Homer: The Poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Founder of the Western Literary Tradition

At the threshold of European literature stands a figure whose poems are read, translated, and argued over after nearly three thousand years, and whose own life is so deeply obscured by legend and by the silence of the records that it has become one of the great unsolved problems of classical scholarship. The Greeks called him simply Homeros, and to them he was the poet, the supreme master to whom no other could be compared, the author of the two long heroic narratives that they knew as the Iliad and the Odyssey. From those two poems the whole of Western literature may be said to descend, for they were the first works of the European imagination to be set down in a form that has come through to the present, and they established at a single stroke the conventions of the epic, the dignity of narrative verse, and the conviction that the deeds and sufferings of human beings were a worthy subject for the highest art. No later poet of the Western tradition, from Virgil to Dante to Milton, composed in ignorance of Homer, and none escaped his influence. He is, in the most exact sense, the fountainhead.

And yet of the man himself almost nothing can be known. The ancient Greeks, who venerated him as the teacher of all Hellas, could not agree on where he was born, when he lived, who his parents were, or whether he was one poet or many; seven cities competed for the honor of his birth, and the dates assigned to him by ancient authorities ranged across four hundred years. Modern scholarship, applying every instrument of historical, linguistic, and archaeological analysis, has been able to narrow these uncertainties but not to dissolve them, and the central questions remain open. Did a single poet of supreme genius compose the Iliad and the Odyssey, or were the poems shaped over generations by a tradition of nameless singers? Was Homer a real individual at all, or is the name a convenient label attached after the fact to an inherited body of song? When, and in what circumstances, were these immense poems first fixed in the form we possess? These questions, gathered together under the name of the Homeric Question, have occupied scholars for more than two centuries and have not been finally answered.

What is not in doubt is the existence and the surpassing quality of the poems themselves. The Iliad and the Odyssey survive complete, the Iliad running to more than fifteen thousand lines and the Odyssey to more than twelve thousand, each divided in antiquity into twenty-four books. They are composed in a stately and resonant verse, the dactylic hexameter, and in a language that no Greek ever spoke in daily life, an artificial poetic dialect built up over many generations of oral performance. The Iliad takes for its subject a few weeks in the tenth and final year of the legendary war waged by a coalition of Greek kingdoms against the city of Troy, and within that narrow span it tells the story of the anger of the warrior Achilles and the terrible consequences that flowed from it. The Odyssey tells of the long and perilous homeward voyage of one of the Greek heroes of that war, Odysseus of Ithaca, and of the troubles that awaited him in his own house. Out of these two stories, deceptively simple in outline, Homer fashioned works of such psychological depth, structural mastery, and moral seriousness that they have never been surpassed and rarely equaled.

The poems were, for the ancient Greeks, far more than literature. They were the foundation of education, the common inheritance that bound the scattered Greek world together, the source from which a Greek child learned the language at its noblest, the deeds of the heroes, the nature of the gods, and the values by which a person of honor should live. The philosopher Plato, even as he quarreled with Homer's authority, conceded that this one poet had educated Greece. The poems supplied the Greeks with their mythology, their models of conduct, their sense of the tragic shape of human life, and a great part of their religion. When Greek civilization passed its inheritance to Rome, Homer passed with it, and the greatest of Roman poets, Virgil, built his Aeneid consciously and openly upon the Homeric pattern. Through Rome, and later through the recovery of Greek learning in the Renaissance, Homer entered the bloodstream of every European literature, and he has remained there ever since.

The biography that follows cannot be a biography in the ordinary sense, for the materials for such a biography do not exist. It must instead be the life of a poet reconstructed from his work, from the traditions that grew up around his name, from the world that produced him, and from the long afterlife of his poems. It will examine the Homeric Question and what scholarship has been able to establish; the ancient legends of Homer's birth, blindness, wandering, and death; the historical world of the early Greek Iron Age into which the poems were born; the oral tradition of heroic song from which they grew and the discovery, in the twentieth century, of how such poetry was made; the language and craft of Homeric verse; the structure, the story, and the meaning of the Iliad and of the Odyssey; the society, the religion, and the heroic code that the poems portray; the long search for the historical reality behind the tale of Troy; the other poems that antiquity attributed to Homer; the manner in which the texts were composed, fixed, and transmitted across the centuries; and the immense and unbroken history of Homer's influence, from the schoolrooms of ancient Greece to the translators and scholars and poets of the present day. It is the story not of a man, for the man cannot be recovered, but of the poems that bear his name and of the civilization that those poems, more than any other single thing, helped to create.

The Homeric Question and the Problem of the Poet

No discussion of Homer can proceed far without confronting the tangle of problems that scholars have long called, collectively, the Homeric Question. In its broadest form the question asks: who or what was Homer, and how did the Iliad and the Odyssey come to be? Beneath that simple formulation lie a cluster of distinct puzzles. Was there a single poet named Homer, a real historical individual? If so, did that one poet compose both of the great epics, or only one, or neither? Were the poems the work of a moment of individual creation, or the gradual accretion of a long tradition? How were poems of such enormous length composed and preserved in an age that may not yet have possessed the art of writing, or possessed it only in a rudimentary form? And when, and by what process, did the texts assume the fixed shape in which they have come down to us? These questions are connected, and the answer given to any one of them constrains the answers possible to the rest.

In antiquity the existence of Homer as a single great poet was rarely doubted, though a small group of ancient critics, known as the Chorizontes or Separators, argued on grounds of style and content that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the work of two different poets. For the most part, however, the Greeks and Romans took it for granted that Homer had lived, had been a real man, and had composed both epics, along, in the looser opinion of many, with a number of other poems besides. The serious modern form of the Homeric Question was born in 1795, when the German classical scholar Friedrich August Wolf published his Prolegomena to Homer, a work that may fairly be called the foundation of modern Homeric studies. Wolf argued that writing had not been available, or not in a form adequate to the composition of long poems, at the time the Iliad and the Odyssey were first made; that poems of such length could not have been composed or transmitted without writing as unified wholes; and that the epics we possess must therefore be the result of a long process, in which originally short and independent songs were gradually combined, expanded, and finally, perhaps in sixth-century Athens, edited into the continuous poems known to later antiquity. Homer, on this view, was at most the greatest of the early singers, not the author of the poems in their finished form.

Wolf's book set off a controversy that has never entirely subsided. Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, scholars divided into two broad camps. The Analysts, following and elaborating Wolf, set themselves to dissect the poems, to detect the seams where older and newer material had been joined, to identify inconsistencies and contradictions that betrayed the hand of multiple authors, and to reconstruct the supposed shorter original poems, the so-called lays or kernels, out of which the monumental epics had grown. Some Analysts believed they could isolate an original Wrath of Achilles, a primitive Iliad, buried within the larger poem; others proposed elaborate theories of expansion and compilation. Against them stood the Unitarians, who insisted that each poem displayed an architectural unity, a consistency of design and a subtlety of cross-reference, that no committee of editors and no process of accretion could have produced, and that the poems must therefore be, in their essential structure, the work of a single commanding artistic intelligence. The Unitarians could point to the magnificent overall shape of the Iliad, the way its opening and its closing books answer one another, the careful preparation of distant events; the Analysts could point to the genuine roughnesses, the small contradictions, the passages that seemed to belong to different layers of composition.

The terms of this old debate were transformed in the second quarter of the twentieth century by the work of a young American scholar, Milman Parry, whose investigations changed the study of Homer permanently and reframed the entire Homeric Question. Parry began by analyzing, with unprecedented rigor, the language of the poems themselves, and in particular the system of fixed descriptive phrases, the so-called epithets, that are applied again and again to the heroes and the gods. He showed that these phrases were not scattered at random and were not chosen, in each instance, for their particular expressive effect, but formed a vast, economical, and interlocking system. For any given character, in any given grammatical case, and for any given position in the line, the tradition supplied one and almost always only one epithet phrase of the required metrical shape. This combination of extension, the existence of a phrase for every recurring need, and economy, the absence of wasteful duplicates, was not, Parry argued, the kind of thing a single literate poet would or could construct. It was the accumulated product of many generations of oral composition, a traditional instrument passed down from singer to singer and designed to enable the rapid composition of verse in the very act of performance.

Parry's conclusion was that the Homeric poems were oral poetry, composed not with pen and tablet but in performance, by singers who did not memorize fixed texts but re-created the songs afresh each time they sang, drawing on an inherited stock of formulaic phrases, recurrent scenes, and traditional stories. To test and confirm this hypothesis, Parry, together with his assistant Albert Lord, traveled in the 1930s to the mountains of Yugoslavia, where a living tradition of oral heroic song still flourished among the South Slavic guslari, the singers who performed long narrative poems to the accompaniment of a one-stringed instrument. There Parry and Lord recorded thousands of lines of performance, observed how illiterate singers composed poems of great length by exactly the formulaic technique that Parry had inferred for Homer, and documented how the same song varied from performance to performance and from singer to singer. The fieldwork demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Homeric epics belonged, in their technique and their origins, to a tradition of oral composition. Parry died young, in 1935, but Lord carried the work forward, and his book of 1960, The Singer of Tales, became the classic statement of the oral theory.

The discovery of the oral nature of Homeric poetry did not, however, settle the Homeric Question; it changed its terms. If the poems were oral, then the old Analyst search for the pen-strokes of multiple authors lost much of its point, for the inconsistencies that the Analysts had treated as signs of compilation could now be understood as the natural and expected features of oral composition, where a singer holds the broad design in mind but cannot, in the rush of performance, police every small detail. But the oral theory raised new questions in turn. If the tradition was oral and collective, what room remained for an individual genius, for a Homer? How could oral poems of fifteen and twelve thousand lines, far longer than any song recorded from the Yugoslav singers, have been composed at all, and how, once composed, could they have been preserved without writing long enough to be written down? Scholars have proposed a range of answers. Many now hold that the Iliad and the Odyssey represent the supreme achievement of the oral tradition, the work of one outstanding singer, or perhaps two, who, working at or near the moment when alphabetic writing became available in Greece, was able to compose, whether by dictation to a scribe or by some other means, poems of unprecedented scale and ambition that the tradition had made possible but had never before realized. On this widely held view, Homer was both the heir of a long collective tradition and a genuine individual creator, the master singer who gathered the inheritance of generations and shaped it, at a unique moment, into the monumental poems.

Other scholars take a more evolutionary view, holding that the texts continued to develop and to stabilize gradually over a long period, perhaps from the eighth century down to the sixth or even later, and that the search for a single founding moment and a single founding poet is misconceived. The debate continues, and it is unlikely ever to be wholly resolved, for the evidence, abundant within the poems themselves, is almost wholly lacking outside them. What can be said with confidence is this: the Iliad and the Odyssey grew out of a long oral tradition of heroic song; they bear, nonetheless, the marks of a controlling artistic design of the highest order; and at some point, most probably in the eighth or early seventh century before the common era, they were given the monumental form, and very likely the written form, in which they have survived. Whether the name Homer denotes the individual responsible for that transformation, or has become the traditional label for the tradition's crowning achievement, is a matter on which honest scholars still differ. In what follows, the name Homer will be used, as it has been used for nearly three thousand years, to mean the poet, or the poetic genius, of the Iliad and the Odyssey, with the understanding that behind the name lies one of the most intractable problems in the history of literature.

