Was Homer a Real Person?

[@WorldofAntiquity]

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[@WilliamBowling-pp4wg]

The Iliad and Odyssey were not written by Homer. They were written by another blind poet of the same name.

[@gordonmorris6359]

I read the Loeb Classics versions which have the Greek & English on opposite pages, and annotations about the texts. I'm wondering how long it would take to orally perform the full story of the Iliad or Odyssey, if such was the original method, and has it ever been done from memory without just reading it aloud?

[@WilliamBowling-pp4wg]

@@gordonmorris6359 It would be difficult to give a total time for two reasons. First, the works were not considered a single work until written down about the 8th c. BC. Sections were performed as a complete story and performance in itself. Second, it was performed orally, with the poet composing extemporaneously. The composition was altered based on the audience's response. Parts that caught their attention were embellished and parts that sparked less interest were abbreviated.

[@chaunceyfeatherstone6209]

Jeez, a guy dips out for a couple thousand years for some well-earned self-care and people begin to question your very existence. Showbiz is brutal.

[@courtneyriley185]

😂

[@ilonabaier6042]

It needs to be investigated at least. By doing so, perhaps more knowledge might be gained about other historical occurrences.

[@Les537]

He's spending some years dead for tax reasons.

[@chaunceyfeatherstone6209]

@@Les537 Ah. The old "Hotblack Desiato" manoeuvre. It's all clear now.

[@jamesjaudon8247]

And look at the awful busts made! I think an imaginary Homer would have appreciated a more youthful version of himself. Happy that no one made a statue, it would have a cane by the looks of it.

[@SobekLOTFC]

Keep up the excellent work, Dr Miano 👏

[@florisvansandwijk6908]

as we discussed in school a long time ago: The Iliad and Odyssee were not created by Homer, but by someone else with the same name.

[@WorldofAntiquity]

That would just make this person Homer.

[@brunopereira6789]

That is, I think, the joke lmao

[@doncarlodivargas5497]

That I call a strike of luck, getting the recognition deserved by someone else just because of confusion around the name, guess Homer number-1 got pretty annoyed?

[@KSignalEingang]

​@@brunopereira6789yeah I've heard the same joke made about Shakespeare. Apparently the gag's been in circulation for well over a century, for all I know dating back to Shakespeare (or Homer) himself.

[@jotaere100]

Exactly, what really matters is the writings.

[@joelabraham9456]

Love the video professor. It seems the quality of your videos has also greatly improved. I look forward to more

[@laurachapple6795]

If my nerd friends and I can spend all day watching the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings movies, I think ancient Greeks could sit through a few chapters of the Iliad.

[@KasumiRINA]

They probably also had songs, plays, games and stuff like puppet or shadow theater that worked as the time's equivalent of modern pop culture. It wasn't just oral stories and theater but the whole tradition around it... For example the horsey story is not in Illiad, we lost the source, and only know about the Trojan Horse from pop culture osmosis ALL THE WAY FROM ANTIQUITY and a brief mention in Odyssey.

[@thomaswhitelake]

An excellent presentation! Will help resolve some of the arguments we have in this household. Thank you

[@WorldofAntiquity]

Now that sounds like an interesting household to be in!

[@LyleFrancisDelp]

Michael Wood covered much of this topic in his series “In Search of the Trojan War”. Though that series was romanticized a bit, it still bore the seeds of excellent scholarly research. He showed that, even today in Ireland and Turkey, there are professional bards, raised very young, to memorize perfectly and performed epic poems. In Turkey, he showed how professional bards are hired to perform at special events and the men will sit for hours on end, listening to the song.

[@slaer]

@@LyleFrancisDelp In India as well we have such bards. Though they don't provide accurate stories, but fun and romantic version of events

[@loke6664]

It is something existing in many places. The Icelandic sagas, Australian aboriginals and many North American tribes have or had similar traditions too. So we know it is plausible that the epics were oral first but it is also plausible that the original author (or authors) wrote them down himself (or themselves) as well. What we can prove is that parts of the Illiad were based on older stories or poems and not all of them from the same time. The boar head helmets Homer describes for instance did not exist when the epic was written down since they disappeared after the bronze age collapse. Some of the heroes have equipment we can trace to around 1250 BCE but there are a few that are a couple of centuries earlier too. Other things are the way they were when the epic was made, like the use of chariots. So Homer clearly did have access to older stories and/or poems but also added his own twist to things. Eric H Cline wrote a rather good book on the subject. He does have the advantage of being both an archaeologists who dug in the area as well as an historian.

