Homer - biography, facts from life, photographs, reference information. Brief biography of Homer the most important

Homer (ancient Greek Ὅμηρος, VIII century BC). The legendary ancient Greek poet-storyteller, the creator of the epic poems "Iliad" (the oldest monument of European literature) and "Odyssey". Approximately half of the ancient Greek literary papyri found are passages from Homer.

Nothing is known for certain about the life and personality of Homer.

It is clear, however, that the Iliad and the Odyssey were created much later than the events described in them, but before the 6th century BC. e., when their existence is reliably recorded. The chronological period in which Homer's life is localized by modern science is approximately the 8th century BC. e. According to Herodotus, Homer lived 400 years before him, other ancient sources say that he lived during the Trojan War.

Homer's birthplace is unknown. Seven cities argued for the right to be called his homeland in the ancient tradition: Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos, Athens. According to Pausanias, Homer died on the island of Ios in the Cyclades archipelago. Probably, the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed on the Asia Minor coast of Greece, inhabited by Ionian tribes, or on one of the adjacent islands. However, the Homeric dialect does not provide accurate information about the tribal affiliation of Homer, as it is a combination of the Ionian and Aeolian dialects of the ancient Greek language.

There is speculation that his dialect is a form of poetic Koine that developed long before Homer's supposed lifetime.

Traditionally, Homer is portrayed as blind. It is most likely that this representation does not come from the real facts of his life, but is a reconstruction typical of the genre of ancient biography. Since many prominent legendary soothsayers and singers were blind (for example, Tiresias), according to the ancient logic that connected the prophetic and poetic gift, the assumption that Homer was blind looked very plausible. In addition, the singer Demodocus in the Odyssey is blind from birth, which could also be perceived as autobiographical.

There is a legend about the poetic duel between Homer and Hesiod, described in the essay "The Contest of Homer and Hesiod", created no later than the 3rd century BC. BC e., and according to many researchers, and much earlier. The poets allegedly met on the island of Euboea at the games in honor of the deceased Amphidemus and each read their best poems. King Paned, who acted as a judge in the competition, awarded the victory to Hesiod, since he calls for agriculture and peace, and not for war and battles. At the same time, the sympathy of the audience was on the side of Homer.

In addition to the Iliad and the Odyssey, a number of works are attributed to Homer, undoubtedly created later: the “Homeric hymns” (7th-5th centuries BC, are considered along with Homer the oldest examples of Greek poetry), the comic poem “Margit”, etc. .

The meaning of the name "Homer" (it first occurs in the 7th century BC, when Kallin of Ephesus called him the author of "Thebaid") was tried to be explained back in antiquity, the options "hostage" (Hesychius), "following" () or “blind man” (Efor Kimsky), “but all these options are as unconvincing as modern proposals to attribute to him the meaning of “compounder” or “accompanist” ... This word in its Ionian form Ομηρος is almost certainly a real personal name.

The legends of ancient times claimed that Homer created his epic based on the poems of the poetess Fantasia during the Trojan War.

Until the end of the 18th century, European science was dominated by the opinion that the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey was Homer, and that they were preserved approximately in the form in which they were created by him (however, already Abbé d'Aubignac in 1664 in his " Conjectures académiques" argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey are a series of independent songs collected together by Lycurgus in Sparta in the 8th century BC).

However, in 1788, J. B. Viloison published the scholia to the Iliad from the Venetus A codex, which in their volume significantly exceeded the poem itself and contained hundreds of variants belonging to ancient philologists (mainly Zenodotus and Aristarchus). After this publication, it became clear that the Alexandrian philologists considered hundreds of lines of Homeric poems doubtful or even inauthentic; they did not delete them from the manuscripts, but marked them with a special sign. Reading the scholia also led to the conclusion that the text of Homer we have refers to the Hellenistic time, and not to the supposed period of the poet's life. Based on these facts and other considerations (he believed that the Homeric era was unwritten, and therefore it was not possible for the poet to compose a poem of such length), Friedrich August Wolff, in his book Prolegomena to Homer, put forward the hypothesis that both poems are very essentially, radically changed in the course of existence. Thus, according to Wolf, it is impossible to say that the Iliad and the Odyssey belong to any one author.

The formation of the text of the Iliad (in its more or less modern form) Wolf refers to the VI century BC. e. Indeed, according to a number of ancient authors (including Cicero), Homer's poems were first collected together and written down at the direction of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus or his son Hipparchus. This so-called "peisistratian redaction" was needed to streamline the execution of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the Panathenaic. Contradictions in the texts of the poems, the presence of layers of different times in them, and extensive deviations from the main plot testified in favor of the analytical approach.

