Who Was Homer?
Homer is the name we now associate with one of the most famous poets of all time: the author of the two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. But who was Homer really?
The ancient sources give us plenty of details about his life. According to tradition, he was a bard: a poet who sang his epics to music and made a living performing his songs at feasts and royal gatherings. He was supposed to have been born on the island of Chios, just off the coast of Turkey a few hundred miles south of the ancient city of Troy. And he was also thought to have been blind.
But how much of this is actually true? Well, as with all ancient history, it's often difficult to separate the fact from the fiction. In fact, the question of who Homer was and what his relation was to the great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, has come so much under scrutiny in recent years that scholars are starting to question if Homer existed at all.
The main problem centres around the way in which the poems were composed. In the days when Homer and his contemporaries were performing, the alphabet hadn't yet been invented - which meant they couldn't write. Instead, bards had to recite poems entirely by memory! But it just wasn't feasible to learn a 16,000 line poem off by heart. What the bards did instead was to learn small chunks of poetry - a speech, for example, a feast scene, a departure on a ship - and then link these bits of poetry that they had memorised together, to create a story. It wasn't like nowadays, where we have printed versions of books so we can check what each sentence should be. In the ancient Aegean Bronze Age, each performance by each bard would have been slightly different.
You might already be starting to spot the difficulty. If every performance was different, then what version do we have now? Who wrote it down, and how did they decide what to write down? And who was Homer?
Some scholars think Homer was the original composer of the oral poem, the bard who memorised and put together the themes of the epic in such a revolutionary way. Some think Homer dictated his poem around 750 BCE, to be written down by a scribe. Some think he wrote it down himself. And others think that Homer didn't exist at all, and that the Iliad and the Odyssey are simply composite bits of poetry, sewn together by different bards at different times.
We still don't have an answer to the question of Homer. When you read the Iliad and the Odyssey for yourself, try to ask yourself if you think they were composed by one poet or many different bards. What would a poem by one man look like? Why would it be different from one where lots of different authors had worked on it? Do you think it's an ancient poem, from the time of the Trojan War when they didn't have writing - or do you think it was composed to be written down?
See what you come up with - and don't forget to let me know what you discover! Happy hunting!
The ancient sources give us plenty of details about his life. According to tradition, he was a bard: a poet who sang his epics to music and made a living performing his songs at feasts and royal gatherings. He was supposed to have been born on the island of Chios, just off the coast of Turkey a few hundred miles south of the ancient city of Troy. And he was also thought to have been blind.
But how much of this is actually true? Well, as with all ancient history, it's often difficult to separate the fact from the fiction. In fact, the question of who Homer was and what his relation was to the great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, has come so much under scrutiny in recent years that scholars are starting to question if Homer existed at all.
The main problem centres around the way in which the poems were composed. In the days when Homer and his contemporaries were performing, the alphabet hadn't yet been invented - which meant they couldn't write. Instead, bards had to recite poems entirely by memory! But it just wasn't feasible to learn a 16,000 line poem off by heart. What the bards did instead was to learn small chunks of poetry - a speech, for example, a feast scene, a departure on a ship - and then link these bits of poetry that they had memorised together, to create a story. It wasn't like nowadays, where we have printed versions of books so we can check what each sentence should be. In the ancient Aegean Bronze Age, each performance by each bard would have been slightly different.
You might already be starting to spot the difficulty. If every performance was different, then what version do we have now? Who wrote it down, and how did they decide what to write down? And who was Homer?
Some scholars think Homer was the original composer of the oral poem, the bard who memorised and put together the themes of the epic in such a revolutionary way. Some think Homer dictated his poem around 750 BCE, to be written down by a scribe. Some think he wrote it down himself. And others think that Homer didn't exist at all, and that the Iliad and the Odyssey are simply composite bits of poetry, sewn together by different bards at different times.
We still don't have an answer to the question of Homer. When you read the Iliad and the Odyssey for yourself, try to ask yourself if you think they were composed by one poet or many different bards. What would a poem by one man look like? Why would it be different from one where lots of different authors had worked on it? Do you think it's an ancient poem, from the time of the Trojan War when they didn't have writing - or do you think it was composed to be written down?
See what you come up with - and don't forget to let me know what you discover! Happy hunting!