Context
Nearly three thousand years after
they were composed, the Iliad and the Odyssey remain
two of the most celebrated and widely read stories ever told, yet next
to nothing is known about their author. He was certainly an accomplished
Greek bard, and he probably lived in the late eighth and early seventh
centuries b.c. Authorship is traditionally ascribed to a blind poet
named Homer, and it is under this name that the works are still
published. Greeks of the third and second centuries b.c., however,
already questioned whether Homer existed and whether the two epics
were even written by a single individual.
Most modern scholars believe that even if a single person
wrote the epics, his work owed a tremendous debt to a long tradition
of unwritten, oral poetry. Stories of a glorious expedition to the
East and of its leaders' fateful journeys home had been circulating
in Greece for hundreds of years before the Iliad and Odyssey were composed.
Casual storytellers and semiprofessional minstrels passed these
stories down through generations, with each artist developing and
polishing the story as he told it. According to this theory, one
poet, multiple poets working in collaboration, or perhaps even a
series of poets handing down their work in succession finally turned
these stories into written works, again with each adding his own
touch and expanding or contracting certain episodes in the overall
narrative to fit his taste.
Although historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence
suggests that the epics were composed between 750 and 650 b.c.,
they are set in Mycenaean Greece in about the twelfth century b.c.,
during the Bronze Age. This earlier period, the Greeks believed,
was a more glorious and sublime age, when gods still frequented
the earth and heroic, godlike mortals with superhuman attributes
populated Greece. Because the two epics strive to evoke this pristine
age, they are written in a high style and generally depict life
as it was believed to have been led in the great kingdoms of the
Bronze Age. The Greeks are often referred to as “Achaeans,” the
name of a large tribe occupying Greece during the Bronze Age.
But Homer's reconstruction often yields to the realities
of eighth- and seventh-century b.c. Greece. The feudal social structure
apparent in the background of the Odyssey seems
more akin to Homer's Greece than to Odysseus's, and Homer
substitutes the pantheon of deities of his own day for the related
but different gods whom Mycenaean Greeks worshipped. Many other
minor but obvious anachronisms—such as references to iron tools
and to tribes that had not yet migrated to Greece by the Bronze
Age—betray the poem's later, Iron Age origins.
Of the two epics, the Odyssey is the
later both in setting and, probably, date of composition. The Iliad tells
the story of the Greek struggle to rescue Helen, a Greek queen,
from her Trojan captors. The Odyssey takes the
fall of the city of Troy as its starting point and crafts a new
epic around the struggle of one of those Greek warriors, the hero
Odysseus. It tells the story of his nostos, or
journey home, to northwest Greece during the ten-year period after
the Greek victory over the Trojans. A tale of wandering, it takes
place not on a field of battle but on fantastic islands and foreign
lands. After the unrelenting tragedy and carnage of the Iliad, the Odyssey often strikes
readers as comic or surreal at times. This quality has led some scholars
to conclude that Homer wrote the Odyssey at a later
time of his life, when he showed less interest in struggles at arms
and was more receptive to a storyline that focused on the fortunes
and misadventures of a single man. Others argue that someone else
must have composed the Odyssey, one who wished
to provide a companion work to the Iliad but had
different interests from those of the earlier epic's author.
Like the Iliad, the Odyssey was
composed primarily in the Ionic dialect of Ancient Greek, which
was spoken on the Aegean islands and in the coastal settlements
of Asia Minor, now modern Turkey. Some scholars thus conclude that
the poet hailed from somewhere in the eastern Greek world. More
likely, however, the poet chose the Ionic dialect because he felt
it to be more appropriate for the high style and grand scope of
his work. Slightly later Greek literature suggests that poets varied
the dialects of their poems according to the themes that they were
treating and might write in dialects that they didn't actually speak.
Homer's epics, moreover, are Panhellenic (encompassing all of Greece)
in spirit and, in fact, use forms from several other dialects, suggesting
that Homer didn't simply fall back on his native tongue but rather
suited his poems to the dialect that would best complement his ideas.