About how exactly Homer's poems were formed, analysts expressed various assumptions. Karl Lachmann believed that the Iliad was composed of several small songs (the so-called "small song theory"). Gottfried Hermann, on the contrary, believed that each poem arose by the gradual expansion of a small song, to which more and more new material was added (the so-called "original core theory").

Wolff's opponents (the so-called "Unitarians") put forward a number of counterarguments. Firstly, the version of the “peisistratus redaction” was questioned, since all reports about it are quite late. This legend could have appeared in Hellenistic times by analogy with the activities of the then monarchs, who took care of the acquisition of various manuscripts (see Library of Alexandria). Secondly, contradictions and digressions do not indicate multiple authorship, as they inevitably occur in large works. "Unitarians" proved the unity of the author of each of the poems, emphasizing the integrity of the idea, the beauty and symmetry of the composition in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey".

Homer is known to the world as an ancient Greek poet. Modern science recognizes Homer as the author of such poems as the Iliad and the Odyssey, but in antiquity he was recognized as the author of other works. It is worth saying that the existence of the personality of Homer is, in principle, questioned. There is also an opinion that the authorship of both the Iliad and the Odyssey belongs to different people who lived at different times. There are also works called Homeric hymns, but they are not counted among the creations of Homer himself.

Be that as it may, Homer is the first ancient poet whose works have survived to this day. During his lifetime, 9 of his biographies were compiled. So, according to Herodotus, the poet lived in the 9th century. BC e. To this day, the place of his birth remains a mystery, but it is generally accepted that he lived in Asia Minor, in Ionia. According to legend, as many as 7 major Greek policies argued for the right to call themselves the birthplace of the creator.

Traditionally, it is customary to portray Homer as blind, but scientists explain this not so much by the real state of his vision, but by the influence of the culture of the ancient Greeks, where poets were identified with prophets.

In the biography of the poet there is a place for a poetic battle with such a person as Hesiod. It took place on the island of Euboea during the games in memory of the deceased. Hesiod emerged victorious, as he raised more populist topics. However, Homer sympathized with the audience more.

Since the 17th century, scientists have faced the so-called Homeric question - a dispute about the authorship of legendary poems. But, no matter what scientists argue about, Homer entered the history of world literature, and in his homeland he had special respect for a long time after his death. His epics were considered sacred, and Plato himself said that the spiritual development of Greece was the merit of Homer.

The legendary storyteller died on the island of Ios.

Biography of Homer about the main

Before talking about the biographical facts of Homer, it should be noted that his name, translated from ancient Greek, means "blind." Perhaps it was for this reason that the assumption arose that the ancient Greek poet was blind.

If we talk about the exact date of Homer's birth, then it is not known for certain until today. But there are several versions of his birth.

So, version one. According to her, Homer was born very little time after the end of the war with Troy.

According to the second version, Homer was born during the Trojan War and saw all the sad events. If you follow the third version, then the lifetime of Homer varies from 100 to 250 years after the end of the Trojan War.

But all versions are similar in that the period of Homer's work, or rather its heyday, falls at the end of the 10th - beginning of the 9th century BC.

The exact date of Homer's birth is unknown, and the place where the ancient rhetorician was born is also unknown. As many as seven cities in Greece are arguing about where Homer was actually born. These are, for example, Athens, Colophon, Smyrna, Argos and others.

Due to the insufficiency of many biographical data, a large number of legends began to appear in connection with the personality of Homer.

One of them says that shortly before his death, Homer turned to the seer to reveal the secret of his origin into the world. Then the seer named Ios as the place where Homer would die. Homer went there. He remembered the sage's admonition to beware of riddles from youth. But remembering is one thing, but in reality it always turns out differently. The boys who were fishing saw a stranger, talked to him and asked him a riddle. He could not find an answer to her, went in his thoughts, stumbled and fell. Homer died three days later. There he was buried.

Peru Homer owns two brilliant poems: "Odyssey" and "Iliad". The Greeks at all times thought so and still believe. Some critics began to question this fact and began to express the point of view that these works appeared only in the 18th century and that they do not belong to Homer at all.

In the 18th century, German linguists published a work that states that there was no written language during the life of Homer, texts were stored in memory and passed from mouth to mouth. Therefore, such significant texts could not be preserved in this way.

It is worth noting that such famous masters of the pen as Goethe and Schiller still gave the authorship of the poems to Homer. We believe that it is important to bring additional interesting facts related to the biography and work of the ancient Greek rhetorician.

First, a selective translation of Homer's texts was performed by Mikhail Lomonosov.

Secondly, in 1829 Nikolai Gnedich translated the Iliad completely into Russian for the first time.

