Homer

Homer, the major figure in ancient Greek literature, has been universally acclaimed as the greatest poet of classical antiquity. The Iliad and the Odyssey, two long epic poems surviving in a surprisingly large number of manuscripts, are ascribed to him.

It is not possible to supply for Homer a biography in the accepted sense of a life history, since there is no authentic record of who he was, when and where he was born, how long he lived, or even if one and the same oral poet was responsible for the two long epic poems universally associated with his name. To be sure, a number of "lives" of Homer are extant from Greek times, but their authority is subject to such grave suspicion that they have been rejected as unfounded fabrications. In both the Iliad and Odyssey the personality of the poet remains wholly concealed, since he does not speak in the first person or otherwise refer to himself as the plot develops or the narrative proceeds.

Portrait of Homer

It is arguable that in one incident of the Odyssey the poet may be giving a glimpse of himself in the guise of a bard whom he calls Demodokos and whom he introduces to the court of the Phaeacian king, where the shipwrecked Odysseus is being generously entertained. This Demodokos (whose name may be rendered "favored of the people") is described as a "divine singer to whom the god gave delight of singing whatever his soul prompted him." He is introduced by a herald to the gathering of young and old and is called an "honored minstrel whom the Muse befriends— yet she gave him both good and bad, in that she conferred on him sweet song but deprived him of his eyesight." (In antiquity there was a persistent belief that Homer was blind.) Then the herald "placed for him a silver-studded chair in the midst of the feasters, propping it against a tall column. And from a hook above his head he hung the cleartoned lyre [phorminx] that he might reach it with his hand; and beside him he set a fair table and a basket of food and a cup of wine, that he might drink withal." And after the company had "partaken of food and put aside their desire of meat and drink, " then "the Muse stirred the bard to sing of the deeds of men, whose fame has reached wide heaven, to wit, the quarrel between Odysseus and Pelead Achilles, how they wrangled with violent words at a sacred banquet." When Demodokos finishes his heroic tale, Odysseus is made to remark how singers such as he "are held in honor and respect by all mankind; for the Muse herself has taught them." And again, addressing Demodokos, he says, "I praise thee beyond all mortals: either the Muse, God's daughter, has taught thee, or Apollo; for thou singest most fitly and aright the destiny of the Greeks, the deeds that they wrought and suffered, and the hardships they endured. Either thou thyself must have been present or heard it all from another."

This is the nearest and clearest approach to a picture of Homer in the act of reciting his poetry of heroic happenings. This passage from the Odyssey seems to have been responsible for the widespread modern idea that in the Homeric Age there were bards attached to the courts of local kings, who declaimed to the accompaniment of the lyre in great baronial halls—a complete misestimate of the poverty-stricken social conditions of the period.

Evidence from the Epics

This lack of any contemporary historical record of Homer's life leaves only what can be deduced from the poems themselves. On this task much ingenuity has been expended by modern scholars, often without acceptable result.

The setting of the Iliad is the plain of Troy and its immediate environment. Topographic details are set forth with such precision that it is not feasible to suppose that their reciter created them out of his imagination without personal acquaintance with the locality. To be sure, there is the apparent objection that not all the action of the poem can be made to fit the present-day terrain. This difficulty arises, however, only when it is assumed that the prehistorical fortified citadel which Heinrich Schliemann uncovered at a site known today as Hissarlik was the city of Priam described by the Iliad. But during the intervening centuries between the abandonment of Mycenaean Troy and its resettlement by Greeks of the classical period there could have been nothing to suggest to a visitor such as Homer that the meager traces of buried walls still visible to him could have marked the proud and great city about which local legend still recounted a protracted siege and sack. The plausible suggestion has been made that the ruins projecting at Hissarlik were locally identified as described in the Iliad as "the high tumbled wall of Herakles, that the Trojans under Pallas Athena built for him that he might escape the sea monster when it pursued him landward from the beaches." If this suggestion is accepted and the site of the storied city is moved farther inland, the congruence of local detail of gushing springs and running rivers will do much to convince the skeptic that the poet of the Iliad must have visited the Trojan plain and learned its topography from personal inspection.

