Was Homer a Real Person?
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- čas přidán 2. 07. 2024
- The Greek poet Homer's name is famous, but did a man named Homer really compose the Iliad and the Odyssey? Did this renowned bard ever exist? This video will fill you in on the problems associated with these questions.
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The Iliad and Odyssey were not written by Homer. They were written by another blind poet of the same name.
Jeez, a guy dips out for a couple thousand years for some well-earned self-care and people begin to question your very existence. Showbiz is brutal.
😂
Keep up the excellent work, Dr Miano 👏
His middle name was Jay, last name Simpson, as forseen and told ages ago.
Great video though, I enjoy every take on the topic including the ones leaving out city of Springfield, and this particular one is stuffed with useful info! Thank you Mr Miano!
To many modern nationalistic Greeks, Homer is like a saint. To question his poems as "facts" or even more his very existence is treated like anti-Hellenic sacrilege.
@gregorynixon2945: Thanks to encrusted scholarship and its books about books about books.
@@craigbhill Huh?
I've never been able to fathom the origins of Homer and now I understand why. Thanks for clarifying my lack of clarity on the subject.
Michael Wood covered much of this topic in his series “In Search of the Trojan War”. Though that series was romanticized a bit, it still bore the seeds of excellent scholarly research. He showed that, even today in Ireland and Turkey, there are professional bards, raised very young, to memorize perfectly and performed epic poems.
In Turkey, he showed how professional bards are hired to perform at special events and the men will sit for hours on end, listening to the song.
@@LyleFrancisDelp In India as well we have such bards. Though they don't provide accurate stories, but fun and romantic version of events
It is something existing in many places. The Icelandic sagas, Australian aboriginals and many North American tribes have or had similar traditions too.
So we know it is plausible that the epics were oral first but it is also plausible that the original author (or authors) wrote them down himself (or themselves) as well.
What we can prove is that parts of the Illiad were based on older stories or poems and not all of them from the same time. The boar head helmets Homer describes for instance did not exist when the epic was written down since they disappeared after the bronze age collapse. Some of the heroes have equipment we can trace to around 1250 BCE but there are a few that are a couple of centuries earlier too.
Other things are the way they were when the epic was made, like the use of chariots.
So Homer clearly did have access to older stories and/or poems but also added his own twist to things.
Eric H Cline wrote a rather good book on the subject. He does have the advantage of being both an archaeologists who dug in the area as well as an historian.
@@loke6664 Not to mention the angled walls Homer described, which were fully buried in “his” day (assuming it was one person).
@@LyleFrancisDelp True, but there is also some issues with some of the walls described.
He do describe the citadel walls with surprising details but we never found the walls around the entire city which have confused archaeologists since the day of Schliemann.
I think the reason is that those walls isn't in Troy who either didn't have a city wall or had one made out of wood (post holes are easier to miss or could have disappeared due to agriculture) and that part was taken from another siege somewhere else.
So at times we get amazing accuracy, at other times it is all wrong which either means that Homer made those things up or used sources about other sieges and added them in to make a more interesting story.
Well, or that the oral stories changed a lot from when the war happened to when Homer compiled the story.
@@loke6664 Cline is just fascinating!
Thank you so much for this! Please make a similar video on the historicity of Socrates!
So - Crates ---- _'Like the sands in an ⏳Hour Glass⏳ - so are the days of our lives'_ --- Bill & Ted --- 😎
Little Iliad … and we’re still waiting for Iliad 2: Dead by Dawn.
Don't forget, Iliad Reloaded.
2 Ill 2 iad
I thought it was called, "The Trojans Strike Back."
as we discussed in school a long time ago: The Iliad and Odyssee were not created by Homer, but by someone else with the same name.
That would just make this person Homer.
That is, I think, the joke lmao
That I call a strike of luck, getting the recognition deserved by someone else just because of confusion around the name, guess Homer number-1 got pretty annoyed?
@@brunopereira6789yeah I've heard the same joke made about Shakespeare. Apparently the gag's been in circulation for well over a century, for all I know dating back to Shakespeare (or Homer) himself.
Exactly, what really matters is the writings.
