When I was younger I accepted the romantic opinion of a single creative Homer, but one time I had to read the Iliad and then the Odyssey straight after, and that single experience changed my mind. It is clear to me that not only there are two different [sets of] authors but they
come from radically different times and places.
The Iliad is a poem that is entirely land-based, set in one place and reflects a warrior ethos fixated on glory. You can almost taste the dust, the blood and the metal, hear the clash of arms, feel the excess of testosterone (that initial argument between Achilles and Agamemnon almost had me scrambling for cover when I had to translate it from the Homeric Greek).
If you move to the Odyssey, the setting is completely different - the unending sea, the island-hopping, the easy acceptance of the "other" (the stranger, the traveller, the god in disguise), the acquiring of reputation through hospitality rather than war. The focus is on achieving the return home, not the posthumous glory (vid. the shade of Achilles stating he would rather be a serf and alive than reign in the underworld!). There is that constant preocupation with the weather and the direction of the wind that only makes sense in a sea-faring society. They count their sheep and worry about pirates.
There is also the role and bandwidth given to the women. In the Iliad you barely hear the feminine voices, and women are completely powerless to control their own destiny. Briseis is an enslaved captive of war who changes hands twice before we even hear her speak, and when she finally opens her mouth it is to grieve over the people she has lost. Helen is a mere spectator in the civilisational cataclism wrought by her presence in Troy. And Andromache, well. That she and her husband can so accurately predict the coming disaster does nothing to prepare her for it.
Turn to the Odyssey and all the women have not just a voice but actual agency (I scoff at the jealousy vibes but my conclusion is the same): Arete of the Phaeacians has the power to decide whether or not to grant hospitality; Circe is very much the sovereign of her island, and so is Calypso. It is quite clear that even in Ithaca Odysseus became king by marrying Penelope and not the other way around (his father Laertes doesn't even live in the palace, for gods' sake). Even Helen is back in control of her own house in Sparta and dosing people around with no control whatsoever. Odysseus is bounced from woman to woman all across the poem and they are the only ones actively helping. I reckon Robert Graves was on to something when he wrote Homer's Daughter.
I could go on, but all this is to say that I rather think that the Iliad comes from an Anatolic tradition that is closer to Troy itself (also there's the dual viewpoint whereby the Achaians and the Trojans are both presented as fully fleshed people rather than generic heroes and villains - there is no villain in the Iliad, just the circumstance of a war where both sides see their lives terminally disrupted). It was probably composed in Greek but it drinks from local stories that predate the Ionian cities, in the same way that Beowulf was written in English, so to speak, but takes up an older story that does not even happen in England. On the other hand, the Odyssey was definitely composed in an island, though I have no idea which. This is a conclusion partly based on vibes on my part but I am absolutely certain of this. I also believe, with less evidence, that it must be more recent than the Iliad, because it reuses the metre, the epic epithets (Rosy-fingered Dawn etc) and the mannerisms of the Iliad, and it contains a lot of lesser stories linked to the Trojan and other cycles, including prominently the killing of Agamemnon (in a version that differs markedly from the Orestiad, which I find really interesting) but also mentions to Herakles and to the Theban cycle (Oedipus, Amphiaraos). Also it is a lot more organised than the Iliad, although that may be a later editorial effect from when the final text was crystallised. Overall it is more sanitised, more positive, and it has a happy ending, which is in spectacular contrast to the final funereal smoke of the Iliad.
All this reasoning finished clicking in my brain when I visited the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Mycenean objects in that museum are perfectly consistent with the Iliad, down to the long-haired Achaians fighting it out in the decoration of the weapons and signet rings and Odysseus' boar tusk helmet reconstruction. The Odyssey, to me, is much closer to the Minoic culture as represented by the Santorini frescoes and especially the pottery - the swallows, the dolphins, the flowers moving in the breeze. There is a joy in life in that art that is completely absent from the violence of the war and hunting scenes associated with the Myceneans, and I believe it is that clash of mentalities that shows in the two poems. This is why I think there cannot be a single author.
