Homer and the Iliad and Odyssey: Origins of the Greek Epics

Homer is the name the ancient Greeks gave to the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two oldest surviving works of European literature. The poems were probably composed in Ionia, on the Aegean coast of modern Turkey, roughly between 750 and 650 BC, drawing on centuries of oral storytelling about the Trojan War and its heroes. Who Homer was, and how the epics came to be written down, has been debated for more than two thousand years.

Background: songs before writing

After the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces around 1200 BC, during the Late Bronze Age collapse, Greece lost the art of writing. Yet stories about the great kings of the past survived. Professional singers, called aoidoi, performed them to the lyre at feasts and festivals, composing as they sang.

The Odyssey itself shows such singers at work. Demodocus, the blind bard of the Phaeacians, sings about the Trojan War, and Phemius entertains the suitors on Ithaca. These scenes probably reflect the real world of Homer’s audiences.

Around the 8th century BC, the Greeks adopted the Greek alphabet from the Phoenicians. Some of the earliest Greek inscriptions are lines of hexameter verse, showing that poetry and the new script were linked from the start.

The Iliad and the Odyssey

The Iliad, about 15,700 lines long, describes a few weeks in the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of Troy. Its theme, announced in its first line, is the wrath of Achilles. After the Greek commander Agamemnon takes his prize, the captive woman Briseis, Achilles withdraws from the fighting. The Greeks suffer heavy losses, and when Achilles’ companion Patroclus is killed by the Trojan prince Hector, Achilles returns to battle, kills Hector and drags his body behind his chariot. The poem ends quietly, with King Priam ransoming his son’s body and the Trojans holding Hector’s funeral.

The Odyssey, about 12,100 lines long, tells of the return of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, ten years after the fall of Troy. It begins with his son Telemachus searching for news while suitors occupy the palace and pursue his mother Penelope. Odysseus recounts his wanderings, including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the witch Circe, the Sirens and a visit to the underworld. In the second half he returns home in disguise, tests the loyalty of his household and kills the suitors.

Both poems are written in dactylic hexameter, a six-beat metre, in an artificial literary dialect that mixes Ionic Greek with older Aeolic forms and archaic words.

Who was Homer? The Homeric Question

Ancient Greeks told many stories about Homer. Several cities claimed to be his birthplace, most often Smyrna and the island of Chios, where a guild called the Homeridae claimed descent from him. He was usually described as blind, perhaps because of a line in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo referring to a blind poet from Chios, and because of the blind bard Demodocus.

Herodotus, writing around 430 BC, believed that Homer had lived no more than 400 years before him, so around the mid-9th century BC. None of the surviving ancient Lives of Homer is reliable; they were written centuries later and are full of legend.

Modern debate began in 1795, when the German scholar Friedrich August Wolf argued in his Prolegomena ad Homerum that the poems could not have been composed as written works by one man, and that they had been assembled later from shorter songs. In the 19th century “Analysts” tried to separate the poems into layers by different authors, while “Unitarians” defended a single designing poet.

The debate was transformed in the 1920s and 1930s by the American scholar Milman Parry. He showed that Homeric language is built from formulas, repeated phrases that fit the metre, such as “swift-footed Achilles” and “rosy-fingered Dawn”. These formulas, he argued, were the tools of poets composing orally in performance. In 1933–35 Parry and his assistant Albert Lord recorded traditional singers in Yugoslavia who could compose long epic songs without writing. Lord set out the theory in The Singer of Tales (1960).

Today most scholars agree that the epics grew out of an oral tradition, but many believe that one or two exceptional poets gave them their final shape, perhaps with the help of writing. Whether the Iliad and Odyssey had the same author is uncertain; differences in style and outlook led even some ancient critics, known as the “separators”, to argue for two poets.

Dating and writing down

The poems contain no firm dates. Many scholars place the Iliad in the second half of the 8th century BC and the Odyssey a generation or so later. Others, such as Martin West, argued for the first half of the 7th century BC. A cup found at Pithekoussai, in the Bay of Naples, carries a short verse inscription from about 740 to 720 BC that mentions the cup of Nestor, which some read as a playful allusion to the Iliad.

