Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When did Homer compose the Odyssey?
The Homeric Question – concerning by whom, when, where and under what circumstances the Iliad and Odyssey were composed – continues to be debated. Broadly speaking, modern scholarly opinion falls into two groups. One holds that most of the Iliad and (according to some) the Odyssey are the works of a single poet of genius. The other considers the Homeric poems to be the result of a process of working and reworking by many contributors, and that "Homer" is best seen as a label for an entire tradition.[4] It is generally accepted that the poems were composed at some point around the late eighth or early seventh century BC.[5]
The central character of the ancient allegory, Odyssey, Odysseus, was believed to be a fictional character. Yet many claim that the Homeric hero was the King of Ithaki, and the detailed geographic descriptions, and places, in the epic have renewed faith and integrity in the authenticity of the history, and that Homer's characters did exist at the locations detailed.
The Homeric epics are written in an artificial literary language or 'Kunstsprache' only used in epic hexameter poetry. Homeric Greek shows features of multiple regional Greek dialects and periods, but is fundamentally based on Ionic Greek, in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was composed slightly before the Odyssey, and that Homeric formulae preserve older features than other parts of the poems.[54][55]
"Cyclops" is a comical burlesque-like play on a story that occurs in book nine of Homer's "Odyssey". In several elements it is faithful to Homer's tale: The shipwreck, the goatskin of Maron's wine, the blinding of the monocular giant, and the pun on the word "Nobody", all occur in Euripides' play and also in Homer's "Odyssey".
Ithaca (; Greek: Ιθάκη, "Ithakē" ]) was, in Greek history, the island home of the hero Odysseus (Odyssey). The specific location of the island, as it was described in Homer's "Odyssey", is a matter for debate. There have been various theories about its location, although modern Ithaca (Ithaki) is generally accepted to be Homer's island by most scholars.
The "Argonautica" is modelled on Homer's poetry to a profound extent. There are of course similarities in plots. The return journey in Book 4, for example, has many parallels in the Odyssey – Scylla, Charybdis, the Sirens and Circe are hazards that Odysseus also negotiates. The "Argonautica" is notable too for the high number of verses and phrases imitating Homer, and for the way it reproduces linguistic peculiarities of old epic, in syntax, metre, vocabulary and grammar. Apollonius in fact is the most Homeric of all the poets whose work has come down to us from the Hellenistic age, when Homeric scholarship flourished and almost all poets responded to Homer's influence, including Callimachus. Homeric echoes in "Argonautica" are quite deliberate and are not slavish imitation. When Jason first meets Hypsipyle in Book 1, he wears a cloak made for him by Athena, embroidered with various scenes alluding to tragic women that Homer's Odysseus met in Hades ("Odyssey" 11.225–380). This Homeric echo has ominous connotations, prefiguring Jason's betrayal of Hypsipyle and Medea.
The main subtopics of the Homeric Question are:To these questions the possibilities of modern textual criticism and archaeological answers have added a few more:Following the seminal work of Milman Parry, most classicists agree that, whether or not there was ever such a composer as Homer, 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 , "aōidoi"). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" shows that the poems contain many regular and repeated phrases; indeed, even entire verses are repeated. Thus 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. Milman Parry and Albert Lord have pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, 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 chunks of repetitive language "formulas".
Cyclic Poets is a shorthand term for the early Greek epic poets, approximate contemporaries of Homer. We know no more about these poets than we know about Homer, but modern scholars regard them as having composed orally, as did Homer. In the classical period, surviving early epic poems were ascribed to these authors, just as the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were ascribed to Homer. Together with Homer, whose "Iliad" covers a mere 50 days of the war, they cover the complete war "cycle", thus the name. Most modern scholars place Homer in the 8th century BC. The other poets listed below seemed to have lived in the 7th–5th centuries BC. Excluding Homer's, none of the works of the cyclic poets survive.
The idea is not new. Eustathius of Thessalonica recounted an ancient fiction in which both epics were composed by an Egyptian priestess, Phantasia; Samuel Butler, in "The Authoress of the Odyssey", attributed the "Odyssey" to a Sicilian woman between 1150 and 1050 BC; and Robert Graves in his novel "Homer's Daughter" made a similar proposal.
Homeric simile, also called an epic simile, is a detailed comparison in the form of a simile that are many lines in length. The word "Homeric", is based on the Greek author, Homer, who composed the two famous Greek epics, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey". Many authors continue to use this type of simile in their writings although it is usually found in classics.
There are three brief references to the "Gigantes" in Homer's "Odyssey", though it's not entirely clear that Homer and Hesiod understood the term to mean the same thing. Homer has Giants among the ancestors of the Phaiakians, a race of men encountered by Odysseus, their ruler Alcinous being the son of Nausithous, who was the son of Poseidon and Periboea, the daughter of the Giant king Eurymedon. Elsewhere in the "Odyssey", Alcinous says that the Phaiakians, like the Cyclopes and the Giants, are "near kin" to the gods. Odysseus describes the Laestrygonians (another race encountered by Odysseus in his travels) as more like Giants than men. Pausanias, the 2nd century AD geographer, read these lines of the "Odyssey" to mean that, for Homer, the Giants were a race of mortal men.