In the end, you seem to give Nolan a free pass, which, based on your argument, is reasonable. A tradition in which innovation is intrinsic. Great article.
Great essay! I'd not heard that the idea of different authors for the Iliad and the Odyssey had some scholarly support, but it makes total sense to me. The voices, the zeitgeists just seem really different.
As to multiple bards reinventing the epics over centuries, well, Yeah! Heck, I see 1 or 2 Shakespeare plays a year, and the versions are always different. And with THAT bard we do have actual original texts!
Yes! In fact, Aristarchus (and some of those other dudes at the library of Alexandria) was a hard core single author truther and combined several inconsistent sources into a canonical “correct” version. There is also a long section of the Iliad that today is regarded as a later addition and not by “Homer”. I don’t know how it came to be included in the Iliad but it certainly has a different moral frame than the rest of it.
This reminded me very much of tutorial no 1 with my old Homer tutor Oliver Taplin ❤️A lovely summary of the key points. I’ve done a couple of articles too, my first one looked at the Bronze Age references and the digamma etc in the poems - if you take it from there we can even take them back 3000 years. I wondered if you had a link to the Calypso scarves as I couldn’t see it on the picture - are you still selling them ?
I think the Greek epics are a testament to how well literary traditions can be preserved through oral transmission. Their recitation in performances and festivals helped cement their place in Greek cultural identity. It was also fortunate that they were eventually written down…otherwise, they might have been lost, as happened to so much of the ancient literature of other civilizations. 😩
My hunch is that there’s actually one original Homer and he channeled these 2 colossal works straight from the ‘gods’, as is the case with most literary&artistic works of such importance. And I trust my hunch more than I trust academics who “squabble over the nitty gritties”. 🪽💫 😉
I moved to İzmir, in part, because tradition placed Homer here. There was a Homereion Temple in Smyrna from Hellenistic times onward, although good cases could be made for nearby locations in Chios (the first school of Homeric performers) or Notion/ Colophon, where a cool statue of the bard was unearthed. The texts were written in Ionian Greek, i.e. along the eastern coast of the Aegean. My "vibe" is that Homer was a popular performer of the era to whom the writing, done by pioneers of the Greek language, was ascribed.
My head canon is that for a couple hundred years the stories were orally passed, changing each time, like a stand up comedian honing bits. Then at some point a single Homer wrote down his/her version in the new fangled Greek alphabet. There were other epics in the so called Epic Cycle but the others are now lost. Aristotle says that the “Homeric” ones are better which makes me think there was a Homer that added some value to those. Although the comment by Ines is very interesting. They certainly do feel as though they are written by different authors and the treatment of women is night and day.
I think the Homeric question cannot be answered definitively and unambiguously. However, I also don’t think the answer matters that much: It’s the question itself and the process through which various people seek potential answers that are most important, as well as being comfortable with and open to ambiguity.
...which I haven't actually seen yet but I've read quite a bit about it, some of it rather hilariously ignorant! There is one thing about the film that makes me want to see it much more than I had initially thought I would partially because of the casting controversy and partially because of the sheer cheek and inventiveness that Nolan brought to the story.
Sinon. Elliot Page only appears as Sinon for a few minutes in the film as Sinon, a character that never actually appeared in The Odyssey but was, rather, from Virgil's Aeneid, written centuries later. Sinon was a reprehensible character in the Aeneid, so much so that the name served as the root for terms like "insidious".
Nolan used Sinon to basically turn the entire narrative on its head by making Sinon an extremely unlucky youth whose death turned him into Odysseus' conscience, even assuming the name upon his return home.
This interests me and, as you described in the debates about who, what Homer was and how Oral Tradition shaped the narrative that we now know, it seems fitting that in this generation, a retelling of the story has a new interpretation...
When I was younger I accepted the romantic opinion of a single creative Homer, but one time I had to read the Iliad and then the Odyssey straight after, and that single experience changed my mind. It is clear to me that not only there are two different [sets of] authors but they
come from radically different times and places.
