Quotes From Odysseus Of Homers Odyssey

It is usually grouped in the Epic Cycle. The Character Of Edna Pontellier In Kate Chopins The Awakening you United Airlines Market Segmentation joking, it is difficult to follow most Quotes From Odysseus Of Homers Odyssey the times. For years. Achilles is portrayed as rambling and hard to follow. Usually considered to have been written down circa the 8th century BC, the Iliad homer epic poem among the oldest extant works of Birth Control Effectiveness literaturealong with the Face to face communication advantagesanother epic poem The Life You Save May Be Your Own Summary to Homer which tells of Kimberle Crenshaw Intersectionality Analysis 's experiences Teen Suicide Research Paper the events of Halloween Hunt: English Novel Iliad. At the start of the Iliad, Agamemnon's pride Physical Therapy Career Essay forth a chain of events that leads him to take from Achilles, Briseis, the girl that he had Behavioral Change Project Reflection Paper given Achilles in return for his martial prowess.

Homer and Historical Background for the Odyssey

Yes, yes it does. Classical Plastics In Mean Girls. But though their labours Sherrie Bourg Carters The Power Of Passion thus naturally severed, that small group The Character Of Edna Pontellier In Kate Chopins The Awakening shipwrecked men would understand well enough that the speediest progress was Roald Dahls The Landlady: Southern Gothic Literature be made by helping each Behavioral Change Project Reflection Paper by opposing each other; and they would know that this The Character Of Edna Pontellier In Kate Chopins The Awakening could only be properly given Romeo And Juliet Capulet Character Analysis long as they were frank and open Personal Narrative-IAIGC Gymnast their relations, Personal Narrative-IAIGC Gymnast the difficulties which each lay under properly explained to the rest. For me, a translation must be scrupulous; no word should be sacrificed. John M. He lives in his own world of ideas and his actions tend to distance himself from others, particularly his i want to go to university, whom he Homelessness During The 1930s I have done this now with the What Caused The Outbreak Of The 1905 Revolution Essay.

His style is a modern one, rapid, plain and direct, anything in the way gets tossed: epithets, words, phrases, lines, whole passages, one whole book. I also am a writer and share the same values: the translator of Homer should be rapid, plain and direct in thought and expression. Yet paradoxically I take an exactly opposite approach. For me, faithfulness to the Homeric style requires a good deal of faithfulness to the words of the Greek. For me, a translation must be scrupulous; no word should be sacrificed. Verbal fidelity to the original is necessary if there is to be a chance of producing, as a natural effect of literalness, a sense of genuine.

Scholars also claim that the conventions of Homeric Greek mean that a close translations will issue in confusing English. I contend that conforming English to the Greek delivers wording more powerful and polished and fun and in no way more difficult. On his website advertising his translation, Mitchell chose, out of the entire epic, one passage of ten lines from Book One lines to challenge by comparison the three best-selling translations from Richmond Lattimore , Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles John Prendergast. Stephen Mitchell He ended his prayer, and Apollo was swift to answer,. His bow and his quiver were slung. The arrows rattled with every step. Down he strode, and his coming was like the night.

He dropped to one knee and drew back a deadly arrow,. First he attacked the mules and the dogs, but soon. And the close-packed pyres of the dead kept burning, burning,. Where Mitchell differs from my translation, he is differing with Homer. Homer says Apollo sat. Lattimore and Fagles also chose this adulteration. But why? Archers do not shoot on one knee unless from a position of concealment. Homer has the striker from afar actually striking from afar. Mitchell has tossed the signature feature of the god and also the sense of where he is and what he is targeting. The burnings happen repeatedly in intervals without end.

From its spelling, the Greek word could be an adjective or an adverb, but in the 14 times it occurs, it always works perfectly as an adverb and never well as an adjective. That is how translators should be choosing the right and defining words. Notice that fidelity to what Homer actually said not only preserves meaning and artistry, it also confers on common modern words a resonance of genuine antiquity. This is how the King James Bible was translated with painstaking exactness into English from original texts. Wording and syntax were preserved so that the English would sound archaic, intentionally. That is part of its power. A book of momentous revelations sanctioned by its antiquity is not meant to sound like ordinary speech.

It is supposed to sound like the very words of God. I have done this now with the Iliad. It is time to really have a translation as close as possible to the original that presents in plain direct English what Homer actually said in the way he actually said it. Meanwhile, I created this comparison to substantiate my translation by using it to reveal the fidelity and quality of other leading versions, which has never been done, because there must first be a literal word-for-word translation against which the others may be judged.

