HomerHomer: one of the greatest (1)______poets.fam

Homer
    Good morning. What I’d like to do in this session is to give you a little detail of Homer, (1) one of the greatest European poets who ever lived, and his epics. As we shall know, he is most famous for two epic poems, which treat themes associated with the Trojan War fought around 1180 B.C.
    The first of these poetry is the Illiad, which describes episodes involving the heroes who fought at Troy. The Illiad consists of more than 15,000 lines divided into 24 chapters, (3) each designated by a capital letter of the Greek alphabet. The heroes of Illiad, both Greek and Trojan, (4) represent different personalities and character traits. There are wise advisors such as Nestor, brave warriors such as Ajax, and (5) cunning tricksters such as Odysseus. There are also heroes who behave cowardly, namely the Greek king Menelaos and the Trojan prince Paris. (6) By reading the Illiad, students in ancient Greece learned how to act properly and how to interact with one another on acceptable social levels. In fact, the Illiad was so popular that Alexander the Great is said to have carried his own personal copy of the epic with him when he campaigned against the Persians.
    The Odyssey contains over 12,000 lines and was likewise divided into 24 chapters, one for each of the small letters of the Greek alphabet. The ancient Greeks did this because they considered the Odyssey less majestic than the Illiad. Nevertheless, students of all ages love the Odyssey because its tale focuses on one hero, a Greek named Odysseus, and (8) relates the fantastic adventures he endured in his 10-year attempt to reach home after the fall of Troy. Homer followed the accepted practice of poets throughout the ancient Greek world when, in the opening lines, he acknowledged his need for inspiration.
    By definition, an epic focuses on a national hero who performs incredible feats. (9) The tale is historical, legendary, or mythological — or a combination of the three. An epic is usually longer and more involved than other poems and stories. In contrast to poetry that relies on rhyming lines for its effect, so does most poetry written in the English language, the Illiad and the Odyssey were written in what is called dactylic hexameter. This means that each line contains between 12 and 17 syllables divided into six groups. The rhythm of the poetry is achieved by the artful combination of long and short syllables in each line.
    When scholars examine these hexameters and the words used in the Illiad and the Odyssey, they can see great differences between the two poems. For example, the Illiad seems to contain more old fashioned words and relies more on the repetition of formulas, that is, certain combinations of words that occur over and over again. Close observation also shows that Illiad and the Odyssey use various words for many of the same common objects.
    Because of such differences in language, scholars working in the great library at Alexandria, Egypt, between the years 280 and 230 B.C. challenged the tradition that claimed a man named Homer wrote both poems. These scholars suggested that one person wrote the llliad and another the Odyssey, but that the identities of the two authors were lost over time. Today, scholars are inclined to accept the tradition at face value and concede that one man, Homer, may have written two very different epics just as, in more modern times, an author such as William Shakespeare may have composed several types of plays. Yet if there really was one man named Homer, who was he, when did he live, and what was the nature of his job as a poet?
    In order to answer these questions, scholars must become literary detectives. They must study the llliad and the Odyssey very closely and attempt to discover clues that Homer may have included about himself in his poems. For example, the Odyssey contains passages in which bards, the equivalent of medieval minstrels, roamed from court to court reciting poems to the accompaniment of a lyre, a stringed instrument resembling a small harp. (10) This was a recognized profession, and Homer most likely was a bard who earned his living very much like the ones he described in his works.
    The tradition that he was blind can readily be explained by the fact that he must have closed his eyes as he recited his poems, the way a singer often does today. Where and when he lived can be discovered by studying the Greek language consisting of several dialects, each spoken in specific geographic areas. The principal dialect of both the llliad and the Odyssey is Ionian Greek. This was the language spoken in Lonia—the region of the Aegean Sea that includes the Greek islands of Samos and Chios and what is now the coast of modern Turkey in the vicinity of the city of Izmir. The archaisms, or old-fashioned words, particularly those used in the llliad, were in style during the 700s B. C, and suggest that Homer lived around 750 B. C. From these clues one can confidently conclude that Homer was a traveling bard who lived in Lonia, perhaps on Chios or Samos, or in Izmir, over 2,700 years ago.
    Let’s sum up. Today, I talked about Homer and his two epics: llliad and Odyssey. Also, I explained the features of epic and Homer’s personal background. That’s all for today.