The Homeric Question 🙋‍♀️

Who WAS Homer and why does it even matter?

Christopher Nolan continues to have me and everyone I know who is remotely ancient-adjacent in a chokehold. Yes, I have seen the film and no, I’m not going to subject you to a scene-by-scene rant. There are more than enough of those pieces clogging my feed at the moment and while there are some brilliant, insightful takes, overall the nit-picky pessimism is grating on me. What I HAVE prepared for you is essentially a follow up to a newsletter I wrote a few weeks ago (I threatened to tackle the Homeric question somewhere around the fourth paragraph).

The idea for this newsletter is actually all thanks to my PhD supervisor. I’m working on monsters in Classical vase painting, but I was initially just focussing on Scylla as a case study (I have been told my topic is going to change at least 4 more times and I’m not at all sickened by that thought). In one of our meetings she was throwing a bunch of suggestions at me (all very helpful, she is genuinely the best), when she, in her German accent, just casually dropped in “and, of course, you’ll have to address the Homeric question at some point.” I replied, I’m sorry the fucking WHAT???? In my mind. I replied in my mind. I have hopes that by the time I get to the third or fourth year of this whole thang I’ll have built up the courage to swear in front of her but we aren’t there yet and that’s okay!!!

The essential Homeric question is, in short, who was Homer?

In my rummaging I came across a 1992 article by Gregory Nagy, who first rips apart the idea that there was only one question, kindly listing a whole bunch of them for us:

“Who was Homer? When and where did Homer live? Was there a Homer? Is there one author of the Iliad and Odyssey, or are there different authors for each? Is there a succession of authors or even of redactors for each? Is there for that matter a unitary Iliad, a unitary Odyssey?”¹

Now I’m sure you can immediately understand why these questions have academics all over the world fizzing their little knickers but these questions got people riled up back in the day too!

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Apotheosis of Homer, 1827.

No one hates chronology more than me but alas I am legally required to give you the timeline. It is broadly agreed that the Iliad and Odyssey went through what’s known as a formative stage in the eighth century BCE, becoming more definitive i.e. locked in around the sixth century BCE.² The epics started spreading during the Archaic period (ca. 650 - 480 BCE), with evidence of the spread of the stories found on both sides of the Aegean in the seventh century.

I’ve never included a map in a newsletter before and I hope I never have to again.

The Homeric question™️ goes as far back as Aristotle, writing around 335 BCE. Plato and Aristotle apparently bickered about it, with Plato claiming that there was no way that Achilles dragged the corpse of Hector around the walls of Troy while Aristotle fired back with receipts, citing a Thessalian custom where they’d drag murderers around the tombs of those they had killed.³ How lovely.

A couple of hundred years after Homer was supposedly rolling around, we also have 4-5 ancient Greek cities calling dibs, claiming him as a native son.⁴ These claims make a rather lovely point about the broad appeal of Homeric epic, articulated by A. B. Lord;

“[T]he very number of [these claims], and the fact that potential ‘homes’ for Homer expanded as the Greek world did… shows just how extraordinary Homer’s ‘universality’ was felt to be.”⁵

So universal we’re still blathering on about it today.

So ancient people were up in arms, surprise surprise, and modern commentators really picked up where they left off, with the shorthand “the Homeric Question” coming into common use from around 1830.⁶ In the nineteenth century scholars were dealing with a much looser chronology than we are today; they thought the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed somewhere between the eleventh or tenth century all the way up to the mid sixth. Nowadays we’re working with a much tighter window, between 750 and 600 BCE.⁷ So that’s something. In terms of archaeological evidence, scenes from the Iliad first pop up in 630 BCE and we do have an early example which depicts Polyphemus getting stabbed in the eye back in 675 BCE.⁸

Funerary amphora depicting the blinding of Polyphemus, ca. 670-660 BCE, Eleusis Museum, Greece.

Not to pile on but I have my own question which is how the hell are we supposed to wrap our heads around the Iliad and the Odyssey when it was first performed and the unified Homeric text that we inherited from the ancient Greeks?

