Searching for the Historical Homer

Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > Winter 1998

Did a man named Homer really live? And are the poems attributed to him, the Iliad and the Odyssey, rooted in actual history? Generations of scholars have wrestled with these problems and provided widely different solutions. But does it really matter? Perhaps the scholarly disputes over the historicity of Homer and his tales are just a game, a fruitless academic debate with no bearing on our appreciation of the epics or our understanding of ancient Greece. It does matter, and it involves more than mere gamesmanship or scholarly contest.1 The poet and his poems can reveal a great deal […]

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Footnotes

Linear B is the hieroglyphic script used to record the Greek language spoken around 1450–1200 B.C. by the Mycenaeans.

Endnotes

For a good description of the issues, see Ian Morris, “The Use and Abuse of Homer,” Classical Antiquity 5 (1986), pp. 81–138.

Quoted in Ulrich Eberl, “Behind the Myth of Troy,” Daimler Benz High Tech Report (January 1995), p. 17.

Cornelius Vermeule III provides a good survey of Troy’s importance in “Neon Ilion and Ilium Novum: Kings, Soldiers, Citizens and Tourists at Classical Troy,” in The Ages of Homer, ed. Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris (Austin: Univ. of Texas, 1995), pp. 467–482.

Plato, Laws 901A.

Quoted by the late second-century author Athenaeus in 8.347E.

Andrew Lang,Homer and the Epic (London: Lang, Longmans, Green and Co., 1893), p. 8.

Ulrich von Wilamowitz, Die Ilias und Homer (Berlin: Weidman, 1916), p. 322.

J.A.K. Thomson, Studies in the Odyssey (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 1914), p. 189.

S.E. Bassett, The Poetry of Homer (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1938), p. 244.

10.

E.R. Dodds, Fifty Years (and Twelve) of Classical Scholarship (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), p. 8f.

11.

Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

12.

For a sampling of differing conclusions, see Carol G. Thomas, ed., Homer’s History: Mycaenaean or Dark Age? (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).

13.

Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1962), p. 26.

14.

M.I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (New York: Viking Press, 1954).

15.

Some would contest the claim that writing disappeared during the Dark Age. Since an alphabet was in use in the Near East in the second millennium, some scholars argue that it was introduced into the Aegean in the late second or early first millennium. See Joseph Naveh, The Early History of the Alphabet(Leiden, the Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1982). As far as actual evidence goes, however, the earliest alphabetic inscriptional evidence from Greece dates only from the eighth century B.C., and there is no trace of the earlier Linear B script after the collapse of the palace centers.

16.

Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1963).

17.

Kurt Raaflaub, “Homer und die Geschichte des 8.Hr.s.v.Chr.,” in J. Latacz ed., Zweihundert Jahre Homer-Forschung (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1991) pp. 205–256.

18.

J. Michael Padgett, “A Geometric Bard,” in Carter and Morris, The Ages of Homer (Austin: Univ. of Texas, 1995), pp. 389–405.

19.

J.K. Anderson, “The Geometric Catalogue of Ships,” in Carter and Morris, The Ages of Homer, pp. 181–191, offers a compelling account of the creative transformation of the Dark Age bards.

20.

Thomas, “The Homeric Epics: Strata or a Spectrum?” Colby Classical Quarterly 29 (1993), pp. 273–282.