Much the same conclusion results from a passage in the thirteenth chapter (or "book") of the Iliad, in which it is recounted how the sea-god Poseidon seated himself on the highest peak of the island of Samothrace "whence all Ida was visible and the city of Priam and the ships of the Achaeans." A map of the Aegean Sea will show that the direct line of sight between Samothrace and the Troad is blocked by the intervening island of Imbros, but the modern visitor to Troy discovers that the sharp 5, 000-foot peak of Samothrace is visible over a notched shoulder of Imbros. Therefore when Homer put Poseidon "on the topmost peak of wooded Samos, " he must have known that the god could have seen Troy because he himself had seen and remembered that from Troy one could see the peak of Samothrace.

In the Odyssey the situation is in many respects quite different. Although the poet demonstrably knew the western Greek island of Ithaca (where the second half of the epic is staged) as intimately as the poet of the Iliad knew the plain of Troy, the Odyssey elsewhere extends over many strange distant lands as Odysseus's homeward voyage from Troy to his native Ithaca is transformed into a weird sea-wandering from adventure to dreadful adventure—first to the land of the indolent Lotus-eaters, thence to the cave of the giant one-eyed Cyclops, thereafter to the island of Aiolos, king of the winds, and the harbor of the savage Laistrygones, and Circe's bewitched isle, to be followed by a visit to the underworld of dead souls, and finally past the fateful singing Sirens and between the sea beast Scylla and the vast whirlpool of Charybdis to the uttermost western land where the sun-god pastures his cattle.

Perhaps misled by the minute accuracy with which the Trojan plain is described in the Iliad and the island of Ithaca is pictured in the Odyssey, various modern commentators have attempted to impose the same topographic realism on Odysseus's astonishing voyage, selecting actual sites in the western Mediterranean for his adventures. But the true situation must be that the Homer of the Odyssey had never visited that part of the ancient world but had listened to the yarns of returning Ionian sailors such as explored the western seas during the 7th century B.C. and had fused these with ancient folktales that were the inheritance of all the Indo-European races.

Theory of Two Authors

That the author of the Iliad was not the same as the compiler of these fantastic tales in the Odyssey is arguable on several scores. The two epics belong to different literary types; the Iliad is essentially dramatic in its confrontation of opposing warriors who converse like the actors in Attic tragedy, while the Odyssey is cast as a novel narrated in more everyday human speech. In their physical structure, also, the two epics display an equally pronounced difference. The Odyssey is composed in six distinct cantos of four chapters ("books") each, whereas the Iliad moves unbrokenly forward with only one irrelevant episode in its tightly woven plot. Readers who examine psychological nuances see in the two works some distinctly different human responses and behavioral attitudes. For example, the Iliad voices admiration for the beauty and speed of horses, while the Odyssey shows no interest in these animals. The Iliad dismisses dogs as mere scavengers, while the poet of the Odyssey reveals a modern sentimental sympathy for Odysseus's faithful old hound, Argos.

But the most cogent argument for separating the two poems by assigning them to different authors is the archeological criterion of implied chronology. In the Iliad the Phoenicians are praised as skilled craftsmen working in metal and weavers of elaborate, much-prized garments. The shield which the metalworking god Hephaistos forges for Achilles in the Iliad seems inspired by the metal bowls with inlaid figures in action made by the Phoenicians and introduced by them into Greek and Etruscan commerce in the 8th century B.C. In contrast, in the Odyssey Greek sentiment toward the Phoenicians has undergone a drastic change. Although they are still regarded as clever craftsmen, in place of the Iliad's laudatory polydaidaloi ("of manifold skills") the epithet is parodied into polypaipaloi ("of manifold scurvy tricksters"), reflecting the competitive penetration into Greek commerce by traders from Phoenician Carthage in the 7th century B.C. Other internal evidence indicates that the Odyssey was composed later than the Iliad.

Oral Composition

One thing, however, is certain: both epics were created without recourse to writing. Between the decline of Mycenaean and the emergence of classical Greek civilization—which is to say, from the late 12th to the mid-8th century B.C.—the inhabitants of the Greek lands had lost all knowledge of the syllabic script of their Mycenaean fore-bears and had not yet acquired from the easternmost shore of the Mediterranean that familiarity with Phoenician alphabetic writing from which classical Greek literacy (and in turn, Etruscan, Roman, and modern European literacy) derived. The same conclusion of illiterate composition may be reached from a critical inspection of the poems themselves. Among many races and in many different periods there has existed (and still exists sporadically) a form of purely oral and unwritten poetic speech, distinguishable from normal and printed literature by special traits that are readily recognizable and specifically distinctive. To this class the Homeric epics conform. Hence it would seem an inevitable inference that they must have been created either before the end of the 8th century B.C. or so shortly after that date that the use of alphabetic writing had not yet been developed sufficiently to record lengthy compositions. It is this illiterate environment that explains the absence of all contemporary historical record of the authors of the two great epics.