When writing the "Aeneid", Virgil (or Vergil) drew from his studies on the Homeric epics of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" to help him create a national epic poem for the Roman people. Virgil used several characteristics associated with epic poetry, more specifically Homer's epics, including the use of hexameter verse, book division, lists of genealogies and underlying themes to draw parallels between the Romans and their cultural predecessors, the Greeks.
In the debate since antiquity over the Catalogue of Ships, the core questions have concerned the extent of historical credibility of the account, whether it was composed by Homer himself, to what extent it reflects a pre-Homeric document or memorized tradition, surviving perhaps in part from Mycenaean times, or whether it is a result of post-Homeric development. Dörpfeld notes that while in "Odyssey" Odysseus's kingdom includes Ithaca, Same, Dulichium, and Zacynthus, the Catalogue of Ships contains a different list of islands, again Ithaca, Same, and Zacynthus but now also Neritum, Krocylea, and Aegilips. The separate debate over the identity of Homer and the authorship of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" is conventionally termed "the Homeric Question".
In 1488, the Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles published the editio princeps of the Homeric poems.[21] The earliest modern Homeric scholars started with the same basic approaches towards the Homeric poems as scholars in antiquity.[21][20][19] The allegorical interpretation of the Homeric poems that had been so prevalent in antiquity returned to become the prevailing view of the Renaissance.[21] Renaissance humanists praised Homer as the archetypically wise poet, whose writings contain hidden wisdom, disguised through allegory.[21] In western Europe during the Renaissance, Virgil was more widely read than Homer and Homer was often seen through a Virgilian lens.[24] In 1664, contradicting the widespread praise of Homer as the epitome of wisdom, François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac wrote a scathing attack on the Homeric poems, declaring that they were incoherent, immoral, tasteless, and without style, that Homer never existed, and that the poems were hastily cobbled together by incompetent editors from unrelated oral songs.[20] Fifty years later, the English scholar Richard Bentley concluded that Homer did exist, but that he was an obscure, prehistoric oral poet whose compositions bear little relation to the Iliad and the Odyssey as they have been passed down.[20] According to Bentley, Homer "wrote a Sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small Earnings and good Cheer at Festivals and other Days of Merriment; the Ilias he wrote for men, and the Odysseis for the other Sex. These loose songs were not collected together in the Form of an epic Poem till Pisistratus' time, about 500 Years after."[20]
Further controversy surrounds the difference in composition dates between the "Iliad" and "Odyssey". It seems that the latter was composed at a later date than the former because the works' differing characterizations of the Phoenicians align with differing Greek popular opinion of the Phoenicians between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, when their skills began to hurt Greek commerce. Whereas Homer's description of Achilles's shield in the "Iliad" exhibits minutely detailed metalwork that characterized Phoenician crafts, they are characterized in the "Odyssey" as "manifold scurvy tricksters".
The late antiquity Greek poets Nestor of Laranda and Tryphiodorus wrote lipogrammatic adaptations of the Homeric poems: Nestor composed an "Iliad", which was followed by Tryphiodorus' "Odyssey". Both Nestor's Iliad and Tryphidorous' Odyssey were composed of 24 books (like the original Iliad and Odyssey) each book omitting a subsequent letter of the Greek alphabet. Therefore, the first book omitted alpha, the second beta, and so forth.
Joyce divides "Ulysses" into 18 episodes that "roughly correspond to the episodes in Homer's "Odyssey"". Homer's "Odyssey" is divided into 24 books (sections).
Klaus Bruengel (born in October 1949 in Holzwickede) is a German Composer and bass player.
Noteworthy are his 46 musical representations of the characters and places in Homer's epic Odyssey, summarized in the Odyssey Suite 2014 he composed the Ballet Suite "In Monets Garden"
It is estimated that Homer's "Odyssey" was composed sometime in the 50-year period from 725 to 675 BC, and it is thought that it shows the influence of earlier oral poetic traditions of different peoples. In the "Odyssey" the episodes that are placed on the Black Sea, which would include the cyclops story, appear to incorporate parts of the Gilgamesh tradition, as well as the Caucasian myths of a one-eyed monster. There are striking parallels between Homer's story and the Caucasian stories of Urzmaeg, where the hero outwits a one-eyed giant, and blinds him with a torch. It is thought that the Caucasian myths probably came to the Greeks through the epic Anatolian song tradition.
