Author

Homer was A Greek poet, to whom are attributed the great epics, the Iliad,
the story of the siege of Troy, and the Odyssey, the tale of Ulysses's
wanderings. The place of his birth is doubtful, probably a Greek colony on the
coast of Asia Minor, and his date, once put as far back as 1200 BC, from the
style of the poems attributed to him is now thought to be much later.
Arguments have long raged over whether his works are in fact by the same
hand, or have their origins in the lays of Homer and his followers
(Homeridae), and there seems little doubt that the works were originally
based on current ballads which were much modified and extended. Of the
true Homer, nothing is positively known. The so-called Homeric hymns are
certainly of a later age.

Context (Odyssey and Iliad)

Nearly three thousand years after they were composed, the Iliad and the
Odyssey remain two of the most celebrated and widely read stories ever told,
yet next to nothing is known about their author. He was certainly an
accomplished Greek bard, and he probably lived in the late eighth and early
seventh centuries b.c.e. Authorship is traditionally ascribed to a blind poet
named Homer, and it is under this name that the works are still published.
Greeks of the third and second centuries b.c.e., however, already questioned
whether Homer existed and whether the two epics were even written by a
single individual.

Most modern scholars believe that even if a single person wrote the epics, his
work owed a tremendous debt to a long tradition of unwritten, oral poetry.
Stories of a glorious expedition to the East and of its leaders’ fateful journeys
home had been circulating in Greece for hundreds of years before the Iliad
and Odyssey were composed. Casual storytellers and semiprofessional
minstrels passed these stories down through generations, with each artist
developing and polishing the story as he told it. According to this theory, one
poet, multiple poets working in collaboration, or perhaps even a series of
poets handing down their work in succession finally turned these stories into
written works, again with each adding his own touch and expanding or
contracting certain episodes in the overall narrative to fit his taste.

Although historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence suggests that the

epics were composed between 750 and 650 b.c.e., they are set in Mycenaean
Greece in about the twelfth century b.c.e., during the Bronze Age. This earlier
period, the Greeks believed, was a more glorious and sublime age, when
gods still frequented the earth and heroic, godlike mortals with superhuman
attributes populated Greece. Because the two epics strive to evoke this
pristine age, they are written in a high style and generally depict life as it was
believed to have been led in the great kingdoms of the Bronze Age. The
Greeks are often referred to as “Achaeans,” the name of a large tribe
occupying Greece during the Bronze Age.

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But Homer’s reconstruction often yields to the realities of eighth- and
seventh-century b.c.e. Greece. The feudal social structure apparent in the
background of the Odyssey seems more akin to Homer’s Greece than to
Odysseus’s, and Homer substitutes the pantheon of deities of his own day for
the related but different gods whom Mycenaean Greeks worshipped. Many
other minor but obvious anachronisms—such as references to iron tools and
to tribes that had not yet migrated to Greece by the Bronze Age—betray the
poem’s later, Iron Age origins.

Of the two epics, the Odyssey is the later both in setting and, probably, date
of composition. The Iliad tells the story of the Greek struggle to rescue Helen,
a Greek queen, from her Trojan captors. The Odyssey takes the fall of the city
of Troy as its starting point and crafts a new epic around the struggle of one
of those Greek warriors, the hero Odysseus. It tells the story of his nostos, or
journey home, to northwest Greece during the ten-year period after the
Greek victory over the Trojans. A tale of wandering, it takes place not on a
field of battle but on fantastic islands and foreign lands. After the unrelenting
tragedy and carnage of the Iliad, the Odyssey often strikes readers as comic
or surreal at times. This quality has led some scholars to conclude that
Homer wrote the Odyssey at a later time of his life, when he showed less
interest in struggles at arms and was more receptive to a storyline that
focused on the fortunes and misadventures of a single man. Others argue
that someone else must have composed the Odyssey, one who wished to
provide a companion work to the Iliad but had different interests from those
of the earlier epic’s author.