[@LyleFrancisDelp]

@@loke6664 Not to mention the angled walls Homer described, which were fully buried in “his” day (assuming it was one person).

[@loke6664]

@@LyleFrancisDelp True, but there is also some issues with some of the walls described. He do describe the citadel walls with surprising details but we never found the walls around the entire city which have confused archaeologists since the day of Schliemann. I think the reason is that those walls isn't in Troy who either didn't have a city wall or had one made out of wood (post holes are easier to miss or could have disappeared due to agriculture) and that part was taken from another siege somewhere else. So at times we get amazing accuracy, at other times it is all wrong which either means that Homer made those things up or used sources about other sieges and added them in to make a more interesting story. Well, or that the oral stories changed a lot from when the war happened to when Homer compiled the story.

[@cattymajiv]

@@loke6664 Cline is just fascinating!

[@Khydul]

His middle name was Jay, last name Simpson, as forseen and told ages ago. Great video though, I enjoy every take on the topic including the ones leaving out city of Springfield, and this particular one is stuffed with useful info! Thank you Mr Miano!

[@mithilbhoras5951]

Thank you so much for this! Please make a similar video on the historicity of Socrates!

[@edgarsnake2857]

I've never been able to fathom the origins of Homer and now I understand why. Thanks for clarifying my lack of clarity on the subject.

[@jerrycornelius5986]

The Iliad is built around a core story about Achilles, with chapters by other authors mixed in. The Odyssey was written by a young lady who introduces herself as Nausica of Shieria. With the playing of her harp and her song, Nausic raises Odysseus naked from the ground and dresses him and brings him into her home. But the author is also Ganymede and Calypso who love Odysseus for his strength, courage and cunning. She is Athena who knows he is a lying cheating violent bastard. She is Penelope who weaves and unpicks her poem everyday, knowing it will end when she is married off to a suitor. If you read the Odyssey and hear the voice of a young lady you will know for certain it is true.

[@Taharqo.saved.the.Hebrew]

​@@jerrycornelius5986that's pure speculation not backed up by concrete evidence, you Europeans always like to make up history and pass it as facts

[@jerrycornelius5986]

@@Taharqo.saved.the.Hebrew I am not a European - that is pure speculation unsupported by the facts.

[@docandreferreira]

Thank you, Professor! Great video, very comprehensive! Best regards from Brazil!

[@Zal1810]

So good as usual. A luxury here in youtube. You have such a clear way of narrating an otherwise complex and unreachabe subject, that keeps us engaged till the end.

[@JulieTheReader]

Homeric historiography is a fascinating topic! My introduction to the idea the Odyssey came later was a teacher bringing up the psychologist Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis of the development of consciousness and agency that could have taken place between it and the Iliad. The differences in language, geography, and mythological references are so cool to have learned about. Thanks!

[@cyberpotato63]

It's fairly well attested that Homer was the creation of a single author and existed no earlier than April 19, 1987.

[@cyberpotato63]

@Carlton-B Terrance Howard ???

[@HomuraAkemiHQ]

D'oh!

[@proto566]

The First original Simpsons comment 😂👍🏿

[@cyberpotato63]

@Carlton-B That's OK. I have no idea who Terrance Howard is.

[@bigjobbies]

also he was a homer-sexual

[@faithlesshound5621]

Closer to our own time, we have Shakespeare's plays, which were written for performance and must have had a somewhat fluid text since they contain topical references to politics and religion, and some low humour, which may not all have been appropriate for a public theatre or a private performance in a nobleman's house. Like modern comedians, authors, directors and performers must have adjusted their performance to suit the audience. The plays were published unofficially by members of the audience before official editions were sold. In the ensuing four centuries, directors have continued to update, censor, or otherwise "improve" what is performed, even though the published texts stay much the same.

[@JMM33RanMA]

I once saw a version performed in Jive, it was startling and possibly a little more understandable to a modern white audience than the Elizabethan original. I've actually wished to see more of that in various dialects and languages. I would definitely like to see Goethe's Faust in Elizabethan and Jive, having waded through the dated Hochdeutsch!

