Homer
Homer | |
---|---|
![]() Marble terminal bust of Homer. Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic original of the 2nd c. BC. | |
Native name | Ὅμηρος |
Born | c. 8th century BC |
Died | Ios[1] |
Language | Homeric Greek |
Genre | Epic |
Subject | Epic Cycle |
Notable works |
Homer (
Homer's Iliad centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War. The Odyssey chronicles the ten-year journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, back to his home after the fall of Troy. The poems are in Homeric Greek, also known as Epic Greek, a literary language which shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence is Eastern Ionic.[3][4] Most researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally.[5]
Homer's epic poems shaped aspects of ancient Greek culture and education, fostering ideals of heroism, glory, and honor.[6] To Plato, Homer was simply the one who "has taught Greece" (τὴν Ἑλλάδα πεπαίδευκεν, tēn Helláda pepaídeuken).[7][8] In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Virgil refers to Homer as "Poet sovereign", king of all poets;[9] in the preface to his translation of the Iliad, Alexander Pope acknowledges that Homer has always been considered the "greatest of poets".[10] From antiquity to the present day, Homeric epics have inspired many famous works of literature, music, art, and film.[11]
The question of by whom, when, where and under what circumstances the Iliad and Odyssey were composed continues to be debated. Scholars remain divided as to whether the two works are the product of a single author.[12] It is thought that the poems were composed at some point around the late eighth or early seventh century BC.[12] Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity; the most widespread account was that he was a blind bard from Ionia, a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary.[13]
Works attributed to Homer

Today, only the Iliad and the Odyssey are associated with the name 'Homer'. In antiquity, a large number of other works were sometimes attributed to him, including the Homeric Hymns, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, the Little Iliad, the Nostoi, the Thebaid, the Cypria, the Epigoni, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War"), the Margites, the Capture of Oechalia, and the Phocais. These claims are not considered authentic today and were by no means universally accepted in the ancient world. As with the multitude of legends surrounding Homer's life, they indicate little more than the centrality of Homer to ancient Greek culture.[14][15][16]
Ancient biographical traditions
Some ancient claims about Homer were established early and repeated often. They include that Homer was blind (taking as self-referential a passage describing the blind
The two best known ancient biographies of Homer are the Life of Homer by the Pseudo-Herodotus and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod.[1][21]
In the early fourth century BC
History of Homeric scholarship
Ancient
As a result of the poems' prominence in classical Greek education, extensive commentaries on them developed to explain parts that were culturally or linguistically difficult.[23][25] During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, many interpreters, especially the Stoics, who believed that Homeric poems conveyed Stoic doctrines, regarded them as allegories, containing hidden wisdom.[25] Perhaps partially because of the Homeric poems' extensive use in education, many authors believed that Homer's original purpose had been to educate.[25] Homer's wisdom became so widely praised that he began to acquire the image of almost a prototypical philosopher.[25] Byzantine scholars such as Eustathius of Thessalonica and John Tzetzes produced commentaries, extensions and scholia to Homer, especially in the twelfth century.[27][25] Eustathius's commentary on the Iliad alone is massive, sprawling over nearly 4,000 oversized pages in a twenty-first century printed version and his commentary on the Odyssey an additional nearly 2,000.[25]
Modern

In 1488, the Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles published the editio princeps of the Homeric poems.[25] The earliest modern Homeric scholars started with the same basic approaches towards the Homeric poems as scholars in antiquity.[25][24][23] The allegorical interpretation of the Homeric poems that had been so prevalent in antiquity returned to become the prevailing view of the Renaissance.[25] Renaissance humanists praised Homer as the archetypically wise poet, whose writings contain hidden wisdom, disguised through allegory.[25] In western Europe during the Renaissance, Virgil was more widely read than Homer and Homer was often seen through a Virgilian lens.[28]
In 1664, contradicting the widespread praise of Homer as the epitome of wisdom,
Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum, published in 1795, argued that much of the material later incorporated into the Iliad and the Odyssey was originally composed in the tenth century BC in the form of short, separate oral songs,[29][30][24] which passed through oral tradition for roughly four hundred years before being assembled into prototypical versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the sixth century BC by literate authors.[29][30][24] After being written down, Wolf maintained that the two poems were extensively edited, modernized, and eventually shaped into their present state as artistic unities.[29][30][24] Wolf and the "Analyst" school, which led the field in the nineteenth century, sought to recover the original, authentic poems which were thought to be concealed by later excrescences.[29][30][24][31]