Like the Iliad, the Odyssey was composed primarily in the Ionic dialect of
Ancient Greek, which was spoken on the Aegean islands and in the coastal
settlements of Asia Minor, now modern Turkey. Some scholars thus conclude
that the poet hailed from somewhere in the eastern Greek world. More likely,
however, the poet chose the Ionic dialect because he felt it to be more
appropriate for the high style and grand scope of his work. Slightly later
Greek literature suggests that poets varied the dialects of their poems
according to the themes that they were treating and might write in dialects
that they didn’t actually speak. Homer’s epics, moreover, are Panhellenic
(encompassing all of Greece) in spirit and, in fact, use forms from several
other dialects, suggesting that Homer didn’t simply fall back on his native
tongue but rather suited his poems to the dialect that would best
complement his ideas.

The Odyssey - Overview / Summary

In the Odyssey there were three main characters. Odysseus is the hero of the
epic. He is the son of Laertes and is the king of Ithaca and a very respected
warrior . He enjoys life, even while struggling to get home. He is restless,
clever, and even tricky and is able to invent lies easily. After the Trojan War,
the gods and goddess were mad that his plan helped the Greeks defended
the Trojans. So they made Odysseus’ journey home as hard as possible. In

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the Odyssey, Odysseus is very brave, overcomes many superhuman forces
and is clever. For instance, in The Land of the Cyclopes Odysseus makes up a
plan that ends with him and his men, that were not eaten by the monster,
escaping and with him being the one that stuck the giant in the eye. People
think of Odysseus as a man that is clever and a great warrior. They believe
this because in the Trojan War he had an idea to present a wooden horse to
the Trojans. The Trojans brought the horse into their town, when they fell
asleep the soldiers hiding inside the horse arose and attacked the people of
Troy, and that won the war for the Greeks.

Eurylochus is one of Odysseus’ crewmen. He leads the men into the forest
were they were turned into animals by Circe, the enchantress. Before they
would led into the forest Odysseus made Eurylochus the leader of one of the
two groups of six men. When Odysseus came back with the men and then
said he wanted to go back to Circe, Eurylochus said that it was Odysseus’
fault that the men on the Land of the Cyclopes died because of his
foolishness. Odysseus called Eurylochus his kinsmen but was going to kill him
anyways. Eurylochus ended up going with the rest of the men to the home of
Circe. From what was said about him when the men first encountered Circe
he is very cautious and careful.

Lady Circe is an enchantress. She has turned many of the men that wash up
on her island into animals that are under her control. The found her in her
quiet house while she was singing in a low tone. Circe turned Odysseus’ men
into pigs. Once Odysseus and Circe became lovers the men stayed on her
island for several years, but once she found out that Odysseus wanted to get
back home is let them go peacefully. Circe advised Odysseus on how to get
pass the Sirens she and she also told him that many bad years come
between him and his homeland.

The Odyssey is set in many places. In The Sirens Odysseus fills that ears of
the crew with beeswax, so they maybe safe from the hailing call of the
Sirens. The men tied Odysseus up and rowed within hailing distance of the
Sirens. Once near the Sirens Odysseus tried to escape his from where he was
tied up because the Sirens’ singing was appealing to him. When they had
rowed a safe distance from the Sirens the crew untied Odysseus and cleared
that wax from their ears. The mood that is displayed in this book is one of
terror and uneasiness. All the men were worried about the Sirens and
Odysseus escaping and trying to go to the Sirens. The atmosphere is a
cautious one and one in which all the men are worried about their and their
captain’s safety.

Critics

One of the first things that strikes me about the Odyssey, especially in
contrast to, say, the Iliad or even much of the Old testament, is that we are

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clearly here on the presence of a very sophisticated story teller who is
manipulating certain conventions of fiction in remarkable ways. For instance,
the narrative line of the Odyssey lays down two stories initially – the first one
focusing on Telemachus and Penelope and events in Ithaca, and the second,
which doesn’t begin until Book V, focusing on the Hero Odysseus’s
adventures, we have to keep close track of where we are, because narrative
lines come together when the father and son are reunited in Book XVI, and
the two stories march together to their common conclusion.