This takes us to ✨ oral poetry ✨

The Homeric epics in their earliest form were not meant to be read hunched over in a library, they were performed live! The sheer size of them—clocking in at somewhere between 10 and 18 hours—make Nolan’s 2 hours and 58 minutes look like child’s play. The fact that they were first spoken rather than written down throws a rather large spanner in the works in terms of trying to get to the bottom of the Homeric question BUT the squabbling about authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey is actually a byproduct of the very nature of oral epic.⁹

Also, in terms of canon (or LACK of canon as per my previous newsletter), it seems reasonable to assume that there was a dash of personalisation or creative license each time a bard got going. Don’t take my word for it, take Gregory Nagy’s:

“[O]ral tradition comes to life in performance, and the here-and-now of each new performance is an opportunity for innovation, whether or not any such innovation is explicitly acknowledged in the tradition.”¹⁰

Martin West puts it quite romantically,

“This is how the epic poets of the Homeric age probably saw themselves: not as authors but as conservators and performers.”¹¹

It’s weird to imagine the tomes we know now, that are so expansive and juicy they’re annoying to travel with, as floating around in the ether, held in the collective memory of ancient bards rather than as something tangible that you could hold in your hand. Homer himself (herself? themselves?) often used the adjective “winged” to describe words which provides us with a handy image; these words were indeed just floating around 🪽

The spread of the epics can also be connecting to the wave of pan-Hellenism crashing during the eighth century BCE,¹² the beginnings of the formation of a national identity (perhaps an ancient audience responded to Odysseus’ getting back to Ithaca and tearing through the suitors in a similar way to a drunk group of Australians when they hear 🎶 I come from a land down under 🎶 in a pub). The Iliad and the Odyssey created and maintained this sense of belonging, with heroic poetry as the shared cultural heritage of the Greeks or rather, the Hellenes.¹³

Now to the nitty gritty. Pisistratus is apparently the poor sod who was tasked with gathering up the work of Homer and actually writing it all down in the sixth century BCE.¹⁴ BUT the earliest account that says this is how it went down comes from Cicero, around 500 years after Pisistratus allegedly did his gathering.¹⁵ Ascribing both the Iliad and Odyssey to Homer can’t be traced further back than 520 BCE where a fellow called Hipparchus established the recitation of both poems as part of the massive Athenian festival, the Great Panathenaea.¹⁶ Aristarchus, an ancient commentator writing in roughly 150 BCE (essentially yesterday) is the guy credited with splitting the Iliad and the Odyssey into 24 books each.¹⁷

It’s a MESS. Such a mess that a bunch of people think that there was no real, historical Homer. H. Turnbull is one of them:

“Homer looks much more like a legend—a way to anthropomorphize the ancient Greek epic tradition—than a historical figure. If scholars have been unable to establish a standard biography and trace the Iliad and Odyssey to a flesh-and-blood individual, it is, we can conclude, because he simply never existed as such.”¹⁸

Others believe that a) Homer did exist and b) Homer was a woman ‼️

This theory was put forward by Samuel Butler, who argued that the Odyssey was written by a woman and not just any woman, but Nausicaa herself!¹⁹ The Authoress of the Odyssey was written in 1897 wherein Butler claims that the Odyssey was written by a young, unmaried woman from Sicily in 1050 BCE.²⁰ Some of his… evidence:

• “Calypso’s jealousy of Penelope is too prettily done for a man. A man would be sure to overdo it.”

• “When Ulysses and Penelope are in bed and are telling their stories to one another, Penelope tells hers first. I believe a male writer would have made Ulysses’ story come first and Penelope’s second.”

• “The other chief characteristics of the “Odyssey” which incline me to ascribe it to a woman are a kind of art for art’s sake, love of a small lie, and a determination to have things both ways whenever it suits her purpose.” (Pages 145, 157 and 119).

You’ve convinced me. In all seriousness this makes me incredibly nostalgic for the time where you could write scholarship based purely off of vibes. He just had a feeling! And that was enough! In 1897!