Thirdly, there are nine versions of Homer's biography today, but none can be considered completely documentary. In every description, fiction occupies a large place.

5, 6, 7 class ancient greece for children

Interesting facts and dates from life

Homer is the first Greek poet whose works have survived to this day.

Homer is still considered one of the best European poets today. He was the author of two heroic poems of antiquity, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are among the first monuments of world literature. Homer is considered a legendary poet, because we do not know anything about him for certain.

From Homer's biography:

There is no reliable information about Homer himself. The name "Homer" first occurs in the 7th century. BC e. It was then that Callinus of Ephesus called the creator of Thebaid so. The meaning of this name was tried to be explained in antiquity. The following options were proposed: "blind man" (Efor Kimsky), "following" (Aristotle), "hostage" (Hesychius). However, modern researchers believe that all of them are as unconvincing as the proposals of some scientists to attribute to it the meaning "accompanist" or "component". Surely in its Ionic form this word is a real personal name.

The biography of this poet can only be recreated tentatively. This even applies to the birthplace of Homer, which is still unknown. Seven cities fought for the right to be considered his homeland: Chios, Smyrna, Salamis, Colophon, Argos, Rhodes, Athens. It is likely that the Odyssey and the Iliad were created on the Asia Minor coast of Greece, which was inhabited at that time by Ionian tribes. Or perhaps these poems were composed on some of the adjacent islands.

The Homeric dialect, however, does not give any exact information about which tribe Homer belonged to, this remains a mystery. It is a combination of the Aeolian and Ionian dialects of ancient Greek. Some researchers suggest that it is one of the forms of poetic koine, which was formed long before Homer.

Was Homer blind? Homer is an ancient Greek poet whose biography has been reconstructed by many, from ancient times to the present day. It is known that he is traditionally depicted as blind. However, it is most likely that this representation of him is a reconstruction typical of the genre of ancient biography, and does not come from real facts about Homer. Since many legendary singers and soothsayers were blind (in particular, Tiresias), according to the logic of antiquity, which linked poetic and prophetic gifts, the assumption that Homer was blind looked plausible.

Ancient chronographs also differ in determining the time when Homer lived. He could create his works in different years. Some believe that he was a contemporary of the Trojan War, that is, he lived at the beginning of the 12th century. BC e. However, Herodotus claimed that Homer lived around the middle of the ninth century. BC e. Modern scholars tend to date his activity to the 8th or even 7th century BC. e. At the same time, Chios or another region of Ionia, located on the coast of Asia Minor, is indicated as the main place of life.

Nothing is known for certain about the life and personality of Homer. There are nine biographies of Homer in ancient literature, but they all contain fabulous and fantastic elements.

There is evidence that in the first half of the VI century. BC. the Athenian legislator Solon ordered the performance of Homer's poems at the Panathenaic festival, and that in the second half of the same century the tyrant Peisistratus convened a commission of four people to record Homer's poems. From this we can conclude that already in the VI century. BC. Homer's text was quite well known, although it has not been precisely established what kind of works these were.

Serious study of Homer's poems began in the Hellenistic era in the 4th - 2nd centuries. BC. A number of scholars from the Library of Alexandria studied his poems, among whom are especially famous: Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Aristarchus of Samothrace, Didyma. But they do not give any accurate biographical information about Homer. The general and popular opinion of all antiquity about Homer was that he was an old and blind singer who, inspired by the muse, led a wandering life and himself composed both the two poems known to us, and many other poems.

If we talk about the exact date of Homer's birth, then it is not known for certain until today. But there are several versions of his birth. So, version one. According to her, Homer was born very little time after the end of the war with Troy. According to the second version, Homer was born during the Trojan War and saw all the sad events. If you follow the third version, then the lifetime of Homer varies from 100 to 250 years after the end of the Trojan War. But all versions are similar in that the period of Homer's work, or rather, his heyday, falls at the end of the 10th - beginning of the 9th century BC.

The legendary storyteller died on the island of Chios.

Due to the insufficiency of many biographical data, a large number of legends began to appear in connection with the personality of Homer.

One of them says that shortly before his death, Homer turned to the seer to reveal the secret of his origin into the world. Then the seer named Chios as the place where Homer would die. Homer went there. He remembered the sage's admonition to beware of riddles from youth. But remembering is one thing, but in reality it always turns out differently. The boys who were fishing saw a stranger, talked to him and asked him a riddle. He could not find an answer to her, went in his thoughts, stumbled and fell. Homer died three days later. There he was buried.