The Ancient Lives and the Legend of Homer

If the scholarly Homeric Question is a modern creation, the ancient Greeks were not without their own curiosity about the poet, and from that curiosity there grew, over the centuries, an elaborate body of biographical legend. Several ancient Lives of Homer survive, the longest of them falsely attributed to the historian Herodotus, others associated with the names of Plutarch and Proclus, along with a curious work known as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. None of these compositions has any claim to historical authority. They are late, the earliest perhaps reaching back in some form to the classical period but most of them the products of the Hellenistic and Roman ages, many centuries after the poet they purport to describe; they contradict one another at every turn; and they are plainly the work of imagination, weaving together local traditions, etymological speculation, and inferences drawn, sometimes ingeniously and sometimes absurdly, from the poems themselves. They cannot tell us what Homer's life was actually like. They are, however, of the greatest interest as evidence for what the Greeks believed, or wished to believe, about their supreme poet, and the legend they preserve became, for later ages, almost as influential as the poems.

The most famous element of the legend concerned Homer's birthplace, and here the ancient tradition was not merely uncertain but actively contested, for many cities of the Greek world claimed the honor of having produced him. The contest was summed up in a celebrated epigram, repeated in various forms throughout antiquity, which named seven cities as rivals for the distinction: most commonly Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos, and Athens, though other versions substituted or added further names, and the total number of claimant cities reported in antiquity exceeds twenty. The epigram drew a pointed contrast between the splendor of the rival claims and the poverty in which the living poet was supposed to have wandered, homeless and unhonored, through the very cities that quarreled over his bones once he was dead. Among the claimants, two stood out as the strongest. Smyrna, on the coast of Asia Minor, was widely regarded as the place of Homer's birth, and the island of Chios, not far to the west, as the place where he settled, lived, and founded a line of poetic descendants. Both claims point in the same direction, to the region of Ionia, the strip of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor and the islands offshore that was settled by Greeks speaking the Ionic dialect. The language of the poems, which is predominantly Ionic, lends real weight to this tradition, and the great majority of modern scholars agree that the Homeric epics took shape in the Ionian, East Greek world, even if the figure of Homer himself cannot be tied to a particular town.

The connection with Chios was reinforced by the existence, on that island, of a guild or clan of rhapsodes who called themselves the Homeridai, the sons or descendants of Homer. These were professional reciters of epic poetry who claimed Homer as their ancestor and who passed down, and performed, his poems as a hereditary inheritance. Whether the Homeridai were ever literally a family descended from a man named Homer, or whether they were a professional association that adopted the great name and the fiction of descent, cannot be determined; but their existence shows how early and how firmly the poems were associated with Chios, and the guild may have played a real part in preserving and transmitting the epics in the centuries after their composition.

The single most persistent feature of the Homeric legend was the poet's blindness. From at least the classical period onward, Homer was imagined and depicted as a blind old man, and the surviving ancient portrait busts, none of them of course made from life, give him the sightless eyes, the furrowed brow, and the long beard of a venerable blind singer. The tradition of Homer's blindness drew support, and very likely owed its origin, to a famous passage in one of the poems associated with his name, the Hymn to Apollo, in which the poet describes himself, or is taken to describe himself, as a blind man who dwells in rocky Chios and whose songs will remain supreme in time to come. The historian Thucydides, in the fifth century, accepted this passage as Homer's own reference to himself. The figure of the blind bard was reinforced, too, by the Odyssey itself, in which the poet Demodocus, who sings of the deeds at Troy at the court of the Phaeacians, is described as a blind man to whom the Muse had given the gift of song in compensation for the loss of his sight; readers in antiquity and since have seen in Demodocus a self-portrait of Homer. Whether the historical poet, if there was one, was in fact blind cannot be known, and the formulaic skill of oral composition does not depend on sight; but the image of the blind poet, who sees with the inward eye what others cannot see, has proved one of the most enduring and resonant in all of Western culture, an emblem of the idea that poetic vision is something other than ordinary perception.

The name Homer itself became an object of speculation, and the ancient biographers, fond of etymology, proposed several explanations of it. According to one widespread account, the poet was originally called Melesigenes, after the river Meles near Smyrna on whose banks he was said to have been born, and the name Homeros was a later designation. Some held that the word meant a hostage, and told a story that the poet had been given or taken as a hostage; others connected it with a word for blindness said to belong to a local dialect, so that the name itself would mean the blind man. Modern scholars have noted that the Greek word can also be understood to mean one who fits together or joins, which would make Homer, fittingly enough, the joiner, the assembler of song, though this is speculation of a modern kind. The truth is that the meaning and origin of the name are as obscure as everything else about the poet, and the ancient etymologies tell us only about the ingenuity of those who devised them.

The legend supplied Homer not only with a birthplace and a name but with a whole biography. He was made the son, in various versions, of a river god, or of a god in disguise, or of humble mortal parents; he was given a youth of poverty, a career of wandering from city to city earning his bread by the recitation of his songs, a period of teaching, episodes of misfortune, and the affliction of blindness in his later years. The most elaborate single episode of the legend was the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, a narrative, surviving in a text of the Roman period but resting on traditions that reach back at least to the classical age, which told how the two greatest poets of early Greece met in a public competition. The contest was set at the funeral games held in honor of a dead nobleman named Amphidamas in the city of Chalcis on the island of Euboea. Homer and Hesiod, according to the story, faced one another before a royal judge, and Homer answered every riddle and capped every verse that his rival could propose, so that the listening crowd called for him to be awarded the prize. But the judge ruled otherwise, and gave the victory to Hesiod, on the ground that the prize ought to go to the poet who summoned men to peace and to the labors of farming rather than to the poet who sang of wars and slaughter. The tale is certainly a fiction, and it is most unlikely that Homer and Hesiod were even contemporaries, but it preserves a genuine ancient sense of the two poets as the twin founders of the Greek poetic tradition, the one the master of heroic narrative and the other of the poetry of work and of the gods.

The legend gave Homer a death as well as a life, and the story of his death was as strange as anything in it. The poet, the tradition ran, had been warned by an oracle to beware of the riddle of the young; and when, in his old age, he came to the small Aegean island of Ios, he met a group of boys returning from fishing, and asked them what they had caught. The boys, who had caught nothing, gave him a riddling answer: what they had caught they had left behind, and what they had not caught they carried with them. They meant the lice that they had been picking from themselves and killing; those they killed they left behind, and those they failed to catch they carried home on their bodies. Homer, the greatest of poets and the master of every riddle, could not solve this one, and, brooding on his failure and on the oracle's warning, he sickened and died on Ios, where his tomb was shown to travelers for centuries afterward. The story is plainly a folktale, and its point is partly comic and partly profound: the poet who knew all things and sang of gods and heroes was undone by the common speech of children, and the master of language met his end at the hands of a riddle. None of the legend, the birthplace, the blindness, the wandering, the contest, the death, can be taken as fact. But the legend as a whole is a precious record of the place that Homer held in the Greek imagination, a figure half human and half mythical, the blind singer who had given his people their poems and their gods, honored after his death by the very world that, in the telling, had let him wander it as a homeless stranger while he lived.

The World into Which Homer Was Born

To understand the poems, and the poet, it is necessary to understand the world that produced them, and that world was not a single world but at least three, layered one upon another in the substance of the epics like the strata of an archaeological site. The poems were composed, in the form we have them, most probably in the eighth century before the common era; they look back, in their subject matter, to a heroic age that they place several centuries earlier, in the Greek Bronze Age; and they were carried, in the long centuries between, by an oral tradition that passed through the obscure period that historians once called the Greek Dark Ages. Each of these worlds left its mark on the poems, and the Homeric epics are, in consequence, a kind of composite, depicting a society that never existed in exactly the form the poems describe but that combines genuine memories of the vanished Bronze Age with the conditions of the poet's own later time.

The heroic age of which Homer sang corresponds, in historical terms, to the civilization that archaeologists call Mycenaean, after the great citadel of Mycenae in the northeastern Peloponnese, which the poems themselves name as the seat of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition against Troy. The Mycenaean civilization flourished in mainland Greece and the Aegean from roughly the sixteenth to the twelfth century before the common era. It was a civilization of powerful fortified palaces, ruled by kings, supported by a complex bureaucracy and a stratified society, and rich enough to bury its great men with masks and vessels of gold. The Mycenaeans were warriors and traders whose influence and whose goods reached across the eastern Mediterranean. Crucially, they were Greeks: the script they used for their palace records, the writing system known as Linear B, was deciphered in 1952 and proved, to general astonishment, to record an early form of the Greek language. The Mycenaean world was therefore the genuine historical ancestor of the classical Greece that came later, and the heroic age of the poems is, at its deepest level, a memory, transformed and magnified by centuries of legend, of this lost Bronze Age splendor.

That splendor came to an end in a catastrophe whose causes are still debated. In the decades around 1200 before the common era, across the whole of the eastern Mediterranean, the great Bronze Age civilizations collapsed. The Mycenaean palaces were destroyed, most of them by fire, and were not rebuilt; the bureaucratic system, the art of monumental building, and the writing system all disappeared together. Whatever the combination of causes, invasion, internal upheaval, the movements of displaced peoples, drought, the breakdown of trade, the result was the disintegration of the Mycenaean order and the onset of a long period of poverty, depopulation, and isolation. Greece entered the centuries that have been called, with some exaggeration but not without reason, the Dark Ages, an age from which little material culture and no written record survives, an age in which the population shrank, contact with the wider world contracted, and the very memory of writing was lost.

It was through these dark centuries, from roughly the twelfth to the eighth century, that the oral tradition of heroic poetry carried the memory of the Bronze Age forward. The singers of the Dark Ages preserved, in their songs, the names of the great Mycenaean centers, Mycenae rich in gold, sandy Pylos, Tiryns of the great walls; they preserved the memory of a time when Greek kings had been mightier and Greek wealth greater than anything the singers' own impoverished age could show; they preserved certain objects and customs, the boar's-tusk helmet, the great body-shield, the practice of cremation, that belonged to the older world. But the tradition also, inevitably, updated and reshaped what it carried, so that the heroes of the Bronze Age came to live, in the songs, amid many of the institutions and assumptions of the singers' own later society. The Homeric poems thus preserve, embedded in their texture, both authentic relics of the Mycenaean past and the conditions of the Iron Age present, and one of the long labors of scholarship has been to distinguish the layers.

