The Homeric Question concerns the doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey and their historicity. The subject has its roots in classical antiquity and the scholarship of the Hellenistic period, but has flourished among Homeric Scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The main questions were:”Who is Homer?” “Were the Iliad and the Odyssey written by a singular poet or multiple poets?” “How old are the oldest elements in Homeric poetry which can be dated with. certainty?”
About Homer we only have few historical proofs and they’re almost legendary. The origins of the name could be two:
- Ό μή ορων “the person who can’t see”, referring to his blindness;
- Όμερος, hostage (according to Aristotle).
There are 7 possible cities where he lived in. We have this epigram:
“Επτά πόλεις μάρναντο σοφήν διά ρίζαν Ομήρου,
Σμύρνα, Χιος, Χολοφών, Ιθακη, Πύλος, Άργος, Αθήναι”
“Seven cities bragged to be the birthplace of Homer:
Smyrna, Chio, Colophon, Ithaca, Pilum, Argo, Athene”
Since the Alexander age, Zenodotus, Aristophane and Aristarchus studied both the Iliad and the Odyssey removing all the mistakes and the changes caused by the oral transmission. They divided the poems in 24 books, indicated with lowercase greek letters in the Odyssey and uppercase in the Iliad. The edition also contained well detailed comments. In Alexandria, philologists started discussing about Homer and his origins so there were two different schools of thought:
- χωρίζοντες or “the separatists”: they thought the authors were different because ther were too many different styles and topics;
- “The units” who thought the author was only one.
According to an anonymous author, in one of his treaty, Homer wrote the Iliad in his youth and the Odyssey in the old-age.
During the Middle age, the poems remained unknown. Only in the Reinassance, Demetrio Calcondilla (1488) translated the epic poems. In 1664, François Hédelin, in his written document “Conjectures académiques ou Dissertation sur l’Iliade”, denied Homer’s existence and he considered the epic poems as a collection of oral stories.
According to Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), Homer was the symbol of Greece and he gave a big cultural importance to these poems.
August Wolf (1759-1824) denied Homer’s existence and he said the poems were only a collection of traditions an old stories transmitted orally. In modern times, philologists reached a conclusion that makes us see different the matter in question. According to them, we should ask ourselves how Homer used oral trading. However, we agree that Homer has probably never existed and the epic poems were mainly composed by Greek poems (αοιδός) and rhapsodes (ραψώδος).
About the oral tradition.
Most classicists agree that the poems attributed to him are to some degree dependent on oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (or αωδοι, aōidoi). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems contain many regular and repeated phrases. So according to the theory, the Iliad and Odyssey may have been products of oral formulaic composition , composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phases. Parry and Lord have pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture . The crucial words here are “oral” and “traditional”. Parry starts with the former: the repetitive chunks of language, he says, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and were useful to him in composition. Parry calls these repetitive verses “formulas”.
An example of formular verses:
“Ηώς δ´εκ λεχέων παρ´αγαυου Τιθονοιο
ώρνυθ,ίν αθανάτοισι φόως φέροι ηδέ βροτοισιν”
“Aurora (a goddess) near the noble Titono arose
Out of the bed, to bring the light to immortals and mortals”
We also have epithets that are used to specify a character’s personality or places or objects. Patronymics are used to specify a component of a personal name based on the given name of one’s father, grandfather.
If you want to read more about Parry and Lord, this is a good source: https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/6110.part-i-the-‘homeric-question’-1-dictation-theories-and-pre-hellenic-literacy
-Stefania
Space writer 