Reminiscences of Homer

Hello everyone –

I’ve been doing a lot of reminiscing lately about Homer, the legendary epic poet of ancient Greece – thinking not only about the poems and tales ascribed to him, but also about Homer as a literary figure/character himself. As a Classics major at the University of Illinois during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Homer was an inspirational figure to me, because he was widely believed in antiquity to have been blind, and because I have lived all my life with low vision. I can recall giving a short talk about this topic at Allen Hall during my undergraduate years, but alas, the manuscript has perished. J

Here is a short introduction to Homeric studies by the Bostonian classicist Thomas Bulfinch, along with two poems about Homer by John Keats.

Except from Chapter 35 of The Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch (1796-1867)

Homer, from whose poems of the Iliad and Odyssey we have taken the chief part of our chapters of the Trojan war and the return of the Grecians, is almost as mythical a personage as the heroes he celebrates. The traditionary story is that he was a wandering minstrel, blind and old, who travelled from place to place singing his lays to the music of his harp, in the courts of princes or the cottages of peasants, and dependent upon the voluntary offerings of his hearers for support. Byron calls him “the blind old man of Scio’s rocky isle,” and a well-known epigram, alluding to the uncertainty of the fact of his birthplace, says:

“Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.”

These seven were Smyrna, Scio, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Argos, and Athens.

Modern scholars have doubted whether the Homeric poems are the work of any single mind. This arises from the difficulty of believing that poems of such length could have been committed to writing at so early an age as that usually assigned to these, an age earlier than the date of any remaining inscriptions or coins, and when no materials capable of containing such long productions were yet introduced into use. On the other hand, it is asked how poems of such length could have been handed down from age to age by means of the memory alone. This is answered by the statement that there was a professional body of men, called Rhapsodists, who recited the poems of others, and whose business it was to commit to memory and rehearse for pay the national and patriotic legends.

The prevailing opinion of the learned, at this time, seems to be that the framework and much of the structure of the poems belong to Homer, but that there are numerous interpolations and additions by other hands.

The date assigned to Homer, on the authority of Herodotus, is 850 B.C.

“To Homer” by John Keats (1795-1821)

Standing aloof in giant ignorance,

Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,

As one who sits ashore and longs perchance

To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.

So thou wast blind; -- but then the veil was rent,

For Jove uncurtained Heaven to let thee live,

And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent,

And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive;

Aye on the shores of darkness there is light,

And precipices show untrodden green,

There is a budding morrow in midnight,

There is a triple sight in blindness keen;

Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befell

To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.

“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

By John Keats

Editor’s Note: The Chapman here referred to is George Chapman (1559-1634), a British classical scholar, translator, and poet. His was the first complete English translation of the works attributed to Homer – the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific — and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise —

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Until next time –

Rob J