The age in which the poems reached their final form, the eighth century before the common era, was an age of renewal and rapid change, sometimes called the Greek Renaissance or the age of the Greek awakening. After the long stagnation of the Dark Ages, the Greek world in the eighth century was once again growing in population, in prosperity, and in confidence. The characteristic institution of classical Greek civilization, the polis or independent city-state, was taking shape. The Greeks were venturing out again across the seas, founding colonies around the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and renewing contact with the older civilizations of the Near East. Panhellenic sanctuaries, above all Olympia and Delphi, were becoming centers where Greeks from every city met, competed, and worshiped together, fostering a sense of common Greek identity. And, most important of all for the history of Homer, the Greeks in this same century acquired, from the Phoenicians, the art of alphabetic writing, adapting the Phoenician script to their own language and producing the alphabet from which all later European alphabets descend. The reappearance of writing in the Greek world, after the loss of the Mycenaean Linear B some four centuries earlier, is very nearly contemporary with the likely date of the Homeric poems, and the coincidence is almost certainly not accidental. The new alphabet provided, for the first time in four centuries, the means by which a long oral poem could be fixed and preserved, and many scholars believe that it was precisely this new technology that made possible the transformation of the oral tradition's accumulated wealth into the monumental, written epics of Homer.

The Homeric poems, then, were born at a hinge of Greek history, at the moment when the long darkness was lifting and the classical world was beginning to take shape. They look backward, with longing and with awe, to the lost greatness of the heroic age, and they are suffused with the sense that the men of that age were stronger, nobler, and closer to the gods than the men of the poet's own day. But they were composed for, and they spoke to, the new and expanding world of the eighth century, a world of cities, of colonies, of renewed horizons, and of a fresh and growing sense of what it meant to be Greek. It is one of the marks of Homer's genius that he held these worlds together, that he made of the remembered Bronze Age a mirror in which his own contemporaries, and every later age, could see reflected the permanent truths of the human condition. The poems gave the emerging Greek civilization a usable past, a gallery of heroes, a vision of the gods, and a set of values; and in giving the Greeks these things, they helped to make the Greeks a single people. Out of the meeting of the remembered past and the awakening present, in the hands of a poet or poets whose name has come down to us as Homer, the first and the founding masterpieces of European literature were made.

The Oral Tradition and the Art of the Bard

The Homeric poems were not written in the way that a modern novel is written, by an author alone with pen and paper, revising and polishing a private text. They were the supreme product of an oral tradition, a living art of composition-in-performance that had been practiced, refined, and handed down for many generations before Homer, and the nature of that tradition is fundamental to any understanding of who Homer was and what he achieved. The discovery of how oral epic poetry actually works, made by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the first half of the twentieth century, is one of the most important advances in the entire history of classical scholarship, and it transformed Homer from a baffling anomaly into the intelligible, if still astonishing, crown of a tradition.

In the world of the early Greek heroic age, and for centuries afterward, the singer of tales held an honored place. The poems themselves describe such singers, and in those descriptions we may catch a reflection of Homer's own profession. In the Odyssey two bards appear, Phemius, who sings in the hall of Odysseus on Ithaca, and Demodocus, the blind singer who performs at the court of the Phaeacian king Alcinous. They are figures of dignity and even of sanctity; the singer is described as one whom the Muse loves, taught by the goddess herself, and his songs are received with reverence by his audience. The Greek word for such a singer was aoidos, and his art was held to be a gift of the Muses, the divine daughters of Memory; the poet did not claim to invent his songs but to receive them, and every performance of the Homeric epics begins with an invocation calling on the goddess to sing, or to tell the poet, the story. This was not a mere convention. It expressed a genuine understanding of how the tradition worked: the singer was the vessel and the voice of an inherited body of song far older and larger than himself, and his authority and his accuracy alike came from the tradition, personified as the Muse, the daughter of Memory who knew all things and had been present at the events the poet could only have heard reported.

The technique by which such a singer composed was the central discovery of Parry and Lord. The oral poet did not memorize a fixed text and then recite it; nor did he improvise freely, making up his lines from nothing. He did something between the two, and more remarkable than either. He had at his command an inherited system of traditional materials, operating at every level of the poem, and from these materials he built his song afresh in the act of singing it. At the level of the single phrase, he had the formulas, the fixed groups of words, each shaped to fill a particular portion of the metrical line, that the tradition supplied for every recurring idea. To say that the dawn appeared, that a hero spoke, that a warrior fell in battle, that wine was poured, that a ship was launched, the singer had ready-made phrases of exactly the right metrical shape, and he could select and combine them at the speed of performance. At the level of the scene, he had the type-scenes, the recurrent set-pieces, an arming for battle, a feast, the arrival of a guest, a sacrifice, a council of the gods, a single combat, each of which followed a traditional sequence of elements that the singer could expand or contract at will. And at the level of the whole, he had the great traditional stories themselves, the tale of the wrath of Achilles, the tale of the return of Odysseus, the vast cycle of legend surrounding the war at Troy, which gave him his plots and his characters.

The formulaic system, as Parry demonstrated through his analysis of the epithets, was a marvel of traditional craftsmanship, exhibiting both extension and economy. Extension meant that the system provided a usable phrase for every recurring need; economy meant that it rarely provided more than one. For Achilles, for the goddess Athena, for the dawn, for the sea, for a ship, the tradition had worked out, over generations, the phrases of differing length that a singer might require to complete his line, and it had pared away the wasteful duplicates. The famous fixed epithets, swift-footed Achilles, much-enduring Odysseus, the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn, ox-eyed Hera, were not chosen, in each individual occurrence, for their local appropriateness; Achilles is called swift-footed even when he is sitting still, and the sea is wine-dark whatever its color, because the epithet is part of a metrical unit, a tool for building the line. This was, for a long time, felt to be a discovery that diminished Homer, reducing his art to the mechanical assembly of prefabricated parts. But that conclusion has rightly been resisted and reversed. The traditional system was not a cage but an instrument; it was the medium in which the poet worked, as paint is the medium of the painter, and the genius of the Homeric epics lies precisely in the way the inherited materials are deployed, combined, varied, and transcended. A great oral poet was not the prisoner of his tradition but its master, and the cumulative beauty of the recurring phrases, the rosy-fingered dawn returning morning after morning across the poem, is itself a source of the poetry's grave and incantatory power.

The fieldwork that Parry and Lord carried out among the South Slavic singers of Yugoslavia in the 1930s gave the theory its decisive confirmation. There, in a society where heroic song was still a living art, they found singers, many of them unable to read or write, who composed long narrative poems by exactly the formulaic method that Parry had inferred for Homer. They observed that such a singer, asked to perform the same song on different occasions, did not reproduce a fixed text but re-created the poem each time, so that no two performances were identical, though the story and its essential shape remained constant. They observed how a gifted singer could expand a song to great length, adding episodes, elaborating scenes, ornamenting the narrative, when the occasion and the audience invited it. And they observed the long apprenticeship by which a young singer absorbed the traditional technique, learning not a repertoire of memorized poems but a productive skill, the capacity to make epic verse. All of this illuminated Homer. It explained how poems could be composed without writing; it explained the formulaic texture of the Homeric language; it explained the small inconsistencies that the older scholarship had treated as the seams of multiple authorship; and it explained how the tradition could carry the memory of the Bronze Age across the centuries of the Dark Ages, not as a fixed text but as a living and self-renewing art.

Yet the analogy with the Yugoslav singers, illuminating as it is, also throws into relief the magnitude of Homer's individual achievement, and it is here that the oral theory, far from dissolving the poet into the tradition, restores him. The recorded songs of the South Slavic guslari, even the longest of them, fall far short of the scale of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Homeric poems are not merely long; they are vast, sustained, and architecturally unified to a degree that the ordinary practice of oral tradition does not produce and perhaps cannot produce. The tradition supplied the language, the technique, the stories, and the characters; but the decision to compose on a monumental scale, to take a single episode, the wrath of Achilles, the return of Odysseus, and to develop it into a poem of fifteen or twelve thousand lines, organized around a single controlling theme, shaped with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and sustained at the highest pitch of art throughout, was an individual decision and an individual accomplishment. Most scholars believe that this leap to the monumental was made possible by the coincidence of an outstanding poetic genius with the arrival of alphabetic writing, and that the poems were committed to writing at or very near the moment of their composition, perhaps dictated by the poet to a scribe. Whether or not that is the exact mechanism, the conclusion stands: Homer was the heir of the tradition, but he was also, and unmistakably, its master and its transformer, the singer who did with the inherited art something it had never done before.

The Language and Craft of Homeric Verse

The medium in which Homer worked was a poetic language and a metrical form as remarkable, in their own way, as the poems themselves. The language of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not the language of any Greek city or any Greek age. It is an artificial construction, a poetic dialect built up over the long generations of the oral tradition and never spoken by anyone in ordinary life. Scholars call it, with a German term, the Kunstsprache, the art-language. Its foundation is the Ionic dialect of the Greek of Asia Minor, which confirms the tradition that placed Homer in Ionia; but mingled with the Ionic are forms drawn from the Aeolic dialect, evidently inherited from an earlier stage of the tradition, together with archaic forms of great antiquity, some of them reaching back to the Mycenaean Bronze Age, and occasional forms that belong to no spoken dialect at all but were created by the tradition itself to meet the needs of the verse. This layered, composite language was the singers' instrument, and its very mixture was useful, for it gave the poet, for almost any word, a choice of forms of differing metrical shape, multiplying the resources from which the line could be built. The Kunstsprache was also, by the eighth century, an old and dignified language, archaic and elevated above common speech, and this lent the poems, from the first, the grandeur and the remoteness proper to the heroic theme. It was the language of a vanished and greater age, and to the Greeks who first heard the epics it must have sounded already venerable.

The metrical form was the dactylic hexameter, the line of six feet that was to remain, for the whole of antiquity, the meter of epic poetry. Each line consists of six metrical units; the rhythm is built from the dactyl, a long syllable followed by two short, with the spondee, two long syllables, admitted as a substitute in most positions, and the line closes with a fixed cadence that gives every verse a recognizable falling rhythm at its end. Greek verse was quantitative, founded not on stress, as English verse is, but on the length of syllables, the duration of time taken to pronounce them, and the hexameter is a long, rolling, flexible line, capable of speed and of solemnity, of the rush of battle and the stillness of grief. It was, almost certainly, the meter to which the oral tradition had shaped itself over centuries, and the formulaic phrases were built to fit its segments; the line and the formula evolved together, each conditioning the other. To hear the Homeric hexameter, even across the gulf of millennia and in the imperfect approximations that modern recitation can offer, is to hear the characteristic music of the heroic age, grave, sonorous, and unhurried.

