The Iliad and the Odyssey

As my husband is revisiting the classics for personal literary enrichment, I was wondering if people really knew or know today precisely who the writer of the Iliad and of the Odyssey was. The two masterpieces were considered superb literature from the time when they were written down, presumably in the eighth century B.C., and were ascribed to the poet Greeks called “Homer.”

The Iliad vividly described the 10-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans. At its conclusion, Troy was infiltrated by Greek soldiers who hid in a wooden horse. Once inside the fortress, the Greek soldiers emerged from the wooden horse at night, opened the city gates and set fire to Troy, destroying the city. Nobody is quite sure how large the horse was, or how many soldiers were able to hide inside the horse.

Archeologists have argued over the potential existence of such Trojan horse and some historians even go as far as attributing wooden planks found in Turkey, 15 ft in length, to such a wooden horse, although it could have been the remains of a ship.

The famous Italian painter Giovanni Tiepolo used his enormous talent to bring to life the Trojan horse being dragged with ropes through the city streets by the Trojans. The circa 1760 oil on canvas painting hangs in the National Gallery in London.

But who was Homer? The ancient Greeks called the poet Homer, but many doubt that the epic stories are the literary work of just one person or that he really was called Homer, this mythical writer who has been venerated and his work dissected and studied for almost three thousand years.

There is a seventh or sixth century B.C. poem that refers to “a blind man living in Chios,” an island on the Aegean Sea. Greeks do recognize that Homer was a street performer of oral poetry, a “singer.” These “singers” memorized certain stories that most people have heard or invented new ones on the spot as they were paid by listeners.

Over time, more elements were added to the oral tradition and to certain stories, recognized by specific metric patterns and repetitions of certain word combinations. Improvisation by more talented “singers,” added a level of mystery and enchantment to some lengthy stories.

According to scholars, the Greeks were illiterate and passed on stories through oral traditions only. They did not have an alphabet until the middle of the eighth century B.C. when they acquired it from the Phoenicians with whom they traded. The Phoenicians, who lived on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, in the Levant region, area known today as Lebanon (Tyre was the capital), invented their alphabet in the 1200 B.C.

When the Iliad and the Odyssey were finally written down, it would have contained years of refinements, flourishes, and additions by various “singers” who used their talents to enchant listeners, paying customers who were surely mesmerized by the creative and imaginative storytelling.

“Scholars agree that both poems contain all the ingredients of orally transmitted poetry.”

The Odyssey describes the ten-year meandering journey of Odysseus at the end of the Trojan War. Scholars think that Scylla and Charybdis represent the straits of Messina but cannot agree where Circe Island was.

A map representing the storied meanderings of Odysseus from Troy to his birthplace, Ithaca, wanders across the sea, around Sicily, to Cape Circeio (Circe’s home) in western mid-part of today’s Italy, back and forth through the tip of Italy, twice above Sicily, and three times across the Ionian Sea towards Greece and finally to Greece.

The details most scholars agree on is that the mythical Odysseus left Troy and returned to his birthplace in Greece, Ithaca. Everything else in-between is often left to individual interpretation.

Vase paintings depict Odysseus putting out the eye of the Cyclopes and the sirens trying to lure away Odysseus who is tied to the ship’s mast.

Because tales from the Trojan War and from Odysseus’ meanderings seem to refer to different time periods, and to earlier times, it is safe to say that different “singers” who told shorter stories contributed to the epics.

Some scholars believe that, at the time that the alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenicians, a poet (“singer”) emerged who used individual stories and created a compendium of two much larger stories called epics and either wrote them down himself or commissioned scribes to do so. Another hypothesis considers that perhaps there were two such “Homers” who “wrote” the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The possibility arises from the fact that the language in the Odyssey seems typical of a later period than the language of the Iliad. The Iliad focuses on a few days of brutal war, whereas the Odyssey focuses on ten years of travel and adventure of one man and his crew across the seas, involving fantastical beings and magical deeds.

The 19the century novelist Samuel Butler thought that, unlike the brutal and martial story of the Iliad, the Odyssey was written by a woman since it did not contain topics of war at all.

No matter how many “singers” contributed to the Homeric epics, in the end, one or perhaps two individuals which scholars like to call “Homer,” have put them all together into two separate but unified stories. We will never know exactly as “no manuscript earlier than the third century B.C. survives.”