Author Says a Whole Culture -- Not a Single 'Homer' -- Wrote 'Iliad,' 'Odyssey'

National Geographic ^ | January 4, 2015 | Simon Worrall

[SunkenCiv]

In Why Homer Matters, historian and award-winning author Adam Nicolson suggests that Homer be thought of not as a person but as a tradition and that the works attributed to him go back a thousand years earlier than generally believed.

Speaking from his home in England, Nicolson describes how being caught in a storm at sea inspired his passion for Homer, how the oral bards of the Scottish Hebrides may hold the key to understanding Homer's works, and why smartphones are connecting us to ancient oral traditions in new and surprising ways...

About ten years ago, I set off sailing with a friend of mine. We wanted a big adventure, so we decided to sail up the west coast of the British Isles, the exposed Atlantic coast, visiting various remote islands along the way. I had thrown into my luggage a copy of The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, having never really looked at Homer for about 25 years.

We had a rough time. Our instruments broke, and it had been a big hike from Cornwall. Lying in my bunk tied up next to a quay in southwest Ireland, I opened this book and found myself confronted with what felt like the truth -- like somebody was telling me what it was like to be alive on Earth, in the figure of Odysseus.

Odysseus is the great metaphor for all of our lives: struggling with storms, coming across incredibly seductive nymphs, finding himself trapped between impossible choices. I suddenly thought, This is talking to me in a way I would never have guessed before.

[SunkenCiv]

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Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson

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[SunkenCiv]

[Red Badger]

[jonatron]

Beat me to it !

[MrB]

Oh... so the Muslims did that, too?

[Scrambler Bob]

Like bo’s girlfriends?

[Tax-chick]

He can say that if he wants to. Doesn’t make it true ... no, not even if it’s in a book.

[jtal]

Yeah and JEDP wrote the books of Moses in the Bible. Whatever.

I have 0% confidence in our corrupt “betters” in Academia.

[DannyTN]

It took a village to write that article.

[omega4412]

Another interesting source is The Singer of Tales, by Albert Lord. Trying to understand Homer by studying oral epic poems from the Balkans, collected in the 1930s

[Telepathic Intruder]

"3,000 years haven't changed the human condition"

Much depends on culture. Islam worships violence. The age of reason may be associated with the renaissance, but it's generally endemic with western civilization, having a lot to do with the Greeks and the Jews. I've a copy of The Odyssey, unread for years. It's a shame that most of Homer's works were probably lost when the religion of peace burned down the Library of Alexandria and murdered its librarian. I guess it didn't contain enough copies of the Quran.

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1659530/posts?page=22#22

[Fightin Whitey]

[ALPAPilot]

Shakespeare used Petrarch so he didn’t write Julius Ceaser. FedEx use ATC so Fred Smith didn’t build that. Apple uses Al Gore’s internet so Steve Jobs didn’t build that.

I do added that Homer matters.

[dfwgator]

You beat everybody to it.

[Billthedrill]

We went at this one for the better part of a week in my last Greek Civ class. Yes, these were oral poems that at last somebody wrote down, my Professor's opinion being that it was probably two somebodies a half century or so apart (he joked that the second guy was Jethro and nobody got it). They were never performed twice precisely alike, but there are recurring phrases, e.g. "rosy-fingered dawn", that serve as memory anchors. That said, whoever did finally commit them to script was an artist of the highest order.

The Iliad, as the article indicates, is a beautiful poem of brutal and savage behavior, and it is very obvious that the narrator considers that the losers were the more civilized people: Priam, pleading with Achilles for the body of his son Hector, tore at Greek hearts (and presumably Greek consciences) as well as ours; what little redemption one finds in Achilles stems from his change of heart in the face of that honest grief. That did not stop the assembled horde from burning Troy and enslaving the survivors, nor from casting Hector's infant son from the walls. What is remarkable is not that this "happened", nor that it was recorded, what is remarkable is that the Greek audience considered it savagery themselves.

[discostu]

Actually it probably is true. The identity of, much less existence of, Homer is a long standing quandary. And most folks that are deep into the history think there probably was no Homer.

[rmh47]

Modern scholars have determined that The Iliad and The Odyssey were not, in fact, written by Homer, but rather by another ancient Greek who had the same name.

[Maelstorm]

My question is what is new in this assertion? Its been a while since I read Iliad and the Odyssey but I was under the impression that Homer was not in any way the originator of that story but was essentially building on what was a preexisting history. The best estimates for Homers birth date places him 168 years after the fall of Troy. The best way to put this in context is to take for a moment the Civil War which began 154 years ago. Also Plato referred to Homer directly in his Republic as educator of all Greece so it would take a lot to convince me that Homer wasn’t important. The fact that we still discuss him today shows his literary importance. That said I’ve always been skeptical of “such and such describes all humanity” tropes. How can a description of a human conflict not encompass the culture it takes place in? However saying that any one writing captures the essence of everything about a culture and or humanity at large is to ignore the varied and the changing nature of culture.

[mjp]

Homer is an example of an author with an integrated mode of thought. His epic is the first work we know of to present a plot that integrates a story’s events from start to finish. Its events occur as or within a carefully structured progression; they follow from previous events and lead to inevitable consequences. The events are not juxtaposed, but united into a plot.