In the "Odyssey" of Homer, the sorceress Circe tells Odysseus of the "Wandering Rocks" or "Roving Rocks" that have only been successfully passed by the "Argo" when "homeward" bound. These rocks smash ships and the remaining timbers are scattered by the sea or destroyed by flames. The rocks lie on one of two potential routes to Ithaca; the alternative, which is taken by Odysseus, leads to Scylla and Charybdis. Furthermore, in the "Odyssey" of Homer, it was Hera, for her love of Jason, who sped the Argo through the Symplegades safely.
The modern debate began with the "Prolegomena" of Friedrich August Wolf (1795). According to Wolf, the date of writing is among the first questions in the textual criticism of Homer. Having satisfied himself that writing was unknown to Homer, Wolf considers the real mode of transmission, which he purports to find in the Rhapsodists, of whom the Homeridae were an hereditary school. Wolf reached the conclusion that the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" could not have been composed in the form in which we know them without the aid of writing. They must therefore have been, as Bentley has said, a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, loose songs not collected together in the form of an epic poem until about 500 years after their original composition. This conclusion Wolf supports by the character attributed to the Cyclic poems (whose want of unity showed that the structure of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" must be the work of a later time), by one or two indications of imperfect connection, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the authenticity of certain parts.
In one of MacDonald's first books, "Christianizing Homer: The Odyssey, Plato, and the Acts of Andrew," he posited the theory that the non-canonical "Acts of Andrew" was a Christian retelling of Homer's "Iliad". In it he argued that one could detect trends that showed parallels between the Homeric epic and the "Acts of Andrew". He argued that the "Acts of Andrew" is better understood in light of the "Odyssey". That the order of events in the Acts follows those found in the Acts of Andrew, that certain events in the Acts are better understood when understood in context of the Homeric epics, and that the Homeric texts commonly were available during the first century AD. In subsequent works, MacDonald expanded his hypothesis to include the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of Mark as being Christian variations of the Homeric epics.
Some of the marriage settlements mentioned in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" suggest that bride price was a custom of Homeric society. The language used for various marriage transactions, however, may blur distinctions between bride price and dowry, and a third practice called "indirect dowry," whereby the groom hands over property to the bride which is then used to establish the new household. "Homeric society" is a fictional construct involving legendary figures and deities, though drawing on the historical customs of various times and places in the Greek world. At the time when the Homeric epics were composed, "primitive" practices such as bride price and polygamy were no longer part of Greek society. Mentions of them preserve, if they have a historical basis at all, customs dating from the Age of Migrations (c. 1200–1000 BCE) and the two centuries following.
Augustus Taber Murray (1866–1940) Homer: Iliad, 2 vols., revised by William F. Wyatt, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press (1999). Homer: Odyssey, 2 vols., revised by George E. Dimock, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press (1995). Robert Fitzgerald (1910–1985) The Iliad, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004) ISBN0-374-52905-1 The Odyssey, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1998) ISBN0-374-52574-9 Robert Fagles (1933–2008) The Iliad, Penguin Classics (1998) ISBN0-14-027536-3 The Odyssey, Penguin Classics (1999) ISBN0-14-026886-3 Stanley Lombardo (b. 1943) Iliad, Hackett Publishing Company (1997) ISBN0-87220-352-2 Odyssey, Hackett Publishing Company (2000) ISBN0-87220-484-7 Iliad, (Audiobook) Parmenides (2006) ISBN1-930972-08-3 Odyssey, (Audiobook) Parmenides (2006) ISBN1-930972-06-7 The Essential Homer, (Audiobook) Parmenides (2006) ISBN1-930972-12-1 The Essential Iliad, (Audiobook) Parmenides (2006) ISBN1-930972-10-5 Barry B. Powell (b. 1942) "Iliad", Oxford University Press (2013) ISBN978-0-19-932610-5 "Odyssey", Oxford University PressI (2014) ISBN978-0-19-936031-4 "Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: The Essential Books", Oxford University Press (2014) ISBN978-0-19-939407-4 Samuel Butler (1835–1902) The Iliad, Red and Black Publishers (2008) ISBN978-1-934941-04-1 The Odyssey, Red and Black Publishers (2008) ISBN978-1-934941-05-8 Herbert Jordan (b. 1938) Iliad, University of Oklahoma Press (2008) ISBN978-0-8061-3974-6 (soft cover) Emily Wilson (b. 1971) The Odyssey, W.W. Norton & Company (2017) ISBN978-0-393-08905-9 Rodney Merrill The Iliad, University of Michigan Press (2007) ISBN978-0-472-11617-1 The Odyssey, University of Michigan Press (2002) ISBN978-0-472-11231-9 Jerome Whitcroft Odyssey of Homer, Zeus Press (2018) ISBN978-1-790-72563-2
The Odyssey (; "Odýsseia", in Classical Attic) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the "Iliad", the other work ascribed to Homer. The "Odyssey" is fundamental to the modern Western canon; it is the second-oldest extant work of Western literature, while the "Iliad" is the oldest. Scholars believe the "Odyssey" was composed near the end of the 8th century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the Greek coastal region of Anatolia.