Homer was born at Smyrna, or Chios, or Colophon, or possibly somewhere else. He lived either in the eighth century BC or in another century, may or may not have been literate, and might or might not have been several different individuals.
If this sounds unhelpfully vague, that’s because we really don’t know much about Homer’s life. He lived before the development of accurate records, and so great was his later fame that many different areas tried to claim him as their own—Smyrna, Chios, and Colophon, all in the eastern Aegean, are among the more plausible contenders for his birthplace; Syria and Egypt, among the less. Most of the traditions that circulated about him in ancient times are extrapolations from his poetry. The story that he was blind, for example, is based on the idea that Demodocus, a blind bard who makes an appearance in the Odyssey, is a stand-in for Homer himself. Although the details of his life are probably forever lost to us, archaeology does at least give us a sense of when he was active. Pots decorated with Homeric episodes become common from around 700 BC, suggesting that Homer was working at around this time or a little earlier.
As well as the Iliad and Odyssey, several other poems were occasionally attributed to Homer. Some of these, such as the Cypria, Aethiopis, and Epigoni, expand on incidents from the Trojan Wars. Others, such as the Thebaid, deal with other mythological stories. Others still, such as the Batrachomyomachia (“The Battle of Frogs and Mice”), are comedic parodies of the traditional Greek epic. But these attributions were controversial even in ancient times, and are universally rejected today as spurious.
Of the two poems commonly attributed to Homer, the Iliad was traditionally considered the more sublime. It deals, not with the entire Trojan War, but with a particular episode therein—the wrath of Achilles, as stated in the opening few lines:
“Anger be thy song, O goddess, the ruinous anger of Peleus’ son Achilles, which brought countless ills upon the Achaeans, and sent many stout souls of heroes untimely down to Hades, whilst they themselves were made food for dogs and every kind of bird—and the will of Zeus was done.” (Iliad 1.1-5)
The trouble starts when Agamemnon, the Greek commander-in-chief, attempts to confiscate Achilles’ slave-girl, Briseis. Achilles, outraged at this dishonour, refuses to fight, and in his absence, the Greeks soon find themselves at a disadvantage. Their Trojan enemies come close to burning the ships on which the Greeks rely to take them home after the war. Still Achilles does not relent, though he does let his companion, Patroclus, lead his men out to battle. These timely reinforcements turn the tide of the fighting, but as the Trojans stampede back into their city, Patroclus lets himself get carried away, pursues them too closely—and is killed by the Trojan hero, Hector. Wracked by grief and guilt, Achilles returns to the fray and slaughters Hector in retaliation. But this is not enough. He drags Hector’s corpse back to the Greek camp, and for the next several days remains in a kind of madness, alternately lying sleepless in his tent and impotently taking revenge on Hector’s body.
As the above reference to the “will of Zeus” indicates, the gods play a major rôle in the events of the Iliad. They speak to mortals in dreams, disguise themselves as human warriors, and even appear openly to join in the fighting. In general, they are portrayed as a big, dysfunctional family, similar to humans in all respects save two: gods are immortal, whereas humans are mortal; and gods are happy, whereas humans are miserable. “Blessed gods” and “wretched mortals” are recurrent phrases in the poem. In one particularly revealing simile, the gods are described as watching Achilles chase Hector round the walls of Troy like spectators at a chariot race. Passionately partisan they may be—Aphrodite, Apollo, Artemis, and Ares supporting the Trojan side; Hera, Athena, Hermes, and Poseidon supporting the Greeks—but ultimately the issue of the great, ten-year Trojan War is of no more importance to their lives than the outcome of a sports match.
Even the gods have their standards, however, and they eventually decide that Achilles’ mistreatment of Hector has become a bit excessive. They order the Grecian hero to stop moping around and ransom back Hector’s body, and tell Priam, Troy’s king and Hector’s father, to take a wagonload of gold to Achilles’ tent for this purpose. Priam sneaks into the Greek camp in a tense nighttime scene, and comes face to face with the man who killed Hector and so many of his other sons. Achilles, astonished, is struck by the likeness between Priam and his own father, anxiously waiting back home for news of Achilles’ safe return—or of his death. And then:
“A longing was roused in his breast to lament his own father: he took the old man by the hand, and gently put him from him. And then the one wept thick tears, huddled at Achilles’ feet, as he remembered man-slaying Hector, whilst Achilles wept now for his own father, now for Patroclus; and the sound of their weeping filled the house.” (Iliad 24.507-12)
It is a powerful recognition of the two sides’ shared humanity even in the midst of war. With this recognition Achilles is finally able to forgive Hector for killing Patroclus, and find respite from his grief.