[@edwardwright8127]

Both Homer and Shakespeare were written by the Earl of Oxford. :-)

[@PeloquinDavid]

The big difference is that Shakespeare's plays in early modern times some 400+ years ago were actually WRITTEN to be performed from the start and always had at least a manuscript version so that the players could learn their lines. Those texts undoubtedly evolved as they were "workshopped" extensively in Shakespeare's time, and have never ceased to be "adapted" since then. But it's quite different dynamic to have a purely oral text emerge from a serial community of bards over many decades or even centuries and to then be transmitted with many more refinements over several more centuries before (finally) being committed to writing in a more or less "definitive" form that had a chance of surviving for posterity. The Homeric epics are by no means the only examples we know of. The south Asian epics and Vedas are both longer and older than Homer and Hesiod but were similarly orally transmitted for many centuries. I suspect this is also true of the even more ancient Sumerian and other Mesopotamian stories we now know about from deciphered cuneiform clay tablets: these too undoubtedly emerged in pre-literate times and were only later committed to writing. Some of them - like a certain flood story - even made their way into much later works, like the Bible's book of Genesis, which most scholars agree dates to AFTER the Homeric epics were written down, i.e. no earlier than in Achaemenid or even Hellenistic times and something like two millennia after they first arose in Sumeria!

[@MechanicaMenace]

The low humour was very appropriate for public performances in the Elizabethan period. Theatre of any type was not counted as a high-brow pursuit at all.

[@faithlesshound5621]

@@PeloquinDavid The most ancient story of all seems to be Jack and the Beanstalk, the "English Fairytale" first printed in the 18th century, whose origins are said to be at least 5000 years ago. Our Jack knocks the ancient gods into a cocked hat!

[@stewartlindsay2275]

Been a long time since I read about swift footed Achilles and Bright Eyed Athene

[@giuseppersa2391]

Warm greetings David from Cape Town South Africa 😊. A most interesting presentation. I'm busy reading the Iliad once again and your commentary assists greatly ✌️🤗

[@thearaucariafarmer556]

This is such a good and fascinating lecture, thanks Dr. Miano!

[@panepomodoro]

Majestic and complete video. Great!

[@Taomantom]

That is as good as it gets. Thank you for your dedication to knowledge.

[@urielstud]

Great, thanks David 👋

[@leopolddevandersnatch5788]

Yes he was and he lives in a town called Springfield

[@MossyMozart]

On he Greek island of Tyre Fyre.

[@aresh004]

I have this long running image in my head of homer just completely defeating his enemy in a freelance rap battle

[@SeanSmith-gm3ov]

Love your work Dr. Miano but I think I mic boom would do you well. I can hear every time you touch your table, thought someone was closing doors in my house. Lol

[@artkoenig9434]

Nicely done, sir!

[@rustomkanishka]

Outside of the Greek speaking world, there are plenty of oral traditions that can maybe give us a glimpse into how stories work. For example, there are still many Farsi entertainers who showcase stories from the Shahnameh, or travelling storytellers who may come down and tell you the stories everyone is kinda sorta familiar with. Now, if i were to be the person paying, I'd request of him the stories i like, and the formula kinda stays the same. The details vary slightly, but stories are kinda similar. I'd request, say, the stories of Rostam, and that in itself is a pretty massive tale. Rostam is born of a C section, does 7 out of the 12 labours or Heracles, but is most famous for the love story and tragedy. Basically he has a midnight rendezvous with the daughter of a castellan, and gives her an amulet as a keepsakes. Much later, he hears of an upstart warrior known as Sohrab raised by the enemy, they fight, and are mostly evenly matched. In the end Rostam prevails and delivers a fatal blow but realises that the warrior sohrab wears his amulet, so is his son. Then gradually everyone dies. A professional would need to remember specific names and stuff, which is easily done, and my family and kids get to have a nice hour or two to kill off. I imagine Homer to be that kind of bloke, you hire him out after the harvest is brought in, get your family and friends together, he tells you stories, you put him up for a few days and give him some produce or money, everyone has a great time. The real life dude probably was the best at his job, and is therefore remembered.

[@GarGhuul]

Little Iliad … and we’re still waiting for Iliad 2: Dead by Dawn.

