Homer's my new homie
 

I took the technical route of education and in all my years of schooling I never once had an assignment to read any of the classics. That makes me somewhat of a dummy in this crowd so I thought I would at least start to cover some basics. Hence, I recently bought a copy of the Illiad and just finished it yesterday. At SU's recommendation, I bought the Stanley Lombardo translation. It's an extremely modern translation, i.e., uses contemporary expressions that may offend some purists (so I hear, anyway). I haven't read any other translations, so I am not able to compare, but I did enjoy it. When I was wading through some of the more boring parts (and there are plenty), I at least could appreciate the lively writing style.

Anyway, I have a few observations/questions. Be gentle with me and try to contain your laughter and ridicule.

1) I kept expecting to read about the trojan horse. Does that come in the Odyssey?

2) The constant intervention of the gods took me a while to get used to. Every time a fight started to get exciting, a god would swoop down from Olympus and mess it up. It was interesting to note that the characters didn't seem to get too upset about the meddling. Just took it in stride. Even when they knew they were about to die.

3) I thought the best part of the book was the battle between Hector and Achilles. I am not sure why, but I was struck by the story-telling, imagery, and drama as Achilles was chasing Hector around the gates of Troy and cutting off his escape.

4) That Achilles was one bad-ass warrior. Dragging Hector's body around and trying to get the dogs to eat it rather than hand it over. Sacrificing twelve young Trojan boys to honor his fallen friend. Killing people as they begged to be spared.

5) Next time I am going to read the introduction after finishing the book. Not only did it go through the entire story-line (thus spoiling some parts for me), but it would have been more meaningful after finishing the book.

6) In the introduction, it said that both the Illiad and the Odyssey were handed down orally and not put into written form for several hundred years. Did I read that correctly? It's hard for me to believe that such a long story (500 pages in this case) full of such vivid detail could survive in oral form.

On to the Odyssey.

I just discussed question 6 with one of the professors of our classics department. It isn't likely that the word for word text was memorized and preserved for so long intact. We've seen just a few of the problems of textual transmission with the New Testament-- the chances of the Iliad or the Odyssey being better preserved are negligible.

The stories themselves, on the other hand, were undoubtedly handed down in oral form. The Trojan Wars (or, at the very least, the events that inspired the stories of the Trojan Wars) would have taken place between 1300 BC and 1200 BC. Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey around 800 BC-- it's likely that he simply was the guy who wrote the story in its epic form. This, incidentally, argues all the more in favor of a single composer, which sheds some light on the so-called Homeric Question.

And speaking of which, I just can't resist an old zinger:

"The Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name"

Trojan Horse is in neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey, apparently. Wikipedia says the most detailed account of the Trojan Horse episode is found in Virgil's Aeneid, though the story is obviously much older than that, given that it was mentioned in the Odyssey. This is a book worth reading if you liked Homer's poems; we're going through it right now in our Latin class. The story is that Aeneas, who figures prominently in the Trojan War, leads a group of survivors from Troy and eventually arrives in Italy. His descendants later become the Romans. Interesting how ancients tried to link themselves to these ancestors (though Dr. John Hall at BYU makes a pretty convincing argument that the claim to Trojan ancestry is legit).

I believe it is also found in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I'm actually pretty sure that was a bunny.

Here's a good section of it from the Odyssey, book VIII:

"But come now, change thy theme, and sing of the building of the horse of wood, which Epeius made with Athena's help, the horse which once Odysseus led up into the citadel as a thing of guile, [495] when he had filled it with the men who sacked Ilios. If thou dost indeed tell me this tale aright, I will declare to all mankind that the god has of a ready heart granted thee the gift of divine song.” So he spoke, and the minstrel, moved by the god, began, and let his song be heard, [500] taking up the tale where the Argives had embarked on their benched ships and were sailing away, after casting fire on their huts, while those others led by glorious Odysseus were now sitting in the place of assembly of the Trojans, hidden in the horse; for the Trojans had themselves dragged it to the citadel. [505] So there it stood, while the people talked long as they sat about it, and could form no resolve. Nay, in three ways did counsel find favour in their minds: either to cleave the hollow timber with the pitiless bronze, or to drag it to the height and cast it down the rocks, or to let it stand as a great offering to propitiate the gods, [510] even as in the end it was to be brought to pass; for it was their fate to perish when their city should enclose the great horse of wood, wherein were sitting all the best of the Argives, bearing to the Trojans death and fate. And he sang how the sons of the Achaeans [515] poured forth from the horse and, leaving their hollow ambush, sacked the city. Of the others he sang how in divers ways they wasted the lofty city, but of Odysseus, how he went like Ares to the house of Deiphobus together with godlike Menelaus. There it was, he said, that Odysseus braved the most terrible fight [520] and in the end conquered by the aid of great-hearted Athena."

