Background: The Homeric Tradition

The authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey has been disputed heavily for decades. Previous tradition held that Homer the ancient, blind poet who sang of a heroic age that was long past even in his own day, composed these magnificent poems. The epics were then handed down through the generations until they acquired an immortal fame that no other work could ever hope to equal, no less exceed.

Today, these traditions have been blanketed by more than a century of scholarship disputing not only Homer’s claim to complete authority over the poems, but even the poet’s historical existence. To best understand the arguments on both sides (for indeed the consensus has not swayed unanimously into the realm of total doubt), we must first understand the basis for the Homeric tradition itself.

That the details of Homer’s supposed existence vary widely is not surprising, considering the tradition is two and half millennia old. Still, the common theory dictates that Homer lived on the western coast of Asia Minor (in modern-day Turkey) in the city of Smyrna circa the eighth or ninth century B.C. The tradition of the Trojan War, with many of its related stories and episodes, was already several centuries old in Homer’s day; his characters and the action that surrounded them would have been known to his contemporaries. Indeed, both poems assume their audience possesses a knowledge of at least the general storyline of Troy.

The irony of Homer’s place as the founder of Western literature is that, in all probability, the master bard was himself illiterate. He was a singer of tales in the oral tradition, most likely entertaining at feasts and court occasions to earn his keep. This does not mean that Homer composed a work and then memorized it by rote, for such a thing assumes that he wrote something down that could be memorized verbatim. The oral tradition was much more subtle and complex than that, as can be observed from Yugoslavian poets who still practice their art in our own century.

An apprenticed bard was taught to employ many tools to master the oral poetic medium. There were routine formulas that he manipulated to form the core of his narrative, and he shaped around these formulas a body of story material that he also inherited. He was taught to compose his story in meter, to the accompaniment of a musical instrument such as the lyre; he never composed his stories without the aid of music. When called upon to perform, the bard would often be asked to recite a particular story or episode that was popularly known, but he would in turn compose his own version of the tale extempore.

What this means is that the oral poet never told the same story twice. Every performance was an original one, as formulaic expressions were meshed with wholly original poetry within the structure of a particular story. As time wore on, a bard continually reciting a particular story would begin to tighten up his structure as he became aware of ingredients which were more effective than others, but the story could never be identical from one performance to the next.

What Homer composed, then, was a series of short episodes that could each be recited in a single evening. The entire mass of tradition that Homer accumulated became the core for the two epic poems as we now have them. Disciples of Homer carried on his tradition, adopting the formulaic arrangements that their master had originated and retelling the stories with essentially Homeric elements. It is supposed that a school of Homerites lived on the island of Chios, and from there they brought the Homeric tradition to the Greek mainland. Then, sometime before or during the sixth century B.C., Homer’s works reached their final form and were inscribed in writing.

Even within the Homeric tradition itself, we must accept the fact that what we are reading are not the exact words of Homer at all. Indeed, even if Homer himself had been capable of writing down his work, we would have only a single performance of Homer; the many variations of his work which took place over the course of his life would be lost to us. As it stands, Homer’s legacy consists solely of a tradition which underwent several centuries of revision by later poets. Yet, so integral were Homer’s personality and skill to that tradition that his fame as the poems’ founder never waned among his descendants.

The written versions of theIliad and Odyssey were widely disseminated and known in classical Greece and surrounding regions such as Egypt. The organization of each of the poems into twenty-four separate Books is the invention of later editors and certainly not the work of Homer or his descendants in the oral tradition. For the most part, the tradition of epic poetry in the West stems from these written versions of the Homeric poems. Classical epic poems in Greek and Latin were directly modeled on Homer, although the Augustan Virgil altered the genre in order to suit the needs of his time when he composed the Aeneid. Dante knew Homer through Virgil, and both he and (two centuries later) Torquato Tasso Christianized Homeric elements when they composed their respective epics, the Commedia and Gerusalemme Liberata. Milton’s English epic, Paradise Lost, is also heavily laced with Christianized elements from Homer.

But consider now those earlier Greek epics, known familiarly as the Epic Cycle and including such poems as the Thebais, the Nostoi, the Little Iliad, the Destruction of Troy, and the Cypria. There are scattered passages in post-Aristotelian writings that ascribe to Homer the authorship of these works, though it is unlikely that Homer did indeed write them. Many scholars fear that, just as these works have been ascribed erroneously to Homer, so too might one or both of his epics be the work of other poets.

Many scholars, although believing Homer wrote the Iliad, propose that either a disciple of his or another poet familiar with his style wrote the Odyssey. One reason for this assertion is that the overall structure and style of the poems differs significantly, and the possibility of false authorship attributed to other classical poems strengthens the argument. Other scholars counterargue that any number of poets whose extant works are undoubtedly their own have created works of differing structures. Others have cited the symmetry and similarity of scope existing between the two works, which they assert outweighs any so-called differences in style and structure.

The more radical arguments come from those who believe that, due to the very nature of oral-formulaic poetry, the odds of a real person named Homer ever having existed are minimal. They assert that one or more schools of poets created a vast body of oral literature over the course of many years. These traditions were later compiled and organized by unifying hands. Then, after the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the various poems of the Epic Cycle had been written and disseminated, the Greeks attributed all of this work to a fictional poet named Homer, the blind poet of Smyrna.

The truth of the matter, of course, is beyond physical proof. Students of Homer should make themselves aware of these various theories, but it is with the poetry itself and not in the historicity of their supposed creator that we should most concern ourselves.