Within this language and this meter, Homer commanded a range of expressive devices that have become the permanent inheritance of Western poetry. The most celebrated is the Homeric simile, the extended comparison that suspends the narrative to set beside it an image, very often drawn from the world of nature or of ordinary peaceful life, that illuminates the action by likeness and by contrast. A warrior charging into battle is compared to a lion descending on a fold of sheep; the massed armies are compared to the leaves of the forest, or to swarming bees, or to the waves of the sea driven by the wind; the soul of a dying man slips away like a dream. The Homeric similes do far more than decorate. They open windows, again and again, onto a world entirely unlike the world of the heroic battlefield, the world of shepherds and farmers and craftsmen, of women at their weaving, of children at play, of storms and harvests and the changing seasons, and by this constant counterpoint they place the violence and the glory of the heroic action within the larger frame of the whole of human experience and of the natural order. The similes are one of the chief means by which the poems achieve their extraordinary breadth of sympathy and their sense of the wholeness of life.

Alongside the similes stand the other great instruments of the Homeric style: the fixed epithets, already described, which give the poems their incantatory recurrences; the long set speeches, through which the characters reveal themselves and debate and persuade and lament, for the Homeric poems are, to a remarkable degree, dramatic, with a very large proportion of their lines given to direct speech; the type-scenes, the formal feasts and sacrifices and arming-scenes and combats, whose recurrence gives the narrative its rhythm and its ceremonial dignity; and the great descriptive set-pieces, of which the supreme example is the description, in the Iliad, of the shield that the god Hephaestus forges for Achilles, a shield on which the divine smith depicts the earth, the sky, the sea, the sun and the moon and the constellations, two cities, one at peace and one at war, the labors of plowing and harvest and vintage, a wedding and a lawsuit and a dance, the whole of human life and the cosmos that contains it. The description of the shield is a poem within the poem, and it is one of the clearest signs that the maker of the Iliad possessed not only the inherited skill of the tradition but a controlling vision of the human condition that he meant his poem, like the shield, to encompass.

It must be remembered, finally, that this poetry was made to be heard, not read. The Homeric epics were composed for performance, sung or chanted aloud, very probably to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument, before a listening audience. Every feature of the style, the formulas that ease both composition and comprehension, the repetitions that allow the mind to rest and remember, the type-scenes that orient the listener, the long speeches that hold the attention, the similes that refresh it, is shaped by the conditions of oral performance. The poems unfold in time, as music does, and they were designed to carry an audience, perhaps across several long sittings, through the whole great arc of the story. To read Homer silently on the page, as most people now encounter him, is to receive the poems in a form their maker never imagined. Something of their original power can still be recovered, even so, for the architecture, the characters, the moral weight, and the sheer narrative grip survive translation and survive the silence of the page; but it is worth holding in mind, as one reads, that these were living performances, the voice of the singer in the hall, the oldest surviving music of the European imagination.

The Iliad: the Wrath of Achilles

The Iliad, the older and the more austere of the two Homeric epics, is a poem about the Trojan War, but it is not the poem of the Trojan War that a reader coming to it for the first time might expect. It does not narrate the causes of the war, the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the gathering of the Greek fleet; it does not narrate the famous episodes that popular memory associates with Troy, the wooden horse, the sack of the city, the death of Achilles; and it does not narrate the war's end. The Iliad takes, instead, a single thread out of the tenth and final year of the long siege, a quarrel and its consequences unfolding across a span of some seven weeks, and from that narrow and unpromising material it makes a poem of overwhelming power. Its true subject is announced in its very first word, the word that in the Greek stands at the head of the poem: wrath. Sing, goddess, the poet asks the Muse, the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus, the ruinous wrath that brought countless sorrows upon the Greeks and sent so many brave souls down to the house of the dead. The Iliad is the poem of the anger of Achilles, of how that anger arose, what it caused, and how, at last, it was set aside.

The quarrel that begins the poem breaks out in the Greek camp before the walls of Troy. A plague has fallen on the Greek army, and when the assembly is called to discover its cause, the seer Calchas reveals that the god Apollo has sent the plague because Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Greek host and the king of Mycenae, has refused to give back a captive woman, the daughter of a priest of Apollo, whom he holds as his prize of war. Agamemnon is compelled, by the anger of the god and the pressure of the army, to surrender the woman; but he insists, in his pride, on being compensated for the loss, and he chooses to take, as his replacement prize, the captive woman Briseis, who had been awarded to Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Greek army. The seizure of Briseis is, in the value system of the heroic world, a public humiliation, a calculated assault on Achilles' honor, and Achilles, enraged beyond bearing, withdraws himself and his men from the fighting and announces that he will take no further part in the war. More than this, he asks his mother, the sea-goddess Thetis, to go to Zeus and to beg the king of the gods to turn the tide of battle against the Greeks, so that they, having dishonored their best man, may learn through defeat and death how much they need him. Thetis makes the appeal, and Zeus, after hesitation, consents. The wrath of Achilles, and the will of Zeus, now together drive the poem forward.

What follows is the working-out of that wrath in the form of the long defeat of the Greeks. With Achilles withdrawn and sulking by his ships, the Trojans, led by their own greatest warrior, Hector, the son of the Trojan king Priam, press the Greeks ever harder. The poem unfolds across days of battle, rich with individual combats, with the deeds of the other Greek heroes, Diomedes, the two warriors named Ajax, Odysseus, the old king Nestor, and with the constant intervention of the gods, who take sides in the human war and fight, scheme, and quarrel among themselves on Olympus and on the plain of Troy. But beneath the surface variety the great movement is steady and grim: the Greeks are driven back, their defenses breached, and the Trojans carry the fighting at last to the very ships of the Greek fleet, threatening to burn them and to end the expedition in catastrophe. At the crisis, the Greek leaders send an embassy to Achilles, offering him the return of Briseis, untouched, together with a vast treasure of gifts and the highest honors, if only he will relent and fight. But Achilles, in one of the central scenes of the poem, refuses. His anger has carried him to a place beyond the reach of gifts; he questions, in his great speech to the embassy, the whole heroic economy of honor and reward, and he will not be bought back.

The turning point of the poem comes through the figure of Patroclus, the dearest companion of Achilles, the gentle older friend who has shared his tent and his life. As the Greek defeat reaches its lowest point and the Trojans set fire to the first of the ships, Patroclus, unable to bear the sight of his countrymen's suffering, comes to Achilles in tears and begs to be allowed to enter the battle himself, wearing Achilles' own armor, so that the Trojans, believing Achilles has returned, may be driven back from the ships. Achilles, his anger still unappeased but his heart moved, consents, and arms his friend in his own armor, with the strict instruction that Patroclus is only to drive the Trojans from the ships and is not to pursue them toward the walls of Troy. Patroclus goes out, and for a while he carries all before him; he turns the battle, he saves the ships, he kills many Trojans, among them Sarpedon, a son of Zeus himself. But, carried away by the joy and the fury of his success, he forgets the warning, and presses on toward the city. There, beneath the walls of Troy, the god Apollo strikes him, his borrowed armor is dashed from his body, and Hector deals him the final blow. Patroclus is dead, and the armor of Achilles is in Hector's hands.

The death of Patroclus transforms the poem. The news is brought to Achilles, and his grief is terrible, a grief so violent that his mother, hearing his cry from the depths of the sea, comes to him with her sister sea-nymphs to mourn. And the grief turns at once into a new and far more terrible anger, no longer the cold anger against Agamemnon but a blazing fury of vengeance against Hector and against the Trojans, an anger that Achilles knows will cost him his own life, for it has been foretold that his death must follow soon after Hector's. He no longer cares. His mother obtains for him a new suit of armor, forged by the god Hephaestus, including the great shield on which the whole of the world is depicted; he is formally reconciled with Agamemnon, the original quarrel now utterly eclipsed by the larger grief; and he goes out to the battle. The closing books of the Iliad are dominated by the irresistible and dreadful figure of Achilles in his wrath of vengeance, slaughtering the Trojans, choking the river of Troy with the bodies of the dead, fighting even against the river-god himself, until at last the Trojan army is swept in rout behind the walls of the city, and only Hector remains outside, to face Achilles alone.

The duel of Achilles and Hector before the walls of Troy is the climax of the poem, and Homer surrounds it with an almost unbearable pathos. Hector's aged father Priam and his mother Hecuba call to him from the walls, begging him to come inside and not to face Achilles; but Hector, bound by his own sense of honor and his shame before the people of Troy, will not retreat. Yet when Achilles comes upon him, terrible in the divine armor, Hector's courage fails, and he runs, and Achilles pursues him three times around the walls of the city before the goddess Athena, by a deception, brings him to bay. They fight, and Hector falls, and dies with a prophecy of Achilles' own death on his lips. And then Achilles, his vengeance still unsatisfied, commits the act that hangs over the rest of the poem: he lashes the body of Hector to his chariot and drags it in the dust around the walls of Troy and back to the Greek camp, and day after day he continues to abuse and dishonor the corpse of his enemy.

But the Iliad does not end with the death of Hector, and the greatness of the poem lies, in large part, in its refusal to end there. The final book brings the aged king Priam, under the protection of the god Hermes, by night and in secret, across the plain and through the Greek camp and into the very tent of Achilles, the man who has killed his son, to beg for the return of Hector's body for burial. The scene that follows, the old king kneeling before the killer of his son, kissing the terrible hands that have destroyed his children, and Achilles, looking at Priam, thinking of his own father far away whom he will never see again, and weeping with him, the two enemies weeping together, the one for his son and the other for his father and his friend, is one of the supreme moments in all of literature. Achilles relents; he gives back the body; he grants a truce for the funeral. And the Iliad closes, not with triumph and not with the fall of Troy, but quietly, with the lamentation of the Trojan women and the burial of Hector, breaker of horses. The wrath that began the poem has been spent, and in its place, at the very end, there has come a moment of shared grief and common humanity between the bitterest of enemies.

The Iliad: Heroism, Mortality, and the Tragic Vision

The Iliad is a poem of war, and it does not flinch from war; its battle scenes are detailed, unsparing, and often horrifying, and a great part of the poem consists of the deaths of men, named and unnamed, killed in every manner that the spear and the sword can devise. But the Iliad is very far from being a poem that glorifies war simply, and its greatness lies in the depth and the honesty of its meditation on the things that war reveals: the nature of heroism, the meaning of honor, the certainty of death, and the worth of the human life that war destroys. It is, in the fullest sense, a tragic poem, the first and in some respects the greatest of tragic poems, and the tragic vision that it embodies has shaped the whole of the Western imagination.

At the center of the heroic world stands a code of values, an ethic of honor, that the poem both presents and, with great subtlety, examines. The Homeric hero lives for honor, for the public recognition of his worth; the Greek word is tim?, and it is expressed in tangible forms, in the prizes of war, the place of precedence at the feast, the respect of the army. Above honor stands glory, kleos, the renown that survives a man's death, the fame that is sung by the poets, the only form of immortality available to a mortal being. The hero's supreme obligation is to excel, to be always the best and to be seen to be the best, and to win, by his deeds, a name that will not die. It was this code that Achilles served when he withdrew from the battle over the insult to his honor, and it was this code that he questioned, in his bitter speech to the embassy, when he asked what profit there was in risking his life day after day, when the coward and the hero come at last to the same death, and when the honor he had earned could be stripped from him at the whim of a king. The Iliad does not simply celebrate the heroic code; it submits it to the most searching scrutiny, and in the figure of Achilles, the greatest of the heroes, it shows the code reaching a crisis and breaking down.