Closer to our own time, we have Shakespeare's plays, which were written for performance and must have had a somewhat fluid text since they contain topical references to politics and religion, and some low humour, which may not all have been appropriate for a public theatre or a private performance in a nobleman's house. Like modern comedians, authors, directors and performers must have adjusted their performance to suit the audience. The plays were published unofficially by members of the audience before official editions were sold. In the ensuing four centuries, directors have continued to update, censor, or otherwise "improve" what is performed, even though the published texts stay much the same.
I once saw a version performed in Jive, it was startling and possibly a little more understandable to a modern white audience than the Elizabethan original. I've actually wished to see more of that in various dialects and languages. I would definitely like to see Goethe's Faust in Elizabethan and Jive, having waded through the dated Hochdeutsch!
Both Homer and Shakespeare were written by the Earl of Oxford. :-)
The big difference is that Shakespeare's plays in early modern times some 400+ years ago were actually WRITTEN to be performed from the start and always had at least a manuscript version so that the players could learn their lines. Those texts undoubtedly evolved as they were "workshopped" extensively in Shakespeare's time, and have never ceased to be "adapted" since then.
But it's quite different dynamic to have a purely oral text emerge from a serial community of bards over many decades or even centuries and to then be transmitted with many more refinements over several more centuries before (finally) being committed to writing in a more or less "definitive" form that had a chance of surviving for posterity.
The Homeric epics are by no means the only examples we know of. The south Asian epics and Vedas are both longer and older than Homer and Hesiod but were similarly orally transmitted for many centuries.
I suspect this is also true of the even more ancient Sumerian and other Mesopotamian stories we now know about from deciphered cuneiform clay tablets: these too undoubtedly emerged in pre-literate times and were only later committed to writing. Some of them - like a certain flood story - even made their way into much later works, like the Bible's book of Genesis, which most scholars agree dates to AFTER the Homeric epics were written down, i.e. no earlier than in Achaemenid or even Hellenistic times and something like two millennia after they first arose in Sumeria!
The low humour was very appropriate for public performances in the Elizabethan period. Theatre of any type was not counted as a high-brow pursuit at all.
@@PeloquinDavid The most ancient story of all seems to be Jack and the Beanstalk, the "English Fairytale" first printed in the 18th century, whose origins are said to be at least 5000 years ago. Our Jack knocks the ancient gods into a cocked hat!
Love the video professor. It seems the quality of your videos has also greatly improved. I look forward to more
It's fairly well attested that Homer was the creation of a single author and existed no earlier than April 19, 1987.
Terrance Howard, it's nice to meet you!
@@Carlton-B Terrance Howard ???
D'oh!
The First original Simpsons comment 😂👍🏿
@@cyberpotato63 Oops! Wrong Homer! I'm slow, but I get there. Sorry for calling you Terrance Howard.
Really a scholarly explanation on a very important topic. Please make a video on epic of Gilgamesh.
Been a long time since I read about swift footed Achilles and Bright Eyed Athene
Robin Lane Fox has written an excellent book on this recently called Homer and His Illiad
Yes he was and he lives in a town called Springfield
On he Greek island of Tyre Fyre.
Homeric historiography is a fascinating topic! My introduction to the idea the Odyssey came later was a teacher bringing up the psychologist Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis of the development of consciousness and agency that could have taken place between it and the Iliad. The differences in language, geography, and mythological references are so cool to have learned about. Thanks!
Question: Couldn't it be that the described Helena in the Iliad is rather Hellas, so, Greece itself?
Helen's myth has correspondent myths in other IE cultures and matches the motif of the marriage of a sun/light goddess with horse twin brothers, which means the myth is much older than the Greek language or the Greek people and is most likely a reflex of an Indo-European myth.
@@sekharapramod7819 - is it not so that the name of her mother, Leda, also can mean "woman" or something? Something that can indicate the story are just a generic story/fairytale about some "people" long time ago?
While the words may look superficially similar, they are really quite distinct. Hellas has two L, i.e. a long consonant, Helena only one (things like that don't get changed willy-nilly, i.e. we would have to prove that this change was a regular occurrence). All forms derived from Hellas (like the mythical forefather Hellēn, or the people, the Hellēnes) have a long E after the Ls (an eta), while Helena has a short E (an epsilon) after the L, again quite different sounds.
