The 'Odyssey' has its close up (photo: Hannah Culik, 2010)
Some Things You Didn’t Know about Homer
Homer is often considered the beginning of Western literature as we know it, the big bang of story-telling, with his epic, heroic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey radiating out through the subsequent literary works like atoms pulsating through the ever expanding universe. We are right to appreciate Homer, just like the ancient audiences who heard his compositions and transmitted them to slightly less ancient audiences whose own literary works were indebted to him, and so on up until the present day. On this end of the chronological spectrum we have works such as the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and Dan Simmons’ award winning Ilium/Olympos duology.
The title of this article has already suggested to you that I’m about to dissolve some of your preconceived notions of the famous bard. We’ll start with one absolutely crucial fact: Homer did not compose in a vacuum, by which I mean that the stories in the Iliad and the Odyssey were not created by Homer from scratch. Milman Parry revolutionised the field of Homeric scholarship when he connected the use of repeating formulae in Homeric works with the practice of oral composition; that is to say, lines or half lines or epithets (‘swift-footed Achilles’, ‘much-suffering Odysseus’, ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’) which repeat throughout the poem are mnemonic aides which the bard can use these formulae to fill in the lines of hexameter as he thinks up the next few lines. The same poem may be differently elaborated each time it was sung by the bard (or by a different bard), with different elements of the same episode brought in or out of focus as the situation required. Oral poetry is therefore more organic than other forms of literature; content is not fixed, and its malleability depends on the bard’s knowledge of a wider database of available stories. Homer himself therefore composed within a framework of inherited poetic material. At a certain point the Homeric epics as we have them became fixed when they were written down, and that organic process stopped.
A word of warning, though: scholars use the name “Homer” for the Iliad and the Odyssey because traditionally both were ascribed to him, but is now generally thought that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not composed by the same poet. And the Odyssey in particular at specific points suggests that its text was elaborated by multiple poets, due to inconsistencies and unexpected insertions which appear to be borrowings from other poetic genres (for example, book 11 of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus travels to the underworld, sees the insertion of a catalogue of women which has no obvious reason for being there, except that there is a specific genre of oral catalogue poetry which the poet may be drawing on). So when I use the name “Homer” in this article, understand that it stands for a much more complicated idea.
The fact is that the works of “Homer” may very well not even be the first extant Greek text that we have. For we also have some of the works of Hesiod: the Theogony, the Works and Days (and the Catalogue of Women is also very often ascribed to him as well). Relative dating has pinned down both Homer and Hesiod to somewhere within the 8th century BC, but we come into serious problems when we attempt to decide which of these two poets came first. For Hesiod has many commonalities with Homer such as dialect, meter, and diction, which suggest that the two poets composed with the same literary inheritance as a starting point. Yet the relationship between the two poets is one that is hotly debated, particularly concerning which came first. When we do find specific similarities between the two poets it is therefore difficult to know who influenced whom, or whether it is even a case of influence in this way rather than influence more broadly by the conventions of the oral tradition within which both poets fit.
The differences between the two poets stand out most obviously: Homer created large-scale stories on the deeds of heroes of the past from an ostensibly objective and impersonal narrative stance, while Hesiod created shorter works, and in the case of the Works and Days, his work focused on more “domestic” themes, from an explicitly subjective narrative stance with didacticism specifically in mind. In the Theogony Hesiod described the origins of the Greek gods and how they established control over the cosmos. The Works and Days begins with a rebuke by Hesiod of his brother Perses for using the law courts to gain more than his fair share of their inheritance; this leads on to an explanation of why life is so hard for mortals (Prometheus stole fire, Zeus sent Pandora – the first woman – as punishment for mankind; the description of the Metallic Races of Mankind, starting from the Golden Age and degrading into the wretched Iron Age in which Hesiod feels he is now living), which in turn leads on to agricultural advice, which ultimately turns into a list of gnomoi, such as, “Don’t face the sun while you’re pissing” (Works and Days, 727). Hesiod set out to teach precepts that would be useful to the average Greek during peacetime, and as a result, as you can see from this quotation, his work does not have the “elevated tone” that Homer’s does indeed have. It is because of this difference that many scholars believe that Homer did come before Hesiod, but this reason is extremely subjective, and attempts to argue that one composed before the other, based on internal or even external grounds have been inconclusive.
But there are similarities between Homer and Hesiod as well. The quarrel between Hesiod and Perses concerning their inheritance which, reportedly, inspires Hesiod to compose the Works and Days sees Perses’ exploitation of the crooked judicial system which subverts the source of justice, Zeus, from whom kings derive their power and right to arbitrate. In the Iliad the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon is started because of one man’s taking of what the other believes to be his, and through this quarrel we see how material goods become crucial status symbols. The idea that it is wrong to take by force what is legally another man’s property is crucial to the Odyssey; Odysseus’ final vengeance upon the men who have been degrading his household in his absence has divine sanction because of the underlying social conventions and understanding of dikē (justice), in which commonly accepted nomoi (customs) are safeguarded by the gods themselves. So presumably the basic link between Hesiodic and Homeric poetry is an understanding of the social concerns of contemporary Greece which informs their composition, creating characters (taking “Hesiod” and “Perses” to be “characters” to some extent in the Works and Days) who behave according to customs and divine laws under which the audience itself in a normative situation operates. So although there are obvious differences between the two poets, they appear to both be operating within the same understanding of social and divine laws. In Homer moral lessons are usually to be interpreted through the portrayal of a series of actions and their conclusions (although speeches often have an explicit moral ‘message’), whereas Hesiod’s lessons are ostensibly the actual point of his poetry, and are therefore explicitly stated.
So even through this brief survey of early Greek hexameter poetry which focuses only on Homer and Hesiod, we begin to see that the concept of “Homer” which is so often referred to actually stands for a much more complicated web of meaning. To a certain extent the questions of whether Homer stands for one bard or many, and whether Hesiod or Homer composed first, do not matter that much. Yet realising that Homer is not simply a solitary genius creating poignant poems about the sufferings of mankind during war and peace alike is important; when we realise this we can take Homer within a broader cultural context. And although we may still look to Homer with the admiration that he deserves, we may now also see that he is not the big bang we thought he was after all, but instead a link to a cultural and literary heritage that goes even further back into our own development as a species.