The deepest theme of the Iliad is mortality. The poem is saturated with the awareness of death, and its heroes are great precisely because they act, and choose, and risk everything, in the full knowledge that they must die. The contrast between the deathless gods and the dying men is drawn again and again, and it is the gods, in the end, who are the lesser beings, for nothing is at stake for them; they can be wounded and recover, defeated and console themselves, and their quarrels, however violent, are finally without weight, because they have eternity. It is the mortals who matter, because for them every choice is final and every loss is forever. Achilles himself carries this knowledge with a peculiar intensity, for he has been told that two destinies are open to him: to stay at Troy and to win undying glory but to die young, or to return home and to live a long life but to be forgotten. When he goes out to avenge Patroclus, he chooses, with open eyes, the short life and the glory, and the poem honors that choice while showing, with unbearable clarity, what it costs. The most famous of the Homeric similes compares the generations of mortal men to the leaves of the forest, which the wind scatters to the ground while the tree puts forth others in the spring; the comparison is at once a statement of the brevity and the fragility of human life and, in its quiet beauty, an affirmation of life's recurring worth.

The poem's tragic vision is matched by an extraordinary breadth of human sympathy, and nowhere is this more evident than in the treatment of the Trojan enemy. The Iliad was composed by a Greek, for Greeks, about a war in which the Greeks were the eventual victors; and yet the poem extends to the Trojans, the losing side, a sympathy as full and as tender as anything it grants to the Greeks, and in some respects fuller. Hector, the defender of Troy, is in many ways the most sympathetic figure in the poem, a man fighting not for glory and plunder, like the Greek invaders, but for his city, his parents, his wife, and his infant son. The scene in which Hector, on a brief return from the battlefield, meets his wife Andromache and their baby son on the walls of Troy, the child frightened by the nodding crest of his father's helmet so that Hector laughs and lays the helmet aside to take him in his arms, the husband and wife speaking together with the knowledge of doom upon them, is one of the tenderest in all literature, and it is given to the enemy. When Troy falls, as the poem and its audience know it must, it is these people, Hector and Andromache and Priam and the women of Troy, whose suffering the poem has made us feel. The Iliad does not divide the world into a side that is right and a side that is wrong; it shows war as a catastrophe that destroys the good and the brave on both sides, and it grieves, with an even-handed grief, for all of them.

This is why the ending of the Iliad is so profound, and why Homer was right not to end it with the death of Hector or the fall of Troy. The poem of wrath ends with an act of compassion and a recognition of shared humanity. When Priam and Achilles weep together in the tent, the bitterest of enemies, the killer and the father of the killed, they weep because they have both understood the common lot of all mortals, the lot of loss and grief and death, and because in the face of that common lot the distinction between enemy and friend has, for a moment, dissolved. Achilles speaks, in that scene, of the two great jars that stand on the floor of Zeus, one of evils and one of blessings, from which the god mingles the fortunes of every human life, so that no one passes through the world without sorrow. That is the wisdom that the Iliad arrives at, and it arrives at it through the whole long course of the wrath and the killing: a clear-eyed acceptance of the tragic shape of human life, of the certainty of death and the inevitability of grief, joined to a deep tenderness for the brief, brave, and precious lives that death and grief destroy. It is a vision without consolation and without illusion, and yet it is not a vision of despair, for it finds, in the courage of the heroes, in the love of Hector and Andromache, in the shared tears of Priam and Achilles, a worth in human life that the poem affirms even as it shows that life passing away. This is the tragic vision, and Homer is its first and one of its greatest masters.

The Odyssey: the Return of Odysseus

If the Iliad is a poem of war, of wrath, and of tragic death, the Odyssey, its companion and in the tradition its sequel, is a poem of peace regained, of endurance rewarded, and of the long road home. It is a different kind of poem in almost every respect, lighter in places, more varied, more fantastic, more concerned with the private world of the household than with the public world of the battlefield, and it tells a story with a happy ending, a story of trials surmounted and order restored. Where the Iliad concentrates its vast power on a few weeks and a single field of action, the Odyssey ranges across ten years and the whole of the known and the imagined world, from the islands of the Greek sea to the edges of the earth and even to the land of the dead. Its hero is Odysseus, the king of the small island of Ithaca, who fought at Troy and who, after the city fell, set out to sail home, and whose homeward voyage, through no fault that the poem allows to be simple, stretched out into a decade of wandering, suffering, and loss before he came at last to his own country and his own house.

The poem does not tell its story in a straight line, and one of the marks of its sophistication is the boldness of its construction. It opens not with Odysseus at all but in his absence, on the island of Ithaca, twenty years after he first sailed for Troy, where his household stands on the edge of ruin. His wife Penelope, who has waited faithfully through all the long years, is besieged by a crowd of arrogant young noblemen, the suitors, who have installed themselves in the palace, consume its wealth in endless feasting, press Penelope to abandon hope and to marry one of them, and plot the death of Odysseus' son. That son, Telemachus, was an infant when his father left and is now a young man, helpless against the suitors and uncertain whether his father lives or is long dead. The first four books of the poem, sometimes called the Telemachy, follow Telemachus as the goddess Athena, the constant protector of the house of Odysseus, rouses him to action and sends him on a journey to the mainland, to the aged Nestor at Pylos and to Menelaus and Helen at Sparta, to seek news of his father. The journey wins him no certain news, but it begins the making of a man out of the boy, and it sets before the audience, before Odysseus himself has appeared, the desperate situation that awaits him at home and the stakes of his return.

Only in the fifth book does the poem turn to Odysseus, and it finds him at the lowest point of his fortunes, held captive on a remote island by the nymph Calypso, who loves him and has kept him with her for years and has offered to make him immortal if he will stay, and who still cannot make him cease to long for his home and his wife. The gods at last decree his release; Odysseus builds a raft and sets out alone across the sea; the sea-god Poseidon, his enemy, wrecks the raft in a storm; and Odysseus, after struggling for his life in the water, is cast ashore, naked and exhausted, on the land of the Phaeacians, a hospitable and half-magical people. There, received with kindness at the court of King Alcinous, and stirred to tears by the songs that the blind bard Demodocus sings of the war at Troy and of Odysseus' own deeds, he is at last moved to reveal his name and to tell the story of all that has befallen him since he left Troy.

The tale that Odysseus tells the Phaeacians, occupying four books of the poem and narrated in the hero's own voice, contains the wonders for which the Odyssey is most widely known. He tells of the land of the Lotus-eaters, whose flower makes those who taste it forget their home; of the Cyclops Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant and son of Poseidon, who trapped Odysseus and his men in his cave and devoured them two by two, until Odysseus, with the cunning that is his defining quality, made the giant drunk, told him that his name was Nobody, blinded his single eye with a sharpened stake, and escaped with his surviving men by clinging beneath the bellies of the giant's sheep, an escape that earned him, when he could not resist shouting his true name in triumph, the undying enmity of Polyphemus' father Poseidon. He tells of Aeolus, the keeper of the winds, and the bag of winds opened by his foolish crew within sight of home; of the cannibal Laestrygonians who destroyed all his ships but one; of the enchantress Circe, who turned his men into swine and whom he overcame and who became, for a year, his lover and at last his helper; of the journey, at Circe's bidding, to the very edge of the world and the entrance to the land of the dead, where he summoned up the shades of the departed, spoke with the prophet Tiresias, who foretold his future, met the ghost of his own mother, dead of grief in his absence, and conversed with the spirits of his old companions of the war, with Agamemnon, murdered on his own homecoming, and with Achilles, who told him that he would rather be the living servant of a poor man than the king of all the dead. He tells of the Sirens, whose song lures sailors to their death and which Odysseus alone has heard and survived, bound to the mast while his men rowed with their ears stopped with wax; of the passage between the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis; and, last, of the cattle of the Sun-god on the island of Thrinacia, which his starving men, against his command and their own sworn oath, killed and ate, and for which the Sun demanded and obtained their destruction, so that Odysseus alone, clinging to the wreckage of his last ship, survived to be carried to the island of Calypso, where his captivity, and the poem's account of it, began.

With the tale told, the Phaeacians, a people of marvelous ships, carry Odysseus home at last, asleep, and set him down with all his treasure on the shore of his own Ithaca. But the return home is not the end of the poem; it is, in a sense, only the beginning of its second and most carefully wrought half. For Odysseus cannot simply walk into his palace and reclaim his place; the suitors, more than a hundred strong, hold the house, and to confront them openly would be to die. The goddess Athena disguises him as an aged, ragged beggar, and in that disguise he makes his way, unrecognized, into his own kingdom. He is sheltered first by the faithful swineherd Eumaeus, a servant of perfect loyalty; he reveals himself, in secret, to his son Telemachus, newly returned from his own journey, and the two of them, father and son meeting as grown men for the first time, plot together the destruction of the suitors. Still in his beggar's disguise, Odysseus enters his own hall, and endures, with a self-command that is itself a kind of heroism, the insults, the mockery, and the violence of the suitors who do not know him, watching and judging, learning which of his servants have remained loyal and which have gone over to the suitors, and waiting for his moment. He is recognized, against his will, by his old nurse Eurycleia, who knows him by the scar of an old wound as she washes his feet, and is sworn to silence; and he speaks, without revealing himself, with the faithful Penelope, who does not know the beggar before her is her husband, and who tells him of her long grief and of the trick of the great web she wove and unwove by night to put off the suitors, and of her resolve, now that hope seems gone, to hold a contest among them.

The contest that Penelope proposes, of stringing the great bow of Odysseus and shooting an arrow through a row of axes, is a feat that only Odysseus has ever been able to perform, and it becomes the trap that springs the poem's climax. The suitors try, one after another, and not one of them can so much as bend the bow to string it. Then the ragged beggar asks for his turn; and over the protests and the jeers of the suitors, the bow is given to him; and Odysseus, the disguise about to fall away, strings the great bow as easily as a singer fits a new string to his lyre, and sends the arrow cleanly through the axes. The disguise is thrown off; Odysseus, with his son and his two loyal servants beside him, turns the bow upon the suitors, and in the long and bloody scene that follows, the whole crowd of them, who have devoured his wealth and dishonored his house and courted his wife and plotted his son's death, are killed, every one. The disloyal servants are punished; the hall is cleansed; and Odysseus, the king, is master of his own house again. There remains the most delicate of all the poem's reunions, that of Odysseus and Penelope, and Homer makes Penelope, cautious and self-possessed after twenty years of guarding the house with her wits, withhold her recognition even now, and test the stranger who claims to be her husband by a secret that only the two of them can know, the secret of how their marriage bed was built, with its bedpost carved from a living olive tree rooted in the ground, immovable. When Odysseus, stung, describes the bed, Penelope knows him at last, and the long-parted husband and wife are reunited. The poem closes with Odysseus restored to his wife, to his son, to his aged father Laertes whom he seeks out in his orchard, and, after a last threatened outbreak of violence from the kinsmen of the slain suitors, with a peace imposed upon Ithaca by the gods.