Also during Homer's time, e.g. in the Iliad itself, the Greeks are _not_ called Hellenes. That comes later; in the Iliad, the Hellenes are only one Greek tribe among many, while the Greeks as a whole are Argeioi, Danaoi, or Achaioi. So the myth around Helena couldn't have meant her to be a symbol for Greece in total, as that was not a thing when these poems were written down.
Thank you, Professor! Great video, very comprehensive! Best regards from Brazil!
Excellent summary, David!
Nicely done, sir!
So good as usual. A luxury here in youtube. You have such a clear way of narrating an otherwise complex and unreachabe subject, that keeps us engaged till the end.
Great, thanks David 👋
Just discovered your channel today. Great work!
Welcome!
I've always thought (liked to think really) that the original storyteller was remembered, even after the editors got a hold of the story.
Absolutely fascinating!! I fully agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey had at least, each one, a single main author and are not a hodge podge of separate poems strung together. It is my understanding linguistic analysis makes that unlikely. Although absolutely none of that means that the poet(s) didn't use and rely on a very well developed tradition of epic poetry for stories and lots and lots of stock phrases. As for the question about whether or not one poet or two wrote the Iliad and Odyssey, I agree that two separate authors is most likely. (Thanks for the info., that there appears to have been an ancient tradition of someone not, initially, named Homer creating the Odyssey. Didn't know that!!) I am although partial to the notion, this is pure speculation, that "Homer" composed the Iliad when "Homer" was young and composed the Odyssey when he was an old man; thus accounting, perhaps, for the differences between the texts.
One of my favorite pieces of Classical scholarship is M. I. Finley's The World of Odysseus which sought to at least partially reconstruct the social world of the Iliad and Odyssey. Finley concluded that socially those two poems reflected the social world the late dark ages and early archaic period, not Mycenaean Greece. Of course Finley recognized that there were Mycenaean survivals in the texts, like the predominance of bronze, the boars tusk helmets etc., but the society depicted was quite different. Having read translations of Mycenaean linear b tablets I see a vast social gap between the very bureaucratic social world of the Mycenaean culture, with its many layers of offices, statuses etc., and the far more simple, far more local social world has depicted in the poems. (The almost total lack of writing in the poems, aside from one ambiguous reference is certainly quite different from the mania for record keeping in the Mycenaean world.) And as a side insert it appears that the Mycenaeans assigned far more importance than than archaic or classical Greeks to chthonic gods. In fact it appears Poseidon, has lord of the underworld, earthquakes etc., not Zeus was the chief god. (Or maybe it was a goddess.) Such differences make it highly unlikely that the social world depicted in the poems is that of Mycenaean Greece. Whether or not Finley's placement of the social world is correct is another matter.
If those who place the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey sometime in the mid to late 7th century are correct it makes it even less likely that either the Iliad or the Odyssey preserves much accurate history of the so-called Trojan war.
A couple of years ago I listened to a recording of someone reciting the Iliad in the original Homeric Greek. I do not understand Greek at all but it is sounded astoundingly good!!! Whoever actually wrote it was a genius!!!
There are a number of stories about the heroes of the Trojan war outside of the Iliad. For example the death of Agamemnon, rhe judgement of Paris, and the the Trojan horse. It seems like someone took a number of elements that overlapped and compiled them into a unified story.
Deeply fascinating, cheers!
Homer is a TV cartoon character.
When were theaters established? Oral or written, they were performed, so an understanding of the theater would add to the conversation.
While there have been some attempts to place the Greek theatre earlier, it really only appears in our sources (written or archaeological) in the 6th century, so long after the Iliad was written down.
@@varana thank you
I remember hearing from somewhere that Homer's details about the layout of the battlements, and chronology of the siege of Troy have been vindicated by archeology, and therefore it's highly likely that Homer was a contemporary if not eyewitness to said siege. Though I don't know about the veracity of this claim
This reinforces my thinking that Schliemann, was full of it. Supposedly, following the text that led him to Troy. Meanwhile, there is still an argument about whether or not Homer was one person or an amalgam of a bunch of separate storytellers. How can the details be so precise, if it's a bunch of different people telling the story over a long period of time. Especially considering most of the details of the stories were conveyed orally. I guess it goes to show that people believe the story that they personally like the most.
One of your very best videos.
Absolutely fascinating. thanks.