Within the Analyst school were two camps: proponents of the "lay theory", which held that the Iliad and the Odyssey were put together from a large number of short, independent songs,[24] and proponents of the "nucleus theory", which held that Homer had originally composed shorter versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which later poets expanded and revised.[24] A small group of scholars opposed to the Analysts, dubbed "Unitarians", saw the later additions as superior, the work of a single inspired poet.[29][30][24] By around 1830, the central preoccupations of Homeric scholars, dealing with whether or not "Homer" actually existed, when and how the Homeric poems originated, how they were transmitted, when and how they were finally written down, and their overall unity, had been dubbed "the Homeric Question".[24]
Following World War I, the Analyst school began to fall out of favor among Homeric scholars.[24] It did not die out entirely, but it came to be increasingly seen as a discredited dead end.[24] Starting in around 1928, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, after their studies of folk bards in the Balkans, developed the "Oral-Formulaic Theory" that the Homeric poems were originally composed through improvised oral performances, which relied on traditional epithets and poetic formulas.[32][31][24] This theory found very wide scholarly acceptance[32][31][24] and explained many previously puzzling features of the Homeric poems, including their unusually archaic language, their extensive use of stock epithets, and their other "repetitive" features.[31] Many scholars concluded that the "Homeric question" had finally been answered.[24]
Meanwhile, the 'Neoanalysts' sought to bridge the gap between the 'Analysts' and 'Unitarians'.[33][34] The Neoanalysts sought to trace the relationships between the Homeric poems and other epic poems, which have now been lost, but of which modern scholars do possess some patchy knowledge.[24] Neoanalysts hold that knowledge of earlier versions of the epics can be derived from anomalies of structure and detail in the surviving versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. These anomalies point to earlier versions of the Iliad in which Ajax played a more prominent role, in which the Achaean embassy to Achilles comprised different characters, and in which Patroclus was actually mistaken for Achilles by the Trojans. They point to earlier versions of the Odyssey in which Telemachus went in search of news of his father not to Menelaus in Sparta but to Idomeneus in Crete, in which Telemachus met up with his father in Crete and conspired with him to return to Ithaca disguised as the soothsayer Theoclymenus, and in which Penelope recognized Odysseus much earlier in the narrative and conspired with him in the destruction of the suitors.[35]
Contemporary
Most contemporary scholars, although they disagree on other questions about the genesis of the poems, agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the apparently imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey in relation to the Iliad."[36][37][38][24] Nearly all scholars agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey are unified poems, in that each poem shows a clear overall design, and that they are not merely strung together from unrelated songs.[24] It is also generally agreed that each poem was composed mostly by a single author, who probably relied heavily on older oral traditions.[24] Nearly all scholars agree that the Doloneia in Book X of the Iliad is not part of the original poem, but rather a later insertion by a different poet.[24]
Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness to the Trojan War; others thought he had lived up to 500 years afterwards.[39] Contemporary scholars continue to debate the date of the poems.[40][41][24] A long history of oral transmission lies behind the composition of the poems, complicating the search for a precise date.[42] At one extreme, Richard Janko has proposed a date for both poems to the eighth century BC based on linguistic analysis and statistics.[40][41] Barry B. Powell dates the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey to sometime between 800 and 750 BC, based on the statement from Herodotus, who lived in the late fifth century BC, that Homer lived four hundred years before his own time "and not more" (καὶ οὐ πλέοσι), and on the fact that the poems do not mention hoplite battle tactics, inhumation, or literacy.[43]
Martin Litchfield West has argued that the Iliad echoes the poetry of Hesiod, and that it must have been composed around 660–650 BC at the earliest, with the Odyssey up to a generation later.[44][45][24] He also interprets passages in the Iliad as showing knowledge of historical events that occurred in the ancient Near East during the middle of the seventh century BC, including the destruction of Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 BC and the Sack of Thebes by Ashurbanipal in 663/4 BC.[24] At the other extreme, a few American scholars such as Gregory Nagy see "Homer" as a continually evolving tradition, which grew much more stable as the tradition progressed, but which did not fully cease to continue changing and evolving until as late as the middle of the second century BC.[40][41][24]
"'Homer" is a name of unknown etymological origin, around which many theories were erected in antiquity. One such linkage was to the Greek ὅμηρος (hómēros), "hostage" (or "surety"). The explanations suggested by modern scholars tend to mirror their position on the overall Homeric question. Nagy interprets it as "he who fits (the song) together". West has advanced both possible Greek and Phoenician etymologies.[46][47]
Historicity of the Homeric epics and Homeric society
Scholars continue to debate questions such as whether the Trojan War actually took place – and if so when and where – and to what extent the society depicted by Homer is based on his own or one which was, even at the time of the poems' composition, known only as legends. The Homeric epics are largely set in the east and center of the
In ancient Greek chronology, the sack of Troy was dated to 1184 BC. By the nineteenth century, there was widespread scholarly skepticism that the Trojan War had ever happened and that Troy had even existed, but in 1873
Most scholars now agree that the Homeric poems depict customs and elements of the material world that are derived from different periods of Greek history.
