4. Introduction to Homer
Literacy in Ancient Greek
The two epic poems of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are the beginning of Greek literature. Before the discovery of ancient Mesopotamia and the discipline of Assyriology (and in the absence of much knowledge about ancient India and China), the Greeks were often considered the first developed civilization, the founders of wisdom and art, of literature and philosophy. The Greeks did achieve magnificent accomplishments in these areas, but they came on the stage about two-thousand years after the glories of ancient Mesopotamian civilization.
The Greeks had a developed civilization in late bronze age Mycenae, in the second century B.C. They had a form of writing, known today as linear B, but their civilization collapsed in the 14th or 13th century B.C., in an age of great upheavals. In the process they lost the art of writing. The linear B tablets that were discovered and deciphered in the twentieth century contain no literature. They include lists and names on economic or legal documents, but no poetry. The tablets are important to historians and linguists, but not to lovers of literature.
The Greeks went through a dark age. In the 8th century they became reacquainted with writing through the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians spoke a Semitic language related to Hebrew, Arabic, and Akkadian. They lived in costal cities, such as the biblical Tyre and Sidon; and settlers from Tyre landed in Carthage in northern Africa. The Phoenicians were sailors, merchants, and traders. They traveled among the Greek Isles, along the coasts of Israel, and in Mesopotamia as well. They imported and exported not only material goods, but ideas and intellectual property as well.
The Phoenicians’ most important contribution to the world was the alphabet. As you recall, the cuneiform signs indicate whole syllables but not separate vowels and consonants. The cuneiform sign list was long and complicated and took years to master.
Semitic languages are based on roots, mostly having three consonants. Vowels change according to regular patterns (as in the English ’song, sing, sang, sung’) that are apparent in context. Therefore, only the consonants needed to be represented in Semitic alphabetic writing.
The oldest alphabetic writing is found on the walls of mines in the Sinai desert in Egyptian territory. The inscriptions from the 16th century B.C. reflect a Semitic language and were written by Pharaoh’s slaves. The alphabet may have been invented by the very Hebrew slaves mentioned in the book of Exodus.
About the same time in the ancient city of Ugarit a simplified form of alphabetic cuneiform was developed. The Ugaritic language and writing system were discovered in 1929 and are very important for history, linguistics, and literature. There is one Ugaritic epic poem known as the Keret (or Kirtu, an alternate spelling), Epic, about a King from Ugarit. There are other long poems about Canaanite gods and goddesses in the Ugaritic literature, sometimes also referred to as epics (e.g. the Baal Epic). The Ugaritic writing system died out when the city was destroyed around 1200 BC.
It was the form of the alphabet as developed by the Phoenicians that prevailed and became the forerunner of our modern alphabet. The Phoenicians exported their form of the alphabet to the Greeks, Arameans, and the Hebrews. The oldest Hebrew inscriptions are identical in form to Phoenician inscriptions from the same period. Hebrew continues to be written from right to left as Phoenician was.
The Phoenician script as used to write Aramaic developed in its own way; and Aramaic eventually replaced Akkadian cuneiform as the international language of trade and administration. By the time of Christ, Akkadian was a dead language and cuneiform an unintelligible script. The Jews living in exile in Babylon used the Aramaic form of the alphabet to write their own Hebrew Scriptures, while the Aramaic script later continued to change in form. Thus the printed Hebrew alphabet as used today is actually the ancient Aramaic script, while people who continue to speak and write Aramaic today use a script or alphabet that looks more like Arabic.
The Greeks needed vowels, so they adapted some consonants they didn’t need to form their alphabet. The oldest Greek inscriptions look like Phoenician. Some were written left to write; others changed directions at the end of each line. The Greeks eventually settled on writing from left to right. The Latin alphabet was an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, and is now the basis for English and most modern European languages. (Russian Cyrillic was developed from Greek).