About Homer's work:

Homer is known to the world as an ancient Greek poet. Modern science recognizes Homer as the author of such poems as the Iliad and the Odyssey, but in antiquity he was recognized as the author of other works. Fragments of several of them have survived to this day. However, today it is believed that they were written by an author who lived later than Homer. This is a comic poem "Margit", "Homeric hymns" and others.

Just as the existence of Homer's personality is in principle questioned, there is also an opinion that the authorship of both the Iliad and the Odyssey belongs to different people who lived at different times.

It is clear that the Odyssey and the Iliad were written much later than the events described in these works. However, their creation can be dated no earlier than the 6th century BC. e., when their existence was reliably recorded. Thus, the life of Homer can be attributed to the period from the 12th to the 7th century BC. e. However, the latest date is the most likely.

There is a legend about a poetic duel that took place between Hesiod and Homer. It was described in a work written no later than the 3rd century BC. BC e. (and some researchers believe that much earlier). It is called "The Contest of Homer and Hesiod." It tells that the poets allegedly met at the games in honor of Amphidemus, held on about. Euboea. Here they read their best poems. The judge of the competition was King Paned. The victory was awarded to Hesiod, because he called for peace and agriculture, and not for slaughter and war. However, it was on the side of Homer that the sympathy of the audience was.

Be that as it may, Homer is the first ancient poet whose works have survived to this day.

25 interesting facts about the life and work of Homer:

1. The name Homer in ancient Greek means "blind". Perhaps it was for this reason that the assumption arose that the ancient Greek poet was blind.

2. In antiquity, Homer was considered a sage: "Wiser than all the Hellenes taken together." He was considered the founder of philosophy, geography, physics, mathematics, medicine and aesthetics.

3. About half of the found ancient Greek literary papyri were written by Homer.

4. Selective translation of Homer's texts was performed by Mikhail Lomonosov.

5. In 1829, Gnedich Nikolai for the first time translated the Iliad completely into Russian.

6. To date, there are nine versions of Homer's biography, but none can be considered completely documentary. In every description, fiction occupies a large place.

7. Traditionally, it is customary to depict Homer as blind, but scientists explain this not so much by the real state of his vision, but by the influence of the culture of the ancient Greeks, where poets were identified with prophets.

8. Homer distributed his works with the help of Aeds (singers). He learned his works by heart and sang them to his Aeds. Those, in turn, also memorized the works and hummed them to other people. In another way, such people were called homerids.

9. A crater on Mercury is named after Homer.

10. In the 1960s, American researchers passed all the songs of the Iliad through a computer, which showed that there was only one author of this poem.

11. The system of ancient Greek education, formed by the end of the classical era, was based on the study of Homer's work.

12. His poems were memorized in whole or in part, recitations were organized on their topics, etc. Later, Rome borrowed this system. Here since the 1st century AD. e. Homer was replaced by Virgil.

13. Large hexametric poems were created in the postclassic era in the dialect of the ancient Greek author, as well as as a competition or in imitation of the Odyssey and the Iliad.

14. In ancient Roman literature, the first surviving work (albeit fragmentary) was a translation of the Odyssey. It was made by the Greek Livy Andronicus. Note that the main work of literature of Ancient Rome - Virgil's Aeneid - in the first six books is an imitation of the Odyssey, and in the last six - the Iliad.

15. Greek manuscripts in the last years of the existence of the Byzantine Empire, and then after its collapse, came to the West. This is how Homer was rediscovered by the Renaissance.

16. The epic poems of this ancient Greek author are brilliant, priceless works of art. Over the centuries, they do not lose their deep meaning and relevance. The plots of both poems are taken from a multifaceted and extensive cycle of legends dedicated to the Trojan War. "Odyssey" and "Iliad" display only small episodes from this cycle.

17. The habits, traditions, moral aspects of life, morality and life of the ancient Greeks are very clearly depicted in the Iliad.

18. The Odyssey is a more complex work than the Iliad. In it we find many features that are still being studied from the point of view of literature. This epic poem mainly deals with the return of Odysseus to Ithaca after the conclusion of the Trojan War.

19. The Odyssey and the Iliad have characteristic features, one of which is the epic style. The sustained tone of the narrative, unhurried thoroughness, complete objectivity of the image, the unhurried development of the plot - these are the characteristic features of the works that Homer created.

20. Homer was an oral storyteller, that is, he did not speak a letter. However, despite this, his poems are distinguished by high skill and poetic technique, they reveal unity.

21. Almost all the works of antiquity can be seen as the influence of the poems that Homer created. The Byzantines were also interested in his biography and work. In this country, Homer was carefully studied. To date, dozens of Byzantine manuscripts of his poems have been discovered. For the works of antiquity, this is unprecedented. Moreover, Byzantine scholars created commentaries and scholia on Homer, compiled and rewrote his poems. Seven volumes are occupied by the commentary of Archbishop Eustathius to them.