Love your work Dr. Miano but I think I mic boom would do you well. I can hear every time you touch your table, thought someone was closing doors in my house. Lol
I really love these authorship videos. Really fascinating. Any thoughts on doing one on Sun Tzu?
A good idea
Thank you
Some olive farmer is gonna find a stone with the words "The society of No Homers." and that will change everything.
Wow thank you. Superb.
You have given an excellent update to things I have learned from introductions and much older texts. My notion of 800 bc is properly dispelled. My first inklings into these matters came from an Isaac Asimov text book written in 1960.
Always look forward to your new offerings. Still I am eager to learn more about the announcement that they have begun deciphering the Herculaneum carbon scrolls. Any news there you might provide?
Thanks again and keep up the good work
This doesn't happen only in ancient history; people have the same questions about Shakespeare, and he lived only 400 years ago
The evidence for Shakespeare is as solid as almost any of his contemporaries and for a man of his position in his time. We can be pretty sure he lived and he wrote. Homer on the other hand is completely misty.
Thank you for another lovely muse on ancient history. Homeric poetry is a universe unto itself, but learning there are modern day likely oral descendants in a way in the balkans was fun to learn.
Has there been anymore archaeology done at ithici (ithica)..?
I heard that the island that wr thought was ithica was actually not..
I hope u do an episode on this topic..
Love the channel..
All killer, no filler..lol
And a thousand years from now they'll conflate the Homer of Ionia with the Homer of Springfield.
Thanks!🎉
Excellent!
The similar book in India the epic Mahabharata which is also said to have inspired from homers Iliad. It is said to have written by “Vyasa”… and the meaning of Vyasa is the compiler.
11:32 the Iliad has 193,000, reading aloud at 150 wpm that's 21 HOURS. Maybe the ancient greek was more terse, but it still would have been way too long to hear in one sitting.
I have thought about this problem also. It seems to me that the poem is recited over the course of a week or more. A traveling bard would make an easier living if he had a week of material to recite in front of a royal court, instead of a two-hour version.
People had longer attention spans back then. I blame TikTok!
Outside of the Greek speaking world, there are plenty of oral traditions that can maybe give us a glimpse into how stories work.
For example, there are still many Farsi entertainers who showcase stories from the Shahnameh, or travelling storytellers who may come down and tell you the stories everyone is kinda sorta familiar with.
Now, if i were to be the person paying, I'd request of him the stories i like, and the formula kinda stays the same. The details vary slightly, but stories are kinda similar. I'd request, say, the stories of Rostam, and that in itself is a pretty massive tale. Rostam is born of a C section, does 7 out of the 12 labours or Heracles, but is most famous for the love story and tragedy.
Basically he has a midnight rendezvous with the daughter of a castellan, and gives her an amulet as a keepsakes. Much later, he hears of an upstart warrior known as Sohrab raised by the enemy, they fight, and are mostly evenly matched. In the end Rostam prevails and delivers a fatal blow but realises that the warrior sohrab wears his amulet, so is his son. Then gradually everyone dies.
A professional would need to remember specific names and stuff, which is easily done, and my family and kids get to have a nice hour or two to kill off.
I imagine Homer to be that kind of bloke, you hire him out after the harvest is brought in, get your family and friends together, he tells you stories, you put him up for a few days and give him some produce or money, everyone has a great time. The real life dude probably was the best at his job, and is therefore remembered.
"repetition and set phrases" and all I can think of is "AND IT CAME TO PASS..."
Learning now what I thought I knew from school.
Since I'm older it's not much of a surprise that understanding is evolving.
I'm of the opinion it will evolve much further and faster than ever before.
So many young mind's overthinking and speculating will likely lead to finds and further understanding..
Now my mortal opinion is expressed I'll get to the Learning part good Sir.
Thanks Prof. Miano, for your fascinating work. I've read similar analyses of authorship [development] of the Torah and associated texts, the letters of Paul [a.k.a. Saul of Tarsus], the various iterations of the biblical and non canonical associated works, and, of course, the authorship of Shakespeare's works. What I find astounding is how so many of the most important literary works of our civilization are so lacking in certainty! This seems to also be true of the authorship of borrowed non-Western works like the Art of War perhaps authored, if not written in its entirety, by Sun Tzu. This is amazing, fascinating and frustrating, but it certainly provides food for thought. Thanks again for all of your invariably interesting and insightful work.