Whereas the Iliad is a tragic war-poem, the Odyssey is more of a picaresque adventure, covering the hero Odysseus’ ten-year attempt to make his way home to Ithaca. Unlike the honest Achilles, Odysseus is described as a “man of twists and turns,” “equal to the gods in counsel,” who relies on his wits quite as much as his fighting prowess to escape from tricky situations. In one episode, for example, he and his men are imprisoned by the savage, man-eating cyclops Polyphemus. Odysseus masterminds a plan to blind their captor with a sharpened log, and then he and his men escape by hanging onto the bellies of Polyphemus’ sheep: as they leave his cave, Polyphemus pats the animals on the back to make sure they really are his flock, never suspecting that his prisoners are leaving too. As they reach their ships and sail away, however, Odysseus cannot resist a final boast. He had told Polyphemus that his name was “Nobody.” Now, however, he reveals his true identity:
“Cyclops, if any mortal man should ask thee of thine unseemly blinding, tell him that Odysseus, sacker of cities, took thy sight—the son of Laërtes, who has his home on Ithaca.” (Odyssey, 9.502-5)
This turns out to be a misjudgement, as Polyphemus’ father is none other than Poseidon, god of the sea. Now knowing the name of his tormentor, Polyphemus calls on dad for help, and Poseidon takes revenge by killing all Odysseus’ men and delaying his return home for ten years, until Zeus finally puts his foot down and tells him to stop tormenting the hero.
The Odyssey is different in style to the Iliad, and has a different perspective. Poorer characters, such as the swineherd Eumaeus, are given a level of prominence which would be unthinkable in the Iliad—although it’s not clear whether this is simply due to their different genres, or whether it’s a sign that the two poems are the work of separate individuals. This so-called “Homeric question” has been discussed ever since antiquity, when disputes raged between adherents of the orthodox position (that both poems were by the same man) and the chorizontes or “splitters.” These disputes notwithstanding, Homer’s (or “Homer’s”) epics were foundational to ancient Greek culture: men would learn large sections of them by heart, and quote them like people in more recent times quoted Shakespeare and the Bible. Naturally his work spawned many imitators and adapters. Pigres of Halicarnassus and Timolaus of Larissa both produced expanded versions of the Iliad, adding a new line between every line of the original. Nestor of Laranda rewrote the Iliad to exclude the letter A from the first book, B from the second, and so on; Triphodorus of Sicily did something similar with the Odyssey, omitting the letter S so he could recite the poem without anybody noticing his speech impediment. One person even wrote a novelty copy of the Iliad so small it could fit inside a nutshell. Homer also inspired many works of scholarship: Demetrius of Scepsis managed to write thirty volumes of commentary on just sixty-one lines of the Iliad (2.816-77, in case you were wondering), whilst others theorised that Homer’s poems were actually coded works of natural philosophy (with Agamemnon representing the upper air, Achilles the sun, Helen the earth, Dionysus the spleen, and so forth).
Despite his enormous cultural influence, Homer was not without his detractors. Depictions of elevated characters acting inappropriately seem to have been a source of considerable distress for some scholars: one, Zenodotus, wished to excise a scene in Book 3 of the Iliad in which Aphrodite carries a chair for Helen; another, Aristonicus, rejected a scene in which Odysseus mentions opening and closing the door of the Trojan Horse; in both cases, the reason given was that such menial tasks would be more appropriately performed by servants. By far Homer’s fiercest critic, however, was Zoilus, nicknamed Homeromastix or “the Scourge of Homer,” because of his savage attacks on the poet. Of the scene where Zeus balances the destinies of Achilles and Hector in his golden scales (Iliad 22.210 ff.), for example, Zoilus asked sarcastically whether the destinies stood up or sat down; regarding a simile in which Patroclus’ shade is described as going down to the underworld like a wisp of smoke (Iliad 23.100), he pointed out that smoke dissipates upwards, not downwards. Eventually, however, Zoilus met his end—either killed by the king of Egypt, or stoned and crucified by the Chians, or thrown alive onto a pyre by the Smyrnaeans. “However he died,” sniffs the Roman author Vitruvius, “he thoroughly deserved it.”
Thank you!