Detail of a mosaic of Ulysses encountering the Sirens. Bardo Museum. Photo by Dennis Jarvis. Wikimedia Commons
To access the Chicago Homer database at Northwestern University, click HERE.
"It's a mistake to think of Homer as a person," says the author of Why Homer Matters.
BY SIMON WORRALL, FOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
PUBLISHED JANUARY 3, 2015
The Iliad and The Odyssey are two of the key works of Western civilization. But almost nothing is known about their author and the date and manner of their creation. In Why Homer Matters, historian and award-winning author Adam Nicolson suggests that Homer be thought of not as a person but as a tradition and that the works attributed to him go back a thousand years earlier than generally believed.
Speaking from his home in England, Nicolson describes how being caught in a storm at sea inspired his passion for Homer, how the oral bards of the Scottish Hebrides may hold the key to understanding Homer's works, and why smartphones are connecting us to ancient oral traditions in new and surprising ways.
Your book begins with a storm at sea.
About ten years ago, I set off sailing with a friend of mine. We wanted a big adventure, so we decided to sail up the west coast of the British Isles, the exposed Atlantic coast, visiting various remote islands along the way. I had thrown into my luggage a copy of The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, having never really looked at Homer for about 25 years.
We had a rough time. Our instruments broke, and it had been a big hike from Cornwall. Lying in my bunk tied up next to a quay in southwest Ireland, I opened this book and found myself confronted with what felt like the truth—like somebody was telling me what it was like to be alive on Earth, in the figure of Odysseus.
Odysseus is the great metaphor for all of our lives: struggling with storms, coming across incredibly seductive nymphs, finding himself trapped between impossible choices. I suddenly thought, this is talking to me in a way I would never have guessed before.
Seven locations have been given as Homer's birthplace. It's said he was blind. Samuel Butler, the 19th-century satirist, wrote an entire book trying to prove he was actually a she. Do we know anything factual about Homer?
I think it's a mistake to think of Homer as a person. Homer is an "it." A tradition. An entire culture coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of telling stories that are important to it. Homer is essentially shared.
Today we have an author obsession—we want to know biography all the time. But Homer has no biography. The Iliad and The Odyssey are like Viking longships. Nobody knows who made them, no name is attached to them, there's no written design or drawings. They're simply the evolved beauty of long and careful tradition.
There are even doubts about when they were composed. The usual date is about 800 B.C. You believe the tradition began much earlier than that. Make your case.
My claim is that the poems, especially The Iliad, have their beginnings around 2000 B.C.—about 1,000 or 1,200 years earlier than most people say Homer existed. The reason I say that has two strands to it. One is that there are large elements of the Homeric stories, particularly The Iliad, that are shared among the Indo-European world as a whole, all the way from north India through Greece to Germanic and Icelandic stories. There are deep elements in Homer that have nothing to do with Greece or the Aegean.
To read the full article, click HERE.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/1/150104-homer-iliad-odyssey-greece-book-talk-travel-world/#close
Why Homer Matters is available for checkout in the ASM Library.
Iliad Manuscript on papyrus
Manuscript on papyrus, Second century CE. Ms. 1063.
Edgar J. Goodspeed Papyri Collection.
This papyrus fragment is from Fayûm, most certainly from Kûm Ushîm (Washîm), ancient Karanis in Egypt. The text is from the Iliad, book 5, lines 824-841.
Works from antiquity had to undergo several risky transformations in order to be read and studied today. The texts—written on papyrus or parchment, and later on paper—were copied by scribes multiple times over the course of two millennia. The long journey from manuscript to printed book resulted in numerous losses and the introduction of many variations in the texts along the way, some accidental and others deliberate.
The Iliad and the Odyssey—epic poems composed for oral performance—present these and other challenges to scholars who are interested in the history of the texts that are available to us. The two poems are generally presumed to have been composed sometime from the eighth century BCE (or earlier) to the mid-seventh century BCE and written down by the mid-sixth century BCE, likely in conjunction with performances at the Panathenaia Festival in Athens. The earliest surviving example of Homeric papyri is from the third century BCE, about the time that scholars in Alexandria produced a relatively stable text that was subsequently used by scribes to produce copies. Over 1,000 manuscripts of Homer's works exist, far more than for any other ancient author and many more of the Iliad than theOdyssey.
About 300 medieval manuscripts of the Iliad or the Odyssey survive dating from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Interest in the Homeric texts flourished in the East, where Byzantine manuscripts produced between the twelfth century and the fall of Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century preserve important scholarship. Differences in the ancient versions copied by medieval scribes, combined with their own transcription errors and editorial decisions, make it very difficult to sort out relationships among the manuscript texts. In the West, where there was almost no knowledge of Greek, scholars and others had to rely for familiarity with the epics on the Ilias Latina, an abridgement in Latin of Homer's Iliad, and other accounts of the Trojan War with dubious authenticity.
With the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century, the transmission of the Homeric texts entered a new phase: editors could choose to work from manuscripts (if they had access to them) or one or more previously printed editions. Despite the apparent stability and fixity of print, Homer in Print chronicles the enduring debate about which text is closest to the "real" Homer—or, at least, the "best."
To access the website, click HERE.
https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/homer-print-transmission-and-reception-homers-works/