[@BaranKRool]

Don't forget, Iliad Reloaded.

[@erinrising2799]

2 Ill 2 iad

[@RadicalCaveman]

I thought it was called, "The Trojans Strike Back."

[@KasumiRINA]

Jokes aside we are literally missing the second part, it's the one with the horse and only thing that survived were the reviews and they said Illiad 2 Electric Boogaloo was not very good.

[@annepoitrineau5650]

I am originally a medievalist and I studied most closely an occitan poet called Guillem de Cabestanh. He was a real person (although mysterious etc). He wrote down his poems, it seems, but none of his versions have survived. Instead, we have dozens of derived versions, and they are even all in the same dialect! I had to apply the methods you describe to try and find out about the provenance etc of the different manuscripts beyond geography. One might be tempted to ask how come so many versions. We modern people tend to forget the capacity people had to remember huge texts. The formulaic verses etc help structure the recitation, and some of the versions had formulae which had been borrowed from similar occitan poets. Also, a poem which is recitated must be, recitable=optimised in terms of flow, rhythm etc. ith time, the poem finds its point of equilibrium...in a given dialect at a given time. Author or not, in mainly oral societies, the recitant will take liberties, and then somebody will write down what they have heard, and the recitant has a few books in case memory fails. And these recitants travelled and adapted to the local dialects (a lot of people in the world can change dialect: I am Swiss German and speak 3 German dialects), which results in rhythm/rime etc that do not carry from one dialect to the next: what rimes in my main dialect "Zurituutsch" might not in Alsatian, Hochtuutsch, or Wallisertuutsch. Or the poem remains popular over decades, while the language changes and the recitant will modernise the language, even changing some "objects" as they do not make sense in the new context....or keeping the items and thus giving the poem an antiquated feel. "Homer's" work was subjected to all that, and that was even longer ago than Guillem de Cabestanh 1162-1212 (modern spelling Cabestany). This is why every Muslim's duty to learn the Coran by heart, without changing one iota is a complete outlier.

[@KasumiRINA]

Quran isn't a complete outlier, as Torah preceded it and had almost no changes as we can see even oldest scrolls having same text as later ones with minimal typos or changes.

[@josephpearson2230]

Very nice lecture, thank you!

[@bodnica]

Thank you

[@gregorynixonAUTHOR]

Excellent summary, David!

[@renerpho]

Just discovered your channel today. Great work!

[@WorldofAntiquity]

Welcome!

[@brettmuir5679]

Wow thank you. Superb. You have given an excellent update to things I have learned from introductions and much older texts. My notion of 800 bc is properly dispelled. My first inklings into these matters came from an Isaac Asimov text book written in 1960. Always look forward to your new offerings. Still I am eager to learn more about the announcement that they have begun deciphering the Herculaneum carbon scrolls. Any news there you might provide? Thanks again and keep up the good work

[@KasumiRINA]

30:13 Yay! Odesa was actually named after Odysseus, what I didn't know was that he actually journeyed to Ukraine in the stories, though names got messed up later (i.e. Kherson is nowhere near temporary occupied Khersonesos, in Beauplan's map it was called Bilechowisce but later Greekified as part of imperial colonization project). Olbia is now Yuzhne/Pivdenne, port that's been bombed every other week and Tyras is the site of Akkerman fortress, Bilhorod-Dnistrovs'kyi (lit. white City on Dniester river - every Slavic country has some form of Belgrad lmao).

[@secularbeast1751]

I loves me an ancient mystery. Great investigation Prof Miano !

[@ji8044]

One of your very best videos.

[@theeternalgus9119]

Will you do a video on Marge?

[@donaldgrove2249]

That was fantastic! Thanks!

[@thischannelhasnoname5780]

Really informative thank you

[@douglasphillips5870]

There are a number of stories about the heroes of the Trojan war outside of the Iliad. For example the death of Agamemnon, rhe judgement of Paris, and the the Trojan horse. It seems like someone took a number of elements that overlapped and compiled them into a unified story.

[@KasumiRINA]

I mean it's a whole story cycle like Arthurian legends or Marvel nowadays. Why wouldn't it have multiple art pieces in different genres related to each other? Like in China they had oral tradition, historical notes, literature, folk plays etc. all touching on same characters i.e. Guan Yu. We can treat Trojan stories the same way, as a shared legendary universe. With Illiad and Odyssey being established canon works. And a few between them being Lost Media.