Thank you.
That people remember oral poems still resonates today. We call this the various genres of music. Songs learned as a child can be remembered as an old person. So a lyric that may be a hundred years old can still be appreciated in a modern setting. As things are, due to our ability to have original recordings, there are many young people that are discovering songs that are 50-100: years old.
True. A good example would be 'Scarborough Fair', which was made famous (again) by Simon & Garfunkel
@@lf7877 Yes or even” Greensleeves” written by Henry VIII. Allegedly to Anne Boleyn. For the ancient past, however we do not have any type of music notation, so the poems attributed to Homer may be similar to Rap. Music Notation only was invented in the 900’s CE.
I believe that Iliad and Odyssey were both part of the cylce of poems about the end of the Mycenaean Age. (The end because we do not know anything about Greek myths/legends with take place after the Trojan War and do not lead with its fallout.) It seems to me that at some time several poets decided to collect all those stories and turn them into a cycle of poems. Sadly most of them seem to be lost.
Hi Dr. Miano...I would like to hear more about your opinion on the excavations at Keeladi and Adichanalur in India. Some archeologists seem to be of the opinion that Keeladi script is similar to IVC.
Very interesting, thanks. I wish more people would consider your arguments on the difficulty of transitioning from an oral to a written tradition. The whole foundation of the ancient aliens hypothesis is shattered when oral tradition cannot be taken at face value.
Arguments over Shakespeare and his work show how difficult it can be to pin things down even for a time that is comparatively very recent and that we have much greater knowledge of. They also show how competition to make some new 'discovery' or develop a new theory can distort people's thinking - eg the whole 'Shakespeare wasn't written by Shakespeare' movement. So good luck to anyone who wishes to get a definitive answer to the 'question' of Homer.
It's more on-the-spot to say "Shake-speare wasn't written by Shakspere" as the name introduced on the dedication of VENUS AND ADONIS addressed to Henry Wriothesley differs from the name of the man from Stratford. I suspect that Shakspere became affiliated with the public theatre as a shareholder (etc.) because the Earl of Oxford saw the advantage in having a man around whose name was awfully similar to his own pseudonym, and so made it worth Will's while.
I've always thought that Homer wasn't a single person but rather the name given to the author of these stories that had been around for a long time, a bit like Aesop. I'm also fond of the idea that homer is a title, rather than a name, and it's like our word bard.
I've seen scholars that say the text we have for Homer's works are consistent with one person having authored it, i.e the writing style and use of words is consistent, but we dont have the stories in their original oral form and the way ancient books were copied means that we're probably looking at a version copied down by a single scribe who could have easily "polished" the writing to make it consistent.
Of course complete works can be memorised easily.
Think of how you could probably sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody word for word, or any number of the epic songs you've grown to love, which are as much a part of your personal cultural heritage as the works of Homer and his contemporaries were to the people and bards of their and following times.
But those details can be remembered because you hear those things over and over. I know plenty of people who still get the words wrong, or don't even know them after hearing the same tune a hundred times. Radio, Mtv, records and tapes meant that you had access to that song as often as you wanted. Some of those albums came with the lyrics written out on the sleeve, so there was no question of what they lyric was. Hearing a song or poem a couple of times would not be enough exposure to it for the average person to remember it verbatim, at least I couldn't.
Great video - thank you. Wouldn't the narrowing of the origin dates for both poems down to little more than a 100 years and the ancient attribution to one author (even if we don't have concrete evidence of that attribution until 100 years later) point to a single author for both? Is it so certain that the parts of the Odyssey that indicate a more western Greek author weren't later additions?
There was a book published in 1991 (in paperback, 1996) titled "HOMER AND THE ORIGIN OF THE GREEK ALPHABET" by Barry B. Powell. The basic thesis is that somebody adapted the consonants-only Phoenician script at some point, purposely altering it so as to be able to represent ALL the sounds spoken by Greeks -- not just the consonants, but also the vowels. For example, 'aleph' -- which is a kind of consonantal glottal stop in languages like Hebrew -- was changed to represent the vowel 'ah', and spelled 'A', of course -- which is differentiated by transliteration with Heb. aleph, usually using an apostrophe ['] to denote that it isn't a vowel like alpha. Powell's book is quite a marvelous work of scholarship, and it wouldn't surprise me if it were correct in its thesis. Imagine if somebody back then was so enamored of the ILIAD and ODYSSEY that he or she, hearing it recited, wanted desperately to have a written version of it available, so as not to lose it to faulty memory for future generations, and then got the wonderful idea to take an existing script -- the Phoenician one, which only had consonants -- and modify it so as to be able to represent the sounds of Greek, including the VOWELS.
