The Homeric Question

Classicists have long debated the uncertainties surrounding Homer’s true identity, the authorship of the two epic poems, and indeed, the poet’s existence—an academic discussion that formally came to be known as the “Homeric Question” from the 1830s. One of the first scholars in the early modern period who questioned the existence of Homer was French dramatist and critic François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac (1604–76), who not only dismissed the Greek poet but also made a disparaging assessment of the poems, concluding that they had been stitched together from several independent ballads. In 1795 German philologist and classical scholar Friedrich August Wolf published Prolegomena ad Homerum, which created the Homeric Question in its modern form. He, too, argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey were assembled over generations from many shorter songs by different hands, with their artistic unity imposed on them at a later date. This school of thought, advanced by critics often identified as the Analysts, proposed that the epics were created from multiple poems, layered together by many people. It has been countered by the Unitarian approach, which emphasizes the artistic unity of the poems and often attributes that unity to a single author, traditionally identified as Homer.

Early 20th-century American scholar Milman Parry, whose ideas were further expanded by his student Albert Bates Lord, is associated with the oral-formulaic theory, which helped move the issue beyond the opposing propositions of the Analysts and Unitarians. In his early studies of the epics, Parry described the “traditional, almost formulaic, quality of Homer.” He used statistical analysis, scientific examination, and extensive fieldwork to study oral poetry traditions and the language of the Homeric epics, showing that Homeric poetry belonged to a living oral tradition, in which singers inherited familiar phrases, diction, scenes, and plots but could reshape them in performance. The oral poets of the epics could draw from traditional verses, expressions, and more, with the poems becoming an evolving composition that could still bear the mark of one single poet.

Geographical clues to Homer’s world

Modern scholars agree with the ancient sources only about Homer’s general place of activity. The most concrete piece of ancient evidence is that his descendants, the Homeridae, lived on the Ionic island of Chios. Yet an east Aegean environment is suggested for the main author of the Iliad by certain local references in the poem; that is, to the peak of Samothrace just appearing over the intervening mass of Imbros when seen from the plain of Troy, to the birds at the mouth of the Cayster near Ephesus, to storms off Icaria and northwest winds from Thrace. East Aegean coloring is fainter in the Odyssey, which is set primarily in western Greece; but the poem’s vagueness over the position of Ithaca, for example, is not incompatible with the idea of a poet in Ionia elaborating materials derived from the farther side of the Greek world.

Same main author or not

Admittedly, there is some doubt over whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were even composed by the same main author. Such doubts began in antiquity itself and depended mainly on the difference of genre (the Iliad being martial and heroic, the Odyssey picaresque and often fantastic), but they may be reinforced by subtle differences of vocabulary even apart from those imposed by different subjects. Aristotle’s conception of the Odyssey as a work of Homer’s old age is not impossible; but if the Iliad is the earlier of the two (as seems likely from its simpler structure and the greater frequency of relatively late linguistic forms in the Odyssey), then the Odyssey could have been created after its image, and as a conscious supplement, once the example of monumental composition had been given. In any case the similarities of the two poems are partly due to the coherence of the heroic poetical tradition that lay behind both.

Dating the works

The internal evidence of the poems is of some use in determining when Homer lived. Certain elements of the poetic language, which was an artificial amalgam never exactly reproduced in speech, indicate that the epics were not only post-Mycenaean in composition but also substantially later than the foundation of the first Ionian settlements in Asia Minor of about 1000 bce. The running together of adjacent short vowels and the disappearance of the semivowel digamma (a letter formerly existing in the Greek alphabet) are the most significant indications of this. At the other end of the time scale the development in the poems of a true definite article, for instance, represents an earlier phase than is exemplified in the poetry of the middle and late 7th century. Both stylistically and metrically, the Homeric poems appear to be earlier than the Hesiodic poems, which many scholars place not long after 700 bce. A different and perhaps more precise criterion is provided by datable objects and practices mentioned in the poems. Nothing, except for one or two probably Athenian additions, seems from this standpoint to be later than about 700; on the other hand, the role assigned in the Odyssey to the Phoenicians as traders, together with one or two other phenomena, suggests a date of composition—for the relevant contexts at least—of sometime after 900. A few passages in the Iliad may imply a new form of fighting in close formation, dependent on the development of special armor for foot soldiers (hoplites) after about 750, and references to the Gorgon mask as a decorative motif point in the same direction. It is true that the poems contain many traditional and archaic elements, and their language and material background are a compound of different constituents originating at different dates. It seems, nonetheless, plausible to conclude that the period of composition of the large-scale epics (as distinct from their much shorter predecessors) was the 9th or 8th century, with several features pointing more clearly to the 8th. The Odyssey may belong near the end of this century, the Iliad closer to its middle. It may be no coincidence that cults of Homeric heroes tended to spring up toward the end of the 8th century, and that scenes from the epic begin to appear on pots at just about the same time.