22. In science in the middle of the 19th century, the opinion prevailed that the Odyssey and the Iliad were unhistorical works. However, he was refuted by the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann, which he carried out in Mycenae and on the Hissarlik hill in the 1870-80s. The sensational discoveries of this archaeologist proved that Mycenae, Troy and the Achaean citadels existed in reality. The contemporaries of the German scientist were struck by the correspondence of his findings in the 4th tented tomb, located in Mycenae, to the descriptions made by Homer.

23. One of the main arguments in favor of the fact that the historical Homer did not exist was that not a single person is able to remember and perform poetic works of such volume. However, in the middle of the 20th century, in the Balkans, folklorists discovered a storyteller who performed an epic work the size of the Odyssey: this is the story of the American Albert Lord's book The Storyteller.

24. A brief summary of the works of Homer formed the basis of many works of authors who lived in ancient Rome. Among them, one can note the “Argonautics” written by Apollonius of Rhodes, the work of Nonn of Panopolitansky “The Adventures of Dionysus” and Quintus Smyrna “Post-Homerian events”.

25. Recognizing the merits of Homer, other poets of ancient Greece refrained from creating a major epic form. They believed that the works of Homer are a treasury of the wisdom of the people of ancient Greece.

Homer by Antoine-Denis Chaudet, 1806.

Homer (ancient Greek Ὅμηρος, VIII century BC) is a legendary ancient Greek poet-storyteller, the creator of the epic poems of the Iliad (the oldest monument of European literature and the Odyssey).
Approximately half of the ancient Greek literary papyri found are passages from Homer.

Nothing is known for certain about the life and personality of Homer.

Homer - the legendary ancient Greek poet-storyteller

Bust of Homer in the Louvre

Homer's birthplace is unknown. Seven cities argued for the right to be called his homeland in the ancient tradition: Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos, Athens. According to Herodotus and Pausanias, Homer died on the island of Ios in the Cyclades archipelago. Probably, the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed on the Asia Minor coast of Greece, inhabited by Ionian tribes, or on one of the adjacent islands. However, the Homeric dialect does not provide accurate information about the tribal affiliation of Homer, as it is a combination of the Ionian and Aeolian dialects of the ancient Greek language. There is speculation that his dialect is a form of poetic Koine that developed long before Homer's supposed lifetime.

Paul Jourdy, Homère chantant ses vers, 1834, Paris

Homer. Naples, National Archaeological Museum

The meaning of the name "Homer" (it first occurs in the 7th century BC, when Kallin of Ephesus called him the author of "Thebaid") was tried to be explained back in antiquity, the options "hostage" (Hesychius), "following" (Aristotle) were proposed or “the blind man” (Efor Kimsky), “but all these options are as unconvincing as modern proposals to ascribe to it the meaning of “compounder” or “accompanist”.<…>This word in its Ionian form Ομηρος is almost certainly a real personal name ”(Boura S.M. Heroic poetry.)

Homer (about 460 BC)

A.F. Losev: The traditional image of Homer among the Greeks. This traditional image of Homer, which has existed for about 3,000 years, if we discard all the pseudo-scientific fictions of the later Greeks, comes down to the image of a blind and wise (and, according to Ovid, also poor), necessarily old singer, creating wonderful tales under the constant guidance of the muse that inspires him and leading the life of some wandering rhapsodist. We meet similar features of folk singers in many other nations, and therefore there is nothing specific and original in them. This is the most common and most common type of folk singer, the most beloved and most popular among different peoples.

Most researchers believe that the Homeric poems were created in Asia Minor, in Ionia in the 8th century. BC e. based on the mythological tales of the Trojan War. There is late antique evidence of the final edition of their texts under the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus in the middle of the 6th century. BC e., when their performance was included in the festivities of the Great Panathenaic.

In ancient times, Homer was credited with the comic poems "Margit" and "The War of Mice and Frogs", a cycle of works about the Trojan War and the return of heroes to Greece: "Cypri", "Aetiopis", "Small Iliad", "The Capture of Ilion", "Returns" ( so-called "kyklichnye poems", only small fragments have been preserved). Under the title "Homeric Hymns" there was a collection of 33 hymns to the gods. In the Hellenistic era, the philologists of the Library of Alexandria Aristarchus of Samothrace, Zenodotus from Ephesus, Aristophanes from Byzantium did a great job of collecting and clarifying the manuscripts of Homer's poems in the Hellenistic era (they also divided each poem into 24 songs according to the number of letters of the Greek alphabet). The name of the sophist Zoilus (4th century BC), nicknamed "the scourge of Homer" for his critical statements, has become a household name. Xenon and Hellanic, so-called. "separating", expressed the idea that Homer might belong to only one "Iliad"

Jean-Baptiste Auguste Leloir (1809-1892). Homere.

