Homer

The ancient Greeks themselves knew almost nothing about Homer and argued about him constantly. Seven cities claimed to be his birthplace, Smyrna and Chios most insistently, and tradition made him a blind wandering singer; the Homeric Hymn to Apollo speaks of a blind man who lives on rocky Chios, and later readers took this as the poet's self-portrait. A guild of rhapsodes on Chios, the Homeridai, claimed to be his descendants and recited his poems for centuries. Dates were guessed from 1100 to 700 BC; today most scholars place the poems in the second half of the eighth century BC, at the moment when the Greek alphabet was new.

Since the eighteenth century the «Homeric question» has asked whether one poet composed both epics, or any of them. The answer that emerged in the twentieth century, largely from the work of Milman Parry in the 1930s, is that the poems grew out of a long tradition of oral poetry: singers improvised in dactylic hexameter using stock phrases such as «swift-footed Achilles» and «rosy-fingered Dawn», and the Iliad and Odyssey are the monumental end-products of that tradition, perhaps shaped by one great singer, perhaps written down in Athens under Peisistratos in the sixth century BC.

Whoever he was, Homer was for the Greeks what the Bible was for others: the text children learned to read from, the source of their gods and heroes, and the book Alexander the Great is said to have kept under his pillow.

The Ιλιάδα (Iliad) does not tell the whole Trojan War. In roughly 15,700 lines and 24 books it covers a few weeks in the last year of the siege: Agamemnon insults Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, by taking his captive Briseis; Achilles withdraws from battle, the Trojans under Hector drive the Greeks back to their ships, and Achilles's friend Patroclus is killed. Achilles returns in a fury, kills Hector and drags his body around the walls, until old King Priam comes to his tent at night to beg for his son's body, and the poem ends with Hector's funeral. It is a poem about anger, honour, and the price of war on both sides.

The Οδύσσεια (Odyssey), about 12,100 lines, is an adventure story and a homecoming. Odysseus, king of Ithaca, spends ten years trying to get home after the war: he blinds the Cyclops Polyphemus, resists the Sirens, loses all his men, and is held for years by the nymph Calypso. Meanwhile on Ithaca his wife Penelope keeps her suitors waiting by weaving and unweaving a shroud, and his son Telemachus sets out to find news of him. Odysseus comes home disguised as a beggar, is recognised only by his old dog Argos, strings his great bow and kills the suitors. Both poems are in dactylic hexameter and use the same formulaic epithets, similes from farm and sea, and long speeches; the Greek is an artificial mixture of dialects that no one ever spoke, which is why Greeks read Homer in translation as foreigners do, but they read him first.

Every Greek pupil reads the Odyssey in the first year of gymnasio and the Iliad in the second, in the modern translations of Nikos Kazantzakis and Ioannis Kakridis or of Dimitris Maronitis. The language is full of Homer: a long ordeal is an οδύσσεια, a hidden trap a δούρειος ίππος (Trojan horse), a faithful wife a Πηνελόπη, a tempting danger a σειρήνα, a wise adviser a μέντορας (after Mentor), and a huge quarrel a «ομηρικός καβγάς». Visitors still go to Mycenae, Agamemnon's citadel, and to the island of Ithaca with a copy of the poems in hand. On this site you can read short, graded retellings of the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, the Sirens, Penelope and the dog Argos, and a B2 reading about Homer himself.

• Seven ancient cities claimed Homer as their own; a Greek epigram lists Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos and Athens.
• The Iliad covers only about fifty days of a ten-year war and never mentions the Trojan Horse; that story is told in the Odyssey and in later poems.
• Many Homeric phrases are formulas repeated hundreds of times, such as «rosy-fingered Dawn», which helped oral singers compose on the spot.
• The Greeks of the classical age learned the poems by heart in school, and public recitations of the whole Iliad and Odyssey were held at the Panathenaic festival in Athens.