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How Homer wrote the Odyssey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Stanley Casson
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Extract

More thoroughly silly questions have been asked about Homer than about any other man or topic. Did Homer exist? Was there one Homer or two Homers? Were the Homeric poems composed by a syndicate or by one man? and so on and so on. Only in thoroughly academic minds could such questions generate. Only minds dead to poetry and the modes of its composition would waste themselves on such mental trivialities, on such extravagant fantasies.

Of one thing we are sure, that the Odyssey and the Iliad are at once the first and the greatest of all European epics, that they were composed deliberately, and that they deal with the deeds of men who might have lived, or did actually live, in an age of which we are fortunate enough to know a good deal more than the mere historical outlines.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 16 , Issue 61 , March 1942 , pp. 71 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1942

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References

1 The Outer (western) Isles of Scotland remained similarly aloof from the Norman and English invasions of Scotland. They too were the homes of petty island chieftains, usually at war with each other, whose adventures were long remembered and told to travellers. But amongst these latter there was no Homer.—O.G.S.C.