In the 19th century, the Iliad and the Odyssey were compared with the epics of the Slavs, skaldic poetry, Finnish and German epic. In the 1930s The American classical philologist Milman Parry, comparing Homer's poems with the living epic tradition that still existed among the peoples of Yugoslavia at that time, found in Homer's poems a reflection of the poetic technique of the Aed folk singers. The poetic formulas they created from stable combinations and epithets (“swift-footed” Achilles, “shepherd of the peoples” Agamemnon, “wise-minded” Odysseus, “sweet-tongued” Nestor) made it possible for the narrator to “improvise” perform epic songs consisting of many thousands of verses.

The Iliad and the Odyssey belong entirely to the centuries-old epic tradition, but this does not mean that oral tradition is anonymous. “Before Homer, we cannot name a single poem of this kind, although, of course, there were many poets” (Aristotle). Aristotle saw the main difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey and all other epic works in the fact that Homer does not develop his narrative gradually, but builds it around one event - the poems are based on a dramatic unity of action. Another feature that Aristotle also drew attention to is that the character of the hero is revealed not by the descriptions of the author, but by the speeches uttered by the hero himself.

Medieval illustration for the Iliad

The language of Homer's poems - exclusively poetic, "supra-dialectal" - has never been identical to living colloquial speech. It consisted of a combination of Aeolian (Boeotia, Thessaly, the island of Lesbos) and Ionian (Attica, insular Greece, the coast of Asia Minor) dialect features with the preservation of the archaic system of earlier eras. Hexameter, rooted in Indo-European epic creativity, metrically designed the songs of the Iliad and Odyssey - a poetic meter in which each verse consists of six feet with the correct alternation of long and short syllables. The unusual nature of the poetic language of the epic was emphasized by the timeless nature of the events and the greatness of the images of the heroic past.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) - Homer and his Guide (1874)

Sensational discoveries of G. Schliemann in 1870-80s. proved that Troy, Mycenae and the Achaean citadels are not a myth, but a reality. Schliemann's contemporaries were struck by the literal correspondence of a number of his finds in the fourth shaft tomb at Mycenae with Homer's descriptions. The impression was so strong that the era of Homer became associated for a long time with the heyday of Achaean Greece in the 14th-13th centuries. BC e. In the poems, however, there are also numerous archaeologically attested features of the culture of the "heroic age", such as the mention of iron tools and weapons or the custom of cremation of the dead. In terms of content, Homer's epics contain many motifs, storylines, myths gleaned from early poetry. In Homer, one can hear echoes of the Minoan culture, and even trace the connection with the Hittite mythology. However, the main source of epic material for him was the Mycenaean period. It is during this era that the action of his epic takes place. Living in the fourth century after the end of this period, which he strongly idealizes, Homer cannot be a source of historical information about the political, social life, material culture or religion of the Mycenaean world. But in the political center of this society Mycenae, however, objects identical to those described in the epic (mainly weapons and tools) were found, while some Mycenaean monuments present images, things and even scenes typical of the poetic reality of the epic. The events of the Trojan War, around which Homer unfolded the actions of both poems, were attributed to the Mycenaean era. He showed this war as an armed campaign of the Greeks (called Achaeans, Danaans, Argives) led by the Mycenaean king Agamemnon against Troy and its allies. For the Greeks, the Trojan War was a historical fact dating back to the 14th-12th centuries. BC e. (according to Eratosthenes' calculations, Troy fell in 1184)

Karl Becker. Homer songs

A comparison of the evidence of the Homeric epic with the data of archeology confirms the conclusions of many researchers that in its final version it took shape in the 8th century. BC e., and many researchers consider the Catalog of Ships (Iliad, 2nd song) to be the oldest part of the epic. Obviously, the poems were not created at the same time: the Iliad reflects the idea of a man of the “heroic period”, the Odyssey stands, as it were, at the turn of a different era - the time of the Great Greek colonization, when the boundaries of the world mastered by Greek culture were expanding.

For a man of antiquity, Homer's poems were a symbol of Hellenic unity and heroism, a source of wisdom and knowledge of all aspects of life - from military art to practical morality. Homer, along with Hesiod, was considered the creator of a comprehensive and orderly mythological picture of the universe: the poets “composed genealogies of the gods for the Hellenes, provided the names of the gods with epithets, divided dignity and occupations between them, and drew their images” (Herodotus). According to Strabo, Homer was the only poet of antiquity who knew almost everything about the ecumene, about the peoples inhabiting it, their origin, lifestyle and culture. The data of Homer as authentic and trustworthy were used by Thucydides, Pausanias (writer), Plutarch. The father of tragedy, Aeschylus, called his dramas "the crumbs from the great feasts of Homer."