[@ProgPiglet]

I remember hearing from somewhere that Homer's details about the layout of the battlements, and chronology of the siege of Troy have been vindicated by archeology, and therefore it's highly likely that Homer was a contemporary if not eyewitness to said siege. Though I don't know about the veracity of this claim

[@UNUSUALUSERNAME220]

This reinforces my thinking that Schliemann, was full of it. Supposedly, following the text that led him to Troy. Meanwhile, there is still an argument about whether or not Homer was one person or an amalgam of a bunch of separate storytellers. How can the details be so precise, if it's a bunch of different people telling the story over a long period of time. Especially considering most of the details of the stories were conveyed orally. I guess it goes to show that people believe the story that they personally like the most.

[@sampagano205]

That would be mistaken, the material in question was largely irrevocably destroyed by Heinrich schlieman.

[@UNUSUALUSERNAME220]

@@sampagano205 What would be mistaken?

[@sampagano205]

@@UNUSUALUSERNAME220 that scientists have matched descriptions in the illiad to actually existing features at the time of the Trojan war. The layers representing that era were mostly destroyed in the process of excavating to where schlieman thought the battle would be. There are layers in the past before the Trojan war that sort of resemble what was described, but troy changed a lot over time and what existed earlier can't be projected forward in time too far.

[@UNUSUALUSERNAME220]

@@sampagano205 Since it has all been destroyed, that would all depend on who you ask. I know that there is no consensus concerning the "treasure" he says he found, and there are letters where he actually admits to lying about many things to many people. Again, his story seems to be one that you believe because it's the story you like, not the one where the most evidence is preserved to back the claim.

[@kencreten7308]

Absolutely fascinating. thanks.

[@hitchman84]

I really love these authorship videos. Really fascinating. Any thoughts on doing one on Sun Tzu?

[@WorldofAntiquity]

A good idea

[@KasumiRINA]

There's also unrelated, later Art of War by Sun Bin, which was considered lost. And a lot of other treatieses on war from China. What's interesting in Sun Tzu's art of war is that we have commentary on it that's longer than the book itself, one of the earliest written by Cao Cao of later Han era, right before Three Kingdoms. Then later era generals and statement added on top and you have layers upon layers of historical people attributing footnotes to the same book.

[@Kivas_Fajo]

Question: Couldn't it be that the described Helena in the Iliad is rather Hellas, so, Greece itself?

[@sekharapramod7819]

Helen's myth has correspondent myths in other IE cultures and matches the motif of the marriage of a sun/light goddess with horse twin brothers, which means the myth is much older than the Greek language or the Greek people and is most likely a reflex of an Indo-European myth.

[@doncarlodivargas5497]

​@@sekharapramod7819 - is it not so that the name of her mother, Leda, also can mean "woman" or something? Something that can indicate the story are just a generic story/fairytale about some "people" long time ago?

[@varana]

While the words may look superficially similar, they are really quite distinct. Hellas has two L, i.e. a long consonant, Helena only one (things like that don't get changed willy-nilly, i.e. we would have to prove that this change was a regular occurrence). All forms derived from Hellas (like the mythical forefather Hellēn, or the people, the Hellēnes) have a long E after the Ls (an eta), while Helena has a short E (an epsilon) after the L, again quite different sounds. Also during Homer's time, e.g. in the Iliad itself, the Greeks are _not_ called Hellenes. That comes later; in the Iliad, the Hellenes are only one Greek tribe among many, while the Greeks as a whole are Argeioi, Danaoi, or Achaioi. So the myth around Helena couldn't have meant her to be a symbol for Greece in total, as that was not a thing when these poems were written down.