When I think of the Odyssey, I tend to concentrate much of my focus on

Odysseus himself, and certainly most of the really famous incidents from this
poem concern the adventures of the main hero. I after I listened to the audio
carefully, I shouldn’t note just how much emphasis the structure gives to
Odysseus’s family, especially to his wife and son. In a way, the narrative
emphasis in the structure puts pressure on me to see in this story more than
just the memorable events in the hero’s life, reminding me that this story is
also about family and about how each principal members of that family plays
and important role in the successful reunion and the restoration of a
traditional ruling household.

What’s remarkable about this (and also very frustrating) is that such an
obviously sophisticated narrative skill cannot just arise from nothing. For it
presupposes, not just an artist educated to use conventions in this way, but
also a listener familiar enough with such matters to follow what is going on.
So we are very safe in assuming that the Odyssey could not have been sui
generic-produced in a cultural vacuum all of a sudden. It presupposes a
tradition of some sort and a listener familiar enough with that tradition to
follow narrative complexities. And yet we have no trace of that tradition. So
here we have what is obviously the product of a long tradition of story telling,
a work so remarkable that even today the Odyssey can serve as really useful
instruction manual fro writers wishing to study the ways in which plot
construction and chronological variety can serve all sorts of vital artistic
purposes, and yet we have no details whatsoever of the tradition out of which
it arose, any of the other works on whose shoulders homer, whoever he or
she say or they were, built.

This structure, in which different stories are going in at the same time and we
are shifting back and forth between them, creates a very different effect than
the narrative style of the Old Testament, where there is an apparently much
simpler narrative line which is always dynamically thrusting ahead into new
events.

Overall, in The Odyssey, there are very many themes to be recognized and
they should be for many reasons. They may impact people in a way that
could change their outlook on life, and make them think twice about
something they are doing, or will do in the future. They can teach very
valuable lessons about life and many of the situations people may find
themselves in today.

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Iliad – Overview/Summary

Nine years after the start of the Trojan War, the Greek (“Achaean”) army
sacks Chryse, a town allied with Troy. During the battle, the Achaeans
capture a pair of beautiful maidens, Chryseis and Briseis. Agamemnon, the
leader of the Achaean forces, takes Chryseis as his prize, and Achilles, the
Achaeans’ greatest warrior, claims Briseis. Chryseis’s father, Chryses, who
serves as a priest of the god Apollo, offers an enormous ransom in return for
his daughter, but Agamemnon refuses to give Chryseis back. Chryses then
prays to Apollo, who sends a plague upon the Achaean camp.

After many Achaeans die, Agamemnon consults the prophet Calchas to

determine the cause of the plague. When he learns that Chryseis is the
cause, he reluctantly gives her up but then demands Briseis from Achilles as
compensation. Furious at this insult, Achilles returns to his tent in the army
camp and refuses to fight in the war any longer. He vengefully yearns to see
the Achaeans destroyed and asks his mother, the sea-nymph Thetis, to enlist
the services of Zeus, king of the gods, toward this end. The Trojan and
Achaean sides have declared a cease-fire with each other, but now the
Trojans breach the treaty and Zeus comes to their aid.

With Zeus supporting the Trojans and Achilles refusing to fight, the Achaeans
suffer great losses. Several days of fierce conflict ensue, including duels
between Paris and Menelaus and between Hector and Ajax. The Achaeans
make no progress; even the heroism of the great Achaean warrior Diomedes
proves fruitless. The Trojans push the Achaeans back, forcing them to take
refuge behind the ramparts that protect their ships. The Achaeans begin to
nurture some hope for the future when a nighttime reconnaissance mission
by Diomedes and Odysseus yields information about the Trojans’ plans, but
the next day brings disaster. Several Achaean commanders become
wounded, and the Trojans break through the Achaean ramparts. They
advance all the way up to the boundary of the Achaean camp and set fire to
one of the ships. Defeat seems imminent, because without the ships, the
army will be stranded at Troy and almost certainly destroyed.