It is probable that Homer's name was applied to two distinct individuals differing in temperament and artistic accomplishment, born perhaps as much as a century apart, but practicing the same traditional craft of oral composition and recitation. Although each became known as "Homer, " it may be (as one ancient source asserts) that homros was a dialectical lonic word for a blind man and so came to be used generically of the old and often sightless wandering reciters of heroic legends in the traditional meter of unrhymed dactylic hexameters. Thus there could have been many Homers. The two epics ascribed to Homer, however, have been as highly prized in modern as in ancient times for their marvelous vividness of expression, their keenness of personal characterization, their unflagging interest, whether in narration of action or in animated dramatic dialogue.

Other Works

Later Greek times credited Homer with the composition of a group of comparatively short "hymns" addressed to various gods, of which 23 have survived. On internal evidence, however, only one or two of these at most can be the work of the poet of the two great epics. The burlesque epic The Battle of the Frogs and Mice has been preserved but adds nothing to Homer's reputation. Several other epic poems of considerable length—the Cypria, the Little Iliad, the Phocais, the Thebais, the Capture of Oichalia—were widely ascribed to Homer in classical times. None of these has survived except in stray quoted verses. But even if they were preserved in full, it is highly doubtful whether modern scholarship would accept them as all by the same author. The simple truth seems to be that the name Homer was not so much that of a single individual as a personification for an entire school of poets flourishing on the west coast of Asia Minor during the period before the art of writing had been sufficiently developed by the Greeks to permit historical records to be compiled or literary compositions to be written down.

Further Reading

Excellent translations of Homer are Richmond Latimore's Iliad (1962) and Odyssey (1967) and Robert Fitzgerald's Odyssey (1961). The literature on Homer and his age is vast. A useful guide is John L. Myres, Homer and His Critics, edited by Dorothea Gray (1958). Since little is definitely known about the authorship of the Homeric poems, all studies on their origin are subject to controversy. Representing the view that, because of similarities, the Iliad and Odyssey were written by one man are the studies of Adam Scott, The Unity of Homer (1921) and Homer and His Influence (1930), which surveys what is known about Homer. Working from archeological evidence, Hilda Lockhart Lorimer, Homer and the Monuments (1950), concludes that the two poems were written by different men. Examining the poems in the tradition of oral literature, Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (1946), suggests that the poems began as oral literature; while Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960), contends that Homer was not an original writer but a singer of folktales. Homer's work is viewed as an aspect of the Greek genius in Gilbert Murray's classic study The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907).

Other useful studies include M. P. Nilsson, Homer and Mycenae (1933), a reconstruction of the historical background of the poems; S. E. Bassett, The Poetry of Homer (1938); Henry T. Wade-Gery, The Poet of the Iliad (1952); Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Homeric Tradition (1958); and Denys L. Page, History and the Homeric Iliad (1959), a detailed survey of the research on the Iliad. Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience (1957), is recommended for background. □

Homer

Born: Ninth century b.c.e.
Died: Ninth century b.c.e.
Greek poet

H omer, the major figure in ancient Greek literature, has been considered the greatest poet of classical antiquity (ancient times). He wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems (long narrative poems) surviving in a surprisingly large number of manuscripts.

Portrait of Homer

It is not possible to supply a biography for Homer in the accepted sense of a life history. Since he lived before cultures began recording history, there is no authentic record of who he was, when and where he was born, how long he lived, or even if he was actually responsible for the two epic poems for which he is known.

It is arguable that in one incident of the Odyssey the poet may be giving a glimpse of himself in the disguise of a bard (singing poet), whom he calls Demodokos and whom he introduces to the court of the Phaeacian king, where the shipwrecked Odysseus is generously entertained. This Demodokos is described as a "divine singer to whom the god gave delight of singing whatever his soul prompted him." He is also described as being blind, which also supports the argument that Homer was portraying himself, because there was a belief that Homer was blind.

