The World of Homer

Was Achilles a real person? Was Odysseus? What period or periods of ancient Greek history do the Iliad and the Odyssey reflect? Or are those epics simply mythical tales of imaginary heroes, without any historical basis? How were the Iliad and the Odyssey originally composed through oral tradition? And how and when did they come to be written down? Was there an arch-poet who transformed the orally-composed stories into two masterful epics? Or did the epics naturally evolve over years of oral performance?Questions about the origin, development, and historicity of the Homeric epics have been asked at least since the 6th century BCE, and a wide range of answers have been given. The World of Homer is the most recent attempt to answer these questions, and Cosmopoulos does this by bringing together an impressive array of archaeological, historical, literary, and sociological evidence. The strengths of this book are its comprehensiveness, clarity, and its accessibility to the non-specialist scholar, as all Greek is transliterated and (almost) all jargon is explained. If Cosmopoulos’s answers will not satisfy everyone, it is not because he has omitted some aspects of the question; the book is remarkably comprehensive in its scope. Cosmopoulos’s only fault is that he seems too quick to embrace one set of answers at the expense of others.The World of Homer is divided into three main parts. Part I, “Homeric Schol-arship,” provides a clear and well-written history of “The Homeric Question,” that is, the question of how and when the Homeric epics were composed, and how they developed into their present form. Part II, “The World of Homer,” discusses the relationship between the Homeric epics and history. In the third part of the book, “History, Memory, and the Emergence of Greek Epic Poetry,” Cosmopoulos uses the historical and archaeological evidence provided in Part II to draw some tentative conclusions about when, where, and how the Iliad and the Odyssey were developed.Cosmopolis begins his history of Homeric scholarship by explaining that references to a poet named Homer (Ὃμηρος in Greek) as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey first began to appear in the Ionian poets and philosophers of the second half of the sixth century BCE (c. 550–500). Cosmopoulos claims that the first appearance of Homer’s name at this time indicates that his existence was simply fabricated, that he was nothing more than the “cultural concept of the archetypal poet” (p. 11), but this claim is not well-supported. The second half of the sixth century was a time when many long-standing traditions, some with a strong historical basis, made their first appearance in writing, so the sudden appearance of Homer’s name at this time proves nothing about his historicity or the lack thereof.Systematic Homeric scholarship did not begin until the Hellenistic period (323–46 BCE), when scholars at the Library of Alexandria produced standard editions of the Homeric epics and wrote grammatical and literary commentaries on them. These editions and commentaries continued to be written throughout the Roman and Byzantine periods. When the Byzantine Empire collapsed in 1453, a number of Greek scholars escaped to Italy, bringing manuscripts of Homer and other classical Greek authors with them. These scholars found positions at Italian universities, where they taught Greek and helped to inspire the revival of Hellenic studies during the Renaissance.Modern approaches to Homer can be dated to 1795, when the German classicist, Friedrich Wolf, published his Prolegomena ad Homerum (Introduction to the Study of Homer), in which he argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey had been composed in oral tradition by stringing together a series of shorter, traditional lays. Scholars who subscribed to Wolf’s thesis came to be known as Analysts, and they were chiefly concerned with isolating and identifying those traditional, shorter poems that comprised the larger whole. A rival group of scholars, known as Unitarians, insisted that, whether they had originated as shorter poems or not, the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as their complex plots and powerful literary themes made it clear that they must have been created by a single, master poet. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars continued to pursue one or another of these two approaches, or to suggest various combinations of them, in the attempt to explain how the poems could have acquired their unique combination of traditional and original elements.In the 1930s, the Harvard scholar, Milman Parry, revolutionized the study of Homer with his oral-formulaic theory. Parry defined a Homeric formula as a group of words—often a name and an epithet, such as “swift-footed Achilles”—that can be used under the same metrical conditions to express an essential idea. Thus, Achilles can be described as “swift-footed” even when he is standing still. These repeating formulas, as well as type-scenes (such as scenes of feasting or fighting) allow the poet to compose his poem orally, during the performance, without relying on strict memorization. Parry saw this kind of oral composition in action during the 1930s when he conducted fieldwork in Yugoslavia. There, he heard traditional poets, called guslars, accompanying themselves on a stringed instrument, known as the gusle, who composed their songs during their performances with the help of epic formulas and type-scenes similar to those in the Homeric epics. It should be noted, however, that not even the longest of the Yugoslavian epics was as long as the Iliad or the Odyssey.Today, all Homeric scholars accept that the Iliad and the Odyssey were orally composed by some process similar to Parry’s oral-formulaic theory, but they disagree as to when, how, and by whom the epics were eventually standardized and written down. Cosmopoulos uses historical and archaeological evidence in Part II, combined with recent sociological research into the concept of collective memory (Part III) to try to provide an answer to this question. Cosmopoulos shows that the Homeric poems, which came into their final form in the late eighth century BCE (750–700), include some elements from the long-gone Mycenaean palatial period (1550–1200 BCE, also called the Late Bronze Age) and some elements from the more recent Early Iron Age (1200–800 BCE). Specifically, he argues that after the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces (c. 1200 BCE), some Mycenaean ruins became sacred sites during the Early Iron Age, and these, along with preserved Mycenaean artifacts and relics, became part of the Greeks’ collective memory. During the Early Iron Age, as the epic poems celebrating Mycenaean heroes began to be sung at the courts of local aristocrats, descriptions of these Mycenaean remains were woven into the poems, which also included elements from contemporary life. Later, when panhellenic religious festivals developed, and the poems began to be sung at those larger venues, the poems became more cosmopolitan and panhellenic in scope, while keeping their original mix of Mycenaean and Iron Age elements.Cosmopoulos argues forcefully that the poems evolved naturally over years of oral performance, a theory that “eliminates the need for a poetic mastermind who would edit the text into a unified whole” (p. 27). In fact, Cosmopoulos insists that the very concept of a master poet is entirely fictitious: “There is no evidence at all that a real historical person stands behind this cultural concept” (p. 11). The evidence of the poems themselves, with their great length, poetic mastery, and thematic complexity, is never fully addressed. In the end, Cosmopoulos does not resolve the “Homeric Question,” but the broad range of literary, historical, and archaeological evidence that he brings to bear will be appreciated by anyone who wonders where these amazing poems came from.