Concerned for his comrades but still too proud to help them himself, Achilles
agrees to a plan proposed by Nestor that will allow his beloved friend
Patroclus to take his place in battle, wearing his armor. Patroclus is a fine
warrior, and his presence on the battlefield helps the Achaeans push the
Trojans away from the ships and back to the city walls. But the counterattack
soon falters. Apollo knocks Patroclus’s armor to the ground, and Hector slays
him. Fighting then breaks out as both sides try to lay claim to the body and
armor. Hector ends up with the armor, but the Achaeans, thanks to a
courageous effort by Menelaus and others, manage to bring the body back to
their camp. When Achilles discovers that Hector has killed Patroclus, he fills

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with such grief and rage that he agrees to reconcile with Agamemnon and
rejoin the battle. Thetis goes to Mount Olympus and persuades the god
Hephaestus to forge Achilles a new suit of armor, which she presents to him
the next morning. Achilles then rides out to battle at the head of the Achaean
army.

Meanwhile, Hector, not expecting Achilles to rejoin the battle, has ordered his
men to camp outside the walls of Troy. But when the Trojan army glimpses
Achilles, it flees in terror back behind the city walls. Achilles cuts down every
Trojan he sees. Strengthened by his rage, he even fights the god of the river
Xanthus, who is angered that Achilles has caused so many corpses to fall into
his streams. Finally, Achilles confronts Hector outside the walls of Troy.
Ashamed at the poor advice that he gave his comrades, Hector refuses to
flee inside the city with them. Achilles chases him around the city’s periphery
three times, but the goddess Athena finally tricks Hector into turning around
and fighting Achilles. In a dramatic duel, Achilles kills Hector. He then lashes
the body to the back of his chariot and drags it across the battlefield to the
Achaean camp. Upon Achilles’ arrival, the triumphant Achaeans celebrate
Patroclus’s funeral with a long series of athletic games in his honor. Each day
for the next nine days, Achilles drags Hector’s body in circles around
Patroclus’s funeral bier.

At last, the gods agree that Hector deserves a proper burial. Zeus sends the
god Hermes to escort King Priam, Hector’s father and the ruler of Troy, into
the Achaean camp. Priam tearfully pleads with Achilles to take pity on a
father bereft of his son and return Hector’s body. He invokes the memory of
Achilles’ own father, Peleus. Deeply moved, Achilles finally relents and
returns Hector’s corpse to the Trojans. Both sides agree to a temporary truce,
and Hector receives a hero’s funeral.

Critics

Although most commentators praise the narrative impact and brilliant

imagery of the Iliad, there remains a great deal of debate regarding the
structural and thematic unity of the poem. A number of contemporary
scholars have examined the underlying complexities of work's narrative
structure and thematic framework, highlighting Homer's use of misdirection,
parallelism, and reversal. Some interpreters have suggested that Homer's
portrayal of the Trojans is not adequately balanced with that of the Greeks,
citing evidence that the poem is biased toward Achaean heroes, and finally
withholds the glory due to the Trojans. Overall, however, critics have tended
to cite the comprehensive and cohesive vision of life depicted in the Iliad as
the poem's central unifying principle. Although Homer presents an extremely
harsh world in which human beings appear destined to suffer as the mere
playthings of the gods and fate, he simultaneously conveys the value of
human ideals and the joy of pursuing heroic excellence. Late twentieth-
century critics have continued to focus on such specialized topics as Homer's
narrative technique, use of irony and humor, and development of individual

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characters, considering the poet's treatment of the gods in relation to
mortals, or probing such minor themes as the guilt of Helen or Paris.

Exploring Homer's philosophical beliefs, scholars still grapple with his

presentation of death, divine and human justice, and the role of the citizen
and the state in society. The concepts of aidōs, aristeia, and other elements
of the heroic code have also inspired considerable commentary. Homer's rich
use of simile continues to elicit interest, with scholars considering his
descriptions of heroes as wild beasts, as well as his lyric evocation of human
gentleness, care, and nurturing in the brutal context of war. With the ongoing
proliferation of critical attention to the Iliad, the oldest and in some ways the
most formidable work of Western literature has remained fresh and intriguing
for generation after generation of scholars and readers. It impresses as much
by its thematic complexity as by its stylistic simplicity, as much by its
depiction of tragedy as by its celebration of life, and as much by its harsh
descriptions of warfare as by its tender lyric poetry.