I was going to post the section from the Aeneid, but it's really long. Start right at the beginning of book II, if you would like to read the story there.

JL, I do hope you'll consider the Aeneid. A great read. Perhaps the others know which is the best translation.

Translation? Vergil had it right the first time. :)

SHow off.

Robert Fitzgerald's is the translation of the Aeneid I have read, and it is beloved. But Robert Fagels, whose translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey may be the most famous, just finished a translation of the Aeneid that received high praise. The Aeneid of course was written not by a Greek, but by a Roman, Virgil, in Latin, about 700 years after the earliest date we know the Iliad existed.

It is only one sign of the Iliad's tremendous influence that at the time of Augustus Rome's most famous poet decided that Rome, like Greece, needed a founding epic, and Virgil made his masterpiece a sequal to the Iliad. But though he modeled it on the Ilidad, the tone is very different. One thing I love about the Aeneid is that its tragic character--its Priam/Hector--is a woman. It also has some steamy romance.

In contrast to the Aeneid's status with the Romans, who simply believed it to be a great work of art, however, the Greeks believed the Iliad to be true and divinely inspired as much as your average Evangelical believes such things about the Bible. Moreover, many well known dramatic and literary devices used and loved in our age originated in the Iliad and the Greek tragedies that it begat. As I've noted, Socrates/Plato made repeated allusions to the Iliad, and it was a very old poem by their age.

The Trojan horse appears in many Greek poems and plays, most of them no longer extant, but we know about them from other references. It is a common misconception that it appears in the Iliad. Among existing works it is best portrayed in the Aeneid.

Not surprisingly, what is meant by the Iliad having been orally transmitted is a subject of vigorous debate in acedemia. From recent stuff I've read it seems to me the pendulum has recently swung more strongly toward concensus that Homer recited it much as it was handed down in written form. See, for example, Bernard Knox's introduction to Fagles' translation, and I believe the one you read in front of Lombardo's. I read a New Yorker article to that effect recently as well, that focused on an ongoing oral tradition in rural India, where bards recite over many days poems with gripping plots and beautiful imagery word for word that are longer than the Bible. Interestingly, they've found that when the bard begins to learn to read, his awesome powers of memorization fade. I'll see if I can post the article electronically.

This begs the unanswerable question. To what extent was Vergil forging his own founding myth versus writing down an existing one? The Romans definitely believed that they descended from the remnants of Troy. "Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar" may have been Vergil's words, but the idea that Caesar was a descendant of Aeneas, and thus of Venus (and of Trojans), was not his own. Nor is the connection of the name Julius with Iulus and Ilia (and the Iliad) his brainchild. The legend of Romulus and Remus had been around for ages. It seems that what Vergil does in the Aeneid is try to interweave all these myths into one work.

One possible hypothesis, which would be hard to prove, given the lack of information of the Homeric age, is that what Homer did the same thing with the Iliad and the Odyssey that Vergil did with the Aeneid-- that is, he compiled the legends of the Trojan War that took place 400 years earlier. Wouldn't be the first time it happened-- in fact, this seems to be a real tendency for ancient civilizations. The Enuma Elish, the Rig Veda, or even the Book of Genesis and the Pentateuch-- they all do the same thing.

If you knew how much time I spent today alone trying to get through as little as I did, you probably would think differently.

Gratefully, you don't know how much time I spent today alone trying to get through as little as I did. :)

When you get to the part in the Odyssey that tells about Odysseus and his men poking the eye of the big cyclops to blind him and the cyclops gets ticked and tells his fellow one-eyes that nobody is the guilty party so the other cyclopes don't worry much about it and then the next day when Odysseus tells the cyclops who he really is and the big cyclops really gets bent out of shape and starts chucking big rocks at the ships - think of me. I served my mission there and have pics of those rocks.

