Talk:Homeric Question

Giambattista Vico
Especially given the re-invigorated scholarship on Giambattista Vico in the past few decades, it strikes me as a serious omission for his earlier account of the "discovery of the true Homer" to not be included here, prior to Wolf. Vico rejects the personhood of Homer as early as the 1740's, although his argument isn't attended to by the German classicists at first. Sir Ian 10:45, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Addendum: I just found a fantastic article by B.A. Haddock in the Journal of the History of Ideas who notes that Wolf himself admitted to Vico's priority on this matter: B.A. Haddock, "Vico's "Discovery of the True Homer": A Case-Study in Historical Reconstruction"; Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1979), pp. 583-602

(I don't have much time for Wikipedia emendations, so I'm adding this here with the hopes that someone will be able to follow up! Thank you!) Sir Ian (talk) 16:55, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Errors
In the final paragraph about Lachmann, it says that he identified 16 different lays, however when you link to the Lachmann article, it says he identified 18 lays. Which is correct?

Paragraph 7: "The debate begins with the Prolegomena of F. A. Wolf." -- This statement is false: the debate began with Xenon and the other chorizontes, in antiquity. Wolf kicked the problem off for 19th-century German classical scholars, which is what is normally understood by "the Homeric question", but the article gives no hint as to its ancient roots. Petrouchka 04:47, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Egyptian theory
I'm removing this text again:


 * The eighteenth century English writer Bryant claims the poems were written by Penthelia, a priestess of Phtha, and stolen from the archives of the temple of Phtha with the aid of "a suborned priest".  Matilda Joslyn Gage finds support for this in Diodorus Siculus, Vol I, Chap. 7, based on the potion Helen gave Telemachus and that potion's use in historic Thebes, Egypt. .   Scholars after Gage have mostly ignored this theory, however.

This text doesn't belong in the article. The theory is not notable. Gage was neither an Egyptologist nor a classicist, and whoever this Bryant character was, he was writing before the decipherment of hieroglyphic, so there's no way he could have had knowledge of Egyptian literature. More importantly, as the removed text says, the theory has been "mostly ignored" by scholarship; in fact, that should read "completely ignored." Bryant/Gage's theory of Egyptian authorship has left no trace on Homeric scholarship, and therefore does not belong in an article that concerns a specific controversy within Homeric scholarship. --Akhilleus (talk) 16:54, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

"Other scholars, however, maintain their belief in the reality of an actual Homer. So little is known or even guessed of his actual life, that a common joke has it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name," and the classical scholar Richmond Lattimore, author of well regarded poetic translations to English of both epics, once wrote a paper entitled "Homer: Who Was She?" Samuel Butler was more specific, theorizing a young Sicilian woman as author of the Odyssey (but not the Iliad), an idea further speculated on by Robert Graves in his novel Homer's Daughter."

This passage doesn't seem to contain enough information to make it notable. Is it notable simply because the scholars are more recentl? How ould they have obtained such information. I realize an encyclopedia can't be exhaustive, but this is dictionary-short and probably needs some elaboration if it is going to be included. Scottandrewhutchins 15:10, 29 June 2006 (UTC)Scottandrewhutchins


 * I'm not a big fan of the paragraph that you quote. I'm not sure where the joke comes from--seems to be based on a more popular saying about Shakespeare. Lattimore is notable because his translation of the Iliad is widely read (in the U.S., at least), and is used in many college and university courses. His supposed paper is not notable, in my opinion, and I'm not even sure it exists--I can't find it through google, and it's not in any bibliography I've consulted. Samuel Butler's Homer's Daughter is notable, because many classical scholars refer to it in just the way this article does--as an illustration of how much opinion about Homer has varied. No one takes Butler's theory seriously, however. --Akhilleus (talk) 15:29, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Gender of the author
I am no Homeric expert, but I studied Classical Greek for O-level GCE in about 1967-1968. For that examination, we studied book 2 of the Odyssey; the famed reception of Odysseus by the Phaecians. My teacher often remarked that it was his opinion that only a woman could have written the passage describing Nausicaa's expedition to do the laundry! He felt that it betrayed too detailed a knowledge of the world of women (strictly segregated in respectable society in Classical times) to have been written by a man. He also felt that some of the sentiments expressed by Nausicaa were ones that again a man might not have arrived at. In fact, his opinion was that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by different authors; a man having written the Iliad and a woman the Odyssey. My teacher, the late Mr Max Line of Wheelwright Grammar School for Boys, Dewsbury, was an examiner in both Latin and Greek for the Northern Universities Joint Matriculation Board. He was a good enough teacher that I and a few other boys studied Greek for O-level after school; I myself was at best a mediocre scholar of classical languages, but was attracted to the subject by a charismatic and interesting teacher. I am a scientist these days! --APRCooper (talk) 17:41, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Book II of the Odyssey is about Telemachus in Ithaca... john k (talk) 22:27, 1 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, that's Odyssey VI you mean. Anyway, your teacher did not take his logic far enough, in my opinion: Homer's description of Thetis' dwelling at the bottom of the sea in book I of the Iliad is so detailed, that only a sea-dwelling goddess could have written it.  Clearly than Homer was a goddess who lived at the bottom of the ocean.  This also explains the attention to detail in the catalogue of ships.  --194.98.58.121 (talk) 07:24, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Stored text
Please store this here for the time being:

Most scholars maintain a belief in the reality of an actual Homer. So little is known or even guessed of his actual life, that a common joke has it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name," and the classical scholar Richmond Lattimore, author of poetic translations to English of both epics, once wrote a paper entitled "Homer: Who Was She?" Samuel Butler was more specific, theorizing a young Sicilian woman as author of the Odyssey (but not the Iliad), an idea further speculated on by Robert Graves in his novel Homer's Daughter. Historian Andrew Dalby (in his book entitled Rediscovering Homer) recently has claimed that the true author of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" was a woman; he argues that the books were most likely written down by a woman after years of being preserved in an oral tradition because women are more likely to preserve such traditions over long periods of time.

