by Adam Nicolson
by Adam Nicolson
Oh... so the Muslims did that, too?
Like bo’s girlfriends?
He can say that if he wants to. Doesn’t make it true ... no, not even if it’s in a book.
Yeah and JEDP wrote the books of Moses in the Bible. Whatever.
I have 0% confidence in our corrupt “betters” in Academia.
It took a village to write that article.
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
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't say it was "written by a whole culture" any more than Shakespeare's or Tolstoy's works were written by a whole culture, but it's not like one person thought the whole thing up on his or her own without making use of earlier oral versions.
What may be more interesting is that there were other epic poems in the same Trojan war cycle that didn't survive. They filled out the story of the war, but have been lost to us.
At some point people decided that they weren't worth copying and recopying. So whoever this Homer was, he or she (one theory is that the Odyssey was composed by a woman) had something that other epic poets didn't.
I suspect that Homer was a real person but probably just gathered various stories into a single epic or epics.
Although the places in both the Iliad and Odyssey were based on actual geographical places, the ones in the Iliad tend to be more accurately described.
Not sure what that means tho.
Homer did not compose the majority of either work. However, he likely composed the core stories within. But then, as the stories were passed along as an oral tradition, they were enhanced, in a way like a theater troupe would add bits about the lineage of the local king and how his ancestors were critical to the events. Over time, this became the bulk of the works.
The Trojan War took place between 1260 and 1240 BC. Homer likely lived about 150 years later. But the two epic poems were only written down in their entirety sometime between the 9th and 6th centuries BC. So between 400 and 700 years after the events, and between 250 and 550 years after Homer.
In related news, Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays.
The well-known “Romeo and Juliet” was based on “Tragic Tale of Two Lovers” by Arthur Brooke, which was based on previous works by Masuccio Salernitano, Luigi da Porto, Mateo Bandello, and others.
“Hamlet” was based on work by Saxo Grammaticus, as revised by Thomas Kyd and possibly by Francois de Belleforest.
“Othello” may have been based on work by Giovanni Giraldi Cinthio.
Besides, we all know that Shakespeare was really written http://www.sirbacon.org/links/evidence.htm by Sir Francis Bacon and/or Kevin Bacon.
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More realistically, I wish scholars who don’t have anything worth saying would simply read instead of publishing nonsense.
My favorite old books.
THE ILIAD
THE ODYSSEY
THE AENEID by VIRGIL. Glad Augustus did not carry out Virgil’s last request.
The Odyssey has so many other tales in it, such as Telemachus’ search for his father,
The epic voyage of Menelaus and Helen from Troy back to Sparta.
This guy reads Homer in TRANSLATION and ascribes authorship?! The Romans tried a repeat with Virgil and the Aeneid and was largely successful, providing Virgil in comfort on the most important commissioned work (commissioned by man, anyway) in the last couple of millennia.
If you read the Greek, and can scan, you would find this is not the work of WikiGreekia, but of one man who can write poetry. The hubris of book hustling authors...
Everyone knows that the Iliad, like the collected works of Shakespeare, is best read in the original Klingon.
How many authors contributed to the mythological story of Barack Obama’s nativity?
