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Spartan Surfers

c. 8th century BC

Homer

The poet the Greeks credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epics of war and homecoming that taught every later Greek, philosophers included, what courage, grief, honour and endurance look like.

Read the life16 sourced lines

In one line

Nobody knows who Homer was, or whether one person composed both poems. What we have is the Iliad, about a few weeks of rage in the tenth year of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, about one man's ten-year struggle to get home across the sea. For a thousand years these were the Greek school curriculum, the shared language of Greek ethics, and the texts every philosopher had to agree or argue with.

The life

The honest answer to "who was Homer?" is that we do not know. The ancient Greeks had biographies of him, the so-called Lives of Homer, but they were written centuries after the poems and are mostly legend. They disagree about almost everything.

Several cities claimed to be his birthplace. The lists vary, but they usually include Smyrna (modern Izmir), Chios, Colophon, Athens, Argos, Rhodes and Salamis. The traditions pointing to Smyrna and Chios, both in Ionia on the eastern Aegean, are the oldest and fit the dialect of the poems, which is mostly Ionic Greek with older forms mixed in. A group of reciters on Chios called themselves the Homeridae, "sons of Homer."

The idea that Homer was blind comes partly from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, a poem in his style but not by the poet of the epics. Its singer describes himself as "a blind man who lives in rocky Chios." The historian Thucydides quotes these lines and takes them to be Homer's own (3.104). The Odyssey also has a blind bard, Demodocus, whom the Muse loved and to whom she gave both good and evil: she took his sight and gave him sweet song (8.63–64). Readers have always been tempted to see the poet in the portrait.

Herodotus believed that Homer and Hesiod lived no more than four hundred years before his own time (2.53), that is, no earlier than the ninth century BC. Most modern scholars date the composition of the Iliad to the second half of the eighth century BC and the Odyssey somewhat later, perhaps around 700 or the early seventh century, but these dates are argued over.

The death story is one of the oddest in Greek literature. In the Contest of Homer and Hesiod and in one of the Lives, Homer, now old, comes to the island of Ios and meets some fishermen's boys on the shore. He asks what they have caught. They answer with a riddle: "What we caught, we left behind. What we didn't catch, we carry with us." Homer cannot solve it. They had been picking lice; the ones they caught they killed and left, the ones they missed they still carried. The tradition says he died soon afterwards, some say of grief at failing to solve it, and was buried on Ios. It is a legend, but a revealing one: the Greeks imagined the wisest poet of all undone by a riddle from children on a beach.

The Homeric question

The real history of the poems is the history of how they were composed and written down. In 1795 the German scholar Friedrich August Wolf argued that the Iliad and Odyssey could not have been composed by one poet in writing, and that they were assembled from shorter oral songs. This started a long debate, still called "the Homeric question."

The decisive evidence came in the 1920s and 1930s from the American scholar Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord. Parry showed that the poems are built from a vast system of formulas, fixed phrases that fit the rhythm of the line, such as "swift-footed Achilles," "rosy-fingered Dawn" and "the wine-dark sea." He and Lord then recorded living oral epic singers in Yugoslavia who composed long poems in performance using a similar technique. Today most scholars agree that the Homeric poems come out of a long tradition of oral poetry, though they disagree about how and when they were fixed in writing, and whether a single great poet stands behind each poem.

Later tradition said that the Athenian ruler Peisistratus, in the sixth century BC, had the poems collected and written down (Cicero, On the Orator 3.137). In the third and second centuries BC, scholars at the Library of Alexandria, especially Zenodotus and Aristarchus, edited the text and divided each poem into twenty-four books, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet.

The big ideas

Glory and mortality

The heroes of the Iliad fight for kleos, glory: the fame that lives on after you die, in song. Achilles knows he has a choice. If he stays and fights at Troy he will die young, but his glory will never perish; if he goes home he will live long without fame (Iliad 9.410–416). He stays. The whole poem is shadowed by the shortness of life. "As the generations of leaves, so are the generations of men," says the Trojan ally Glaucus: the wind scatters some on the ground, and the forest puts out others in spring (6.146–149).

