Homer by Barbara Graziosi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Homer by Barbara Graziosi Bruce Whiteman Barbara Graziosi. Homer. Oxford University Press, 2016. No one knows precisely when or even if Homer lived, nor when exactly the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed, nor if the same poet wrote both epic poems. An old joke among classicists has it that Homer demonstrably did not write the poems, that it was some other guy named Homer. Since Friedrich August Wolf ’s Prolegomena ad Homerum of 1795, and with the examination during the early twentieth century of the oral composition of epic poems in eastern Europe by Milman Parry and Alfred Lord, many scholars have come to believe that the Homeric texts are conglomerations of stories by many “writers” or story-tellers, and that “Homer” is just a convenience for publishers, since a name has to go on the almost infinite number of editions and [End Page 33] translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey that have appeared since the Greek text was first published in 1488 in Florence. There is rough agreement that the poems date from the late eighth or early seventh century BCE; by the classical period they were already the central texts of Greek culture and were being studied assiduously by textual scholars and philologists, not to mention schoolboys. Their influence on western literature has been profound and continues. Homer Simpson is not called Homer Simpson for no reason. Like editions of the poems, the literature on Homer is also immense. The vocabulary, dialect, and style of the poems have been extensively analyzed. Heinrich Schliemann, famously taking the poems as truth rather than fiction, discovered the remains of Troy in present-day Turkey and revolutionized how we read Homer. Victor Bérard, more contentiously, sailed around the Aegean and Adriatic Seas in an attempt to determine the exact locations of all of Odysseus’s adventures. Scholars continue to write dissertations on Homer (over a hundred in English during the last decade alone), and they and others write both specialized studies and books for the general reader. Like the literature on Dante and Shakespeare, the Homeric literature is so vast that it would be the work of several lifetimes to read all of it. Barbara Graziosi, who has a PhD from Cambridge and is a professor of Classics at Durham University in the north of England, has added a brief and useful book to the Homeric shelf in her Homer, a book that could easily fit into Oxford University Press’s growing “Very Short Introduction” series, and perhaps will at a later date. In four introductory chapters, Graziosi genially explores the Homeric Question (Analysts, who see the poems as a quilt of stories by different hands and even from different eras, in one corner, Unitarians, arguing from style and cohesiveness for a single “Homer,” in another); the evidence from the text itself (how, for example, the Homeric epithets like “wine-dark sea” support oral composition); the evidence from archaeology, with the complications that inhere in the fact that, while probably composed not “much before 700 BCE,” the story itself takes place 500 years earlier; and what she calls “The Poet in the Poems,” including the importance of Demodocus, an actual poet or singer in the Odyssey, whose blindness may have contributed to the contention that Homer himself was blind (“And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat,” as Pound put it in Canto 2). There follow three short chapters each on the Iliad and the Odyssey. (The Homeric Hymns get only a passing mention, and the Batrachomyomachia, like the hymns, falsely attributed to Homer, gets none at all.) In “The Wrath of Achilles,” Graziosi explores Achilles’s evolution from sulky warrior benched on his own recognizance, caring more about survival than glory and angry with Agamemnon for stealing his girl, to fully engaged hero more concerned about revenge than death itself. “A Poem About Troy” examines death and the shortcomings of leadership on both sides in the Trojan conflict. Graziosi notes how every fallen soldier in the poem is named (a fact which the English poet Alice Oswald embraced for her remarkable Iliadic poem Memorial), and how graphically the deaths are described. The last of the...