"Cliff Notes - Iliad, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

HOMER: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

Homer's Iliad originated at the beginnings of Western
civilization. Its power is so timeless that it has been read
continuously for more than 2500 years. Yet its origin lies
shrouded in mystery, tangled in mythology, religion, and ancient
tribal history. Aside from these elements, the real excitement
of the Iliad lies in its brilliant poetry, which is sustained
for more than 15,000 lines, bringing an age of heroes and their
exploits to life with clarity, complexity, and depth of
feeling.

Homer has been known since classical Greek times as the
author of the Odyssey and the Iliad--and that is about all that
can be said for certain about him. The ancients regarded him as
practically a god, equal to the muses (who were the divine
inspiration for all arts). Facts about Homer the man have long
been the subject of hot debate among scholars. Perhaps Homer
also wrote a group of long poems, still called the Homeric
Hymns. Perhaps Homer didn't actually write the two great epic
poems but merely pieced together small sections written by many
different poets over centuries. Perhaps there was no Homer at
all, and the poems were a kind of oral history, written and
recited by numerous poets and much later collected into the
books we now know. Each of these theories has been offered as
true, and each remains unproven.

What is certain is that the ancient Greek scholars and
commentators were convinced that Homer was real and lived in the
9th or 8th century B.C. Modern scholars generally agree that
the Iliad was composed around 725 B.C. (the earliest written
versions we have are hundreds of years later than that, so
there's plenty of room for conjecture). But though we don't
have the earliest texts, the ancient Greeks did, and Homer was
written about, discussed, and analyzed throughout the classical
Greek period.

One of the key controversies among Homeric critics is whether
Homer composed his poems orally or whether he actually wrote
them down. We do know that Homer's poems were recited in later
days, at festivals and ceremonial occasions, by professional
singers called rhapsodes, who beat out the measure with rhythm
staffs. (There is a similar poet/singer in the Odyssey who
sings a poem about the Trojan War. He is an old man, and blind;
that may be the source behind the legend that Homer himself was
blind.) Whether or not Homer actually wrote down his poems, it
now seems certain that the Iliad and the Odyssey are part of an
ancient literary tradition of oral composition. The stories on
which they are based had probably been sung aloud for hundreds