The Emperor
Hadrian asked the
Oracle at
Delphi who Homer really was, and
Pythia proclaimed that he was Ithacan, the son of Epikaste and
Telemachus, from the
Odyssey.
But even if a single author, Homer, was indeed responsible for the two major epics ascribed to his name, nothing is known of him. Indeed, there is no concrete evidence that such a person ever existed. We do have a number of traditions holding that he was
blind (perhaps because in the Aeolian dialect of
Cyme, homēros bore this meaning.) ), and that he was born on the island of
Chios or, elsewhere in
Ionia, where various cities vied in claiming him as one of their native sons. According to
Diodorus Siculus, Homer had visited
Heliopolis of
Egypt.
It has repeatedly been argued and questioned whether the same poet was responsible for both the
Iliad and the
Odyssey. While many find it unlikely that the
Odyssey was written by one person, others find that the epic is generally in the same style, and too consistent to support the theory of multiple authors. A further view is that the Iliad was composed by 'Homer' in his maturity, and the Odyssey was a work of his old age. The
Batrachomyomachia, Homeric hymns, and cyclic epics are generally agreed to be later than the
Iliad and the
Odyssey.
Homer was even at one time credited with the entire
Epic Cycle. The genre included further poems on the
Trojan War as well as the
Theban poems about
Oedipus and his sons. Other works, such as the corpus of
Homeric Hymns, the comic mini-epic
Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War," Βατραχομυομαχία), and the
Margites were also attributed to him, but this is now believed to be unlikely.
Most scholars agree that the
Iliad and
Odyssey underwent a process of standardization and refinement out of older material beginning in the
8th century BCE. An important role in this standardization appears to have been played by the
Athenian tyrant Hipparchus, who reformed the recitation of Homeric poetry at the
Panathenaic festival. Many
classicists hold that this reform must have involved the production of a
canonical written text.
Other scholars, however, still support the idea that Homer was a real person. Since nothing is known of the life of this Homer, the common joke, often recycled also in disputes about the authorship of plays ascribed to
Shakespeare, has it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name,"
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/History/preface.htm#f4http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/literarystudies/LiteraryBlunders/chap7.html.
Samuel Butler argued that a young Sicilian woman wrote the
Odyssey (but not the
Iliad), an idea further pursued by
Robert Graves in his novel
Homer's Daughter.
Independently of the question of single authorship, it is agreed universally, after the work of
Milman Parry that the Homeric poems are the product of an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (
aoidoi). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the
Iliad and
Odyssey shows that the poems consist of formulaic phrases typical of extempore epic traditions; even entire verses are at times repeated. Milman Parry and his student
Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of
epic poetry in a predominantly oral cultural milieu. The crucial words are "oral" and "traditional." Parry started with "traditional." The repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and they were useful to the poet in composition. He called these chunks of repetitive language "formulas." One of his famous quotes was "In life sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons."
Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis," wherein a non-literate "Homer" dictates his poem to a literate scribe between the 8th and 6th centuries. The
Greek alphabet was introduced in the early 8th century, so that it is possible that Homer himself was of the first generation of rhapsodes that were also literate. More radical Homerists, such as
Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the
Hellenistic period (
3rd to
1st century BCE).
