Who is homer

For most people in antiquity, however, the two epics were the products of a single male mind. In the second century AD, a satirical writer named Lucian imagined meeting the poet and interrogating him as to who he truly was. While his words were to be taken lightly, scholars today consider it highly probable that the Homeric poems did indeed originate in these parts. Their Greek, while not one that was ever spoken, is overall more typical of the ancient dialects of the west coast of Turkey and the islands just off the coast than it is of those of mainland Greece.

Homer was associated with this part of the world from a very early date. References also exist in the early sources to Homer being conceived on the island of Ios or at Cyme and being born at Smyrna modern-day Izmir.

Ancient writers had various ideas about what Homer looked like. One reason for this was that the Odyssey features a blind but immensely talented poet named Demodocus who recites his work before a royal court. It is possible that the blindness of Homer was a myth invented to account for the fact that the Homeric poems originally evolved orally, before the development of writing in Greece, by being performed and passed down from bard to bard.

The Iliad and Odyssey are conventionally dated to the late 8th or early 7th century BC. By this time the use of writing was becoming more widespread in Greece and it seems that the poems were also set down for the first time. The story of the origins of the Trojan War, for example, in which Paris, prince of Troy, granted Aphrodite, goddess of love, the golden apple, is alluded to only briefly by Homer.

The story of the judgement of Paris, in other words, is at least contemporary, if not older, than the poems themselves. The poems may also preserve memories of an earlier, heroic age. The men of this time are presented as far stronger and mightier than those who came after them. Many scholars today believe that, if anything like the Trojan War ever happened, the most feasible historical background for the heroic age of the epics is the Late Bronze Age, about years before the Iliad and Odyssey were first written down.

Still today the monumental architecture of the city of Troy speaks of the highly developed civilisation that flourished in this period in Anatolia. It finds its counterpart in the grand palaces that Mycenaean Greeks built in the Peloponnese in the period between — BC. The precise reasons for why their civilisation collapsed in the 12th century BC are still a matter of scholarly debate.

Part of the problem is that Homer lived before a chronological dating system was in place. The Olympic Games of classical Greece marked an epoch, with BC as a starting point by which to measure out four-year periods for the event. In short, it is difficult to give someone a birth date when he was born before there was a calendar.

It has been identified as Ionia, Smyrna or, at any rate, on the coast of Asia Minor or the island of Chios. But seven cities lay claim to Homer as their native son. There is some basis for some of these claims, however.

That fact, paired with frequent mentions of local phenomena such as strong winds blowing from the northwest from the direction of Thrace, suggests, scholars feel, a familiarity with that region that could only mean Homer came from there.

The dialect helps narrow down his lifespan by coinciding it with the development and usage of language in general, but The Iliad and The Odyssey were so popular that this particular dialect became the norm for much of Greek literature going forward. Virtually every biographical aspect ascribed to Homer is derived entirely from his poems.

As a result, many busts and statues have been carved of Homer with thick curly hair and beard and sightless eyes. But he wasn't the first, nor was he the last. Countless attempts to recreate the life and personality of the author from the content of his epic poems have occupied writers for centuries.

Homer's two epic poems have become archetypal road maps in world mythology. Find Poets. Poetry Near You. Jobs for Poets. Read Stanza. Privacy Policy. Press Center. First Book Award. James Laughlin Award. Ambroggio Prize. Homer's poetry was sung by bards, often to the accompaniment of a lyre.

It is written in dactylic hexameter, a metrical pattern in which the line is broken up into six feet, each foot consisting of a long syllable followed by two short syllables. In any foot the two short syllables may be replaced by a second long syllable. Every single line of Greek in Homer's work follows this meter. In order to meet these tight metrical constraints, line-opening or line-closing epithets that meet the metrical standards, such as "godlike Achilles" or "much-enduring Odysseus," permeate the Homeric epics.

These stock phrases make memorization as well as on-the-spot composition much easier for the bard. See Homeric Composition. Timeline of Relevant Events.