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.