The decipherment of
Style and language

The Homeric epics are written in an artificial literary language or 'Kunstsprache' only used in epic hexameter poetry. Homeric Greek shows features of multiple regional Greek dialects and periods, but is fundamentally based on Ionic Greek, in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was composed slightly before the Odyssey, and that Homeric formulae preserve older features than other parts of the poems.[59][60]
The poems were composed in unrhymed dactylic hexameter; ancient Greek metre was quantity-based rather than stress-based.[61][62] Homer frequently uses set phrases such as epithets ('crafty Odysseus', 'rosy-fingered Dawn', 'owl-eyed Athena', etc.), Homeric formulae ('and then answered [him/her], Agamemnon, king of men', 'when the early-born rose-fingered Dawn came to light', 'thus he/she spoke'), simile, type scenes, ring composition and repetition. These habits aid the extemporizing bard, and are characteristic of oral poetry. For instance, the main words of a Homeric sentence are generally placed towards the beginning, whereas literate poets like Virgil or Milton use longer and more complicated syntactical structures. Homer then expands on these ideas in subsequent clauses; this technique is called parataxis.[63]
The so-called 'type scenes' (typische Szenen), were named by Walter Arend in 1933. He noted that Homer often, when describing frequently recurring activities such as eating, praying, fighting and dressing, used blocks of set phrases in sequence that were then elaborated by the poet. The 'Analyst' school had considered these repetitions as un-Homeric, whereas Arend interpreted them philosophically. Parry and Lord noted that these conventions are found in many other cultures.[64][65]
'Ring composition' or chiastic structure (when a phrase or idea is repeated at both the beginning and end of a story, or a series of such ideas first appears in the order A, B, C ... before being reversed as ... C, B, A) has been observed in the Homeric epics. Opinion differs as to whether these occurrences are a conscious artistic device, a mnemonic aid or a spontaneous feature of human storytelling.[66][67]
Both of the Homeric poems begin with an invocation to the
Textual transmission

The orally transmitted Homeric poems were put into written form at some point between the eighth and sixth centuries BC. Some scholars believe that they were dictated to a scribe by the poet and that our inherited versions of the Iliad and Odyssey were in origin orally-dictated texts.[69] Albert Lord noted that the Balkan bards that he was studying revised and expanded their songs in their process of dictating.[70] Some scholars hypothesize that a similar process of revision and expansion occurred when the Homeric poems were first written down.[71][72]
Other scholars hold that, after the poems were created in the eighth century, they continued to be orally transmitted with considerable revision until they were written down in the sixth century.[73] After textualisation, the poems were each divided into 24 rhapsodes, today referred to as books, and labelled by the letters of the Greek alphabet. Most scholars attribute the book divisions to the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria, in Egypt.[74] Some trace the divisions back further to the Classical period.[75] Very few credit Homer himself with the divisions.[76]
In antiquity, it was widely held that the Homeric poems were collected and organised in Athens in the late sixth century BC by
The first printed edition of Homer was produced in 1488 in
See also
- Achaeans (Homer)
- Aeneid
- Bibliomancy
- Catalogue of Ships
- Creophylus of Samos
- Cyclic Poets
- Deception of Zeus
- Epithets in Homer
- Geography of the Odyssey
- Greek mythology
- Hector
- Historicity of Homer
- Homeric psychology
- Homeric scholarship
- Homer's Ithaca
- List of Homeric characters
- Peisistratos
- Sortes Homericae
- Tabula iliaca
- Telemachy
- The Golden Bough
- Trojan Battle Order
- Trojan War in literature and the arts
- Venetus A Manuscript
Notes
- ^ ISBN 978-1472503077.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 31 August 2021.
- ISBN 978-1118885956.