How the text was fixed is also debated. Some think the poet dictated it to a scribe; others think it was transmitted orally for generations by rhapsodes, professional reciters. Later Greek and Roman writers spoke of a “Pisistratean recension”, an official text made at Athens under the tyrant Pisistratus in the 6th century BC, when the poems were recited at the Panathenaic festival.

In the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, scholars at the Library of Alexandria, including Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace, compared manuscripts and produced critical editions. The division of each poem into 24 books is usually credited to them.

What the epics reveal about early Greece

The poems blend memories of different periods. Some objects are genuine Bronze Age survivals, such as the boar’s-tusk helmet described in the tenth book of the Iliad, known from Mycenaean graves. The Catalogue of Ships lists places, some of which were important in the Mycenaean age, such as Mycenae itself.

Much else reflects the Iron Age world of the poets. Heroes cremate their dead, iron is known, and society is organised around households, local chiefs and assemblies rather than the palace bureaucracies recorded in Linear B. Whether a real war lies behind the legend of Troy is discussed in the article on the historicity of the Trojan War. Excavations at Hisarlik in north-west Turkey, begun by Heinrich Schliemann in 1870, show that a large city did stand there in the Late Bronze Age.

Key people

• Homer: the poet, or poets, to whom the Greeks attributed the two epics.
• Aristarchus of Samothrace: head of the Library of Alexandria in the 2nd century BC and the most influential ancient editor of Homer.
• Friedrich August Wolf: German philologist whose Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) launched the modern Homeric Question.
• Milman Parry: American scholar who demonstrated the oral and formulaic nature of Homeric verse.
• Albert Lord: Parry’s collaborator, whose fieldwork and book The Singer of Tales spread the oral-formulaic theory.

Myths and facts

Myth: Homer wrote the whole story of the Trojan War. The Iliad does not include the Trojan Horse or the fall of Troy. These stories were told in other epics of the “Epic Cycle”, now lost, and in later works such as Virgil’s Aeneid.

Myth: the Homeric Hymns are by Homer. The 33 Homeric Hymns to the gods were attributed to him in antiquity, but they were composed by various poets over several centuries.

Fact: the poems were the Greek “Bible” of education. Greek children learned to read with Homer, and philosophers such as Plato debated his influence on morals. Fragments of the Iliad are among the most common literary texts found on papyri from Greek and Roman Egypt.

Legacy

Homer shaped all later Greek literature, from tragedy to history. Herodotus and Thucydides measured their own work against him, and Alexander the Great reportedly carried a copy of the Iliad on campaign. The Roman poet Virgil modelled the Aeneid on both epics.

In medieval Western Europe Homer was known mainly by reputation, while the Byzantine world preserved and studied him. The 10th-century manuscript known as the Venetus A, now in Venice, contains the Iliad with ancient scholarly notes. The first printed edition appeared in Florence in 1488. English translations by George Chapman (completed 1616) and Alexander Pope (1715–1726) became classics in their own right, and modern versions by Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fagles and Emily Wilson continue to find new readers.

Timeline

• c. 1200 BC: fall of the Mycenaean palaces; the age in which the epics are set comes to an end.
• c. 800–750 BC: the Greeks adopt the alphabet.
• c. 750–650 BC: probable period of composition of the Iliad and then the Odyssey.
• c. 740–720 BC: the Nestor’s Cup inscription is made at Pithekoussai.
• 6th century BC: Homer is recited at the Panathenaic festival in Athens.
• 2nd century BC: Aristarchus of Samothrace edits the poems at Alexandria.
• 1488: first printed edition of Homer, in Florence.
• 1795: Friedrich August Wolf publishes the Prolegomena ad Homerum.
• 1933–1935: Milman Parry and Albert Lord record oral epic singers in Yugoslavia.

Why it matters

The Iliad and the Odyssey stand at the beginning of Western literature. They preserved the shared stories that defined what it meant to be Greek, and their themes of anger, grief, loyalty and homecoming still speak to readers nearly three thousand years later.