The Odyssey: Identity, Cunning, and the Moral Order

The Odyssey is built upon a different set of values from the Iliad, and the difference begins with its hero. Achilles is the supreme warrior, defined by physical strength, by speed, by the unmatched force of his anger and his arm; Odysseus is something else, and the poem announces it in its first line, where its hero is called the man of many turns, the man of many devices, the resourceful and the much-traveled man. The defining quality of Odysseus is not strength but intelligence, and a particular kind of intelligence at that, the practical, flexible, improvising cunning that the Greeks called m?tis, the capacity to find a way out of any difficulty, to deceive, to plan, to adapt, to endure. It was m?tis that devised the wooden horse that took Troy; it was m?tis that named itself Nobody in the cave of the Cyclops; it is m?tis, joined to an almost superhuman power of self-restraint and patient endurance, that brings Odysseus through every trial of his wanderings and, at the last, through the far more dangerous trial of his own house. The Odyssey is the epic of intelligence as the Iliad is the epic of force, and in raising the cunning survivor to the rank of hero it opened a path that the whole later tradition of the novel, the poem of the resourceful individual making his way through a difficult world, would eventually follow.

Bound up with the theme of cunning is the theme of identity, and the Odyssey is, to a degree unusual in ancient literature, a poem about who a person is and how that is known. Its hero spends the second half of the poem in disguise, concealing his identity even from his wife, and the poem is full of scenes of recognition, the moments when a disguise falls away and one person knows another for what they truly are: the nurse Eurycleia knowing Odysseus by his scar, the dog Argos, dying, knowing his master after twenty years, the father Laertes, the son Telemachus, and, most carefully wrought of all, Penelope, who will not be deceived and who tests her returned husband by the secret of their immovable bed. These recognitions are the emotional heart of the poem's second half, and they make of the Odyssey a sustained meditation on the question of what constitutes a self that persists through twenty years and a thousand dangers, and on the bonds of marriage, kinship, and loyalty by which a self is known and held.

The Odyssey is also, far more openly than the Iliad, a poem with a moral design, a poem in which the universe rewards the good and punishes the wicked. It declares its moral framework at the very outset, when Zeus, in the council of the gods, complains that mortals blame the gods for their sufferings when in truth they bring ruin upon themselves by their own recklessness, and cites the example of a man who committed murder in defiance of an explicit divine warning and paid for it with his life. That principle governs the whole poem. The suitors who consume the house of Odysseus, who abuse the disguised beggar, who scorn the laws of hospitality and plot murder, are warned again and again, by omens, by prophecies, by the words of the disguised Odysseus himself, and they ignore every warning, and they die. The disloyal servants die with them. The faithful, the swineherd Eumaeus, the nurse, the patient Penelope, the loyal old father, are restored and rewarded. The contrast with the Iliad, where the good and the brave perish on both sides and the moral order is anything but clear, is striking, and it has led many readers to feel that the Odyssey, for all its monsters and marvels, inhabits a more comfortable and more comprehensible moral universe than the harsher, more tragic world of the older poem.

The supreme value of the Odyssey, the value toward which the whole poem moves, is the homecoming itself, the nostos, and all that the home contains: the wife, the son, the father, the household, the ordered kingdom, the rooted and the settled life. Odysseus is offered, in the course of the poem, alternatives to that homecoming, and he refuses them all. The nymph Calypso offers him agelessness and immortality if he will stay with her forever, and he chooses, instead, his mortal wife and his rocky island and the death that waits for every mortal at the end. That choice is the moral center of the Odyssey, and it is the reverse of the choice of Achilles. Achilles chose the brief life and the undying glory; Odysseus chooses the long life, the return, the human and the ordinary, the growing old beside Penelope that the prophet Tiresias foretells for him. The Odyssey affirms, against the heroic glamour of early death and everlasting fame, the worth of survival, of endurance, of the patient recovery of an ordinary happiness, and in doing so it sets beside the tragic vision of the Iliad a different and a gentler wisdom, no less profound.

The World of the Poems: Society, the Gods, and the Heroic Code

The Iliad and the Odyssey are set in a vanished heroic age, and they depict, with great vividness and consistency, a whole world, a society with its own structure, its own customs, its own values, and its own gods. That world, as has been said, is a poetic composite, fusing genuine memories of the Mycenaean Bronze Age with the conditions of the poet's own early Iron Age and with elements that belong to no real period at all but only to the idealizing imagination of heroic song. It is not a historical society that can be placed on a single map or in a single century. But it is a coherent imaginative world, and it is worth describing, for the picture the poems give of human life has been, for almost three thousand years, one of the most influential pictures ever drawn.

Homeric society is aristocratic, and its central figures are the basileis, the kings or chieftains, the great men who own broad lands, command followers, lead in war, and speak in council. Around them is a household, an oikos, that is the basic unit of the social and economic order: the lord, his wife, his children, his dependents, his servants and slaves, his herds and his fields, his stores of treasure. The household is a little kingdom, and the great theme of the Odyssey is precisely the threat to one such household and its restoration. Above the individual household there is only a loose political order, an assembly of the people that may be summoned and addressed but that holds little independent power, and a king whose authority rests on his birth, his wealth, his prowess, and his ability to persuade. The bonds that hold this world together are personal rather than institutional: the bond of kinship, the bond between a lord and his followers, the bond of guest-friendship, the xenia that obliges a host to receive, feed, protect, and give gifts to a stranger, and obliges the stranger and his descendants to return the obligation forever. Xenia is sacred, protected by Zeus himself, and the keeping and the breaking of it is one of the great moral measures of the Odyssey, where the monstrous Cyclops who eats his guests and the suitors who abuse their host's house stand at one extreme and the generous Phaeacians and the faithful swineherd at the other.

Over this human world preside the gods, and the Homeric gods are among the most remarkable creations of the poems. They are the Olympians, the family of deities ruled by Zeus, and they are imagined with an extraordinary and sometimes disconcerting vividness: they are immortal and powerful, they control the forces of the world and the destinies of men, and yet they are also intensely and recognizably human, possessed of human shapes, human passions, human partialities, and human failings. They love and hate, scheme and quarrel, feast and laugh, take sides in the human war, deceive one another, and are deceived. They are not, on the whole, the guardians of morality; in the Iliad especially, they are more like a quarrelsome and powerful aristocracy than a moral providence, and the difference between them and the human heroes is, in the end, not goodness but deathlessness. This is the deepest fact about the Homeric gods: they cannot die, and because they cannot die, nothing they do carries the weight that mortal action carries. The gods give the poems their breadth, their irony, their occasional comedy, and their sense of a world watched over by powers greater than man; but it is the mortals, precisely because they are mortal, who hold the poems' moral and emotional center.

Above gods and men alike stands fate, moira, the apportioned lot, and the relation between fate, the will of the gods, and the choices of human beings is one of the subtlest things in Homer. The poems do not present a simple determinism. The heroes are fated to certain ends, and they often know it; Achilles knows he will die at Troy, Hector knows Troy will fall. But within the frame of what is fated, they choose, and act, and bear the responsibility for their choices, and the poems never suggest that fate excuses a man from the duty of courage or relieves him of the consequences of his folly. The heroic code by which these men live, the code of honor and glory, of being always the best and winning a name that death cannot erase, has already been described in connection with the Iliad. It is a demanding and in some ways a terrible code, and the poems, especially the Iliad, examine it with a critical eye. But it is also, in the world of the poems, what gives human life its shape and its dignity: the certainty of death is met by the resolve to live, in the brief space allowed, so well and so bravely that the living will remember. It is no accident that the immortality the heroes can actually attain is the immortality of song, the kleos kept alive by poets; the poems are, among other things, about the very thing they themselves accomplish, the rescue of human greatness from oblivion.

Troy and the Search for the Historical Homer

For most of the long history of Homer's readers, the question of whether the events of the Iliad had actually happened, whether there had been a real Trojan War, a real Troy, a real Agamemnon and Hector and Achilles, was either answered with simple faith or set aside as unanswerable. The ancient Greeks did not doubt it; they dated the fall of Troy to a specific year, reckoned their own descent from the heroes, and showed visitors the tomb of Achilles on the plain. By the skeptical eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the educated consensus had swung the other way, and the Trojan War was widely regarded as pure myth, the city of Troy as a poetic fiction with no more reality than the land of the Cyclops. It was against that consensus that one of the most famous episodes in the history of archaeology was directed.

In the 1870s a wealthy German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann, who had made a fortune in trade and who had nursed since boyhood a passionate conviction that Homer's poems contained genuine history, turned his energy and his money to the search for Troy. Guided in part by the earlier observations of the British scholar and resident Frank Calvert, who had identified the likely site and owned part of it, Schliemann began to excavate the mound of Hisarlik, in the northwest corner of Asia Minor, near the entrance to the straits, exactly where Homeric geography placed the city. What he found astonished the world. Beneath the mound lay not one city but the superimposed remains of many, a series of settlements built one upon the ruins of another across more than two thousand years. Schliemann had found a real and ancient fortified city on the site that tradition assigned to Troy, and although his methods were crude by later standards and his eagerness led him into errors, above all his identification of a hoard of gold and jewelry, the so-called Treasure of Priam, with a layer that in fact belonged a thousand years before the Homeric period, the central fact stood: there had been a city at Troy. Schliemann went on to excavate at Mycenae itself, where he uncovered the shaft graves with their masks and treasures of gold, and proclaimed, over one golden death-mask, that he had gazed upon the face of Agamemnon, a claim as romantic and as unfounded as it was unforgettable.

The work that Schliemann began has continued, with ever-increasing care and sophistication, down to the present, through the excavations of Wilhelm Dörpfeld, of the American archaeologist Carl Blegen in the 1930s, and, in recent decades, of the international expedition long directed by Manfred Korfmann, which revealed that the citadel of Hisarlik was the fortified heart of a substantially larger lower city. The archaeologists distinguished the successive cities of the mound by number, and the long debate over which of them, if any, was the Troy of Homer settled chiefly on the layers known as Troy VI and Troy VIIa, prosperous and strongly walled settlements that flourished and were destroyed in the centuries around 1200 before the common era, the very period to which Greek tradition assigned the Trojan War and to which the collapse of the Mycenaean world belongs.

