Ancient Greek History - Homer
Early Greek history was somewhat disturbed by the lays of the poets displaying the exaggeration of their craft, and by the compositions of the chroniclerss that were attractive at truth's expense. The subjects they treated were out of the reach of evidence, time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend. Although the detailed narratives improved with the telling, the Greek histories transcribed with the advent of literacy
The earliest Minoan writing (Linear A) dates to around 2000 BC, while the earliest Greek writings (Linear B) dates to 1500 BC. The earliest Egyptian writing dates from 3100 BC, the earliest [as yet undeciphered] writing in the Indus valley dates to 2500 BC, while the first "oracle bone" writing [fortune cookie like magic spells] emerged in China around 1200 BC. The cumbersome form of Linear B was usable only for accountants' ledgers. The Mycenaeans used Linear B not to keep historical records but strictly as a device to register the flow of goods and produce into the palaces.
The stories of the Mycenaean age were preserved as oral poetry by wandering bards and written down only much later when a far more flexible form of writing came into currency that permitted the recording of epics of massive length and graceful subtlety. The Greeks were the first Europeans to write with an alphabet, and from them alphabetic writing spread to the rest of Europe. The invention of the Phoenician alphabet came around the year 1000 BC, and the Greek alphabet derived from the Phoenician one around 900 BC. The earliest Greek writings are thought to date from no sooner than 800 BC.
It sems most probable that the Iliad, the story of the Trojan War, derived from a number of long-standing Bronze Age oral traditions, distilled by 'Homer' into written form. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the telling of Odysseus' long journey home after the fighting is over, are among the earliest Greek writings. The Illiad tells of an episode of disorder which presaged the catastrophe that was to overcome Mycenaean civilization. The Mycenaean civilisation was not the civilisation of of the Homeric bards, but the people they sang about. This is, of course, a mere truism, and yet it is one that is too often clearly overlooked, or at least its consequences are not rightly estimated. The Iliad and the Odyssey examine the failures of a past civilization and analyze what is needed for a more successful future age.
The system of accounting for the present state of Homer's poems was by a process of evolution, not aggregation — in which process they were transmitted orally, passing through the minds and mouths, not merely of many men, but probably of distinct bardic schools. There are many stylistic differences between the pair, which may have been transcribed by different people, living up to a century apart.
Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War derive from a specific historical conflict usually date it to the twelfth or eleventh centuries BC, often preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes, 1194–1184 BC, which roughly corresponds with archaeological evidence of a catastrophic burning of Troy VIIa.
A man named Homer is traditionally believed to be the author of the ancient Greek epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The actual time of writing of Homer's epics cannot be determined accurately and the exact date is still a subject of historical research. The date of Homer was controversial in antiquity, and is no less so today. Herodotus is said to have written that Homer lived 400 years before his own day, which would place Homer about 850 BC. But the Life of Homer, imputed by some to Herodotus, seems generally determined among scholars, that though undoubtedly of great antiquity, must have been written by some other hand. According to the classicist and cultural historian Barbara Graziosi, other ancient sources gave dates much closer to the Trojan War. It is a matter of long dispute, where or when Homer lived, if, "he" indeed lived at all, and whether he was the author, in any sense, of the Odyssey and the Iliad. But many still regard Homer as the author of the epics.
The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was a historical individual, but some modern scholars are more sceptical about this theory: G.S. Kirk commented that “Antiquity knew nothing definite about the life and personality of Homer”. The hymns are considered by some to be later works, who contend that Homer worked some time between 725 and 675 BC, when the alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians was coming into use among the Greeks. It seems likely that writing helped Homer in collecting and composing. Writing out the long epics of Troy could well have been the work of a lifetime.
One of the problems of dating Homer is that the Iliad includes details from the Bronze Age: a bronze cup belonging to Nestor (11.632) and a helmet made of boars tusks (10.261). These Bronze Age references suggest an early date for these texts, but Iron Age references suggest a later date. And the crucial question of the iron references in Homer hinges on the supposition that iron came in with the Dorians, and not with the Achaeans. The references to iron, taken in the aggregate, are fairly numerous as well as spread over the whole 'corpus' of Homeric poetry ; but taking the references to iron weapons and instruments by themselves, they are not plentiful in the Iliad, and mostly belong to the less primitive strata of that poem. Surely, it is not surprising to find that the later Ionian bards, who were every day familiar with the use of iron implements, should introduce the mention of them chiefly into their own newer additions to the older work, but even occasionally into their recitations of the more primitive strata.
There is discernible in the poems at least one great structural fissure dividing the creative from the imitative work. The earlier portion (consisting mainly of the Achilleid) must be dated before, the later portion after, the coming of the Dorians and the great Migrations. The system of accounting for the present state of the poems was by a process of evolution, not aggregation — in which process they were transmitted orally, passing through the minds and mouths, not merely of many men, but probably of distinct bardic schools.
There can be no such thing as a single date for their entire composition. The latest date, the date before which the poems must have existed as completed compositions, would not be the date at which the poems were already canto for canto, line for line, precisely in the form which they bear in the modern text. The antiquity of that text is another and a very different question. But relatively, organically, complete, in the sense that the poems were fully-developed epics, such as could gain a wide celebrity and become sources of inspiration to succeeding schools of poets. The early beginnings of Hellenic as distinct from Homeric literature, provide a cogent though indirect reason for throwing back well into the ninth century the bloom of the Homeric epic. The schools of elegiac poetry in Ionia and of lyric poetry in AEolis took their rise at least in the early part of the seventh century, and their existence certainly seems to postulate that the epic inspiration was on the wane.
Except for the works of Homer, the epics of Hesiod are among the earliest Greek writings to come down to the present. Sometimes the ancients, as Herodotus, thought Hesiod was nearly as old as Homer: but he was never put later than the eighth century BC. His Theogony relates the myths about the gods, and Works and Days is a book of wisdom literature that traces the decline of humanity from an early golden age through the silver, bronze, and heroic periods down to his own time. The gap between the style of Homer and of Hesiod is so marked as to postulate a very decided interval. Hesiod represents the beginning of a new school of epic quite distinct from the Homeric, yet presupposing it. In language, in mythological ideas, in poetic ethos, he cannot be less than a century later than the bulk of Homer.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