Wrath and its cost

The first word of the Iliad is menis, wrath. The poem is about what anger does: Achilles' rage at Agamemnon's insult keeps him out of the fighting, his friend Patroclus is killed as a result, and his grief turns into a new rage that drives him to kill Hector and abuse his body. The poem ends not in victory but in pity. In Book 24 old King Priam crosses the enemy lines at night, kneels before Achilles and kisses the hands that killed his son. The two enemies weep together, and Achilles gives back the body.

Endurance and cunning

The Odyssey's hero is polytropos, "the man of many turns." Odysseus survives by patience, disguise and intelligence. Its central virtue is endurance. In Book 20, home at last but disguised as a beggar in his own house, watching the suitors abuse it, he strikes his chest and speaks to his own heart: "Endure, heart. You endured worse than this" (20.18, our rendering). Plato quotes this line twice (Phaedo 94d; Republic 3.390d) as a model of reason controlling anger.

Hospitality and the stranger

Xenia, the sacred bond between host and guest, holds the Odyssey together. The good hosts, Nestor, Menelaus, the Phaeacians and the swineherd Eumaeus, feed the stranger before asking his name. The bad ones, the Cyclops and the suitors, break the bond, and are destroyed for it.

Homecoming

Nostos, the return home, is the Odyssey's subject and gives us the word "nostalgia." Odysseus turns down immortality with the goddess Calypso to return to an aging wife on a rocky island (Odyssey 5.215–224).

What the philosophers did with Homer

Every Greek philosopher had to deal with Homer. Heraclitus said he should be thrown out of the poetry contests and flogged (fragment DK B42). Xenophanes complained that Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods everything shameful among humans. Plato admired Homer and banned him from his ideal city in the Republic (Books 2, 3 and 10) for showing gods behaving badly and heroes lamenting. The Stoics read Homer allegorically and treated Odysseus as a model of the wise man. Epictetus used the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon to show what happens when people mistake externals for goods (Discourses 1.22).

What their lines mean for you

At work. Odysseus wins by thinking, not by brute force. The wooden horse was an idea.

In training. "Endure, heart. You endured worse than this." It is the oldest recorded piece of self-talk in Western literature, and it still works on the last rep, the last interval, the last paddle back out.

In anger. The Iliad is a three-week case study in how anger destroys the angry man and everyone he loves. Its cure is not argument but shared grief: Achilles finally sees in Priam his own father.

In grief. When Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles in the underworld and praises his fame, Achilles answers that he would rather be a hired hand for a poor farmer on earth than king of all the dead (Odyssey 11.489–491). Glory does not replace life. Honour the living.

On the water. No book has more sea in it than the Odyssey: the wine-dark sea, the storm sent by Poseidon, the raft broken under Odysseus, his two days and nights swimming before he crawls ashore on Scheria (5.388–493). The poem knows that the sea can take everything and that the one who keeps swimming gets home.

In ambition. Achilles chose glory over a long life and spent the afterlife regretting it. Odysseus chose home over immortality. The poems put both choices in front of you.

Where people get them wrong

  • "The gods envy us because we're mortal..." A line from the film Troy (2004), not Homer.
  • Achilles' heel. Not in Homer. Achilles dies at Troy in the tradition, but the story of his mother dipping him in the river Styx and holding him by the heel is first found much later, in the Roman poet Statius (Achilleid, first century AD).
  • The Trojan Horse in the Iliad. The Iliad ends before Troy falls and does not tell the story of the horse. It is mentioned in the Odyssey (4.271–289, 8.492–520) and told at length in Virgil's Aeneid, Book 2.
  • "The face that launched a thousand ships." Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (around 1592), describing Helen. Not Homer.
  • "Even Homer nods." A Roman saying, from Horace (Ars Poetica 359): even the best poet sometimes slips.
  • Homer as one blind man. Possible, but not established. The blindness may come from the Hymn to Apollo and from the portrait of Demodocus.

Read them yourself

Timeline

  • c. 1200 BC: the approximate date of the destruction of Troy (Hisarlik), the setting of the poems
  • c. 750–700 BC: probable composition of the Iliad
  • c. 700–650 BC: probable composition of the Odyssey
  • 6th century BC: the poems recited at the Athenian Panathenaea; Peisistratus is said to have had them written down
  • c. 500 BC: Heraclitus and Xenophanes attack Homer
  • c. 430 BC: Herodotus dates Homer about four hundred years before his time
  • c. 375 BC: Plato banishes Homer from the ideal city in the Republic
  • 3rd–2nd century BC: Alexandrian scholars edit the poems and divide them into 24 books each
  • 1795: F. A. Wolf's Prolegomena opens the modern Homeric question
  • 1920s–1930s: Milman Parry and Albert Lord show the poems' roots in oral composition

Every line we carry

Each one links to its source, what it means, and the shirt in any of our looks.