[@mattmexor2882]

I have no idea if these ideas are already part of the debate, but some possibilities that aren't mentioned in the overview in this video come into my head. It seems like the poems were created around the time when writing was once again taking hold in the area. And it seems like there had been an oral tradition for performance poetry at that time. This intersection creates a unique context for the creation of the Homeric epics. For example, it is entirely possible that the works were meant to represent the genre of oral poetry even if they themselves were never meant to be performed. Perhaps the Homeric poems were written poems composed in the style of oral poems, much like the Aeneid, I am told, was written in the style of the Homeric poems. It's alternatively possible that the Homeric epics were both written down and meant to be performed, however they were created in such a way to rely on the performance practices of the time: details lost to us but which would have been well understood at the time of the writing. I don't know the fragmentary nature of the archeological evidence of written poetry at the time the Homeric epics were thought to have arisen, but through the idea of writing for performance practice the existence of various versions could possibly be explained. There is a rough analogy of the intersection of performance and composition in Renaissance and Baroque music. Although in their case, music had been written down for quite some time, still there was an increasing degree to which parts were written out that previously had been interpreted entirely through performance practice. Writing out more of the music allowed more complex music to be made and also allowed the composer more control on the final performance. There was, over time, a decreasing reliance on improvisation and an increasing preference for taking advantage of the greater complexity of music that could be created with full composition. During this period, fully composed pieces both relied on the expertise of performance practice of the period to interpret the music and also had elements of improvisation apparent in their compositional styles even when a piece was never meant to be improvised, or improvised on, during its performance. If the Homeric epics had been written during a time when such a thing was going on, one might expect to end up with a work that seems like it may have arisen over time from an oral tradition.

[@franklemmond740]

Has there been anymore archaeology done at ithici (ithica)..? I heard that the island that wr thought was ithica was actually not.. I hope u do an episode on this topic.. Love the channel.. All killer, no filler..lol

[@ladyflimflam]

Robin Lane Fox has written an excellent book on this recently called Homer and His Illiad

[@arkemiffo]

Ok, while talking about the oral poets at about 11-12 minutes, I can't stop imagining a poet standing on the stage in an amphitheatre right now, basically shouting his poems to a full crowd, while someone tries to navigate himself through the audience with lots of "Sorry, excuse me" etc. to his friend because he had to take a piss just before everyone was let into the amphitheatre, asking his friend "What did I miss", and everyone around him shushing him.

[@DneilB007]

My first thought on the video: brown denim-looking sports coat, blue Oxford collar shirt; if you’re also wearing tan khaki pants then you are legitimately dressed like an archaeologist.

[@anasevi9456]

Thank you for another lovely muse on ancient history. Homeric poetry is a universe unto itself, but learning there are modern day likely oral descendants in a way in the balkans was fun to learn.

[@peters616]

Great video - thank you. Wouldn't the narrowing of the origin dates for both poems down to little more than a 100 years and the ancient attribution to one author (even if we don't have concrete evidence of that attribution until 100 years later) point to a single author for both? Is it so certain that the parts of the Odyssey that indicate a more western Greek author weren't later additions?

[@guidosalescalvano9862]

Freestyle rap is pretty solid evidence for the potential of oral traditions. Look at Marlon craft’s improvisation on sway. There are tonnes of similar examples. Also, every human is capable of near perfect memory. To prove you have it too please finish the following lines: “Happy birthday to you…🎶”

[@bipolarminddroppings]

I've always thought that Homer wasn't a single person but rather the name given to the author of these stories that had been around for a long time, a bit like Aesop. I'm also fond of the idea that homer is a title, rather than a name, and it's like our word bard. I've seen scholars that say the text we have for Homer's works are consistent with one person having authored it, i.e the writing style and use of words is consistent, but we dont have the stories in their original oral form and the way ancient books were copied means that we're probably looking at a version copied down by a single scribe who could have easily "polished" the writing to make it consistent.

[@Taharqo.saved.the.Hebrew]

How can you prove a oral story as accurate or original??

[@Savvas1640]

23:25 or may implies a single group of curators who gathered and preserved Homer's poems in written text, I think. A major candidate in my guess could be the pharaoh Ptolemy I Soter, distant grandfather of Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII). He was one of the Great Alexander's generals, then he became Egypt’s governor (reign 305- 282 BC), and, he was the founder of the famous Library of Alexandria with a very active role in the constitution of it.

