Homer is the name given to the man credited with
composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, great Greek
EPIC poems that are the earliest surviving examples
of European literature. The Iliad, or “poem
about Ilion (Troy),” recounts an episode during the
Trojan War with Greece. The Odyssey follows one
Greek warrior, the shrewd and wily Odysseus, as he
wends his way back home after the siege of Troy.
Almost nothing is known about Homer, including
whether he truly existed, but the ancient
Greeks in the centuries that followed the poems’
composition considered him a distinct individual
and depicted him in sculpture. Many scholars are
convinced that the two epic poems were created by
the same person, as they seem stamped with a single
artistic sensibility, sharing such traits as individualized
characters, humor (often derived from
the all-too-human antics of the gods on Mount
Olympus), and deeply moving scenes. They are
written in hexameter verse and reveal a structural,
stylistic, and dramatic harmony. The narratives are
characterized by swift descriptions, straightforward
storytelling, generous use of simile (but little
if any metaphor), and such oft-repeated epithets as
“swift-footed Achilles,” “gray-eyed Athena,” “resourceful
Odysseus,”“Hector, tamer of horses,” and
“Zeus the cloud-gatherer.” Common themes include
a reverence for lineage and the heroic code,
destiny and fate, and the role therein of the gods,
who guide arrows, bring false dreams, and directly
and indirectly influence human lives.
These masterpieces influenced almost all Greek
poetry that followed and much of Western literature.
As H. C. Baldry, a scholar of Greek literature,
wrote,“For epic [Homer’s poems] were accepted as
models which all must imitate but none could
equal.”
It is not known whether Homer was literate or
composed the poems orally while others wrote
them down. It is known that what has come to us
of the Iliad is not entirely the original composition.
The ancient Athenians altered the narrative to enhance
their role in the Trojan War. Additionally,
each of the poems was divided long after their creation
into 24 convenient sections, or “books.”
Of the two eminent Homeric epics, the Odyssey
was probably composed first, although the events
it relates take place at a later date than those in the
Iliad. The first four books of the poem tell two important
background stories, one concerning
Mount Olympus and the other concerning the
state of Odysseus’s household in Ithaca. This is the
first documented use of the narrative device in
which the story is begun in the middle, and the beginning
is recounted at a later stage of the tale. The
Roman epic poet VIRGIL used this strategy in the
Aeneid.
As the story opens, the war goddess Athena had
been the Greeks’ greatest divine ally, but after the
Greeks sacked Troy they failed to pay proper tribute
to the gods, so she gives them bitter homecomings.
Odysseus, who had spent 10 years fighting the
Trojan War, is doomed to spend another decade returning
home from it. His son Telemachus, who
had been an infant when Odysseus left, is now a
fine young man.
Meanwhile, in Ithaca, Odysseus’s wife Penelope,
beautiful, wealthy, and presumably a widow, is
fighting off an onslaught of suitors who have taken
up residence in Odysseus’s home, devouring his
provisions and ordering his servants about. To discourage
the parasitic petitioners, Penelope tells
them she cannot select a husband from among
them until she has finished weaving a shroud for
Odysseus’s father; and she delays the odious obligation
by unraveling by night what she has woven
during the day.
Odysseus ventures into many a familiar folktale.
He escapes from the island of Calypso, a sea
nymph who loves him and wants to give him immortality,
and is washed up on the shores of
Scheria, home of the mythic Phaeacians, whose
king is a grandson of the sea god Poseidon. Here,
Odysseus tells of his adventures since he left Troy:
He and his crew had traveled to the land of the
Lotus-eaters, where men forgot their pasts; blinded
the Cyclops, a one-eyed monster; encountered the
sorceress Circe, who turns men into swine; traveled
to the underworld; averted being tempted by
the Sirens’ singing by placing wax into their ears;
and tried, not altogether successfully, to avoid
being eaten by the sea serpent Scylla.
