"The Odyssey": The original chick lit?
Shaking up the academy, an independent scholar argues that Homer didn't write the great epic poems -- and that their author was likely a woman.
By Andrew O'Hehir
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July 27, 2006 | For most of the past 2,500 years, scholars and aficionados of what we would now call the Western literary tradition had little doubt about its point of origin. At the dawn of Greek civilization, nearly 1,000 years before the birth of Christ, a blind poet named Homer (Homeros, in Greek) had written or composed -- and here we feel the first faint stirrings of an irresolvable ambiguity -- two great epic poems, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey."
These poems were not the beginning of literature; the Sumerian epic of "Gilgamesh" was first written down at least 1,000 years earlier (but was not widely known in the West). Just as Greek society and politics would set the table, for better and for worse, for the 3,000 years of Occidental civilization to follow, so too would the Homeric epics generate a fertile, extensive and continuing literary culture. There is no story about the cruelty and heroism of warfare in the Western tradition -- and no story about men fighting over a woman -- that does not refer back to Achilles and Agamemnon, Paris and Helen, Hector and Andromache, and the other characters and themes of "The Iliad."
Every tale of a hero who survives many hardships and adventures on the long road home -- and every tale of a woman who remains true to her long-lost husband, in defiance of her own family and community -- is essentially a reworking of the saga of the wily Odysseus and the steadfast Penelope in "The Odyssey." In many ways, the world of Achilles and Odysseus seems enormously distant from our own, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility. At the same time, imagining what Western culture would be like without these poems and the stories they tell is literally impossible; it's like imagining contemporary America without cars or guns.
As the English historian and linguist Andrew Dalby reminds us in his new book "Rediscovering Homer," most of what was understood about the Homeric epics, for most of Western history, was wrong or misleading. Conventional ways of thinking about history and legend, about authorship and the oral tradition, about the structure and language of the poems, and about what they actually say, have clouded men's minds for generations -- and continue to do so today, Dalby thinks, even in an age of more rigorous scholarship.
Dalby's headline-grabbing assertion is that Homer, if he ever existed, was certainly not the author of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," and not even the author of early drafts or proto-texts. The author was the person who decided to write down (or dictate) the legendary stories of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus as epic narratives, far longer than would be suitable for an evening's tale spinning. That author had at least the faint glimmering of an idea that would change the world: Writing a long poem on a stack of cured goatskins (the only available medium) might ultimately reach a larger audience than that available to the traditional poet-singers who traveled from place to place as after-dinner performers. Dalby thinks that author was probably, or at least plausibly, a woman.
"Rediscovering Homer" is certain to rile professional Homeric scholars, whose view of the epics has changed cautiously and gradually over the past century or so. Some may seek to dismiss Dalby, who is a free-floating, unaffiliated author and researcher of the sort once described as a "gentleman scholar." (He holds a Ph.D. in ancient history, but makes his living by writing books for general readers, not by teaching in a university.) They will argue that his dating of the poems is unorthodox -- he thinks "The Iliad" was written around 650 B.C. and "The Odyssey" around 630, whereas most scholars would date them 70 to 90 years earlier -- and that his identification of a female author is no better than guesswork.
Dalby himself cheerfully acknowledges these criticisms. His work is full of speculation and supposition, he admits, but at least those are rooted in the best available linguistic, literary and historical scholarship rather than antiquated tradition. Many contemporary textbooks and teachers, on the other hand, offer a half-hearted and indecisive mishmash of information: "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" are the work of person or persons unknown, conventionally called Homer, perhaps literate and perhaps not. Some authorities try to make Homer coincide with the birth of Greek writing, while others ascribe authorship to an anonymous process called the "oral tradition" rather than to specific people. Either way, these are fuzzy, self-undermining notions.
The Homeric epics have been surrounded by an aura of mystery and controversy since they first became popular (sometime around 500 B.C.), and this has never prevented readers from enjoying them, or grasping their seminal importance. If anything, the idea that "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" offer a window onto human prehistory, onto a past that is otherwise silent piles of dust and bone, has formed a considerable part of their allure. But anyone who admires intellectual puzzles will appreciate Dalby's attempt, imaginative as it may be, to synthesize the arguments of many other scholars with his own and untangle the tortured question of Homeric origin.
If you read the poems in school sometime in the last 30 years or so (most likely in Richmond Lattimore's dutiful but leaden 1961 translation), you already have a vague sense that the question of who wrote them, and when and how and why -- and even the question of what we mean when we ask who wrote them -- has no easy answer. Homer isn't mentioned in Greek sources until at least 300 years after his presumed lifetime, and many scholars view him as a folkloric figure, a "personification of epic," in Dalby's phrase, rather than a remembered human being. Spurious biographies of Homer were published later, after the poems had achieved widespread fame, but those bear roughly the same relationship to historical truth as the books about Nostradamus available in today's supermarkets.
If Homer was a real person, he almost certainly lived and died before the introduction of the Greek alphabet. (Yes, language wonks, written Greek existed centuries before "Homer," in the alphabet known as Linear B, but that had vanished by 1100 B.C. and in any case was never used for literary purposes.) Even early Greek commentators saw this problem, and so a traditional answer emerged: Homer was an oral poet or bard (Dalby prefers the simpler term "singer") who composed the epics during the Greek Dark Ages, sometime between the 10th and 8th centuries B.C. After that they were handed down from poet to poet, essentially intact, for decades or centuries, until someone wrote them down.
Next page: Homer may have been a famous singer, but he didn't write "The Odyssey" as we know it