[@stevenbollinger9776]

Nicely done. The whole subject of the authorship of ancient texts fascinates me. I hope you make more videos like this one. Some topics with possible broad appeal: the Pauline epistles written by someone other than Paul, and the Platonic dialogues written by someone other than Plato. And a real doozie: the Augustan Histories, or Historia Augusta, allegedly a collection of biographies, by several different authors, of Roman Emperors from Hadrian to Numerianus. Down to the 19th century, the Augustan Histories were treated by historians as one of the major sources of 2nd- and 3rd-century Roman history, and were angrily denounced for their frustratingly poor quality by Gibbon, Burckhardt and many other modern historians. Now, scholars generally agree that they are actually the work of one author. Some argue that they were not originally written as history at all, but as something in some other genre altogether -- perhaps as a satire of bad historical writing! Within one's bosom the outrage of the historian contends with the utter delight of the satirist. On the "question" of the Augustan Histories see for example Ronald Syme's book Ammianus and the Historia Augusta.

[@PeterS-r4o]

Arguments over Shakespeare and his work show how difficult it can be to pin things down even for a time that is comparatively very recent and that we have much greater knowledge of. They also show how competition to make some new 'discovery' or develop a new theory can distort people's thinking - eg the whole 'Shakespeare wasn't written by Shakespeare' movement. So good luck to anyone who wishes to get a definitive answer to the 'question' of Homer.

[@patricktilton5377]

It's more on-the-spot to say "Shake-speare wasn't written by Shakspere" as the name introduced on the dedication of VENUS AND ADONIS addressed to Henry Wriothesley differs from the name of the man from Stratford. I suspect that Shakspere became affiliated with the public theatre as a shareholder (etc.) because the Earl of Oxford saw the advantage in having a man around whose name was awfully similar to his own pseudonym, and so made it worth Will's while.

[@sampagano205]

Except arguments over Shakespeare are completely marginal.

[@yohei72]

@@patricktilton5377Sheer nonsense. It was common to vary the spelling of even one’s own name back then. Shakespeare himself used both spellings on various documents. The more fundamental problem with your story is that there isn’t a smidgen of evidence someone else wrote those plays, and no reason to doubt that Shakespeare himself did.

[@barbarossarotbart]

I believe that Iliad and Odyssey were both part of the cylce of poems about the end of the Mycenaean Age. (The end because we do not know anything about Greek myths/legends with take place after the Trojan War and do not lead with its fallout.) It seems to me that at some time several poets decided to collect all those stories and turn them into a cycle of poems. Sadly most of them seem to be lost.

[@ulrichkamp6291]

Fantastic!

[@walterulasinksi7031]

That people remember oral poems still resonates today. We call this the various genres of music. Songs learned as a child can be remembered as an old person. So a lyric that may be a hundred years old can still be appreciated in a modern setting. As things are, due to our ability to have original recordings, there are many young people that are discovering songs that are 50-100: years old.

[@lf7877]

True. A good example would be 'Scarborough Fair', which was made famous (again) by Simon & Garfunkel

[@walterulasinksi7031]

@@lf7877 Yes or even” Greensleeves” written by Henry VIII. Allegedly to Anne Boleyn. For the ancient past, however we do not have any type of music notation, so the poems attributed to Homer may be similar to Rap. Music Notation only was invented in the 900’s CE.

[@makinapacal]

Absolutely fascinating!! I fully agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey had at least, each one, a single main author and are not a hodge podge of separate poems strung together. It is my understanding linguistic analysis makes that unlikely. Although absolutely none of that means that the poet(s) didn't use and rely on a very well developed tradition of epic poetry for stories and lots and lots of stock phrases. As for the question about whether or not one poet or two wrote the Iliad and Odyssey, I agree that two separate authors is most likely. (Thanks for the info., that there appears to have been an ancient tradition of someone not, initially, named Homer creating the Odyssey. Didn't know that!!) I am although partial to the notion, this is pure speculation, that "Homer" composed the Iliad when "Homer" was young and composed the Odyssey when he was an old man; thus accounting, perhaps, for the differences between the texts. One of my favorite pieces of Classical scholarship is M. I. Finley's The World of Odysseus which sought to at least partially reconstruct the social world of the Iliad and Odyssey. Finley concluded that socially those two poems reflected the social world the late dark ages and early archaic period, not Mycenaean Greece. Of course Finley recognized that there were Mycenaean survivals in the texts, like the predominance of bronze, the boars tusk helmets etc., but the society depicted was quite different. Having read translations of Mycenaean linear b tablets I see a vast social gap between the very bureaucratic social world of the Mycenaean culture, with its many layers of offices, statuses etc., and the far more simple, far more local social world has depicted in the poems. (The almost total lack of writing in the poems, aside from one ambiguous reference is certainly quite different from the mania for record keeping in the Mycenaean world.) And as a side insert it appears that the Mycenaeans assigned far more importance than than archaic or classical Greeks to chthonic gods. In fact it appears Poseidon, has lord of the underworld, earthquakes etc., not Zeus was the chief god. (Or maybe it was a goddess.) Such differences make it highly unlikely that the social world depicted in the poems is that of Mycenaean Greece. Whether or not Finley's placement of the social world is correct is another matter. If those who place the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey sometime in the mid to late 7th century are correct it makes it even less likely that either the Iliad or the Odyssey preserves much accurate history of the so-called Trojan war. A couple of years ago I listened to a recording of someone reciting the Iliad in the original Homeric Greek. I do not understand Greek at all but it is sounded astoundingly good!!! Whoever actually wrote it was a genius!!!

