Homer: WhoWas He? Good question.
It’s such a good question, in fact, that scholars have given it its own name: the Homeric Question. Many scholars have devoted entire careers to defending their explanation of Homer’s identity andmethod ofwriting.Was he blind, asmany people believe?Did he compose his poems by writing them down, or was he completely illiterate?Were his poems recited bymemory, orwere they improvised and onlywritten down later in history? The truth is,we can’t say for sure thatHomer even existed; or, that if he did, that hewas a he and not a she or even a they. In fact,multiple cities across Greece claimto be the birthplace
ofHomer.Many theories
A Traditional Depiction of Homer Here are a few:
The Ancient Greek historian Herodotus believed that Homer lived and wrote in the 9th centuryBCE—some 400 years beforeHerodotus himself came along, and around 300 years after the TrojanWar is thought to have
taken place. The Homeric scholar Aristarchus of Alexandria argued that Homer lived some 140 years after the TrojanWar,making Aristarchus’ Homer about 300 years older than Herodotus’ Homer.
Up until the 18th century CE, scholars generally believed thatHomerwas blind and that he—like the scholars who wrote about him—composed hiswork bywriting it down.
argued, were “transmitted by memory” and “not uniied until much later.”
In the 17th century CE, philosopher Giambattista Vico posited that Homer did not exist. Homeric poems, he believed,were the product and legacy of the entire Greek people.
In his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1769), Englishman Robert Wood proposed that Homerwas completely illiterate.
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Joseph ben Matthias (1st century CE) was one of the irst scholars to refute the theory that Homer wrote down his poems. Homer’s poems, he
have been proposed to explain the origin of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the identity of their creator.
wikipedia.org
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