From what I've read, I think this is right. Homer may well not have invented his plots, just as Shakespeare did not. One interesting fact I hadn't thought about but learned recently is that the Iliad is filled with historical anacronysms. Like all historical fiction its themes and even much of its imagery and material world are more reflective of the time in which it was written than the time it depicts. (I could cite an example, controversial and well known here, but won't for fear of sidetracking this excellent discussion about these poems.)

I hadn't thought much about that the Romans believed they descended from Troy apart from the Aeneid. That really helps explain their deification of their emperors beginning with Augustus.

How could I forget that Lombardo as well just issued a translation of the Aeneid.

This was covered in the intro to Lombardo's Illiad. I can't remember everything that was discussed, but I seem to recall that the chariots and some of the weapons would not have been around during the time the battle took place.

That was my next question. Would you recommend Lombardo's translation for the Aeneid as well?

Not to steal your thunder, but I'll give you this example. The years in which Homer wrote his poems, the Archaic period, were just after the Greek "dark ages," so-called more because there is comparatively little information about them than anything else-- they are dark to us. The Archaic period is really the beginning of the Greek [ipoleis], which seemed to all start off as kingdoms that evolved into democracies. Solidarity and sheer manliness were necessary traits for the king (basileus) to show in order to maintain loyalty and stability.

Key Homeric traits reflect this time, and the men were so absolutely powerful and compelling that they served as models for other leaders to follow. Some of these traits are timé, or honor (shown when the Greeks followed Helen, the woman who had been taken by Paris from Greece into Troy, to redeem the offense against him); areté, virtue or excellence; and Xenia, a sort of hospitality to foreign friends (shown in one episode of the Iliad, when a Greek fighting a Trojan recognizes him as a descendant of a man who had been a guest-friend (xenos) with an anscestor of his. They immediately agreed to spare each other and go find other greeks/trojans to kill). Others could surely be listed.

Well my own personal bias is with Lombardo. Here is a thread I started a while back with a linked article comparing the two translations of the Aeneid. I have pasted into the body of the post the part of the article that was so interesting to me comparing a passage line by line. Based on this article, I favor Lombardo's Aeneid as I do his Iliad. Interestingly enough, even though I've read that Lomabrdo's Iliad is in a more modern vernacular, according to this article his Aeneid more faithful to the original Latin. Fagles' is purportedly more lush, on the other hand. Let me know if you can't access the linked article and I'll help you get it if you're interested.

http://cougarguard.com/forum/showthr...ighlight=Homer

I urge to re-read the story of Gilgamesh, it is actually quite moving how the selfish Gilgamesh upon the death of his friend Enkidu seeks out a path of wisdom by the head God.

The poet for which we have the majority of the legend wrote his Poem more than a millenium after the historical king about whom the legend was generated. The poet-priest Sin-leqi-unninni writes beautifully about his city which we now view in the past. The king lived or died approximately 2750 BCE and its first forms were found in Sumerian written around 2100 BCE, but the poet wrote in Akkadian around 1200 BCE, having borrowed the theme from a thousand years before.

In it the King Gilgamesh is to be tamed by the Wild Man Enkidu, who is tamed by Shamat, the love priestess. The themes are nonpuritanical and must have been quite a shock for Victorian archaeologists.

It is a beautiful tale.

Fagles' new one. I haven't finished it but I read the last page (my favorite part).

Awesome.

Congratulations on reading the greatest book ever written (IMO).

Milman Parry did a lot of research in the nature of oral epic in the 1930s. Certain stock epithets helped the poet maintain the meter while each telling was undoubtedly slightly different. Pisistratus is supposed to have ordered the first comprehensive written compilation of Homer in the late 6th century, and the men who did this undoubtedly compared various (written?) versions. So, while Homer is credited with the kernel, the anachronisms and the various dialects that show up in the text indicate it is an amalgamation of multiple sources.

My favorite are the passages that show how the war impacts the women. I see the Aeneid as a very (very) early feminist work.