Homeric Question

The Homeric question is a controversy surrounding the identity of the Greek epic poet Homer, regarded traditionally as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Although the first written texts of these epics date from the 6Th century B.C., at least hundreds of years after the presumed death of Homer, it was generally agreed by ancient scholars that Homer was the author. Critical study of the Homeric texts was first undertaken during the Alexandrian period, beginning with Zenodotus (around 325-260 B.C.). The Alexandrian scholars made recensions of the texts and provided them with commentaries (scholia), but cast little doubt upon Homer being the author.

In modern times the German scholar Friedrich August Wolf was the first to question Homer as the author of the Iliad and Odyssey. In his prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) Wolf expounded the theory that the Iliad and the Odyssey are the work of several poets, arguing that the two poems were composed from pre-existing material by an editor of a later period. Wolf's ideas were extremely influential despite the opposition of many poets and scholars, including the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who were convinced that books revealing such unity of plot and consistency of characters as the Homeric epics could have been only written by one great poet. Wolf's theory was refined by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, who maintained that the Iliad and Odyssey were not literary epics but folk epics composed during a long period of time by a number of anonymous poets, The theory was greatly elaborated and given its definitive statement in the books of German philologist Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann. On the basis of an extended comparison between the Homeric books and the medieval German epic poem Nibelungenlied, lachmann attempted to show that the Iliad consists of sixteen independent folk epics, or lays, which were enlarged and compiled in to the present form of the work. Toward the end of the 19Th century most scholars adhered to the theory that the Iliad and the Odyssey were each an editorial hodgepodge based either on various earlier folk epics or, according to the German philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz Moellendorff, on a lost original Iliad or Odyssey.

With the greater archaeological knowledge of ancient Greece and Asia which was gained during the late 19Th and the early 20Th century, and with the ore careful study of the Homeric question by philologists and other scholars, the arguments of Wolf and his successors gradually were refuted. The scholarly consensus during the first half of the 20Th century was the Iliad and Odyssey are both the books of Homer as a single great poet. Despite some changes that have made their way into the books over the last two thousand years, it is assumed presently that the text of both epics is, for the most part, that of the original poet Homer. This opinion is borne out by the recent discover that a form of Greek was written as early as 1400 B.C., in a Minoan script. The only substantial disagreement is that between those scholars who hold, as did the ancients, that both poems were written by a single poet, and those who hold that the Odyssey was written some time later by an imitator of Homer. Modern scholars continue to agree with Wolf and Lachmann that the epics contain many incidents, characters, and stock epithets which previously might have been embodied in heroic folk songs. However, they assume that the poet or poets used these materials to compose completely original poetry, discounting the theory that the material merely were compiled into their present form by an editor or group of editors.





Homer leather bound books