The Phaeacians return Odysseus to Ithaca,
where he summarily slaughters his wife’s wooers in
a gruesome bloodbath. Penelope, no less cunning
and resourceful than her husband, tests him to
make sure he is who he claims to be. When
Odysseus reminds her that he built one of their
bedposts out of a growing olive tree, Penelope welcomes
her husband home.
Critical Analysis
The Iliad, sometimes titled “The Wrath of
Achilles,” takes place over a few action-packed days
during the 10-year conflict between Troy and
Greece. Paris, the son of Priam, king of Troy, has
absconded with the beauteous Helen, wife of
Menelaus, king of Sparta. In retaliation, the
Greeks, led by Agamemnon, Menelaus’s brother,
have waged war on the Trojans. At the opening of
the poem, a priest of the sun god Apollo visits the
Greeks’ camp to request the return of his daughter,
who has been kidnapped to serve as Agamemnon’s
concubine. To appease Apollo, Agamemnon
agrees, but he insists that one of his colleagues give
up his own mistress to replace the girl he is relinquishing.
Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest warrior, objects,
so Agamemnon punishes him by seizing
Achilles’ mistress to take the place of the priest’s
daughter.
An enraged Achilles retreats from the battlefield
and withdraws his men. He prays to his mother,
Thetis, a sea nymph, to persuade Zeus to give the
Greeks ill fortune in battle so Agamemnon will be
humiliated and his fellow soldiers will realize how
essential Achilles is to their victory.
A series of savage battles follows. The Trojans,
led by Hector, son of Priam and brother of Paris,
and assisted by Zeus, trounce the Greeks in the
next day’s battle. Alarmed, Agamemnon sends an
envoy to Achilles, still sulking in his tent, offering
many gifts and honors if Achilles will return to the
battlefield. The warrior rejects the attempt at reconciliation,
but when his dearest friend, the kindhearted
Patroclus, is slain by Hector, he leaps to his
feet and lets forth his famous war cry:
There he stood, and shouted, and from her
place Pallas Athene
gave cry, and drove an endless terror upon
the Trojans.
As loud as comes the voice that is screamed
out by a trumpet
by murderous attackers who beleaguer a
city,
so then high and clear went up the voice of
Aiakides.
But the Trojans, when they heard the
brazen voice of Aiakides,
the heart was shaken in all, and the very
floating-maned horses
turned their chariots about, since their
hearts saw the coming afflictions . . .
Three times across the ditch brilliant
Achilleus gave his great cry,
and three times the Trojans and their
renowned companions were routed.
(XVIII, 217–224)
With reinforcement from Achilles, the Greeks
massacre the Trojans. Achilles slays Hector and
drags his body by the heels behind his chariot
around the walls of Troy and back to the army
base. Patroclus’s body is buried amid much ceremony,
and Achilles is persuaded by Priam to permit
Hector to have a suitable burial as well.
Critic David Denby describes the vividness of
the poetry:
The brute vitality of the air, the magnificence
of ships, wind, and fires; the raging battles, the
plains charged with terrified horses, the beasts
unstrung and falling; the warriors flung facedown
in the dust; the ravaged longing for
home and family and meadows and the rituals
of peace, leading at last to an instant of reconciliations,
when even two men who are bitter
enemies fall into rapt admiration of each
other’s nobility and beauty—it is a war poem,
and . . . it has an excruciating vividness, an obsessive
observation of horror that causes almost
disbelief.
According to scholar Howard W. Clarke,
Homer’s epics have “retained a primacy . . . as the
first and probably the finest example of its genre,
the beginning of the Western literary tradition,
and the ideal introduction to literature. . . .”
English Versions of Works by Homer
The Iliad of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. Introduction
and notes by Bernard Knox. New York: Penguin,
1996.
The Poetry of Homer. Translated by S. E. Bassett.
Edited by Bruce Heiden. Lanham, Md.: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2003.
Works about Homer
Clayton, Barbara. A Penelopean Poetics: Reweaving the
Feminine in Homer’s Odyssey. Lanham,Md.: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2004.
Knight, W. F. Jackson. Many Minded Homer. New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1968.
Powell, Barry. Homer. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2003.