Oral Traditions
During the dark ages when the Greeks were without an alphabet, they continued to have an “oral literature.” The remembered tales of the heroes from the distant past. They remembered the lost Mycenaean civilization and the wars that brought it to an end. They remembered and retold the stories of a lost age of bronze and gold, of heroes and aristocrats
As in many ancient cultures, the ancient Greeks also had professional poet-singers who entertained at the royal court and at public festivals. At some of these festivals there were contests, battles of the poets, and prizes were awarded. The poet Hesiod describes winning a “tripod” in one of these contests. Hesiod is the only other Greek epic poet whose works survive. He is famous for two works: Theogony (the birth of the gods), which shares epic poetry’s interest in mythology, and Works and Days, an un-heroic farmer’s almanac in epic verse.
When the Greeks conversed with Phoenician sailors, we can imagine that they traded stories. You will see themes from Gilgamesh reflected in Homer. The Greeks remembered the names of their own heroes and the names of places where famous battles were held; they must have filled in some detail, though, about the ways and values of the lost heroic age with common themes from the surrounding civilizations.
Oral Composition
The studies of Milman Perry in the twentieth century have led to a better understanding of how Homer’s poetry developed. Perry compared research on contemporary folk poetry with the language of Homer. Others followed Perry and reached the following conclusions:
1) The basic outlines of the stories, the plots and episodes were well known both to the audience and the poet.
2) The metrical pattern of epic poetry was an aid in composition. Stock phrases, sometimes whole lines or verses were memorized and could be inserted where needed. Some multi-syllabic phrases were especially usefully for filling in or finishing out a line, for example polyphloisboio thalassa (the thrashing sea) or rhododactylos Eos (rosy-fingered Dawn).
3) Although the theme and plot, and much of the language were known and recycled, each performance was a fresh one.
Stories of ancient heroes continued to be passed on by oral tradition and formed the basis for many later Greek tragedies. Aeschylus, for example wrote of the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra upon his return from the Trojan war.
Homer the Author
Legend says that Homer was a blind poet, from the island of Cos. Not much else is known about him. There is even disagreement as to whether both of the famous poems are the product of the same author. He is credited with composing the poem in its current form. Scholars are divided as to whether Homer actually wrote down the poems or committed them to memory. If the latter case is true, epic poetry had reached a new stage. The poem was not a new performance each time, there was a set version to be memorized and preserved.
Either way, Homer is an author, a composer, a creator of something new out of old material. He gives his own meaning to the stories he composed. Still many features of the old oral style of epic remain in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer has his own story to tell, but he also includes traditional tales of heroes not essential to his main theme.
Homer has remained popular in Greek literature from the beginning to the present day. Other Greeks often quoted him in ways similar to the ways we quote the Bible. More manuscripts of Homers’ two famous works have survived than those of most other Greek authors. The ancient librarians of Alexander compared existing manuscripts of Homer and worked to establish an authentic text. They were the founders of textual criticism.
Many Greeks considered all poets, but especially Homer to be divinely inspired by the gods, or more particularly the Muses, the goddesses of poetry. Poetic inspiration for the Greeks didn’t always guarantee truthfulness, though, for they believed that the gods sometimes told lies. Poetic inspiration did grant poetic beauty, the Greeks were sure. Homer himself believed in poetic inspiration: he begins his epics with an invocation to the goddess asking that she sing him the story that he is to record. The invocation to the Muse became a standard feature of epic poetry and was imitated even by Christian authors such as Dante and Milton.
Some modern writers claim there is a psychological truth to the idea of poetic inspiration. They say that their stories and poems come to them, as from an outside voice, and that the characters sometimes take on a life of their own.
Plato criticized Homer for telling lies about the gods, inspired or not, and in his ideal Republic, reluctantly decided that Homer must be banned. Of course, the Greeks were not convinced by Plato. Aristotle defended poetry and fiction arguing that they give an aesthetic pleasure, provide psychological catharsis, and yield insight and wisdom.