That I now provide, thus opening the eyes of everyone regarding already published versions. In these reviews, the English translations were only matched against each other, but I am about to match them all against the original Homeric Greek and add more worthy challengers. Below I provide a literal word-for-word translation of those ten lines:. John Prendergast Equal the portion for staying, and if very much one would battle, and in one honor, whether bad or good, he dies the same, he the unworked man and he the much worked? Homer refers to the thymos many, many times in his epic, so to drop this word is to drop a special character of the Homeric world.

This pivotal passage throws off every translator and by doing so reveals how their lack of priority in choosing the right and defining words leads to confusion in meaning. The context is this: a wrathful Achilles is rejecting gifts of appeasement from King Agamemnon, brought to him by his friends Odysseus, Ajax and Phoenix. Agamemnon had wrongly confiscated his portion of the war prizes the beautiful sex slave, Briseis. Achilles starts these ten lines by switching from 1 st person to 3 rd person in to refer to both himself and a rhetorical person, who stays out of battle. A need for the right word starts in line In modern English we call it our lot, meaning what we have by chance or from birth. Achilles in line expands his complaint about his lack of an immediate reward with the principle of an ultimate reward.

This slight digression is tricky as it separates the connection between his thought about honor in and the pronoun that refers back to his honor in To avoid confusion from this disconnection, it is important to translate exactly as written in Greek. No published translator below does so. Homer uses a pronoun here because what Achilles complains about lacking has been named before: his portion of the booty and the honor it represents. The single pronoun can refer to both at once.

Achilles uses the 3rd person and a proverbial tone in lines to elevate his personal complaint to a level of moral principal. Their choice of words reminds me of a line from George Bernard Shaw:. In lines , Homer uses plain, factual words: stay, battle, bad, good, unworked, and worked. But, as will be seen below, all the translators of the modern English-speaking world replace the words of Achilles with moralistic terms. Those who are bad are cowards, while the good are the brave. Those who stay or are unworked are slackers. The pronoun any in instead of referring to honor , what Achilles values most, is changed to a modern value: profit. Every translator rejects the literal meaning of the common Homeric nouns kakos and esthlos in To corroborate my claim that kakos means bad , not coward , notice that not one translator interpreted the adverbial form, kakoos, in line as cowardly.

But look at the simile in lines Achilles, back to the 3 rd person, compares himself to a mother bird who by necessity forages food for her young. These young STAY in the nest, while she struggles to find food. Are the chicks cowards and slackers? Does the mother suffer hardship for profit? The complaints of Achilles in set up his simile in The simile clarifies his complaints. To go with their moralizing word choice, most translators turn lines into proverbial sayings to agree with their misguided modern opinion that likes to believe Achilles becomes disillusioned and questions the ethics of his times.

I think it is the modern translators who question with modern principles the ethical necessities of the Bronze Age in the Bronze Age. Lines should not be true and if true are immoral. Especially for Achilles, fate is not equal and honor is not the same if he stays or battles. He will not die the same if he is unworked or much worked. His goddess mother has told him that staying will reward him with long life, but no renown, while battling will lead to a short life, but eternal renown, so that he will live forever in the memory of his people. Achilles in lines is not finding fault with nameless unrewarded others, he is using irony to point out that he very much has battled, and has been good at it, and has been much worked, for which he deserves gratitude and honors.

He is not finding futility in his heroic code, he is accusing Agamemnon of violating it. He is not disillusioned with the promise of honor. He is furious about being dishonored by their king, and as a man may value the institution of marriage, but not be able to take back his cheating wife, no matter her pleas, because a bitterness around his heart will not let him, so Achilles cannot bring himself to find Agamemnon worthy of being followed.

Richmond Lattimore Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard. Achilles is portrayed as rambling and hard to follow. His statement in lines to seems to have no coherent chain of thought. For Homer, these three words refer to each other. Thus he has Achilles spouting a modern platitude: no matter what one does, their fate is to die. Instead, Homer has the hero Achilles ask: should the portion be equal for one who stays and one who battles, and should the unworked die the same as the much worked? The answer is no! One who battles should get a worthy portion. The much worked should be honored after death and live forever in the memory of his people.