Evidence from the epics

This lack of any historical record of Homer's life leaves only what can be taken from the poems themselves. On this task many scholars have attempted to draw conclusions about Homer, often without acceptable results.

The setting of the Iliad is the plain of Troy (an ancient Greek city) and its immediate surroundings. Details of the land are so precise that it is not feasible to suppose that their author created them out of his imagination. To be sure, there is the objection that not all of the poem's action can be made to fit the present-day lands.

In the Odyssey the situation is in many respects quite different. The poet demonstrates that he knew the western Greek island of Ithaca (where the second half of the epic takes place) as well as the poet of the Iliad knew the plain of Troy. The Odyssey, however, also extends over many strange, distant lands, as Odysseus's homeward voyage from Troy to his native Ithaca is transformed into a bizarre sea-wandering adventure.

Perhaps misled by the accuracy with which the Trojan plain is described in the Iliad and the island of Ithaca is pictured in the Odyssey, various modern commentators have tried to impose the same realism on Odysseus's astonishing voyage, selecting actual sites in the western Mediterranean Sea for his adventures. The true situation must be that the Homer of the Odyssey had never visited that part of the ancient world, but he had instead listened to the stories of returning Ionian sailors who explored the western seas during the seventh century b.c.e.

Theory of two authors

That the author of the Iliad was not the same as the author of these fantastic tales in the Odyssey is arguable on several levels. The two epics belong to different literary types: the Iliad is essentially dramatic in its confrontation of opposing warriors who converse like the actors in a tragedy (a play with struggle and disappointment), while the Odyssey is cast as a novel narrated in more everyday human speech. In their physical structure, also, the two epics display an equally obvious difference: the Odyssey is composed in six distinct parts of four chapters ("books") each, whereas the Iliad moves unbrokenly forward in its tightly woven plot.

Readers who examine psychological qualities see in the two works some distinctly different human responses and behavioral attitudes. For example, the Iliad voices admiration for the beauty and speed of horses, while the Odyssey shows no interest in these animals. The Iliad dismisses dogs as mere scavengers, while the poet of the Odyssey reveals a modern sympathy for Odysseus's faithful old hound, Argos.

The strongest argument for separating the two poems is the chronology, or dating, of some of the facts in the pieces. In the Iliad the Phoenicians are praised as skilled craftsmen working in metal, and as weavers of elaborate, much-prized garments. In contrast, Greek feelings toward the Phoenicians have undergone a drastic change in the Odyssey. Although they are still regarded as clever craftsmen, the Phoenicians are also described as "tricksters," reflecting the invasion of Phoenecian commerce into Greek markets in the seventh century b.c.e.

Oral composition

One thing, however, is certain: both epics were created without writing sources. Between the decline of Mycenaean and the emergence of classical Greek civilizations—which is to say, from the late twelfth to the mid-eighth century b.c.e.—the inhabitants of the Greek lands had not yet acquired from the easternmost shore of the Mediterranean the familiarity with Phoenician alphabetic writing that would lead to classical Greek literacy (and in turn, Etruscan, Roman, and modern European literacy). Therefore it could be concluded that the epics must have been created either before the end of the eighth century b.c.e. or so shortly afterwards that the use of alphabetic writing had not yet been developed sufficiently to record long pieces of writing. It is this illiterate (unable to read or write) environment that explains the absence of all historical record of the author's two great epics.

It is probable that Homer's name was applied to two individuals differing in style and artistic accomplishment, born perhaps as much as a century apart, but practicing the same traditional craft of oral composition and recitation (to read out loud). Although each became known as "Homer," it may be (as one ancient source says) that "homros" was a word for a blind man and so came to be used generically to refer to the old and often sightless wandering reciters of heroic legends. Thus there could have been many Homers.

The two epics Homer is generally regarded as writing, however, have been as highly prized in modern as in ancient times for their vividness of expression, their keenness of personal characterization, and their lasting interest, whether in narration of action or in animated dramatic dialogue.

Other works

Later Greek times credited Homer with the composition of a group of comparatively short "hymns" (songs of praise) addressed to various gods, of which twenty-three have survived. With a closer look, however, only one or two of these, at most, can be the work of the poet of the two great epics. The epic "The Battle of the Frogs and Mice" has been preserved but adds nothing to Homer's reputation. Several other epic poems of considerable length—The Cypria, The Little Iliad, The Phocais, The Thebais, and The Capture of Oichalia —were also credited to Homer in classical times.

