Did Homer exist? If so, was he a sole author of the Iliad and Odyssey or did they have many separate authors? Why are there so many inconsistencies, plot holes etc in the story?
Did Homer exist? If so, was he a sole author of the Iliad and Odyssey or did they have many separate authors?
THERE ARE NO PLOTHOLES
THERE ARE NO INCONSISTENCIES
THERE IS NORE MORE THAN ONE AUTHOR
stop asking questions
Homer must have good memory because the man was alleged be blind and memorize his poems.
Humans in general have very good memories, they just have a tendency to trivialize forgetting. It is easier to remember than it is to forget.
Plus he didn't really memorize every single line. He memorized special formulas which made up 60-70% of the poems and mixed them up with improvisation
You know this how?
This is a general theory regarding epic poetry. This was discovered based on contemporary Balkan poets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singer_of_Tales). Then Homer was analyzed from this standpoint and it adds up pretty well
>This was discovered based on contemporary Balkan poets
What a moronic logic. It shouldn't have even been necessary to rely on some random Balkan poets to come to the conclusion that epos originates in improvisation, but to match it up so closely, as if the method is 1:1, is ridiculous.
it's not moronic. Many epic poems (indian, sumerian, greek etc) have very similar structure, formulas, even word usage. There was a big comparative study on this
profound post
When you are passionate about one of the 3 arts, something like that is not surprising actually.
If you are an artist or a writer you inherently get that.
I've encountered people who have committed the entire Bible to memory.
Also in that time, it's really the only art form you could have been good at.
This was before, TV, radio, even theater.
Only music and poetry.
So even a blind man, probably had more memory space than nowadays, since his memory wouldn't have been so full of other things.
Which probably explains how they memorized whole texts.
Because they had all that uncorrupted space in their minds.
Is there even a way to regain lost memory capacity? Furthermore are there books on this subject?
You can certainly improve it.
Start by getting rid of the israelite-box. No more TV. No more vidya. No more tiktok or youtube. No more booze and drugs. Eat healthy, exercise, get sunlight every day, read a lot, sleep at night and wake up in the morning. You will be surprised at how much you will be able to remember.
>jew-box
Lol what even is that? Anyway good advice. I probably should fix my sleep schedule.
There's no way Iliad and Odyssey have the same author, the style of story telling is completely different. It's just from a similar time period.
there are many contemporary authors who have works with very different story telling. Why couldn't Homer be the same?
The scholarly consensus by critical historical scholarship is that homer was a group of ghostwriting black women so ignore the chuddies here spouting unscholarly nonsense.
The reason why some scholars think the two works were not written by one person is because of the anachronisms and the mix of dialects found in the text, combined with weird shit we do know about it like the Peisistratean recension, when an athenian dictator made a bunch of laws about the order of the episodes that were to be recited in competitions. There was also a type of oral epic tradition which was alive in the balkans until the early 20th century which used a lot of mnemonic devices that were very similar to the way 'Homer' uses things like epithets. Even back in antiquity, Aristotle wrote a now lost work called "Homeric problems" where he would presumably discuss the unexplained oddities in the text. Gregory Nagy has a book where he tries to reconstruct how the text might have been transmitted and reached its current form.
But also there's nothing really conclusive, just a lot of clues on how Homer might have been a legendary poet with a poetic tradition attached to himself. We will simply never know, but you can believe in Homer if you want.
Regarding Athens, it's also interesting how Athena is the number one goddess helping greeks in their war. Seems like blatant propaganda
>Even back in antiquity, Aristotle wrote a now lost work called "Homeric problems" where he would presumably discuss the unexplained oddities in the text
Prepare to be disappointed. Among the many fragments discussed in Robert Mayhew's study of the Homeric Problems:
>Why was Achilles dragging Hector around the tomb of Patroclus, acting contrary to established custom with respect to the corpse?... It is possible to solve [this], Aristotle says, also by referring to the fact that the existing customs were like that, since even nowadays in Thessaly they drag [corpses] around tombs.
Maybe us moderns just misunderstood Achilles' motivation this whole time?
>If so, was he a sole author of the Iliad and Odyssey or did they have many separate authors?
He didnt write them at all. He just knew them.
Of course, he was named after Homer Simpson.
The Iliad and Odyssey were themselves both hodge podges of oral stories which were collected over time and amalgamated into two mostly consistent epic poems. One of the ideas is that the main story of Patroclus and Hector was the main book of the Iliad in the Bronze Age and at a later point the miscellaneous stuff which makes up the rest of the story was tacked on.
Bards back in the day would have memorized a lot of poetry and stories, and changed them a little bit depending on their audience. If you're performing in Athens, you emphasize the Athenian heroes; if you're performing in Sparta, emphasize the Spartan heroes. Combine two stories into one, if you think it will be more entertaining. All these slightly different stories would have been attributed to Homer, but Homer was never, like, an actual person. Attributing the stories to Homer was a way to ground them in a certain poetic tradition. "Homer" was a genre, which, in the classical Greek polytheist way, was personified and venerated.
>he
Homeros not existing is a cope created by modern academics. They can't fathom that one man wrote the greatest literary works in 750BC when everything was backwards and bad back then, when compared to modern diverse and enlightened times.
The worse is when they say, he was a woman, when his art and bust show he was male, and his name in greek is etymologically male, or that he only wrote one of the texts of the 2 main homeric texts because "they are different in writing" as if that couldn't be explained rationally with reasons.
The fact that is common to deny Homer's existence, is just bizarre to me.