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The Odyssey
Home pages: The Greatest Literature of All Time
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trans. Lattimore
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When we speak of "Homer", we're referring of course to the author of the ancient epic poems about the Trojan War and one warrior's journey home, the Iliad and the The Odyssey, which every schoolchild has studied—or at least seen depicted in movies and on television. They're the most enduring legends known to Western man, rivalled only by the stories of the Bible. If there was an individual Homer, he probably lived in a Greek colony on Asia Minor (Turkey today) around the ninth century BCE, though some think he can be placed as far back as 1200 BCE, shortly after the Trojan war of which he sings. The problem is that between these dates, the eastern Mediterranean world was in somewhat of a dark age. The people of that era looked back at the time depicted in the epics as a golden era (actually the Late Bronze Age, according to archeologists) of economic and military might, a time when the gods walked among them and favoured them with their support. As the Greek world recovered from ruin and chaos and started rebuilding their culture—and power—they were heartened by the stories of their former glory. The Homeric tales were shaped to this end over the dark and recovering centuries. We don't know if the originator of the Iliad was the same who first composed the Odyssey. Or if either poem was created by a single person. Both works may have been created, revised and expanded by many hands. Some scholars argue that one poet brought together numerous existing poems and shaped them into the two epics, which were further remodelled by others over the years. It is also doubted that Homer, or anyone else, wrote them down from the beginning. In the oral tradition of the time, these poems would have been committed to memory and recited (chanted or sung) at gatherings by storytellers over several centuries. They were thought to have been put into writing only sometime after 500 BCE, having been passed on orally for 300 years or longer. So, if we continue to refer to "Homer" here, it should be understood we're talking not necessarily about a particular individual but about the poets and performers that shaped two of the world's greatest myths over several centuries. In effect we're talking about the ancient Greek people. Not that they even considered themselves Greek then. Their loyalties were to small kingdoms and cities. Part of the appeal of the Homeric poems to them was that it heralded the transition of the inhabitants of the area from that earlier state into a wider awareness of themselves as a people. Like all mythologies important to any peoples, the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey encoded their fears and aspirations as they began to feel their collective power. Why do we still care today? Well, to a large degree we don't. We've absorbed the imagery, we refer to Homeric characters and situations in our language (usually without realizing it), and our writers plunder the epics for good storylines in modern entertainments. But most of us don't dwell on the details of the myths as ancient Greeks did. We don't feel the fates of Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen, Hector and Ulysses are significant in our daily lives. We don't go around thinking in Homeric terms. But Homer's works are still significant to our civilization as a whole. And anyone who immerses oneself in them can still come away with a sense of having been involved in something meaningful. Why is this? Homer has been called the Shakespeare of the ancient world, and if you've read my views on Shakespeare, you'll have a good idea how I look at Homer's writings. In short, I think we appreciate him in proportion to how much the values he promulgates are still relevant to us. Homer was writing not only as the Greek world was developing—the first society we give the word "civilization" to—but also as the pattern for the Western world was being set. We find early templates for ideas of the common good versus the power of the individual. The pitting of mortal strength against fate and the gods. The obligations of men to their leaders, of women to their men, of children and their parents to each other. The right of might and the nobility of blood. It's all delivered as an enthralling story for its time and honed as entertainment, but one can read (or listen to) Homer as a series of morality tales, as guides to how one should behave in the new world that was coming into being then. Of course, the morals of the stories are not always what we would consider helpful today. On those counts, Homer is not relevant enough to grab our imaginations. But in those aspects of the adventures that do still reflect our society and lives—what we think of as the "universal" themes—we can still be engaged. So my advice is to read Homer for the fun of it. Try to imagine what it would have been like in an age without television, movies or even books, to hear these stories in person as they rolled out in thunderous and portentous phrases. Imagine yourself huddling with others in the dark, listening to the voice beside the fire but following with your imagination the exciting tales of men fighting for their honour and for their lives against each other, the elements, monsters and the gods. — Eric
© Copyright 2002-2007 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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HOMER