The Iliad is a poem that is entirely land-based, set in one place and reflects a warrior ethos fixated on glory. You can almost taste the dust, the blood and the metal, hear the clash of arms, feel the excess of testosterone (that initial argument between Achilles and Agamemnon almost had me scrambling for cover when I had to translate it from the Homeric Greek).
If you move to the Odyssey, the setting is completely different - the unending sea, the island-hopping, the easy acceptance of the "other" (the stranger, the traveller, the god in disguise), the acquiring of reputation through hospitality rather than war. The focus is on achieving the return home, not the posthumous glory (vid. the shade of Achilles stating he would rather be a serf and alive than reign in the underworld!). There is that constant preocupation with the weather and the direction of the wind that only makes sense in a sea-faring society. They count their sheep and worry about pirates.
There is also the role and bandwidth given to the women. In the Iliad you barely hear the feminine voices, and women are completely powerless to control their own destiny. Briseis is an enslaved captive of war who changes hands twice before we even hear her speak, and when she finally opens her mouth it is to grieve over the people she has lost. Helen is a mere spectator in the civilisational cataclism wrought by her presence in Troy. And Andromache, well. That she and her husband can so accurately predict the coming disaster does nothing to prepare her for it.
Turn to the Odyssey and all the women have not just a voice but actual agency (I scoff at the jealousy vibes but my conclusion is the same): Arete of the Phaeacians has the power to decide whether or not to grant hospitality; Circe is very much the sovereign of her island, and so is Calypso. It is quite clear that even in Ithaca Odysseus became king by marrying Penelope and not the other way around (his father Laertes doesn't even live in the palace, for gods' sake). Even Helen is back in control of her own house in Sparta and dosing people around with no control whatsoever. Odysseus is bounced from woman to woman all across the poem and they are the only ones actively helping. I reckon Robert Graves was on to something when he wrote Homer's Daughter.
I could go on, but all this is to say that I rather think that the Iliad comes from an Anatolic tradition that is closer to Troy itself (also there's the dual viewpoint whereby the Achaians and the Trojans are both presented as fully fleshed people rather than generic heroes and villains - there is no villain in the Iliad, just the circumstance of a war where both sides see their lives terminally disrupted). It was probably composed in Greek but it drinks from local stories that predate the Ionian cities, in the same way that Beowulf was written in English, so to speak, but takes up an older story that does not even happen in England. On the other hand, the Odyssey was definitely composed in an island, though I have no idea which. This is a conclusion partly based on vibes on my part but I am absolutely certain of this. I also believe, with less evidence, that it must be more recent than the Iliad, because it reuses the metre, the epic epithets (Rosy-fingered Dawn etc) and the mannerisms of the Iliad, and it contains a lot of lesser stories linked to the Trojan and other cycles, including prominently the killing of Agamemnon (in a version that differs markedly from the Orestiad, which I find really interesting) but also mentions to Herakles and to the Theban cycle (Oedipus, Amphiaraos). Also it is a lot more organised than the Iliad, although that may be a later editorial effect from when the final text was crystallised. Overall it is more sanitised, more positive, and it has a happy ending, which is in spectacular contrast to the final funereal smoke of the Iliad.
All this reasoning finished clicking in my brain when I visited the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Mycenean objects in that museum are perfectly consistent with the Iliad, down to the long-haired Achaians fighting it out in the decoration of the weapons and signet rings and Odysseus' boar tusk helmet reconstruction. The Odyssey, to me, is much closer to the Minoic culture as represented by the Santorini frescoes and especially the pottery - the swallows, the dolphins, the flowers moving in the breeze. There is a joy in life in that art that is completely absent from the violence of the war and hunting scenes associated with the Myceneans, and I believe it is that clash of mentalities that shows in the two poems. This is why I think there cannot be a single author.
I believe Homer was a real dude because I want to
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It’s just amazing that people are talking about The Odyssey. It’s a great time to be a fan.
In the end, you seem to give Nolan a free pass, which, based on your argument, is reasonable. A tradition in which innovation is intrinsic. Great article.
