Background+Notes

The man historians call Homer is actually quite an elusive and mysterious character. Of course, no actual records of his life exist, and what has been strung together about the life of the poet throughout the years is all no more than speculation and hearsay. What we do know is that two major works, the //Iliad //and the //Odyssey //,  were written down at some time around the sixth century B.C., and survive from that period to the modern era in essentially the same form. Today, both of these works serve as a fragment of living history that provide us insight into that ancient world.
 * Odyssey Background Information **

The birth of Homer is estimated to be as early as 1200 B.C.; However, the styles of the //Iliad //and the //Odyssey //correlate with a style that is thought to have existed much later, which has led some historians to doubt the validity of that early birth date. To further complicate matters, it is likely that a group of Homer’s students or followers were responsible for the written versions of the poems since writing was not a part of the early oral tradition from Homer’s time. In this scenario, the written forms of the two poems are surely much different than the original oral composition, which would have undergone many changes over the years as it was passed along in the oral tradition. With only a speculative time-frame to work with, the task of assessing how much could have changed in style, tone, and content from the time until the time when they were finally written down much more difficult.

Records discovered by some modern scholars indicate that not even the ancient Greeks knew the true origin of the poems. In fact, some ancient Greek scholars who investigated Homer’s life believed that the works attributed to him were actually written by a woman. Whatever is the true case, and whomever is the mysterious author behind the epic poems that remain, we are left with are a pair of vivid, humorous, and often graphic tales of heroics in a mythologically enchanted ancient Greek landscape. It is reasonable to assume that some of the stories within each epic are based on fact, while others are pure fiction, but both give us invaluable insights into the thinking, values, and cultural lives of the ancient Greeks.

In addition to the changes the poems may have gone through as they were told and retold before being written down, the modern versions of these poems have also seen many translations and adaptations. The original poems were written in the Greek language, and featured a flourishing, lyrical verse. Many modern translations have changed the text into a modern prose that is more readable and digestible. This has made the literature more accessible to the modern reader, as part of an effort to keep the legacy of these great works alive.