Homer's poems are written down

The story

Two poems, a war and a voyage

The Iliad and the Odyssey are the two oldest great poems of European literature. They are written in very long lines, hexameters, in which each line is made of six units of sound and has a rhythm you can almost beat with your hand. The Iliad has 15,693 lines, in the edition usually used, and the Odyssey 12,109; each work is divided into twenty-four books, that is, twenty-four parts. This division, which numbers them with the letters of the Greek alphabet, is the work, according to most scholars, of the learned men of Alexandria in Egypt, many centuries later.

The Iliad: the wrath of Achilles

The Trojan War, according to Greek tradition, lasted ten years. The Greeks, led by King Agamemnon, besieged the city of Troy to win back Helen, the wife of King Menelaus, carried off by the Trojan prince Paris. The Iliad, however, does not tell the whole war: it narrates only its last weeks. The first word of the poem is “mênin”, “wrath”, and that is exactly its subject: the wrath of Achilles, the strongest of the Greek warriors, offended by Agamemnon. In anger, Achilles stops fighting. When his friend Patroclus dies in battle, killed by the Trojan Hector, Achilles returns to the fight, kills Hector and then, in the end, gives the body back to Hector's father, the old King Priam. The poem closes with Hector's funeral.

The Odyssey: the journey home

The Odyssey begins after the end of the war. Its hero is Odysseus, king of Ithaca, who takes another ten years to get home. Meanwhile in Ithaca, his wife Penelope is courted by many suitors who want to marry her and take the kingdom, while his son Telemachus sets out to look for news of his father. Odysseus meets the Cyclops Polyphemus, the sorceress Circe, the Sirens and the nymph Calypso, and is helped by the Phaeacians. He comes home in disguise and is recognised first by the dog Argos and by the nurse Eurycleia, who sees his scar. With the help of the faithful swineherd Eumaeus he defeats the suitors. The central theme is the “nostos”, the return home.

Who was Homer?

By tradition the author of both poems is Homer, a blind singer who is said to have lived in Ionia, the coastal region of present-day Turkey, perhaps on Chios or Samos. Ancient biographies describe him like this, but modern scholars regard them as largely legendary. We do not know whether Homer existed, or whether the two poems were composed by the same person. The historian Herodotus, in the 5th century BC, wrote that Homer lived about four hundred years before him, which leads to about 850 BC. Today it is thought that the poems took their present form between the end of the 8th and the 7th century BC.

The “Homeric question”

The debate about who composed the poems is called the “Homeric question”, a name given to it around 1830. In 1795 a German philologist, Friedrich August Wolf, argued that the poems began as short oral songs, later joined into epics and finally reworked over time. Another important idea came in the 20th century. Milman Parry and Albert Lord studied the folk singers of the Balkans and discovered that they improvised very long tales using fixed phrases and formulas, such as “swift-footed Achilles”. They realised that Homer too could have worked like this, composing aloud, without writing. This theory, called “formulaic”, is accepted today by many scholars.

The poets who sang these stories were called aoidoi and accompanied themselves on a stringed instrument. For centuries the poems were handed down from memory, from mouth to mouth. Only later were they put in writing. According to an ancient tradition, in the 6th century BC the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus had the songs collected and put in order. Then, at Alexandria in Egypt, the great scholars of the library, such as Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and above all Aristarchus of Samothrace, compared the manuscripts and prepared the edition that lies at the base of the text we read today.

How they reached us

The oldest complete manuscript of the Iliad is the so-called Venetus A, copied in the 10th century AD by Byzantine scribes. There are also older fragments on papyrus, found in Egypt. The text, in a mixed language based mostly on the Ionic dialect, has survived almost three thousand years of copying.

From 1795 to today, the “Homeric question” has produced mountains of books. The wonderful thing is that the question still has no final answer: whoever composed the Iliad and the Odyssey created two works that are still being read.