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot. Homer and the Shepherds

Greek children learned to read from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer was quoted, commented on, explained allegorically. By reading selected passages from Homer's poems, the Pythagorean philosophers called for the correction of souls. Plutarch reports that Alexander the Great always had with him a list of the Iliad, which he kept under his pillow along with a dagger.

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✪ Homer's poem "The Odyssey". Video lesson on General History Grade 5

✪ Homer's poem "Iliad". Video lesson on General History Grade 5

✪ Homer - O D I S S E I (audiobook part 1)

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Biography

Nothing is known for certain about the life and personality of Homer.

There is a legend about the poetic duel of Homer with Hesiod, described in the essay "The Competition of Homer and Hesiod", created no later than the 3rd century BC. BC e. , and according to many researchers, and much earlier. The poets allegedly met on the island of Euboea at the games in honor of the deceased Amphidemus and each read their best poems. King Paned, who acted as a judge in the competition, awarded the victory to Hesiod, since he calls for agriculture and peace, and not for war and battles. At the same time, the sympathy of the audience was on the side of Homer.

In addition to the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer is credited with a number of works undoubtedly created later: “Homeric hymns” (VII-V centuries BC, are considered along with Homer the oldest examples of Greek poetry), the comic poem “Margit”, etc. .

The meaning of the name "Homer" (it was first found in the 7th century BC, when Kallin of Ephesus called him the author of The Thebaid) was tried to be explained back in antiquity, the options "hostage" (Hesychius), "following" (Aristotle) were proposed or “blind man” (Efor Kimsky), “but all these options are as unconvincing as modern proposals to attribute to it the meaning of “compounder” or “accompanist”.<…>This word in its Ionian form Ομηρος is almost certainly a real personal name.

Homeric question

The totality of problems associated with the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey, their emergence and fate until the moment of recording, was called the "Homeric question". It arose back in antiquity, for example, then there were statements that Homer created his epic based on the poems of the poetess Fantasia during the Trojan War.

"Analysts" and "Unitarians"

Artistic Features

One of the most important compositional features of the Iliad is the "law of chronological incompatibility" formulated by Thaddeus Frantsevich Zelinsky. It consists in the fact that “in Homer the story never returns to the point of its departure. It follows from this that Homer's parallel actions cannot be depicted; Homer's poetic technique knows only the simple, linear, and not the double, square dimension. Thus, sometimes parallel events are depicted as sequential, sometimes one of them is only mentioned or even hushed up. This explains some imaginary contradictions in the text of the poem.

Researchers note the coherence of the works, the consistent development of the action and the solid images of the main characters. Comparing the verbal art of Homer with the visual art of that era, one often speaks of the geometric style of the poems. However, opposing opinions are also expressed in the spirit of analyticism about the unity of the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The style of both poems can be characterized as formulaic. In this case, the formula is understood not as a set of stamps, but as a system of flexible (changeable) expressions that are associated with a certain metric place of the line. Thus, one can speak of a formula even when a certain phrase occurs only once in the text, but it can be shown that it was part of this system. In addition to the actual formulas, there are repeated fragments of several lines. For example, when one hero retells the speeches of another, the text can be reproduced again in full or almost verbatim.

Homer is characterized by compound epithets (“swift-footed”, “pink-fingered”, “thunderer”); the meaning of these and other epithets should not be considered situationally, but within the framework of the traditional formulaic system. So, the Achaeans are “fluffy”, even if they are not described in armor, and Achilles is “swift-footed” even during rest.

The historical basis of Homer's poems

In the middle of the 19th century, the opinion prevailed in science that the Iliad and the Odyssey were unhistorical. However, the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann on the Hissarlik hill and in Mycenae showed that this is not true. Later, Hittite and Egyptian documents were discovered, in which certain parallels are found with the events of the legendary Trojan War. The decipherment of the Mycenaean syllabic script (Linear B) gave a lot of information about life in the era when the Iliad and Odyssey took place, although no literary fragments of this script were found. Nevertheless, the data of Homer's poems correlate in a complex way with the available archaeological and documentary sources and cannot be used uncritically: the data of the "oral theory" testify to very large distortions that must arise with historical data in traditions of this kind.

According to modern opinion, the world of Homer's poems reflects a realistic picture of the life of the last time of the period of the ancient Greek "Dark Ages".