Two further bodies of evidence have deepened the picture. The first is the decipherment, achieved in 1952 by the English architect Michael Ventris with the collaboration of the scholar John Chadwick, of the Mycenaean script known as Linear B. Ventris proved that the language of the script was Greek, and the clay tablets it recorded, though they are only administrative documents, inventories and lists, established beyond doubt that the Mycenaean palace-civilization of the Bronze Age was Greek, and so confirmed that Homer's heroic age had a genuine historical ancestor, a real Greek Bronze Age world whose dim memory the oral tradition had carried forward. The second is the evidence of the archives of the Hittite empire, the great power that controlled much of Asia Minor in the Bronze Age. The Hittite records refer to a land or city they call Wilusa, a name that corresponds remarkably well to one of the Greek names of Troy, Ilios, and they refer to a power they call Ahhiyawa, which many scholars connect with the Achaeans, one of Homer's names for the Greeks. The Hittite documents reveal that the region around Troy was, in the Bronze Age, a place of real strategic importance and of recurring conflict.

What all this evidence permits, and what it does not permit, must be stated with care. It does not prove that the Trojan War of the Iliad took place, that Helen was carried off, that a Greek coalition besieged the city for ten years, that the events and the characters of the poem are historical. The Iliad is not a chronicle, and no excavation can confirm a wrath or a duel. What the evidence does establish is that the poems are not spun from nothing. There was a real and important city where Homer placed Troy; it was destroyed, more than once, by violence, in the right era; there was a real Mycenaean Greek civilization, warlike and far-ranging, capable of mounting overseas expeditions; and the memory of that vanished Bronze Age world, transmuted by centuries of song into the golden heroic age, lies at the foundation of the poems. Behind the legend there is history, deep, fragmentary, and transformed; the search for Troy did not recover the world of the Iliad, but it proved that the world of the Iliad had roots in the real and ancient past.

The Epic Cycle and the Other Poems Attributed to Homer

The Iliad and the Odyssey are the two poems that the verdict of antiquity, and of every age since, has placed at the summit, and they are the two whose attribution to Homer was, in the end, least disputed. But they were not, in the ancient world, the only poems that bore his name, and they did not stand alone. They were part of a far larger body of early Greek hexameter poetry on heroic and divine themes, and to understand Homer's place it is necessary to know something of the poems that surrounded his.

Closest to the Iliad and the Odyssey stood the group of poems that scholars call the Epic Cycle. These were narrative epics, composed in the same meter and the same tradition, probably somewhat later than the Homeric poems themselves, which together told the whole vast story of the Trojan War and its aftermath, filling in everything that the Iliad and the Odyssey left out. There was a poem, the Cypria, that told the origins of the war, the judgment of Paris and the abduction of Helen and the gathering of the fleet, and carried the story down to the point where the Iliad begins. There was the Aethiopis, which took up the tale where the Iliad ends and told of the later battles and of the death of Achilles. There was the Little Iliad and the Sack of Troy, which told of the wooden horse and the fall of the city. There were the Returns, which told of the homeward voyages of the other Greek heroes, as the Odyssey told of the voyage of Odysseus. And there was even a poem, the Telegony, that continued the story beyond the end of the Odyssey. These cyclic poems were attributed in antiquity to various authors, and sometimes, loosely, to Homer himself, but the best ancient critics already judged them inferior, and they have not survived; they are known to us only from fragments, from ancient summaries, above all the prose summary made by a writer named Proclus, and from the use later poets and artists made of them. Their loss is a real one, but the ancient judgment that set the Iliad and the Odyssey decisively above them is one that no reader of the survivors is likely to dispute, and the contrast is itself instructive: it shows what the genius of Homer added to the common stock of the tradition.

Beyond the Trojan cycle, antiquity attributed to Homer a range of other works. There was a collection of poems, the Homeric Hymns, thirty-three in number, hexameter compositions in praise of the various gods, ranging from short pieces of a few lines to substantial narrative poems of several hundred; the longer hymns, to Demeter, to Apollo, to Hermes, and to Aphrodite, are works of real beauty, and the Hymn to Apollo contains the passage about the blind poet of Chios that antiquity took for Homer's signature. The Hymns were ascribed to Homer in ancient times, and they are composed in the Homeric manner, but scholars have long recognized that they are the work of various poets over a considerable span of time, later than the great epics. There was also a comic poem, the Margites, about a foolish man who knew many things but knew them all badly, which Aristotle regarded as genuinely Homeric and as the ancestor of comedy as the Iliad was of tragedy; it too is lost. And there was a mock-epic, the Battle of Frogs and Mice, a miniature parody that recounts a war between the two small creatures in full heroic style; it was attributed to Homer in antiquity, was popular for centuries as a school text, and survives, but it is certainly not his. The modern judgment is that none of these other poems is the work of the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey. But their existence, and their ancient ascription to Homer, tell us something important: in the Greek mind, Homer was not merely the author of two poems, he was the very embodiment and origin of poetry itself, and it was natural to gather under his great name whatever the early tradition had produced.

The Composition, Fixing, and Transmission of the Text

Between the eighth century before the common era, when the Homeric poems were most probably composed, and the manuscripts on which every modern edition ultimately depends, there stretches a gulf of some eighteen hundred years and an unbroken chain of transmission, copying, performance, and scholarship. The history of how the text of Homer survived that gulf is itself one of the great stories of European culture, and it falls into several distinct phases.

The first problem is the fixing of the poems in the first place. An oral poem, recreated at every performance, has no fixed text; the Iliad and the Odyssey, as fixed and stable texts, must have come into being at some definite point, and the most widely held view connects that point with the arrival of alphabetic writing in Greece in the eighth century. On this view, the monumental poems were composed at or near the moment when writing first made it possible to record them, perhaps dictated by the master poet to a scribe, and it was the act of writing that gave the tradition's supreme achievement its permanent form. For some centuries after that, however, the poems lived a double life. They existed as written texts, but they continued above all to be performed, recited at festivals throughout the Greek world by the professional reciters known as rhapsodes, men who had memorized the poems and who carried them, in performance, to every corner of Hellas. It is to this period of performance that an important ancient tradition belongs: the tradition that in sixth-century Athens, under the tyrant Peisistratus or his sons, the Homeric poems were given an authoritative form and that a rule was established requiring the rhapsodes who competed at the great Athenian festival, the Panathenaia, to recite the poems in their proper order, one taking up where the last left off. Whether this Athenian episode amounted to a true editing of the text, or only to the regulation of performance, has been debated for centuries; but it reflects a real and growing concern, as the classical age approached, that the poems should be performed whole and in order, and Athens clearly played a major part in the poems' preservation and prestige.

The decisive phase of textual scholarship came later, in the great age of learning that followed the conquests of Alexander, when the kings of Egypt founded at Alexandria the most famous library of the ancient world and gathered there the scholars who created the discipline of textual criticism. Homer was, from the first, the central object of their attention. A succession of distinguished scholars, Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first of them, then Aristophanes of Byzantium, and above all, in the second century before the common era, Aristarchus of Samothrace, collated the many manuscripts that had come to the library, studied the language and the usage of the poems with minute care, and produced critical editions and commentaries. Aristarchus, the greatest of them, worked on the principle that Homer should be interpreted out of Homer, that the poet's own usage elsewhere was the surest guide to a difficult passage, and he marked, with a system of critical signs in the margin, the lines he judged to be spurious or doubtful, without, in general, deleting them, so that later ages could see and weigh his judgment. The Alexandrians, or their tradition, are also generally credited with the division of each poem into twenty-four books, numbered by the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, the division still in use today. Much of the Alexandrian scholarship was preserved in the form of marginal notes, the scholia, that accumulated in the manuscripts, and after the work of Aristarchus the text of Homer became, for practical purposes, stable; the wide variation found in the earliest surviving fragments gradually gave way to a standard text.

The survival of that text through the following centuries depended on continuous copying. From the dry sands of Egypt have come hundreds of fragments of Homer written on papyrus, the most numerous remains of any ancient author, testimony to how endlessly the poems were copied and read; Homer was the schoolbook of the ancient world, and to copy him was a constant labor. When the papyrus roll gave way to the parchment book, and the ancient world to the medieval, the transmission passed to the Greek-speaking Byzantine empire, where Homer was never lost, never forgotten, and never ceased to be copied and studied. The oldest complete manuscripts of the Iliad that survive are Byzantine, and the most precious of them, a magnificent tenth-century volume now in Venice and known to scholars as the Venetus A, preserves not only the text but a great mass of the ancient scholia, the distilled learning of Alexandria; when its scholia were published at the end of the eighteenth century they helped to launch the modern science of Homeric criticism. The text of Homer that the world reads today rests on this long chain: the oral tradition that made the poems, the writing that fixed them, the rhapsodes and the Athenians who carried and ordered them, the Alexandrians who edited them, the countless copyists of papyrus and parchment, and the Byzantine scholars who guarded them through the medieval centuries until they could pass, at the Renaissance, into the keeping of the printing press and of all the ages since.

Homer in Antiquity: the Educator of Greece and Rome

To say that Homer was important to the ancient Greeks is to understate the matter to the point of distortion. Homer was not, for the Greeks, one great author among others; he was the foundation of their common culture, the first and the indispensable book, the poet so far above all others that he could be referred to simply as the Poet and everyone would know who was meant. From the classical period onward, the education of a Greek child began with Homer and was steeped in Homer; the poems were memorized, recited, copied, and studied, and a Greek learned from them, at one and the same time, the language at its highest, the myths and the gods, the deeds of the ancestral heroes, and the values, the courage and the honor and the eloquence and the hospitality, by which a good person was held to live. Homer supplied the Greeks with a shared inheritance that transcended the divisions of their fiercely independent cities; whatever else separated an Athenian from a Spartan from a Greek of Asia Minor, they had Homer in common, and the poems were one of the strongest of the bonds that made the scattered Greek world conscious of itself as a single people. The philosopher Plato gave this fact its classic expression when he wrote that Homer had been the educator of Greece.

That very centrality, however, made Homer a subject of debate as well as of reverence, for if the poems formed the mind of Greece, then what the poems taught was a matter of the highest importance. Already in the sixth century the philosopher Xenophanes attacked Homer for ascribing to the gods every kind of human wickedness, theft and adultery and deceit, and the criticism of Homer's theology and morality became a recurring theme of Greek thought. It reached its most famous form in Plato, who, in the Republic, while acknowledging Homer's supremacy and his own love of the poems, argued that the poet's false and unworthy representations of the gods and his picture of heroes weeping and wailing and fearing death made him a dangerous teacher, and proposed that the poems be censored, or their author excluded, from the ideal state. Plato spoke of an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, and his attack set the terms of a debate about the moral authority of literature that has never ended. Against the philosophical critics, others rose to Homer's defense, and the chief instrument of the defense was allegory: the claim that beneath the surface of the poems, the apparently scandalous stories of the gods concealed a deeper meaning, that the divine combats stood for the strife of the natural elements or for the conflict of moral forces, and that Homer, rightly read, was a teacher of philosophy and even of theology. Aristotle, for his part, declined to treat Homer as a moral document at all and praised him, in the Poetics, as the supreme artist, the model of epic construction, the poet who understood, as none other did, how to build a unified action and how to let his characters speak and act for themselves; for Aristotle, Homer was simply the master from whom the principles of the poetic art were to be learned.