- ISBN 978-1614512950. Retrieved 23 November 2016.
- ISBN 978-0801483356. Retrieved 23 November 2016.
- ISBN 978-0-19-980510-5.
- ISBN 978-0199577804. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
- ISBN 978-0195358629. Archivedfrom the original on 30 June 2017. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
- ^ Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto IV, 86-88 (Longfellow's translation):
"Him with that falchion in his hand behold,
Who comes before the three, even as their lord.
That one is Homer, Poet sovereign;" - ^ Alexander Pope's Preface to his translation of the Iliad:
"Homer is universally allowed to have had the greatest invention of any writer whatever. The praise of judgment Virgil has justly contested with him, and others may have their pretensions as to particular excellencies; but his invention remains yet unrivalled. Nor is it a wonder if he has ever been acknowledged the greatest of poets, who most excelled in that which is the very foundation of poetry." - ISBN 978-0472083534. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
- ^ ISBN 978-1136736629. Retrieved 23 November 2016.
- ^
- Wilson, Nigel (2013). Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece. Routledge. p. 366. ISBN 978-1136788000. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
- Romilly, Jacqueline de (1985). A Short History of Greek Literature. University of Chicago Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0226143125. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
- Graziosi, Barbara (2002). Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic. Cambridge University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-0521809665. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
- Wilson, Nigel (2013). Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece. Routledge. p. 366.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ISBN 978-0715632826.
- ISBN 978-0521809665.
- ^ ISBN 978-0521809665.
- ^ Odyssey, 8:64ff.
- ^ "Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica" (Contest of Homer and Hesiod)
- ^ Parke, Herbert William (1967). Greek Oracles. pp. 136–137 citing the Certamen, 12.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ^ West, M. L. Theogony & Works and Days. Oxford University Press. p. xx.
- ^ ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ^ JSTOR 23208780.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-674-03572-0.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-108-42831-6.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ^ ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ^ ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ^ ISBN 978-0198721123.
- ^ ISBN 978-0253342607.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ^ Reece, Steve. "The Cretan Odyssey: A Lie Truer than Truth". American Journal of Philology 115 (1994) 157-173. The_Cretan_Odyssey
- JSTOR 639863.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ISBN 978-1614517375.
- ISBN 978-0199542840.
- ^ ISBN 978-0521809665.
- ^ ISBN 978-0521012461.
- ISBN 978-0801874819.
- ISBN 978-0-521-58907-9.
- ISBN 978-0226313290.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ISBN 978-0521809665.
- ^ West, M. L. (1997). The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 622.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ISBN 978-0140136869.
- ISBN 978-1910589298.
- JSTOR 25010840.
- ISBN 978-1444396935.
- ^ ISBN 978-1438110202.
- ^ ISBN 978-9004217607.
- ISBN 978-0-520-21599-3. Retrieved 1 September 2017.
- ISBN 978-0-89236-867-9. Retrieved 1 September 2017.
- ISBN 978-0-7524-9506-4. Retrieved 1 September 2017.
- ISBN 978-9004217607.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ISBN 978-1444317404.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ISBN 978-0862921729.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ^ Edwards, MW (1992). "Homer and Oral Tradition: The Type-Scene". Oral Tradition. 7: 284–330.
- ISBN 978-1400863372.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7425-2167-4.
- ^ Steve Reece, "Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: From Oral Performance to Written Text", in Mark Amodio (ed.), New Directions in Oral Theory (Tempe: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005) 43-89.
- ^ Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).
- ISBN 978-0521213097.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.
- ISBN 978-0521558488.
- ^ U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Homerische Untersuchungen (Berlin, 1884) 369; R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford, 1968) 116-117.
- ISBN 978-1405177689.; S. West, The Ptolemaic Papyri of Homer (Cologne, 1967) 18-25.
- ^ P. Mazon, Introduction à l'Iliade (Paris, 1912) 137-40; C.H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge [Mass.], 1958) 282-83; G.P. Goold, "Homer and the Alphabet", TAPA 96 (1960) 272-91; K. Stanley, The Shield of Homer (Princeton, 1993) 37, 249ff.
- ISBN 978-8772890968.
- ^ ISBN 978-1405177689.
Selected bibliography
Editions
- Texts in Homeric Greek
- Demetrius Chalcondyleseditio princeps, Florence, 1488
- the Aldine editions(1504 and 1517)
- 1st ed. with comments, Micyllus and Camerarius, Basel, 1535, 1541 (improved text), 1551 (incl. the Batrachomyomachia)
- Th. Ridel, Strasbourg, c. 1572, 1588 and 1592.