Homer in world culture

The influence of the Homeric poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey" on the ancient Greeks is compared with the Bible for the Jews.

In the postclassical era, large hexametric poems were written in the Homeric dialect in imitation or as a competition with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Among them we can name "Argonautics" by Apollonius Rhodes, "Post-Homer events" by Quintus Smyrna and "Adventures of Dionysus" by Nonnos Panopolitan. Other Hellenistic poets, recognizing the merits of Homer, abstained from the large epic form, believing that "there is muddy water in the big rivers" (Callimachus) - that only in a small work can one achieve impeccable perfection.

In the literature of Ancient Rome, the first surviving (fragmentary) work is the translation of the Odyssey by the Greek Livius Andronicus. The main work of Roman literature - the heroic epic Aeneid by Virgil is an imitation of the Odyssey (the first 6 books) and the Iliad (the last 6 books). The influence of Homeric poems can be seen in almost all works of ancient literature.

Homer is practically unknown to the Western Middle Ages due to too weak contacts with Byzantium and ignorance of the ancient Greek language, however, the hexametric heroic epic retains great importance in culture thanks to Virgil.

Literature

Texts and translations

See the Iliad and Odyssey articles for details. see also: en:English translations of Homer

With the advent of printing, in 1488 in Florence Demetrius Chalkokondil first published the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Russian prose translation: The Complete Works of Homer. / Per. G. Yanchevetsky. Revel, 1895. 482 pages (supplement to the Gymnasium magazine)
In the Loeb classical library series, the works were published in 5 volumes (No. 170-171 - Iliad, No. 104-105 - Odyssey); and also No. 496 - Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Biographies of Homer.
In the Collection Budé series, the works are published in 9 volumes: The Iliad (introduction and 4 volumes), Odyssey (3 volumes) and hymns.
Krause V. M. Homeric Dictionary (to the Iliad and the Odyssey). From 130 fig. in text and a map of Troy. SPb., A. S. Suvorin. 1880. 532 stb. ( an example of a pre-revolutionary school publication)
Part I. Greece // Antique Literature. - St. Petersburg: Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University, 2004. - T. I. - ISBN 5-8465-0191-5.

Monographs on Homer

see also the bibliography in the articles: Iliad and Odyssey

Petrushevsky D. M. Society and the State in Homer. M., 1913.
Zelinsky F.F. Homeric psychology. Pg., Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences, 1920.
Altman M.S. Survivals of the tribal system in Homer's proper names. (Izvestiya GAIMK. Issue 124). M.-L.: OGIZ, 1936. 164 pages. 1000 copies.
Freidenberg O. M. Myth and literature of antiquity. M.: Vost. lit. 1978. 2nd ed., add. M., 2000.
Tolstoy I.I. Aeds: Ancient creators and bearers of the ancient epic. M.: Nauka, 1958. 63 pages.
Losev A.F. Homer. M.: GUPI, 1960. 352 p. 9 t.e.
- 2nd ed. (Series "Life of Remarkable People"). M.: Mol. Guards, 1996=2006. 400 pages
Yarkho V. N. Guilt and responsibility in the Homeric epic. Herald of ancient history, 1962, No. 2, p. 4-26.
Sakharny N. L. Homeric epic. M.: KhL, 1976. 397 pages. 10,000 copies.
Gordeziani R.V. Problems of the Homeric epic. Tb.: Tbil Publishing House. un-ta, 1978. 394 pages. 2000 copies.
Shtal I.V. Artistic world of the Homeric epic. Moscow: Nauka, 1983. 296 pages, 6900 copies.
Chelyshev P. V., Koteneva A. V. Essays on the history of world culture: gods and heroes of ancient mythology. M.: MGGU, 2013. 351 p. 100 copies ISBN 978-5-91615-032-2
Chelyshev P. V. Antique space and its inhabitants. - Lambert Academic Publishing, 2016. - 154 p. ISBN 978-3-659-96641-5
Koteneva A. V. Psychology in the epic poems of Homer. Concepts, phenomena and mechanisms. – Lambert Academic Publishing, 2016. ISBN 978-3-659-95960-8
Cunliffe R.J. A lexicon of the homeric dialect. L., 1924.
Leumann M. Homerische Würter. Basel, 1950.
Michalopoulos, Dimitri, L" Odyssee d "Homère au-delà des mythes, Le Pirée: Institut d "Histoire Maritime Hellène, 2016, ISBN 978-618-80599-2-4
Treu M. Von Homer zur Lyrik. Munich, 1955.
Whitman C.H. Homer and the heroic tradition. Oxford, 1958.
Lord A. Narrator. M., 1994.

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