When the rising power of Rome absorbed the Greek world, it absorbed Homer along with it, and the poems became as central to Roman education as they had been to Greek. The very first work of Latin literature was a translation: in the third century before the common era, Livius Andronicus rendered the Odyssey into Latin verse, and with that act the Homeric tradition entered the literature of Rome. Educated Romans read Homer in the original Greek, and the poems shaped the Roman sense of what the highest poetry could be. The supreme proof of Homer's hold on Rome is the Aeneid of Virgil, the national epic of the Roman people, which is from beginning to end a conscious and profound engagement with Homer: its hero, the Trojan Aeneas, is a survivor of Homer's Troy; its first half, the wanderings of Aeneas across the sea to Italy, answers the Odyssey, and its second half, the war he must fight to establish himself, answers the Iliad. Virgil did not copy Homer; he rivaled him, measured himself against him, and created out of that measuring a masterpiece of a different temper. But the Aeneid is unimaginable without the Iliad and the Odyssey, and through Virgil, the master-poet of the Latin tradition, Homer's forms and themes and his very conception of what an epic is were handed on to all the centuries of European literature that took their first lessons from Rome.

Homer from Byzantium to the Renaissance

The fate of Homer in the thousand years that followed the fall of the western Roman empire was a tale of two worlds. In the Greek-speaking east, in the Byzantine empire, Homer was never lost. The poems remained the cornerstone of education, as they had been since the classical age; Byzantine children learned their letters and their language from the Iliad, scholars copied and annotated the texts, and the tradition of Homeric learning continued without a break. Its crowning monument was the work of Eustathius, the twelfth-century archbishop of Thessalonica, who composed enormous commentaries on both the Iliad and the Odyssey, gathering into them the accumulated learning of the whole ancient and Byzantine tradition; these vast works of scholarship preserved a great quantity of older material that would otherwise have perished. In the Byzantine world Homer was a living presence, quoted, imitated, and revered, throughout the medieval centuries.

In the Latin west the story was very different. The knowledge of the Greek language, never universal even in the Roman period, faded almost to nothing in the early medieval centuries, and with the loss of Greek went the loss of direct access to Homer. The western Middle Ages did not read the Iliad and the Odyssey; the poems were known only by reputation, as the supreme works of a poet whose very name carried authority but whose text was a closed book. The story of Troy, immensely popular throughout the medieval west, reached it not from Homer but from other sources: from a short Latin verse epitome of the Iliad, and, far more influentially, from two Latin prose narratives that purported to be eyewitness accounts of the war, one ascribed to a Trojan named Dares and the other to a Greek named Dictys. These prose accounts, and the great medieval romances of Troy that grew out of them, gave the Middle Ages a Trojan War without Homer, and one that, significantly, tended to favor the Trojans, from whom many of the peoples and ruling houses of Europe were pleased to claim descent. The measure of the western loss is the case of Dante, the greatest poet of the medieval west, who placed Homer in the first circle of his other world, naming him the sovereign poet who walks before the rest, and yet who could not read a line of him and knew him only through the report of the Latin tradition.

The recovery of Homer in the west was one of the achievements of the Renaissance, and it followed directly upon the recovery of the Greek language. The first stirrings came in the fourteenth century, when the poet Petrarch, who longed to read Homer and who owned a Greek manuscript he could not decipher, and his friend Boccaccio arranged for a halting Latin translation to be made by a Greek-speaking scholar; it was a crude version, but it opened a door. The door was flung wide in the fifteenth century, when the study of Greek revived in Italy, spurred by contact with Byzantine scholars, several of whom came west, especially as the Byzantine empire entered its final crisis, bringing their manuscripts and their learning with them. Italian humanists learned Greek; Homer was studied, taught, and translated anew; and in 1488, in Florence, the complete text of Homer was printed for the first time, the editio princeps that placed the poems, at last, in the hands of every scholar in Europe who could read them. After more than seven centuries of eclipse in the Latin world, Homer had come home, and the modern European engagement with the poems, an engagement of scholarship, translation, imitation, and argument that has continued without interruption ever since, had begun.

Homer in the Modern World: Translation, Scholarship, and Influence

From the Renaissance onward the history of Homer is, in one of its main strands, the history of translation, for once the poems were recovered the desire to carry them into the living languages of Europe became irresistible, and the long succession of translators, each wrestling anew with the impossible task of rendering Homer's grandeur and speed and strangeness, is itself a record of changing literary taste. In the English-speaking world the line of great translations begins with George Chapman, an Elizabethan poet who, across the turn of the seventeenth century, produced the first complete English Iliad and Odyssey, vigorous, expansive, and idiosyncratic, the version that, two centuries later, would draw from the young poet John Keats the sonnet in which, reading Chapman's Homer for the first time, he felt like an astronomer discovering a new planet or an explorer sighting an unknown ocean. In the eighteenth century Alexander Pope undertook the poems, rendering them into the polished heroic couplets of his age; Pope's Homer was criticized for making the ancient poet too elegant and too modern, but it was a triumph of craft, it was read for generations, and it earned its author a fortune and his independence. The translators have never stopped: every generation, finding the versions of its predecessors grown old, has gone back to the Greek, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been especially rich in English Homers, in verse and in prose, plain and ornate, scholarly and free, including, in our own time, the first published English translation of the Odyssey to be made by a woman, the work of the scholar Emily Wilson, a sign of how the long conversation with Homer continually renews itself.

The modern era has also been the great age of Homeric scholarship, and the decisive turning point, as has been described, was the publication in 1795 of Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena, the book that opened the modern Homeric Question and made the origins of the poems a permanent problem of research. The two centuries since have seen the Analyst dissection of the poems and the Unitarian defense of their unity; the transforming discovery, by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, of the oral and formulaic nature of the tradition; the decipherment of Linear B and the recovery of the Mycenaean background; the long archaeological investigation of Troy; and an unending labor of editing, commentary, linguistic study, and interpretation. The scholarship has not answered every question, and the central mystery of Homer's identity remains; but it has immeasurably deepened the understanding of how the poems were made, of the world they came from, and of the tradition they crown.

And through all of this the poems have gone on doing what they have always done, which is to feed the imagination of later writers. The influence of Homer on Western literature is so pervasive that it can hardly be summarized; it runs through Virgil and through Dante, through the Renaissance epic, through Milton's Paradise Lost, which set out quite consciously to do for the Christian story what Homer had done for the heroic age, through the whole later history of narrative poetry and of the novel. In the modern period that influence has if anything intensified and grown more inventive. The single most celebrated example is the great novel that the Irish writer James Joyce published in 1922, which transposes the wanderings of Odysseus onto a single ordinary day in the life of an ordinary man in the city of Dublin, and which takes its very title, Ulysses, from the Roman name of Homer's hero; Joyce's book is at once a demonstration that the Odyssey can be made new and a tribute to its inexhaustibility. The poems have been retold, reimagined, and answered from countless angles, by poets returning to the figures of Achilles and Penelope and Helen, by novelists giving voice to the silent or the defeated characters, by dramatists and film-makers and artists. Nearly three thousand years after they were composed, the Iliad and the Odyssey are more widely read, in more languages, than at any earlier moment in their history.

The Legacy of Homer: Historical Assessment and Conclusion

To assess Homer is to confront a paradox that has no parallel in the history of literature: the most influential poet of the Western world is also the most completely unknown. Of the human being, if there was a single human being, almost nothing can be established, not the date, not the birthplace, not the life, not even, with certainty, the bare fact of individual existence. And yet the poems are there, complete, magnificent, and inexhaustible, and their effect upon the civilization that grew up after them is beyond reckoning. Whatever conclusion one reaches about the Homeric Question, whether one believes that a single supreme poet composed the Iliad and the Odyssey at a stroke, or that the name covers the crowning achievement of a long collective tradition, the achievement itself is not in doubt, and it is an achievement of the very first magnitude.

What, precisely, did Homer accomplish? In the first place, the poems gave Western literature its foundation and its first models. The epic as a form, the narrative of heroic action raised to the highest pitch of art, was given by Homer a shape so complete and so authoritative that every later epic poet in the tradition, for nearly three thousand years, worked in relation to it. The conventions of the form, the invocation of the Muse, the plunge into the middle of the action, the catalogues, the extended similes, the divine machinery, the great set speeches, were Homer's bequest. More than that, Homer established, at the very beginning, the conviction that the deeds, the sufferings, the choices, and the inner lives of human beings were a subject worthy of the most serious and the most beautiful art, and he set a standard of psychological truth and emotional depth that has functioned ever since less as a model to be copied than as a measure against which all later narrative is judged.

In the second place, the poems shaped a civilization. For the ancient Greeks, Homer was the common book, the source of their mythology, the teacher of their values, a principal foundation of their religion, and one of the strongest bonds of their identity as a people; Greece, as Plato said, was educated by Homer. Through Greece and then through Rome and then through the recovered learning of the Renaissance, that formative influence passed into the whole of European culture, and the names and the stories of Achilles and Hector and Odysseus and Penelope and Helen became, and remain, part of the common imaginative inheritance of the Western world, known even to many who have never read a line of the poems.

In the third place, and deepest of all, the poems offer a vision of human life of permanent and universal power. The Iliad looks without flinching at war, at anger, at the certainty of death, and finds in the midst of that darkness the worth of courage, the tenderness of love, and, at the last, in the shared tears of Priam and Achilles, the recognition of a common humanity that binds even the bitterest of enemies; it is the first and one of the greatest of all tragic visions of life. The Odyssey sets beside it a vision of endurance, of intelligence and patience outlasting every trial, of the longing for home and for the ordinary human happiness of marriage and family and a settled life, and of a moral order in which faithfulness is at last rewarded. Between them the two poems hold a great part of what can be said about the human condition, and they say it with a clarity, a generosity of sympathy, and a beauty that the passage of three thousand years has not dimmed.

The final reckoning, then, is this. Homer cannot be recovered as a man; the name may stand for an individual of supreme genius, or for the genius of a whole tradition gathered to a point, and the question will very likely never be settled. But the poems endure, and they endure not as venerable relics but as living works, read, translated, performed, and loved, in more languages and by more people now than ever before. They stand at the head of Western literature, and they have never been displaced from it. The blind singer of the legend, wandering the cities that would one day quarrel over his bones, asked the Muse, at the opening of each of his poems, to grant that his song should be remembered; and of all the prayers that poets have made, none has been answered so completely, for as long as the literature of the West is read, the Iliad and the Odyssey will be read at its source, and the name of Homer will be spoken first.