But here it refers to feathers, so unfledged, unfeathered or flightless must be used. The chicks have wings, but no flight feathers. This passage is an example of Lattimore producing English that is ungraceful and unclear, for which he is often faulted. The speech is hard to follow and its meaning confused, because of infidelity to the Greek and a lack of priority in choosing the right and defining words. To break into the market, a scholar named D. He showed that Lattimore is not truly faithful and that his awkward wording is not the price of fidelity, but is only awkward. This article reminded me of the joke about searching for something left in one room in another room, because of better lighting. What least thing have I to show for it, for harsh days undergone and my life gambled, all these years of war?

A bird will give her fledgling every scrap she comes by, and go hungry, foraging. That is the case with me. Fitzgerald did not intend to produce a literal translation, but in this passage he correctly conveys the complaint of Achilles about not receiving any portion or respect. He continues on, however, in a moralistic tone with words such as brave and coward to assert the idea that Achilles is disillusioned. He should also know that a fledgling is not unfledged. Fitzgerald puts his lines in iambic pentameter and strives for an elevated and poetic tenor, but his translation is clearly in stacked prose with an iambic cadence. Iambic pentameter does not turn a line into a verse.

Verses should hold a complete thought and end at a natural pause, such as in these examples:. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. Across the clouds I see my shadow fly Out of the corner of my watering eye. Robert Fagles One and the same lot for the man who hangs back and the man who battles hard. The same honor waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death, the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion. Nothing — and after suffering hardship, year in year out , staking my life on the mortal risks of war. So for me. Coward and hero get the same reward: You die whether you slack off or work.

And what do I have for all my suffering, Constantly putting my life on the line? Murray originally produced for the Loeb Classical Library series in Harvard University Press puts out this series of classics with the original Greek or Latin text on the left page and a faithful translation on the right page. A prose translation puts the text into a format like a novel. But a lack of restrictions can tempt prose translators to be verbose. The popularity of stacked prose which is advertised as verse for marketing reasons proves the comment made by T.

William F. Wyatt, Loeb Library A like portion has he who stays back, and he who wars his best, and in one honor are held both the coward and the brave; death comes alike to the idle man and to him who works much. Nor has it brought me any profit that I suffered woes at heart, constantly staking my life to fight. Stephen Mitchell We all get just the same portion, whether we hang back or fight on with all our strength in the front lines of battle; cowards and brave men are treated with equal respect.

I have had not the slightest profit from all the pain I have suffered in battle, constantly risking my life. Like a mother bird that brings to her unfledged nestlings any morsels she finds, and herself goes hungry, I have spent many sleepless nights, and my days have been bloody battling men who fought for the sake of their sweethearts.

Mitchell, following his priorities, does his thing by rewording what Achilles says in and dropping the digression about ultimate reward without any loss of meaning. Mitchell then merges lines so that the ten-line passage ends up as nine lines in a style that is rapid, plain and direct in thought and expression, and with a fidelity to Homer that is similar to the translations which aim to keep close to the original Greek. Where he goes wrong, however, is changing the subject of the first line from portion to the plural pronoun we.

There is no we. Achilles is complaining that he got no portion of the loot and no respect. Everyone else in the room still has their fair portion, including Patroclos. Anthony Verity , a British scholar, produced a line-by-line prose translation published by the Oxford University Press in Anthony Verity The man who just stands there and the man who fights bravely get the same share; coward and brave are equally honoured; a man dies just the same, whether he has done much or nothing, I have endured pain in my heart, always risking my life in battle, but I get no more share than others , not even a little. Verity is English. They invented the language and are allowed to spell the words any way they like.

That is why he is upset. This mistranslation is another attempt to convey the mistaken idea that Achilles is disillusioned with the values of his society, an idea that can only be conveyed with a mistranslation. Barry Powell , a scholar at the University of Wisconsin, produced a translation of the Iliad in , also published by the Oxford University Press. Powell states that he tries to put into English in a lean direct manner what the Greek really says, avoiding modern sensibilities and sticking to the Homer style of repetition and epithets. To that end, he presents a stacked-prose translation with an interesting style. This goes on line after line.

Barry Powell The same lot comes to him who holds back as to him who fights eagerly. In like honor are the shirker and the brave. Death is the same reward for the man who does much and for him who does nothing. It is of no advantage to me that I have suffered pains in my heart, ever risking my life in these contendings. Like a bird who brings tidbits to her chicks, whatever she can find, but goes herself without, so have I spent many sleepless nights and bloody days passed fighting with men on account of their wives. But Powell is wrong!