- Wolf (Halle, 1794–1795; Leipzig, 1804 1807)
- Spitzner (Gotha, 1832–1836)
- Bekker (Berlin, 1843; Bonn, 1858)
- La Roche (Odyssey, 1867–1868; Iliad, 1873–1876, both at Leipzig)
- Ludwich (Odyssey, Leipzig, 1889–1891; Iliad, 2 vols., 1901 and 1907)
- W. Leaf (Iliad, London, 1886–1888; 2nd ed. 1900–1902)
- William Walter Merry and James Riddell(Odyssey i–xii., 2nd ed., Oxford, 1886)
- Monro (Odyssey xiii–xxiv. with appendices, Oxford, 1901)
- Monro and Allen (Iliad), and Allen (Odyssey, 1908, Oxford).
- D.B. Monro and T.W. Allen 1917–1920, Homeri Opera (5 volumes: Iliad=3rd edition, Odyssey=2nd edition), Oxford. ISBN 0-19-814534-9
- H. van Thiel 1991, Homeri Odyssea, Hildesheim. ISBN 3-487-09459-2
- M. L. West 1998–2000, Homeri Ilias (2 volumes), Munich/Leipzig. ISBN 3-598-71435-1
- P. von der Mühll 1993, Homeri Odyssea, Munich/Leipzig. ISBN 3-598-71432-7
- M. L. West 2017, Homerus Odyssea, Berlin/Boston. ISBN 3-11-042539-4
Interlinear translations
- The Iliad of Homer a Parsed Interlinear, Handheldclassics.com (2008) Text ISBN 978-1-60725-298-6
English translations
This is a partial list of translations into English of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
- Augustus Taber Murray (1866–1940)
- Homer: Iliad, 2 vols., revised by William F. Wyatt, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press (1999).
- Homer: Odyssey, 2 vols., revised by George E. Dimock, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press (1995).
- Robert Fitzgerald (1910–1985)
- The Iliad, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004) ISBN 0-374-52905-1
- The Odyssey, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1998) ISBN 0-374-52574-9
- The Iliad, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004)
- Robert Fagles (1933–2008)
- The Iliad, Penguin Classics (1998) ISBN 0-14-027536-3
- The Odyssey, Penguin Classics (1999) ISBN 0-14-026886-3
- The Iliad, Penguin Classics (1998)
- Stanley Lombardo (b. 1943)
- Iliad, ISBN 0-87220-352-2
- Odyssey, ISBN 0-87220-484-7
- Iliad, (Audiobook) Parmenides (2006) ISBN 1-930972-08-3
- Odyssey, (Audiobook) Parmenides (2006) ISBN 1-930972-06-7
- The Essential Homer, (Audiobook) Parmenides (2006) ISBN 1-930972-12-1
- The Essential Iliad, (Audiobook) Parmenides (2006) ISBN 1-930972-10-5
- Iliad,
- Barry B. Powell (b. 1942)
- "Iliad", Oxford University Press (2013) ISBN 978-0-19-932610-5
- "Odyssey", Oxford University PressI (2014) ISBN 978-0-19-936031-4
- Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: The Essential Books, Oxford University Press (2014) ISBN 978-0-19-939407-4
- "Iliad", Oxford University Press (2013)
- Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
- The Iliad, Red and Black Publishers (2008) ISBN 978-1-934941-04-1
- The Odyssey, Red and Black Publishers (2008) ISBN 978-1-934941-05-8
- The Iliad, Red and Black Publishers (2008)
- Herbert Jordan (b. 1938)
- Iliad, University of Oklahoma Press (2008) ISBN 978-0-8061-3974-6(soft cover)
- Iliad, University of Oklahoma Press (2008)
- Emily Wilson (b. 1971)
- The Odyssey, W.W. Norton & Company (2017) ISBN 978-0-393-08905-9
- The Odyssey, W.W. Norton & Company (2017)
- Rodney Merrill
- The Iliad, University of Michigan Press (2007) ISBN 978-0-472-11617-1
- The Odyssey, University of Michigan Press (2002) ISBN 978-0-472-11231-9
- The Iliad, University of Michigan Press (2007)
General works on Homer
- Carlier, Pierre (1999). Homère (in French). Paris: Les éditions Fayard. ISBN 978-2-213-60381-0.