I believe people have always had a drive to preserve history. Before writing I'm sure they devised ways to do that.
Most of the Homeric stories were originally oral traditions and stories and some may have gone way back into the proto Indo European past as there are many echoes of them -especially in Indian texts like the story of Odysseus and the suitors.
Are there other ancient stories, even from other cultures about the same subjects? I think that would have bearing. Maybe further computer analysis of the different variations can help solve the issue, like historical genetics has done for lineages (and migrations etc.) of people.
Language changes over time and Homer's poems are full of archaisms, because poetry preservs ancient forms of speech. The best option for dating Homer's poems is linguistics. This video was not bad.
😮 my mouth dropped.....thank all the Rome and Greek gods for you , David! 😂 You teach this 34 year old so much that I was misled about for years!!!!
Thanks for another thoughtful and balanced view! We had grossly misleading theories of collective folk orality acting as unconscious quasi-author for New Testament texts in Older Form Criticism (K L Schmidt, Dibelius and Bultmann and a massively influential school based on them, around the 1900s-1920s, influential until today) , comparing ancient texts with the likes of Sadhu Sundar Singh orality rather than with other ancient texts. This theory was especially bizarre in the face of quite coherent texts claimed to be the result of an unsoncious folk/community process within a few decades, opposed to centuries. From my view, in his Poetics, Aristotle had a much smarter view on works like the Odyssey than modern proponents of either insane degrees of orality or insane assumptions of authorial genius. Aristotle was modern enough to compare "Homer's" works with other hero epics like Panyassis' Heracles stories, observing a striking difference: while Panyassis seemed to have collected and retold all Heracles stories available into a merely additive (epeisodion) account, putting episode after episode, Aristotle saw a much better organized (epeisodic) whole in a text like the Odyssey, where parts (without too much overall digression) were related to the whole in a meaningful way: a clear signal of well done authorship - but not claiming it happened without any relation to former tradition (may it have been oral and/or written). Seeing that overarching conecpt of the whole is not the same as extreme unitariansm, which from my view is just as much a nonsensical view on ancient texts (hardly any of them is "unitarian": many show tensions, breaks, historic errors, tendencies etc.) as is pure oral theory. After all I can see, as soon ancient writing is established, oral and written communication simply coexists, but with written works gaining massive importance for intertextuality over time. And last not least modern linguistic genre research like SFL shows how both being part of existing genre conventions, and working as author within and beyond these conventions, is part of the same process, aimed at practical social goals. Every "either - or" (either collective oral or authorial written, either just convention or genius author etc.) is plain nonsense by defintion.
Love an ancient mystery!
The microphone buzz on this is pretty rough. You could run it through Audacity's noise reduction filter or something
I think I just got Homer-shamed
Is Hesiod - Works and days subject to similar analysis?
Hail to the Divine Homer!
I saw him in a cartoon so he's definitely real and surprisingly living well with his family.
I can't wait for more charred Vesuvian scrolls to be read. So much knowledge just waiting for us. Maybe some answers to the Homer question is in there.
I've been waiting decades for them to be read, I hope I live long enough to find out what's in them... Atlantis anyone? (Hint: Cyclades Plateau)
Greetings from the BIG SKY of Montana. I've read 'most' of Homer's writings and I'd have to say those works are from one guy.
It doesn't matter if Homer, Socrates, or any other historical writer existed. What matters is the works attributed to them. The Illiad is one of the greatest works produced by man. Touching on themes of loyalty, questioning authority, the treatment of enemy combatants, among others.
Must read for anyone who considers themselves "well-read"
Your comment would be appreciated more on a literature channel than on a history channel.