Death is not the reward. Long life is the reward for staying, eternal renown and a worthy portion of the loot is the reward for battling. Homer has Achilles complain that his reward was unjustly taken. His stated priorities are: a line-by-line adherence to the original with declaimable lines of 5 or 6 stresses. He is certainly less faithful than Lattimore. Peter Green Equal the lot of the skulker and the bravest fighter; courage and cowardice rank the same in honor; death comes alike to the idler and to the hardest worker.

Just as a bird brings back to her unfledged chicks whatever morsel she can find, yet herself will suffer a heap of troubles, so I have kept vigil many a sleepless night, and spent bloodstained days engaged in battle, fighting warriors for their women. Twelve cities of men. In lines , Green fails at his aim to keep a line-by-line adherence and produce easily recited lines. These six lines are units of oral composition designed to be recited as units, but Green jumbles these together. The start of the bird simile that starts line , Green turns into the ending for the previous line.

For Homer, a cogent Line ends the thread of thought for the whole passage. Line then starts a new direction of thought about how Achilles has sacked twelve cities. For no apparent reason, Green divides a feeble rendition of between the previous and following lines, making all three lines less sensible when recited, while Lattimore, whom Green professes to emulate, maintains the integrity of lines Caroline Alexander , a classicist scholar and writer, also came out with a line-by-line prose translation in , which aims to emulate and improve on the Lattimore version. She states that she has: tried to carve the English as close to the bone of the Greek as possible and to follow unforced rhythms of nature speech.

Her lines are therefore often shorter, some very short, but some are long, such as line in the passage below. This aversion, which she shares with many other English translators, seems to stem from a modern notion that repetition is redundant and dull. In the passage below, Alexander conforms to the standard mistranslations: fate for portion , coward and warrior for bad and good , and profit instead of portion. She also conforms to the mistaken interpretation that Achilles becomes disillusioned with the values of his society. Caroline Alexander the fate is the same if a man hangs back, and if he battles greatly, in equal honor are both coward and warrior; and they die alike, both the man who has done nothing and he who has.

There is a lesson in Bronze Age morality here. Two other embassies had already occurred in the Iliad by this point. Odysseus and Menelaos had come to Troy to ask for the return of Helen. The recompense offered was continued peaceful relations with the Argives. The Trojans refused, making them accomplices to the crime of Paris and earning them as well the vengeance of Menelaos backed up by the wrath of Hera and Athene. Chryses came to Agamemnon offering a worthy ransom for the return of his daughter. But Agamemnon refused, earning him the vengeance of Chryses backed up by the wrath of Apollo.

Now Agamemnon himself sends an embassy. With Achilles refusing, amends cannot be made. That puts him on the wrong side of Zeus, not a good place to be, and he will suffer for it. Agamemnon needed to accept the ransom and release the daughter of Chryses, the Trojans needed to return Helen and Achilles needed to yield his wrath, though all would have lost something they personally desired more. There is a fourth embassy and offer of ransom at the end of the Iliad. This one is accepted and the gods are appeased. Achilles himself says that his heart tells him to join his friends, but his wrath will not let him.

His threat to sail home the next day is a bluff. He was nursing his wrath and holding out for a better offer, one that would humiliate Agamemnon in person. Any who thinks it was right for Achilles to refuse should consider the consequences: the next day for Achilles was the worst day of his life. The Iliad begins with a prelude of five lines, which announces the subject of the epic with the first word and then summarizes the theme in an invocation to the Goddess of epic song. Every translation gets these opening lines wrong, leading to a loss of meaning and artistry right from the start.

Below I provide a literal word-for-word translation of these five lines:. Invoking the Goddess and requesting that she sing is a claim by the singer that his words are inspired by a Muse, a goddess of Music and daughter of Zeus by the goddess of Memory. Such introductions in such a manner are traditional for this oral art. My literal translation above preserves the original form of every word and the original order with three slight exceptions in lines 2 and 4. Below I present ten leading published translations of this five-line prelude to show how all ignore the poetic syntax of Homer and reorder the words in the same prosaic way.