My main concern right now is for the organization and this text has nothing to do with the topic of oral poetry under which it is found. I am not saying it will not have a place elsewhere but according to the article's current setup it does not belong in the subsection. It should go under single-author theories, female.Dave (talk) 16:10, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Pretty boring
Sorry to say this article doesn't really come alive. Too much grad-school essaying and too little encyclopedia.

---203.117.92.2 (talk) 07:42, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Machine translated?
I agree with the comment on the quality of the writing in this page.

The section on the controversy over identity is particularly poor. It reads like a bad machine translation.

86.26.6.199 (talk) 08:15, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Influence of the Epic of Gilgamesh (2000 BC) on Homer's Odissey (ca. 800 BC)==

2 Facts and one question?

FACT #1 from the Wikipedia page on the The Epic of Gilgamesh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh):

"The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from Ancient Iraq and is among the earliest known works of literary writing. Scholars believe that it originated as a series of Sumerian legends and poems about the mythological hero-king Gilgamesh"

FACT #2 from the same page as above and from the French Wikipedia page (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Épopée_de_Gilgamesh):

"According to the Greek scholar Ioannis Kakridis, there are a large number of parallel verses as well as themes or episodes which indicate a substantial influence of the Epic of Gilgamesh on the Odyssey, the Greek epic poem ascribed to Homer".[6] (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh#cite_note-5)

"De récents travaux rapprochent l’épopée de Gilgamesh des 12 travaux d’Héraclès (l’homologue grec du héros romain Hercule), la légende babylonienne étant antérieure de près de 1 000 ans aux écrits d’Homère." (Source: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Épopée_de_Gilgamesh#cite_note-1)

QUESTION:

If it is nowadays obvious that the Epic of Gilgamesh had not only an influence on the Bible (e.g. Noah's Ark episode), but also on Homer's Odissey (Gilgamesh vs. Hercules/Herakles), why is there nothing in this article mentioning it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by217.162.135.107 (talk) 14:35, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Good question, it should. Here are some English sources ., , . Dougweller (talk) 16:13, 20 February 2010 (UTC)


 * The question of Near eastern influence on Homer and other early Greek poetry is one that's intensively studied, and worth covering on Wikipedia--but it doesn't have much bearing on this article. Homer, Odyssey, and Iliad would be better places. By the way, thinking of this as "plagiarism" is somewhat misguided. A literary work can be deeply influenced by another without there being any question of copying or stealing. --Akhilleus (talk) 19:44, 21 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I should have commented on the 'plagiarism' claim. I agree entirely, we shouldn't use the word. You're right about where it should go also. Dougweller (talk) 19:56, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

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Babylonian?
I recently read that some people suppose Homer was an Assyrian or Babylonian person "kidnapped" by (or maybe freely associated to) Greeks from Phoenician villages (maybe in modern-day Syria?). One of their arguments is that ὅμηρος meant "hostage" in Ancient Greek. This is also in line with Ancient Roman author Lucianus, who had imagined an interview with Homer.

Has this hypothesis been studied, disproved, considered, etc.?

CielProfond (talk) 01:31, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The story about Homer having been a Babylonian named Tigres is entirely fictional; it was invented by Lucian (who was, in fact, not a "Roman" at all, but rather a Greek-speaking Assyrian born in the city of Samosata) in his novel A True Story. In case you have not read A True Story and are unfamiliar with it, it is a work of satire and the whole premise of the novel is that everything in it is completely made-up and ridiculous. In it, Lucian visits the moon, takes part in a war between the king of the moon and king of the sun, gets swallowed by a whale, meets fish-people, and all kinds of other absurd nonsense. When Lucian interviews Homer and learns he was a Babylonian, he is just spinning another tall tale making fun of the fact that just about every nation in the ancient Mediterranean world had claimed Homer as one of its members. In historical reality, Homer is probably just a legend; the Iliad and the Odyssey were most likely composed by a whole school of poets over the course of many centuries, being passed down through oral tradition. It is possible that there was a single genius who ultimately strung all the old poems together to create the two great, unified epics we know today, but, if so, we have no way of knowing anything at all about that genius, and even his name is probably lost to us. --Katolophyromai (talk) 02:15, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Frequency of letters?
The following section:

"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, sounds... Based on the frequencies of Greek letters, a first study of Dietmar Najock[19] 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[20] highlights the unity of the works of Homer compared to Hesiod. The thesis of modern Analysts being questioned, the debate remains open."

How can the frequency of letters prove stylistic unity? The frequency of words, possibly, but letters? Something is off here.

Similarly, the claims of Powell, while notable, hardly seem to be the entire "modern status of the Homeric question" as implied by this article. I can't really believe there are that many scholars who believe the Greek alphabet was invented to write Homer, particularly given the many other more likely reasons someone would want to be able to write.

I get the impression that someone with a pet theory about the Greek alphabet has been editing the article.--Ermenrich (talk) 03:13, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Identity of Homer
The paragraph titled "Identity of Homer" contains absolutely nothing about Homer's identity. Is anyone aware of this? 47.138.89.120 (talk) 09:07, 11 August 2023 (UTC)