- ISBN 978-2-13-054830-0.
- Fowler, Robert, ed. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-01246-1.
- ISBN 960-16-1557-1.
- Monro, David Binning (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). pp. 626–39. .
- Morris, Ian; Powell, Barry B., eds. (1997). A New Companion to Homer. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-09989-0.
- Powell, Barry B. (2007). Homer (2nd ed.). Malden, MA; Oxford, UK; Carlton, Victoria: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-5325-6.
- ISBN 978-2-262-01181-9.
- ISBN 978-0-333-07113-7.
Influential readings and interpretations
- ISBN 978-0-691-11336-4. (orig. publ. in German, 1946, Bern)
- de Jong, Irene J.F. (2004). Narrators and Focalizers: the Presentation of the Story in the Iliad (2nd ed.). London: Bristol Classical Press. ISBN 978-1-85399-658-0.
- Edwards, Mark W. (1987). Homer, Poet of the Iliad. Baltimore: ISBN 978-0-8018-3329-8.
- Fenik, Bernard (1974). Studies in the Odyssey. Hermes, Einzelschriften 30. Wiesbaden: Steiner.
- ISBN 978-1-59017-017-5.
- Nagy, Gregory (1979). The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Nagy, Gregory (2010). Homer: the Preclassic. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-95024-5.
- Reece, Steve. The Stranger's Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Commentaries
- Iliad:
- P.V. Jones (ed.) 2003, Homer's Iliad. A Commentary on Three Translations, London. ISBN 1-85399-657-2
- ISBN 0-521-31209-4
- ISBN 3-598-74304-1
- N. Postlethwaite (ed.) 2000, Homer's Iliad: A Commentary on the Translation of Richmond Lattimore, Exeter. ISBN 0-85989-684-6
- M.W. Willcock (ed.) 1976, A Companion to the Iliad, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-89855-5
- P.V. Jones (ed.) 2003, Homer's Iliad. A Commentary on Three Translations, London.
- Odyssey:
- A. Heubeck (gen. ed.) 1990–1993, A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey (3 volumes; orig. publ. 1981–1987 in Italian), Oxford. ISBN 0-19-814953-0
- P. Jones (ed.) 1988, Homer's Odyssey: A Commentary based on the English Translation of Richmond Lattimore, Bristol. ISBN 1-85399-038-8
- I.J.F. de Jong (ed.) 2001, A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey, Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-46844-2
- A. Heubeck (gen. ed.) 1990–1993, A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey (3 volumes; orig. publ. 1981–1987 in Italian), Oxford.
Dating the Homeric poems
- Janko, Richard (1982). Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns: Diachronic Development in Epic Diction. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-23869-4.
Further reading
- Buck, Carl Darling (1928). The Greek Dialects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Evelyn-White, Hugh Gerard (tr.) (1914). Hesiod, the Homeric hymns and Homerica. The Loeb Classical Library. London; New York: Heinemann; MacMillen.
- Ford, Andrew (1992). Homer : the poetry of the past. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-2700-8.
- Graziosi, Barbara (2002). Inventing Homer: The Early Perception of Epic. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Kirk, G.S. (1962). The Songs of Homer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert (1940). A Greek-English Lexicon (Revised ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press; Perseus Digital Library.
- Murray, Gilbert (1960). The Rise of the Greek Epic (Galaxy Books ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
- Schein, Seth L. (1984). The mortal hero : an introduction to Homer's Iliad. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-05128-7.
- Silk, Michael (1987). Homer: The Iliad. ISBN 978-0-521-83233-5.
- Smith, William, ed. (1876). A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. I, II & III. London: John Murray.
External links



Library resources about Homer |
By Homer |
---|
- Works by Homer at Perseus Digital Library
- Works by Homer in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
- Works by Homer at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Homer at Internet Archive
- Works by Homer at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Homer; Murray, A.T. (1925). The Iliad with an English Translation (in Ancient Greek and English). Vol. I, Books I–XII. London; New York: William Heinemann Ltd.; G.P. Putnam's Sons; Internet Archive.
- The Chicago Homer
- Homer at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Heath, Malcolm (4 May 2001). "CLAS3152 Further Greek Literature II: Aristotle's Poetics: Notes on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey". Department of Classics, University of Leeds; Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 8 September 2008. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
- Bassino, Paola (2014). "Homer: A Guide to Selected Sources". Living Poets: a new approach to ancient history. Durham University. Retrieved 18 November 2014.
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