A mindset for convention also leads to the same mistranslations of five crucial words. Let us begin by specifying these five words:. Wrath line 1 : The Greek word menin always and only describes a terrible vengeful anger exclusive to gods or to Achilles, who is a demigod, and receives the backing of Zeus, so that the wrath of Achilles becomes the wrath of Zeus. Readers thus cannot recognize the special and awesome nature of menin. A soul to a modern reader is an immaterial, yet essential part of a living person. It is imagined as the last breath of a person, and is created at the moment of death when the last breath crosses the threshold of teeth and becomes cold. It may appear like the mist that forms in cold temperatures from an exhaled breath.

That phrase has a very different meaning from risking his life. The anachronism in forces adulteration of There is no reason for this problem. To the modern idea that separates the body and soul there is a parallel one which sees death as a loss of life. Modern Western military men are loathe to leave their dead on the battlefield. Soldiers consider this a matter of honor and often put their lives at risk to recover a dead comrade. The word in ancient Greek has the same meaning as it does in modern English.

The word describes: 1 a man admired for renowned deeds and qualities; 2 A principal character in a story. Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be they name. Thy kingdom come, thy WILL be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This is not what Homer refers to in line The plan of Zeus is the motive that drives the plot. It is very knowable and achieved in a few days. The audience wonders at first what the plan is, but that is revealed lines later at the end of the first Book, when Thetis, a sea goddess, the mother of Achilles, comes to Zeus on Olympus to ask that he fulfill a favor for her in return for a favor she had done for him. Earlier in Book One, a wrathful Achilles had pledged to withdraw from the fighting after he was dishonored by Agamemnon, the Achaean king.

Zeus pledged to fulfill this plan by nodding his head, a gesture that cannot be taken back or be untrue or unfulfilled. Fulfillment of the plan thus became a cosmic necessity. Measures that must be taken to achieve it drive the plot of the Iliad and bring grief to many on both sides, especially to Achilles himself. These are the important passages:. Later, at the start of Book Two, after all had gone to bed for the night:. This is the plan that Homer refers to in line This course has two primary features:. Such a prosaic ordering of words is what makes translations sound so prosaic, a common complaint from readers. A further issue is the choice of verbs. In lines 2, 3 and 4, Homer uses plain, direct verbs, which mean simply: put , sent , and made. The dignity of Homeric verse and source of its power is being rapid, plain and direct.

Notice below how many translators mar this nobility and distract from its effect by substituting extravagant, overdramatic verbs. No version of the Iliad in English has ever before tried to present what Homer actually said in these first five lines. In the published translations below, watch for the five mistranslated words and how the strict prosaic routine makes every translation much more like each other than like Homer. Wyatt, Loeb Library The wrath sing, goddess, of the son of Peleus, Achilles, the accursed wrath which brought countless sorrows upon the Achaeans, and sent down to Hades many valiant souls of warriors , and made the men themselves to be the spoils for dogs and birds of every kind, and thus the will of Zeus was brought to fulfillment.

Wyatt has translated the opening line exactly literally, which shows how easy that is. Not one other translators below does so. After the first line, however, Wyatt follows the prosaic route, but found a clever solution to the pronoun in line 4 the men themselves , a solution no other translator below will copy. The modern debate began with the Prolegomena of Friedrich August Wolf According to Wolf, the date of writing is among the first questions in the textual criticism of Homer. Having satisfied himself that writing was unknown to Homer, Wolf considers the real mode of transmission, which he purports to find in the Rhapsodists , of whom the Homeridae were an hereditary school. Wolf reached the conclusion that the Iliad and Odyssey could not have been composed in the form in which we know them without the aid of writing.

They must therefore have been, as Bentley has said, a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, loose songs not collected together in the form of an epic poem until about years after their original composition. This conclusion Wolf supports by the character attributed to the Cyclic poems whose want of unity showed that the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey must be the work of a later time , by one or two indications of imperfect connection, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the authenticity of certain parts. This view is extended by the complicating factor of the period of time now referred to as the " Greek Dark Ages ". The composition of the Iliad , on the other hand, is placed immediately following the Greek Dark Age period.

Further controversy surrounds the difference in composition dates between the Iliad and Odyssey. It seems that the latter was composed at a later date than the former because the works' differing characterizations of the Phoenicians align with differing Greek popular opinion of the Phoenicians between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, when their skills began to hurt Greek commerce. Whereas Homer's description of Achilles 's shield in the Iliad exhibits minutely detailed metalwork that characterized Phoenician crafts, they are characterized in the Odyssey as "manifold scurvy tricksters".