The simple truth seems to be that the name Homer was not so much that of a single individual but an entire school of poets flourishing on the west coast of Asia Minor (today, the area of Turkey). Unfortunately, we will probably never know for sure, since during this period the art of writing had not been sufficiently developed by the Greeks to permit historical records to be compiled or literary compositions to be written down.

For More Information

Colum, Padraic. The Children's Homer. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1982.

Lorimer, Hilda Lockhart. Homer and the Monuments. London: Macmillan, 1950.

Myres, John L. Homer and His Critics. Edited by Dorothea Gray. London: Routledge & Paul, 1958.

Scott, John Adams. The Unity of Homer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1921.

Homer principal figure of ancient Greek literature; the first European poet.

Works, Life, and Legends

Two epic poems are attributed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. They are composed in a literary type of Greek, Ionic in basis with Aeolic admixtures. Ranked among the great works of Western literature, these two poems together constitute the prototype for all subsequent Western epic poetry.

The "Homeric question" was the great dispute of scholarship in the 19th cent. Scholars tried to analyze the two works by various tests, usually to show that they were strung together from older narrative poems. Recent evidence strongly suggests that the Iliad is the work of a single poet. Modern scholars are generally agreed that there was a poet named Homer who lived before 700 BC, probably in Asia Minor, and that the Iliad and the Odyssey are each the product of one poet's work, developed out of older legendary matter. Some assign the Odyssey to a poet who lived slightly after the author of the Iliad.

Legends about Homer were numerous in ancient times. He was said to be blind. His birthplace has always been disputed, but Chios or Smyrna seem most likely. The study of Homer was required of all Greek students in antiquity, and his heroes were worshiped in many parts of Greece. The Iliad and the Odyssey are composed in dactylic hexameter and are of nearly the same length. The Homeric Hymns were falsely attributed to Homer.

The Iliad

Divided into 24 books, the Iliad tells of the wrath of Achilles and its tragic consequences, an episode in the Trojan War . The action is in several sections. Achilles quarrels with Agamemnon over possession of the captive woman Briseis, and Achilles retires from the war to sulk in his tent. The Greek position gradually weakens until Agamemnon offers amendment to Achilles (Books I-IX). Book X tells of an expedition by Odysseus and Diomedes leading to Greek reverses in the war. Thereupon Patroclus, Achilles' friend, is inspired to go into battle wearing Achilles' armor. He is killed by Hector (Books XI-XVII).

Book XVIII tells of the visit of Thetis, mother of Achilles, to comfort her grieving son and of the forging of new armor by Hephaestus for Achilles. Achilles then determines to avenge his friend, kills Hector, buries Patroclus, and finally, at the entreaty of Priam, gives Hector's body to the Trojan hero's aged father (Books XIX-XXIV). The Iliad is a highly unified work, splendid in its dramatic action. Written in a simple yet lofty style, it contains many perceptive characterizations that make exalted personages like Hector and Achilles believable as human beings.

The Odyssey

The Odyssey is written in 24 books and begins nearly ten years after the fall of Troy. In the first part, Telemachus, Odysseus' son, visits Nestor at Pylos and Menelaus at Sparta, seeking news of his absent father. He tells them of the troubles of his mother, Penelope, who is beset by mercenary suitors. Menelaus informs him that his father is with the nymph Calypso (Books I-IV). The scene then shifts to Mt. Olympus with an account of Zeus' order to Calypso to release Odysseus, who then builds a raft and sails to Phaeacia. There he is entertained by King Alcinoüs and his daughter Nausicaä; he relates to them the story of his wanderings in which he has encountered Polyphemus, Aeolus, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the Laestrygones, and the lotus-eaters (Books V-XII).

Dramatic tension mounts with the return of Odysseus and Telemachus to Ithaca; together they plan and execute the death of the suitors. Afterward Odysseus makes himself known to his wife and his father, with whose aid he repulses the suitors' angry kinsmen. Athena intervenes, peace is restored, and Odysseus once again rules his country (Books XIII-XXIV). The atmosphere of adventure and fate in the Odyssey contrasts with the heavier tone and tragic grandeur of the Iliad.

