ;')
Don't ask, don't tell... ;')
Butler's position (and perhaps Graves', dunno) was the the Odyssey and the Iliad had different authors, and that the (very much older) Iliad was written (or rather, composed) by a blind poet, while the Odyssey was written during Classical times by a woman living in, hmm, Lipari or something. Sappho is another example of a woman who left written work; and there were dozens of sequels to the Iliad besides the Odyssey, and most of them have not survived except as quotations in other works which have (the Aeneid survived, and is broadly speaking a sequel to the Iliad). Even in ancient times the authorship of the many sequels were attributed to Homer, but that wasn't taken too seriously.
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