Homer

Merely to assert that Homer is the first literary artist and arguably the greatest does not begin to do justice to his remarkable achievement. In a fundamental sense, literature originates with Homer. As the progenitor of epic poetry, Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey defined the monumental work of literary art that captures an entire culture, synthesizing beliefs, customs, and tradition into a serious and popular form that has been the aspiration of writers ever since. His only rivals to have a comparable impact on Western culture are the Bible, SHAKESPEARE [1], and DANTE [2], and no single author has carried such uninterrupted influence for so long. 

Although Homer follows Shakespeare and Dante in my ranking, strong argument could easily alter this arrangement. Only the passing of the heroic age that Homer chronicled so magnificently, more remote in its values to the modern reader than the medieval world of Dante and the Renaissance of Shakespeare, has determined his placement below both.Homer’s achievement is clouded in scholarly controversy, beginning with the central question of whether there was a historical Homer at all. Did a single poet create the Iliad and the Odyssey, or were they the work of several individuals, the gradual accretion of collective voices out of the oral tradition from which they originated? If a single poet wrote both, how is the author of the Iliad also the creator of the very different Odyssey? 

Recent textual analysis points strongly to the likelihood that the Iliad is indeed the work of one poet, but on both sides of the argument there is doubt that the same poet is also the author of the Odyssey, though the evidence is insufficient to overturn the conventional belief that Homer is the creator of both poems. Adding to the mystery, we know virtually nothing about Homer, except that he was likely a bard in the eighth century B.C. whose homeland was in Ionia, south of Troy in Asia Minor (now modern Turkey). He traditionally is thought to have been blind. What is incontestable is the considerable value the Greeks placed on the Homeric poems from their inception. Aristotle considered Homer’s work to represent the ideal of heroic poetry, and knowledge of Homer’s verses was part of every Greek’s education. Homer’s prestige remained uncontested by the Romans and reasserted its influence in Europe during the Renaissance with the widespread dissemination of classical learning.

In appreciating Homer’s achievement, it is crucial to recognize that the poems were oral creations, not literary ones. Homer made his poems in performance, borrowing and adapting stories, ideas, and phrases from the oral tradition of a preliterate culture. Each performance in effect produced a new poem. The texts that we now read are later transcriptions, standardized from various written versions by scholars and librarians from the fifth to the second century B.C. Composed in Greek dactylic hexameter (12 syllable lines with a meter of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones) Homer’s epics were originally sung or recited to the accompaniment of a lyre, and were based on the poet’s memory and skill at improvisation. 

The poems’ formulaic phrases—“fleet-footed Achilles,” “rosy-fingered dawn,” “bronze-shirted Achaians”—and repetition are all evidence of oral performance, aiding the audience’s understanding and helping the poet fit his language to the metric structure.Given the traditional qualities of Homer’s epics, in which he borrowed from a storehouse of stories and phrases, what makes his work so unique are the overall excellence of his verse, his perceptiveness, and the sheer magnitude of his conception. Individual oral compositions are thought to have been between 500 and 600 lines in length, able to hold the attention of an audience on a single occasion—for example, following an evening meal—as seen in the Odyssey’s Book Eight in the performance of the bard Demodocus. This is the length of just a single book of a total of 24 in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. 

Homer is considered unique in his monumental expansion of oral poetry into a much grander dramatic unity, shaping traditional stories and methods into a whole of unprecedented range. To achieve the dramatic unity and coherence of his epics without the possibility of revision or the deliberate forethought and planning we associate with writing, is almost unthinkable and a testimony to Homer’s unmatched skill as a poet and storyteller.Homer’s greatness is evident even through a superficial look at his epics. In the Iliad, his subject is war and the various examples of heroism it represents under the threat of death. Tradition dictated that heroic poetry must deal with past events and figures of great renown and distinction, and Homer selects the 10-year Trojan War at its climax.

The Iliad describes the events leading up to the fatal and decisive combat between Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest warrior, and the Trojan champion Hector in a battle that ensures Troy’s fall. Homer’s poem begins with Achilles’ withdrawal from the battlefield as a result of the slight to his honor by Agamemnon, the commander of the Greeks. This allows the Trojans a momentary triumph and results in the slaying of Achilles’ closest friend Patroclus by Hector. Only the absolute obligation of blood vengeance is sufficient to overcome the slight to Achilles’ honor, and he meets and kills Hector. The poem ends with Achilles’ change of heart from vengeance to pity and the ending of his wrath, which culminates in his agreement to return Hector’s body to his family for proper burial.The Iliad works on a number of levels, but primarily it is an exciting story that Homer narrates skillfully with godlike objectivity and focus on the telling detail. Although all of Homer’s characters are remarkable in their qualities and accomplishments, which are well beyond the reach of ordinary men and women, each acts according to his or her personality and temperament. 

Collectively, the characters and events describe the values of a heroic world in which honor is the highest virtue and violent death is almost certain.In the Odyssey, Homer re-imagines the tragic heroism of the Iliad as heroic comedy. Following the fall of Troy, Odysseus struggles for 10 years to return home to Ithaca and restore the life he led before the conflict. The dramatic unity of the Iliad is replaced by the extended episodes of Odysseus’s journey and the multiple stories of his son Telemachus and his wife Penelope, afflicted by a collection of rapacious suitors who must be vanquished in the story’s climax. Odysseus’s heroism is also markedly different from that of Achilles. Odysseus is the consummate survivor who is shown as more human, with a more complex blend of skills and weaknesses, than the unrelenting demigod and warrior Achilles.

Although there is no mistaking the heroic worldview of both Homeric poems, the Odyssey locates its values more closely in the world of Homer’s audience. It also redirects his art to essential themes of home and domestic love, and the eventual prize and goal of the hero in recapturing both, even in a story that involves a visit to the underworld and encounters with mythical creatures. If the Iliad portrays a heroic world and values that were waning, archaic even to Homer’s first audiences, the Odyssey points heroic art in a new direction, toward ordinary life of mixed character. It is not surprising that JAMES JOYCE [7], in looking for a structuring principle for his modern epic Ulysses, should select Homer’s Odyssey. For Joyce, Odysseus was the only completely well-rounded character presented by any writer, and as he observed, “The most beautiful, all-embracing theme is that of the Odyssey. 

It is greater, more human, than that of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust . . . I find the subject of Ulysses the most human in world literature. . . . After Troy there is no further talk of Achilles, Menelaus, Agamemnon. Only one man is not done with; his heroic career has hardly begun: Ulysses.”In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer shows his mastery of the experience of war and peace in themes that are both serious and profoundly human. With Homer, the epic, wide-ranging enough to capture the values of an entire culture, evolves as a form and sets a standard that later writers would try to master as the highest aspiration of literary art. By succeeding, a writer can be described as the Homer of his age, a tribute to the power and possibility of art that Homer established.