Another camp argue that the Odyssey and the Iliad were written by two different people. Martin West cites their thematic differences: the Iliad is “a tragedy of heroic passions… [while] the Odyssey is the story of one man’s triumph over adversity in a world of folktale.”²¹ Tim Whitmarsh fires back, asserting that “the [Odyssey] possesses a remarkable unity of tone and treatment and that the whole is marked by that unique combination of matter and form which we term Homeric.”²²

Turnbull argues that it was at least conceivable that the epics had different authors:

“The argument that it is improbable that early Greece could have produced two epic poets of such genius is sufficiently answered, I think, by the fact that at Athens, a city of perhaps 30,000 free citizens, a period of about sixty years saw the productions of the masterpieces of three great tragic poets, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.”²³

There was something in the WATER. Or, more likely, the olive oil.

West continues, “There will always be folk who cling to the traditional faith in one Homer who composed both epics.”²⁴

I fear I am one of those folk.

Marble bust of Homer, Roman copy of a Hellenistic original from the 2nd century BCE.

Let’s wrap things up with a quote I’ve nicked from Tim Whitmarsh, who, writing about that kook Samuel Butler, penned this whopper:

“The truth of the Homeric texts cannot be exposed by academic praxis, because academic praxis is trammelled by its own self-serving trajectory.”²⁵

Don’t. Trust. ANYONE. Least of all me.

The main thing I want you to take away from all this is that the Homeric epics are not sealed in amber. The power of these stories comes from their elasticity, their adaptability, a feature that was an integral part of them in their earliest form. Even in antiquity they couldn’t access some sort of pure, frozen version of these stories, they started evolving as soon as they came into being.²⁶

Back to the actual Homeric question 🙋‍♀️ To summarise, there’s still a frankly staggering amount that we don’t know but it feels like we’re getting warmer. And the fact that we’re standing on the shoulders of those that have come before is kind of the whole point.

What about you? Do you have a theory? Gut feelings and hunches are more than welcome, in fact they are encouraged.

Reference List

Dougher, Sarah. “An Epic for the Ladies: Contextualizing Samuel Butler’s Theory of ‘Odyssey’ Authorship.” Arethusa 34, no. 2 (2001): 173–84.

Foley, John Miles. “‘Reading’ Homer through Oral Tradition.” College Literature 34, no. 2 (2007): 1–28.

Hunter, Richard. The Measure of Homer: The Ancient Reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Lord, A. B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, 1960.

Nagy, Gregory. “Homeric Questions.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 122 (1992): 17–60.

Turnbull, H. G. D. “The Homeric Question.” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 2, no. 2 (1920): 143–53.

West, Martin. “The Homeric Question Today.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155, no. 4 (2011): 383–93.

Whitmarsh, Tim. “What Samuel Butler Saw: Classics, Authorship and Cultural Authority in Late Victorian England.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, no. 48 (2002): 66–86.

1. Nagy, 1992, 17.

2. Nagy, 1992, 52.

3. Nagy, 1992, 17.

4. West, 2011, 385.

5. Nagy, 1992, 27, quoting Lord, 1960.

6. Nagy, 1992, 27.

7. West, 2011, 389.

8. West, 2011, 389.

9. Foley, 2007, 2.

10. Hunter, 2018, 24.

11. West, 2011, 390.

12. Foley, 2007, 7.

13. Foley, 2007, 7.

14. Turnbull, 1920, 146.

15. Turnbull, 1920, 147.

16. West, 2011, 389.

17. Turnbull, 1920, 144.

18. Turnbull, 1920, 145.

19. Turnbull, 1920, 146.

20. Dougher, 2001, 173 and 176.

21. Whitmarsh, 2002, 73.

22. West, 2011, 388.

23. West, 2011, 388.

24. West, 2011, 392.

25. West, 2011, 393.

26. “Every engagement with Homer was, to a greater or lesser degree, also an engagement with what Homer had meant to previous readers, and how Homer had been absorbed into, and thus helped to shape, literary culture. There was, then, in antiquity no ‘unmediated’ access to the poet: the ‘Homeric tradition’ was part of what ‘Homer’ was.” Hunter, 2018, 135.