When I read the Iliad, I immediately thought of the guslar tradition. They recite poems of heroes of old that end up shared, adapted and reworked from one area to the other until you have what are beasically heroic and tragic cycles being told throughout the western Balkans. Also, some personalities who were morally ambiguous at best, played for both sides in conflicts and in any case were not particularly important end up as great heroes for one side (Marko Kraljević), which to me is a warning against reading too much into the historicity of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The same kinds of Oral tradition have been detailed in Irish and Welsh poetry. The poetics involved are extremely complicated and take years if not decades to learn or master and are thousands of years old and the role of the poet in these societies is a critical institution to those cultures. That Homer was a single individual cannot be seen as that farfetched or the continuity of these stories and poems underestimated. The notion that these needed to be written down is absurd. English adventures into Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries were astounded the amount of memorization the Irish poets possessed, entire cycles and thousands of stories, and this persisted into the early 20th century. The extant works in oral traditions surviving implies there could have been a single singer or bard (Filidh in Irish) whose name gets attached to the works. Obviously does not mean Homer was a real guy but dismissing that out of hand would be ignoring some of the history that an oral tradition can actually include. We have the same dilemma in the poetry attributed to Taliesin and Aneurin in Britian or Amergin in Ireland. Did those Bards actually exist? Well, unless a certain someone named Prof Miano invents a time machine, we will never know. A really good start is The Role of the Poet in Early Societies, Bloomfield and Dunn.
The more the mind feasts
the hunger high devours it.
~ john darc
If my nerd friends and I can spend all day watching the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings movies, I think ancient Greeks could sit through a few chapters of the Iliad.
Thanks for this, David.
I have previously used apps to learn 13 languages, and wondered if there are any such apps that could be used to learn ancient Hellenic, Akkadian etc.
Are you aware whether any are available, or the potential for profit in getting one off the ground?
I know I'd be throwing my money at the developer!
Not that I know of
One thing I've noticed from similarities and differences in language families and bordering languages, I wonder about the ancient pronunciation of upsilon in placenames (among other things).
We read the 'y' and think Pilos, My-see-nee etc, but in archaic Greek, the letter was pronounced as an 'oo', so shouldn't we be saying Pulos/Poolos, Mukunae?
If not, why not?
I noticed that in Ukraine, there are repeated instances where locals from one area will pronounce the ancient upsilon in their Cyrilic Ukrainian, and speakers from a different area will speak with the modern 'Y'.
They also flip with the G/H consonants, among others.
This must come, to some extent, from the ancient Greek influence around the Black Sea and Crimea/southern Ukraine, and is a contributing factor in the Russian desire to keep the connection to ancient Greece, which can only be kept if those territories are held.
The Tsars only called themselves so because they wanted to be thought of as the descendants of the ancients.
Duh! Was Marge a real person?
I was reading The Odyssey in portuguese and there was always a repetition: "Penélope, a mais cordata entre as mulheres", imagine my shock when later they changed the cordata to another word, this took me out and I wondered if it was a mistake by the translator or he choose it because it was added by another writer.
Also, do you believe is there any chance to find copies of the lost epic cycles or it is all gone? Not fragments but the full texts.
Hopefully all these are hiding somewhere in the Pompeii scrolls, we can hope.
You mean Homer as in Homer bucket?
You’re dating yourself 😂
@@WilliamSanderson-zh9dq It's boo kay! 😉
Of course he existed. I saw him. I was there...
Honestly, I think he was real. Like you said, an editor. The stories existed, but the version we have is the one Homer synthesized and made it easy to write (as the Greek alphabet was beginning to coalesce) and later study.
But did he see you?
@@pattheplanter With his own two eyes. 🙃
Someone wrote those poems, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me.
"Homer" is slang for "home run." This implies that the Ancient Greeks invented baseball. Why this wasn't asserted in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" is a mystery for the ages. 🙂
What would be your guess as to why Homer was acredited for the Odyssey in ancient times?
All those so-called Helenic (Ancient Greek) dudes weren't Greeks as their names have quite popular equivalent names up to nowadays. Homer is Kumar or Qumar, Socrate is Shukhrat, Shakrat. There are many parallels between Illiyad and a Kyrgyz apos called: "Manas". A lot of so called Greek gods have Turkic equivalents e.g. "Hermes" - "Kermez", "Heracles" - "Kerogly", "Appolo" - "Topalan". If the history wouldn't have been politicized so much we'd have had way more explicit picture of antiquity.
