The Homeric Question

 

    The Homeric Question

After more than half a century away from the ancient Greek language, I took on the lofty ambition of translating the Iliad. It took me 17 months to complete the task and then I decided to turn my attention to the Odyssey. That took me an additional 7 months, as the job got easier as time went on and I was able to re-familiarize myself with the language. However, after translating only about the first 20 lines of the Odyssey, I reached the conclusion that the two epics were created by different authors. To me the Iliad seemed to have been composed by a gifted artist, whereas the Odyssey had been cobbled together by a news reporter. The fact was that I had come face-to-face with the Homeric Question for the first time.

The Homeric Question refers to the long-standing debate among scholars about the true authorship and the origin of the Iliad and the Odyssey. There is the question as to whether Homer actually existed and if so, was he male or female? Was there a single author responsible for the creation of both poems or were they under different authorships? Was Homer one person or were the epics the result of a committee or group thought? What date can be ascribed to the epics? Were they oral or written works? Did someone named Homer write them down him/herself or dictate them to a scribe? Were the events and the places depicted in the epics fictional or non-fictional? Questions like these have plagued scholars for years and much has been written over time about the Homeric Question. It is not my intention to repeat all the arguments for or against the various positions held with regard to the questions posed. I will summarize briefly where things seem to stand at the moment and then share my personal thoughts on the matter at hand.

The question about authorship asks whether there was a single poet called Homer and if he was a historical person, or does the name Homer represent a tradition or a collective. Questions about the authorship have existed since ancient times and reached their height in the 19^th century. The ‘unitarians’ believed in a single genius author and were opposed by the ‘analysts’, who saw the poems as composite works developed from a long tradition. Samuel Butler, in The Authoress of the Odyssey, went so far as to declare that the Odyssey had been written by a young Sicilian girl, who actually wrote herself into the narrative as the character Nausicaa. Most modern scholars now believe that the poems grew out of a long oral tradition and that they were eventually written down sometime between the 8^th and 6^th centuries BCE. They think that the two epics may have been dictated by a single bard, but they had been shaped by generations of oral poets who preceded the complier.

We have to thank Heinrich Schliemann, bumbling antiquarian and archaeological wannabe, for opening to door to the historical probability of the existence of the city of Troy and the Trojan War itself. Modern archaeologists and historians believe that something like a Trojan War occurred and that the city has indeed been found among the ruins through which Schliemann drove his infamous trench. His dates may have been off somewhat, as they were in his dig at Mycenae, but the German amateur was on the right track. Scholars like Butler in the 19^th century and writers like Laura Coffey (Enchanted Islands) today, have taken great pains to place on a modern map the locations of many of the islands and ports named in the Odyssey. The latest take on this aspect of the Homeric Question is that the story told in the Iliad has some basis in history, whereas the story of the Odyssey is pure fiction, despite the fact that some of its locations actually do exist.

I take an entirely different approach to the Homeric Question. The fact of the matter is that the questions being asked can never be answered. Positions can be bantered back and forth for decades, as they have been for the centuries preceding us. When all is said and done, we will still end up with the two epics as we have them today, and we will be no closer to discovering the answers to the questions posed. For that I have my own question – Why should we even care? My answer is that trying to answer the Homeric Question is just a waste of time and gets us nowhere. It might provide someone with great fodder for one more PhD dissertation, but it adds little to the corpus of scholarly work on Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey are great pieces of poetry and are the cornerstones of modern western literature and that fact will not be altered, nor will the epics be re-written or edited, based on trying to answer questions to which there are no answers. I suggest we just forget the Homeric Question and move on to more important matters.