One historian has made a different kind of argument. Adam Nicolson argues that the Iliad and the Odyssey show signs of originating from about 1000 years earlier than when Homer is supposed to have lived. This would mean that Homer cannot have been their author. Since Homer’s only contribution to history is as the supposed author of those poems, that would take away his historical standing.
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Back in the day, we were taught that Homer wrote down existing oral stories - that he is believed to have actually written them is new to me. I’ll stick with what I was taught back when they actually taught history.
“Back in the day, we were taught that Homer wrote down existing oral stories - that he is believed to have actually written them is new to me.”
I was taught he used existing, time honored plots and combined them with using his own muse.
Yup. And there is a very great deal of evidence - specific memory markers such as repetitions of "rosy-fingered dawn" for example - that both poems are exactly that. The controversy these days mostly centers around the question "Were there two Homers?", based on subtle differences between the Greek dialect used in the oldest available copies of the respective works. That's way outside my paygrade but my last Classics professor said he thinks there's a good chance there probably were.
Whoever wrote this piece seems unaware of all the work that has been done on oral poetry since the 1920s by Milman Parry, Albert Bates Lord and many other scholars. Homer would have been illiterate. Whether the same poet created the Iliad and the Odyssey is still debated.
There were performers of epic poetry called Homeridae who claimed to be descendants of Homer but whether he really existed is unknown.
Archilochus of Paros was active in the mid-600s and we know something about him. If Homer was as late as the 7th century we probably would know something definite about him.
The transition was in the late 60's to early 70's. My older high school teachers taught ancient, medieval and modern European history as one would expect using well established texts.
For American histroy we got some bright spark of a young genius out of one of our well-known Ivy League schools who taught us that American history is the history of immagrants. End of story. Nothing more to know. We learned nothing. And within 40 years the rot has spread everywhere and corrupted everything.
Point taken! But it seems clear that Homer gathered older stories and worked them into a new and coherent whole (as Kipling notes!) Otherwise, we would just have fragments along the lines of Sappho’s poems . . . the only survivals were used by later poets to illustrate the Aeolic dialect.