Bibliography

Among the many notable translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey are the prose translations by A. Lang et al., the mid-20th-century poetic translations by R. Lattimore, and the late 20th-century translations by R. Fagles and S. Lombardo. See C. H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (1958, repr. 1965); M. Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, ed. by A. Parry (1971); C. M. Bowra, Homer (1930, repr. 1973); A. J. B. Wace and F. H. Stubbings, ed., A Companion to Homer (1962, repr. 1974); C. R. Beye, The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Epic Tradition (1966, repr. 1976); G. S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer (1962; repr. 1977); A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960, repr. 1978); W. A. Camps, An Introduction to Homer (1980); H. W. Clarke, Homer's Readers (1981); M. W. Edwards, Homer (1987); K. C. King, ed., Homer (1994).

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.

Homer (8th century bc), Greek epic poet. He is traditionally held to be the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, though modern scholarship has revealed the place of the Homeric poems in a pre-literate oral tradition. In later antiquity Homer was regarded as the greatest poet, and his poems were constantly used as a model and source by others. (Homeric can be used of Bronze Age Greece as described in these poems.)
Homer sometimes nods even the greatest expert may make a mistake (nods here means ‘becomes drowsy’, implying a momentary lack of attention). The saying is recorded in English from the late 14th century, but derives ultimately from the Roman poet Horace commenting on the Greek epic poet Homer, ‘I'm aggrieved when sometimes even excellent Homer nods.’

Homer

Two of the greatest works of ancient literature—the Iliad and the Odyssey —are credited to a Greek poet named Homer. However, Homer is a shadowy figure, and some scholars doubt that he ever existed. They suggest that the two epics, which tell of the Trojan Warf and the events surrounding it, were woven together by generations of storytellers. Others, however, believe that one poet—perhaps Homer—could have gathered traditional legends and stories told for centuries and created the two great works of literature.

In any case, the ancient Greeks named Homer as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey Stories about the poet suggest that he lived in Ionia, a region on the west coast of Anatolia (present-day Turkey). The dates of his life are uncertain, possibly in the 800s or 700s b.c.

According to tradition, Homer was a blind poet who wandered from place to place telling tales of legendary heroes, gods, and goddesses. It was customary in that period for performers to sing or chant such tales while playing a lyre or other musical instrument. If Homer was, indeed, a wandering performer, he would have relied on voluntary contributions of food, money, and other goods for his support.

epic long poem about legendary or historical heroes, written in a grand style

lyre stringed instrument similar to a small harp

Whether or not Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two works had a profound influence on Western culture and education. To the ancient Greeks, they were a source of moral lessons as well as a symbol of Greek unity and achievement. The philosopher Aristotle, author of the Poetics, praised Homer highly. A number of later writers, such as the Roman poet Virgil*, modeled their own works on the style and patterns of Homer's epics.

See also Greek Mythology; Iliad, the; Odyssey, the.

Homer (active 8th century bc) Greek poet. Homer is traditionally considered to be the author of the the Iliad and the Odyssey, the great early epics of Greek literature. Nothing factual is known about Homer, he is supposed have been blind and lived in Ionia. Literary scholarship revealed that the Homeric poems are a synthesis of oral, bardic stories. The Iliad relates the siege of Troy in the Trojan War. The Odyssey tells of the post-war wanderings of Odysseus on his way back to Penelope in Ithaca.

http://www.dc.peachnet.edu/~shale/humanities/literature/world_literature/homer.html

Homer ♂ English form of the name of the Greek epic poet Homēros, now regularly used as a given name in the United States (compare Virgil), where it has been immortalized by the cartoon character Homer Simpson in the television series The Simpsons. Many theories have been put forward to explain the origin of the name of the poet, but none is conclusive. It is identical in form with the Greek vocabulary word homēros ‘hostage’.

ho·mer / ˈhōmər/ • n. 1. Baseball a home run. 2. a homing pigeon. 3. inf. a referee or official who is thought to favor the team playing at home. • v. [intr.] Baseball hit a home run: he homered for the sixth time in seven games.

Homer, USA 1. Alaska: founded in 1895 and named after Homer Pennock, a prospector.2. Seven states have cities with this name (and one called Homer City), most probably named after the Greek poet (9th or 8th century bc?).

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