Biography of homer book

He is famous for the epic poems The Iliad and The Odysseywhich have had an enormous effect on Western culture, but very little is known about their alleged author. Homer is a mystery. The Greek epic poet credited with the enduring epic tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey is an enigma insofar as actual facts of his life go. Some scholars believe him to be one man; others think these iconic stories were created by a group.

A variation on the group idea stems from the fact that storytelling was an oral tradition and Homer compiled the stories, then recited them to memory. The stories have repetitive elements, almost like a chorus or refrain, which suggests a musical element. All this speculation about who he was has inevitably led to what is known as the Homeric Question—whether he actually existed at all.

This is often considered to be the greatest literary mystery. Much speculation surrounds when Homer was born because of the dearth of real information about him. Guesses at his birth date range from BC all the way back to BC, the latter because The Iliad encompasses the story of the Trojan War, so some scholars have thought it fit to put the poet and chronicler nearer to the time of that actual event.

But others believe the poetic style of his work indicates a much later period. Greek historian Herodotus c. Part of the problem is that Homer lived before a chronological dating system was in place. Gary Walter de Gruyter. Retrieved 23 November The Odyssey Re-formed. Cornell University Press.

Biography of homer book

Oxford University Press. The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World. OUP Oxford. Retrieved 22 November Archived from the biography of homer book on 30 June Goold Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. JSTOR Stanley, The Shield of Homer Princeton, 37, ff. Sources [ edit ]. Selected bibliography [ edit ]. Editions [ edit ].

Interlinear translations [ edit ]. English translations [ edit ]. Main article: English translations of Homer. General works on Homer [ edit ]. Influential readings and interpretations [ edit ]. Commentaries [ edit ]. Dating the Homeric poems [ edit ]. Further reading [ edit ]. Buck, Carl Darling The Greek Dialects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hesiod, the Homeric hymns and Homerica. The Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Evelyn-White, Hugh Gerard. Ford, Andrew Homer : the poetry of the past. Kirk, G. The Songs of Homer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liddell, Henry George ; Scott, Robert A Greek-English Lexicon revised ed. Murray, Gilbert New York: Oxford University Press.

Schein, Seth L. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silk, Michael Homer: The Iliad. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. Here we have compiled a short biography of the man who changed the literary world. It is assumed that the Ancient Greek poet was born somewhere around BC. Broadly speaking, his birth date is estimated to be between the 12 th and 8 th centuries B.

Historians think that he lived somewhere around Chios, on the coast of Asia Minor. Many theories debate him and his books:. The Homeric question has been studied by scholars since ancient times and continues to fascinate people even now. If we agree that the poet Homer did exist, several ideas come up as to what the man looked like. His talent is so immense that he manages to bring the great hero Odysseus to tears.

This could have been a reference to the author himself. In any case, plenty of drawings and sculptures depict Homer as blind. Homer is known as the mysterious author who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey. Nowadays, only these two literary classics are attributed to his authorship. However, back in Ancient Greece, a variety of other literature was associated with his name.

With time, we came to the understanding that somebody wrote them much later. From this stems the question:. Texts of The Iliad and The Odyssey existed from at least the sixth century BC, and probably for a considerable span of time before that. These two great epic poems also had a life in performance: through the centuries, professional artists made their living by reciting Homer, performing the great epics for audiences that often know great parts of the poem by heart.

It is impossible to pin down with any certainty when Homer lived. Eratosthenes gives the traditional date of BC for the end of the Trojan War, the semi-mythical event that forms the basis for the Iliad. The great Greek historian Herodotus put the date at BC. These dates were arrived at in a very approximate manner; Greek historians usually used genealogy and estimation when trying to find the dates for events in the distant past.

But Greek historians were far less certain about the dates for Homer's life. Some said he was a contemporary of the events of The Iliadwhile others placed him sixty or a hundred or several hundred years afterward. Herodotus estimated that Homer lived and wrote in the ninth century BC.