They are similar because the languages and mythologies descend from previous cultures. In fact they can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-Europeans and there have been efforts to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language and mythology.
Homer and Societies were Greek, as were the stories attributed to Homer.
@@clwho4652 Indo-Europeans couldn't have that mythology as neither Germans, nor Romans, nor Slavics or Indians had those heroes. They all inherited it way way later after, I am afraid at renaissance.
@@channel_archistoriac Did you just claim the The Iliad and Odyssey Greece in the Renaissance? Alt-history people like you always prove that you people don't care about real history, only what your ideologies that you people only have because you lack your own sense of self esteem and overall sense of self. You, nor your culture or nationality are are in anyway shape or form special, and anyone that tells you that you or they are, they are users and abusers who would use you, abuse you, throw you in the trash, and do the same to your loved ones.
The oldest evidence of Homers work comes from pottery with verses that date from about the 3rd century CE from Homer have been found, in a temple to Zeus, with written in Greek. These are not the only fragments that long predate the renaissance and are written in Greek or Latin. And of course these stories are set in the Greek world.
Who ever Homer was, he or they were Greek.
You, nor your culture or nationality are not special, regardless of what it is, Turkish, American, Greek, Japanese, or whatever. If any one tells that you, your culture, or your nationality are, utterly destroy them before they harm you or someone you care about.
yeah, you should talk about style.How did you manage to put this 2 mismatching colors on you ?
?
Whether there is/was an actual Homer or not, it doesn’t change the stories and their impact one bit.
Love me a discussion of Classical lit!
1. Homer and Hesiodos were cousins . Their fathers were brothers .
2. Most of the theories are somehow right except for not being one person .
3. The mostly right thing you mentioned is the dynamic nature of oral tradition . Do you know what oral tradition is called in Greek ? Mythos !
4. I knew a guy (he is dead now) who played the "bouzouki" and used to sing the complete Iliad in his own words . Poetically .
What I find amazing is that some of his stories are repeated in the Gospels.
literary (or textual) criticism has one huge problem. A problem so incurable as to leave all literary criticism able to only provide perspectives, not definitive conclusions. What is that problem and how is it still a part of the later paradigms? Well, you read into the text what you bring to it. This is not generally some evil intent, but arrogance, cultural bias, and of course, a small library of comparison. The other problem is that we just do not know what we do not know about things in the second millennium BC. No universal assumptions can be made so at best, all we can say is, "we don't know, but we suspect".
Not exactly a solid foundation for conclusions.
My problem with Iliad and Odyssey is the English translations. There seems to be one definitive version of each in Greek (various ancient manuscripts notwithstanding), but there is no single version in English. The reason is copyright law. I once thought that I would replace my paperback Penguin editions with nice hardcover copies only to look at the first verses of a hardcover version, and see such a drastic difference in words and style that it was hard to recognize the same poem. I ended up sticking with my paperbacks. Even if someone devises a perfect couplet that accurately reproduces part of Homer's works, no one else can use it because of copyright issues. It would be nice to see copyright law set aside so that one definitive version in English could be produced.
Yes, I could learn Greek - I have been trying for around twenty years, but I am never going to be proficient enough to enjoy the epics.
Read the Richmond Lattimore translations of the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY. He translates them line-by-line, using an English hexameter to match (as closely as possible) the contents and flow of the original lines, which of course were written in hexameters. Also, read them ALOUD, as if you're a Bard reciting the story before an audience. Maybe read 1 or 2 books a day, spread over the course of 12-to-24 days, depending, on each epic. Think of it as the equivalent of "binge-watching" a TV show or series of movies. Maybe -- if you can swing it -- provide different voices for each major character . . . mimicking famous actors from TV and film, like Christopher Walken as Priam, for example, or Sean Connery as Agamemnon, that sort of thing. For all we know, the bardic poets who anciently recited these poems before a royal audience might've done just that, using different voices to give the dialogue from different characters. And, heh heh, maybe record your recitations and post 'em here on CZcams. It could be 'epic'!
@@patricktilton5377 Thanks for the information.
what happened to the Ancient History being politicized video? I had saved to watch it later... and it was removed?
Temporarily down, but it will return.
What was his last name?
I had no idea there was a Homeric Question!
There will always be some measure of doubt about the past. More evidence changes the discussion so we keep digging in the earth and into the text itself.