Great essay! I'd not heard that the idea of different authors for the Iliad and the Odyssey had some scholarly support, but it makes total sense to me. The voices, the zeitgeists just seem really different.
As to multiple bards reinventing the epics over centuries, well, Yeah! Heck, I see 1 or 2 Shakespeare plays a year, and the versions are always different. And with THAT bard we do have actual original texts!
You go, Christopher Nolan!
What a fun article, I think I have even more questions now! Chiefly among them, are there differences in the written versions that have been found?
Yes! In fact, Aristarchus (and some of those other dudes at the library of Alexandria) was a hard core single author truther and combined several inconsistent sources into a canonical “correct” version. There is also a long section of the Iliad that today is regarded as a later addition and not by “Homer”. I don’t know how it came to be included in the Iliad but it certainly has a different moral frame than the rest of it.
This reminded me very much of tutorial no 1 with my old Homer tutor Oliver Taplin ❤️A lovely summary of the key points. I’ve done a couple of articles too, my first one looked at the Bronze Age references and the digamma etc in the poems - if you take it from there we can even take them back 3000 years. I wondered if you had a link to the Calypso scarves as I couldn’t see it on the picture - are you still selling them ?
I think the Greek epics are a testament to how well literary traditions can be preserved through oral transmission. Their recitation in performances and festivals helped cement their place in Greek cultural identity. It was also fortunate that they were eventually written down…otherwise, they might have been lost, as happened to so much of the ancient literature of other civilizations. 😩
This is a lot like discussing the formation of the Old Testament - who, what, where, when, why.
Going out on a limb, and sticking to tradition.. homer was obviously, Francis Bacon.
My hunch is that there’s actually one original Homer and he channeled these 2 colossal works straight from the ‘gods’, as is the case with most literary&artistic works of such importance. And I trust my hunch more than I trust academics who “squabble over the nitty gritties”. 🪽💫 😉
I moved to İzmir, in part, because tradition placed Homer here. There was a Homereion Temple in Smyrna from Hellenistic times onward, although good cases could be made for nearby locations in Chios (the first school of Homeric performers) or Notion/ Colophon, where a cool statue of the bard was unearthed. The texts were written in Ionian Greek, i.e. along the eastern coast of the Aegean. My "vibe" is that Homer was a popular performer of the era to whom the writing, done by pioneers of the Greek language, was ascribed.
My head canon is that for a couple hundred years the stories were orally passed, changing each time, like a stand up comedian honing bits. Then at some point a single Homer wrote down his/her version in the new fangled Greek alphabet. There were other epics in the so called Epic Cycle but the others are now lost. Aristotle says that the “Homeric” ones are better which makes me think there was a Homer that added some value to those. Although the comment by Ines is very interesting. They certainly do feel as though they are written by different authors and the treatment of women is night and day.
I think the Homeric question cannot be answered definitively and unambiguously. However, I also don’t think the answer matters that much: It’s the question itself and the process through which various people seek potential answers that are most important, as well as being comfortable with and open to ambiguity.
Well, since you brought up Nolan's film...
...which I haven't actually seen yet but I've read quite a bit about it, some of it rather hilariously ignorant! There is one thing about the film that makes me want to see it much more than I had initially thought I would partially because of the casting controversy and partially because of the sheer cheek and inventiveness that Nolan brought to the story.
Sinon. Elliot Page only appears as Sinon for a few minutes in the film as Sinon, a character that never actually appeared in The Odyssey but was, rather, from Virgil's Aeneid, written centuries later. Sinon was a reprehensible character in the Aeneid, so much so that the name served as the root for terms like "insidious".
Nolan used Sinon to basically turn the entire narrative on its head by making Sinon an extremely unlucky youth whose death turned him into Odysseus' conscience, even assuming the name upon his return home.
This interests me and, as you described in the debates about who, what Homer was and how Oral Tradition shaped the narrative that we now know, it seems fitting that in this generation, a retelling of the story has a new interpretation...