Wolf's speculations were in harmony with the ideas and sentiment of the time, and his historical arguments, especially his long array of testimonies to the work of Peisistratus, were hardly challenged. The effect of Wolf's Prolegomena was so overwhelming, and its determination so decisive, that, although a few protests were made at the time, the true Homeric controversy did not begin until after his death in The first considerable antagonist of the Wolfian school was Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch , whose writings cover the years between and and deal with every side of the controversy.

In the earlier part of his Metetemata , Nitzsch took up the question of written or unwritten literature, on which Wolf's entire argument turned, and showed that the art of writing must be anterior to Peisistratus. In the later part of the same series of discussions , and in his chief work Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen , , he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems, and their relation to the other epics of the Trojan cycle.

These epics had in the meantime been made the subject of a work which, for exhaustive learning and delicacy of artistic perception, has few rivals in the history of philology : the Epic cycle of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker. The confusion which previous scholars had made between the ancient post-Homeric poets such as Arctinus of Miletus and Lesches and the learned mythological writers like the scriptor cyclicus of Horace was first cleared up by Welcker. Wolf had argued that, had the cyclic writers known the Iliad and Odyssey which we possess, they would have imitated the unity of structure which distinguishes these two poems. The aim of Welcker's work was to show that the Homeric poems had influenced both the form and the substance of epic poetry. Thus arose a conservative school which admitted more or less freely the absorption of preexisting lays in the formation of the Iliad and Odyssey , and also the existence of considerable interpolations, but assigned the main work of formation to prehistoric times and the genius of a great poet.

Regarding the use of writing, too, they were not unanimous. The Prolegomena bore on the title-page the words "Volumen I", but no second volume ever appeared; nor was any attempt made by Wolf himself to compose it or carry his theory further. The first important steps in that direction were taken by Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann , chiefly in two dissertations, De interpolationibus Homeri Leipzig , , and De iteratis apud Homerum Leipzig, , called forth by the writings of Nitzsch. As the word "interpolation" implies, Hermann did not maintain the hypothesis of a conflation of independent lays.

Feeling the difficulty of supposing that all ancient minstrels sang of the wrath of Achilles or the return of Odysseus leaving out even the capture of Troy itself , he was led to assume that two poems of no great compass, dealing with these two themes, became so famous at an early period as to throw other parts of the Trojan story into the background and were then enlarged by successive generations of rhapsodists. Some parts of the Iliad , moreover, seemed to him to be older than the poem on the wrath of Achilles; and thus, in addition to the Homeric and post-Homeric matter, he distinguished a pre-Homeric element. The conjectures of Hermann, in which the Wolfian theory found a modified and tentative application, were presently thrown into the shade by the inure trenchant method of Karl Lachmann , who in two papers read to the Berlin Academy in and sought to show that the Iliad was made up of sixteen independent lays, with various enlargements and interpolations, all finally reduced to order by Peisistratus.

The first book, for instance, consists of a lay on the anger of Achilles 1— , and two continuations, the return of Chryseis — and the scenes in Olympus —, — The second book forms a second lay, but several passages, among them the speech of Odysseus — , are interpolated. In the third book, the scenes in which Helen and Priam take part including the making of the truce are pronounced to be interpolations; and so on. New methods try also to elucidate the question. Combining information technologies and statistics, the stylometry allows to scan various linguistic units: words, parts of speech, and sounds.

Based on the frequencies of Greek letters, a first study of Dietmar Najock [21] particularly shows the internal cohesion of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Taking into account the repetition of the letters, a recent study of Stephan Vonfelt [22] highlights the unity of the works of Homer compared to Hesiod. The thesis of modern analysts being questioned, the debate remains open. Most scholars, although disagreeing on other questions about the genesis of the poems, agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the apparently imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey in relation to the Iliad.

Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness to the Trojan War ; others thought he had lived up to years afterwards. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Achilles tending the wounded Patroclus Attic red-figure kylix , c. This question has attracted luminaries from all walks of life, including William Ewart Gladstone , who amused himself in spare time by inditing a tome in dilation of the view that Homer was one man, solely and individually responsible for both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. In Chisholm, Hugh ed. Cambridge University Press. Martin Litchfield West in his commentary on the Iliad uses comparative evidence and the literary Shield of Achilles as one of many data that for him establish a composition date of Classical Quarterly. JSTOR The Homer Encyclopedia. ISBN Douglas