Homer

Homer, the supposed author of two famous early Greek epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, of whom nothing is known. It is now considered unlikely that both epics are the work of a single poet. U. von Wilamowitz's theory (1916) that a poet, ‘Homer’, living in the 8th cent. bc combined and remodelled earlier poems, and that his work was in its turn enlarged and remodelled by others, seems the most plausible account of the genesis of The Iliad, while The Odyssey is generally held to consist of a substantial kernel poem with some later additions. Homer occupied in the culture of ancient Greece a position even more central than Shakespeare's in England, since his works provided everyone's elementary education, and his reputation survived in the Middle Ages even in the Latin West where his works were unknown. When the humanists began to learn Greek in the 14th cent. they turned eagerly to The Iliad, but found its directness and realism disappointing. The study of Homer stagnated, and a serious interest in his work did not show itself, in spite of G. Chapman's heroic versions (Il. ?1611, Od. ?1615), until Hobbes's and Dryden's attempts at translation towards the end of the century. During the 18th cent. there was the natural wish to make an ancient masterpiece available to contemporary readers which produced Pope's Iliad (1715–20); there was the new view of poetic inspiration fostered by ‘Longinus’, which justified the ‘fire’ Pope found in Homer, and a new cult of primitivism which prepared the ground for F. A. Wolf's theory (1795) that the Iliad consisted of bardic lays roughly woven together. In the 19th cent. some poets like Tennyson (in ‘The Lotos-Eaters’) made use of a Homeric story for unhomeric purposes, but it is M. Arnold's lectures ‘On Translating Homer’ that indicate most forcefully the almost extravagant worship that the poet inspired in cultivated Englishmen of the Victorian age.

In the 20th cent. the most widely read English translations are those of E. V. Rieu.