  1. Endure, heart. You have endured worse.

    Odysseus, home in disguise and furious at what he sees, holds himself back with these words. He reminds his own heart of the Cyclops' cave. When you want to snap, remember what you have already come through.

    Odyssey 20.18, our translation from the Greek

  2. Wreck me on the wine-dark sea. I will bear it.

    Odysseus tells Calypso he will sail home even if a god smashes his raft. He has a heart built for suffering and has already survived waves and war. Commit to the crossing before you know how rough it will be.

    Odyssey 5.221-222, our translation from the Greek

  3. I have suffered much on the waves and in war. Let this come too.

    Odysseus counts his past hardships as training rather than wounds. One more storm is just one more on the list. Let what you have survived make you calmer about what is next.

    Odyssey 5.223-224, our translation from the Greek

  4. The Fates gave us hearts that can endure.

    Apollo says this while rebuking Achilles for his endless rage over a loss. Everyone loses someone, and human hearts are made to carry it. Grief is real, and so is your capacity to bear it.

    Iliad 24.49, our translation from the Greek

  5. Not without a fight. Let me do something great first.

    Hector realizes the gods have abandoned him and he cannot escape Achilles. He chooses to go down fighting, doing something people will remember. When the outcome is out of your hands, the way you meet it is not.

    Iliad 22.304-305, our translation from the Greek

  6. I hate the one who says one thing and hides another.

    Achilles tells Odysseus he hates such a man as much as the gates of death. He wants plain speech, even when it is unwelcome. Say what you mean and mean what you say.

    Iliad 9.312-313, our translation from the Greek

  7. Even weak men are strong together.

    Poseidon, in disguise, rallies the Greeks with this line. Strength added together beats the strength of any one person. Find your crew and stand with them.

    Iliad 13.237, our translation from the Greek

  8. When two go together, one sees what the other misses.

    Diomedes asks for a partner before a dangerous night mission. Two people spot the chance one of them would overlook. Do not go into the hard thing alone if you can help it.

    Iliad 10.224, our translation from the Greek

  9. As you speak, so you'll be spoken to.

    Aeneas says this to Achilles as they trade insults before fighting. Words come back the way they were sent. Choose the tone you would want returned.

    Iliad 20.250, our translation from the Greek

  10. Always be the best. Rise above the rest.

    Glaucus repeats the advice his father gave him when he sent him to Troy. It is the old heroic standard: aim for excellence every time. Hold yourself to your best, not to the average around you.

    Iliad 6.208, our translation from the Greek

  11. One omen is best: defend your home.

    When a seer reads a bad sign in the birds, Hector waves it away. He does not need signs to know what is right. Some duties are clear enough without waiting for permission.

    Iliad 12.243, our translation from the Greek

  12. My homecoming is lost, but my glory will never die.

    Achilles knows his choice: go home and live long, or stay, die young and be remembered. Every serious life involves a trade like that. Know what you are giving up and why.

    Iliad 9.413, our translation from the Greek

  13. We blame the gods for the pain we cause ourselves.

    Zeus complains that people blame heaven for troubles their own recklessness created. Bad luck exists, but so does bad judgment. Before blaming fate, check your own part.

    Odyssey 1.32-34, our translation from the Greek

  14. No greater glory than what you win with your own hands and feet.

    A young Phaeacian invites Odysseus to the games with these words. Homer's world prized what a body could do: run, throw, wrestle. Earned effort is its own kind of honor.

    Odyssey 8.147-148, our translation from the Greek

  15. Nothing breaks a man like the sea, however strong he is.

    Odysseus, washed up after days in the water, looks worn out, and his hosts say the sea does that to anyone. Respect the ocean. Strength is no excuse for carelessness.

    Odyssey 8.138-139, our translation from the Greek

  16. Nothing is sweeter than home.

    Odysseus turned down goddesses and palaces to get back to rocky Ithaca. Nothing, he says, is sweeter than your own land and parents. Know where home is and keep the way back open.

    Odyssey 9.34, our translation from the Greek