[@kariannecrysler640]

When were theaters established? Oral or written, they were performed, so an understanding of the theater would add to the conversation.

[@varana]

While there have been some attempts to place the Greek theatre earlier, it really only appears in our sources (written or archaeological) in the 6th century, so long after the Iliad was written down.

[@kariannecrysler640]

@@varana thank you

[@nathanimes4041]

11:32 the Iliad has 193,000, reading aloud at 150 wpm that's 21 HOURS. Maybe the ancient greek was more terse, but it still would have been way too long to hear in one sitting.

[@Deipnosophist_the_Gastronomer]

People had longer attention spans back then. I blame TikTok!

[@yohei72]

@Carlton-BYeah, it’s easy to imagine breaking off at some dramatic point and saying “Come back tomorrow night for the next part,” like Saturday matinee serials. I can also imagine that in some contexts, the performer would recite just an excerpt.

[@TomHand3]

Thanks for another informative video! Was Aesop a real person?

[@TT3TT3]

Thanks!🎉

[@mg4361]

When I read the Iliad, I immediately thought of the guslar tradition. They recite poems of heroes of old that end up shared, adapted and reworked from one area to the other until you have what are beasically heroic and tragic cycles being told throughout the western Balkans. Also, some personalities who were morally ambiguous at best, played for both sides in conflicts and in any case were not particularly important end up as great heroes for one side (Marko Kraljević), which to me is a warning against reading too much into the historicity of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

[@kaloarepo288]

Most of the Homeric stories were originally oral traditions and stories and some may have gone way back into the proto Indo European past as there are many echoes of them -especially in Indian texts like the story of Odysseus and the suitors.

[@jerrymuzsik3782]

after watching this my sense is that these works are an assemblage of oral traditions leading to a single (or a single and an apprentice) who had the dual skill of an oral and written historian. this person (or two persons or probably best to think of a small organization of varying skills) decided to create and write this story. this story having a direct lineage from past masters leading to this person that had creative reigns and out came the skeleton of the illiad and odyssey. this skeleton was reworked over centuries, gradually becoming what it is today

[@thegrayshaws]

The second thing I'm interested in is imagining how different things might be if we had the rest of the Epic Cycle and not just the Illiad and the Odyssey.

[@gregorynixonAUTHOR]

To many modern nationalistic Greeks, Homer is like a saint. To question his poems as "facts" or even more his very existence is treated like anti-Hellenic sacrilege.

[@craigbhill]

@gregorynixon2945: Thanks to encrusted scholarship and its books about books about books.

[@gregorynixonAUTHOR]

@@craigbhill Huh? I love books about books about books. Nearly as much as historical facts.

[@scottowens1535]

Learning now what I thought I knew from school. Since I'm older it's not much of a surprise that understanding is evolving. I'm of the opinion it will evolve much further and faster than ever before. So many young mind's overthinking and speculating will likely lead to finds and further understanding.. Now my mortal opinion is expressed I'll get to the Learning part good Sir.

[@BiPaganMan]

Find the idea that length would limit the oral tradition weak, after all we know Beowulf came from an oral tradition. And it is possible the written down Odyssey was a combination of several poems.

[@AlwaysGrowAndLearn]

Thanks I appreciate your balanced quackery-free videos

[@gouthamk5990]

The similar book in India the epic Mahabharata which is also said to have inspired from homers Iliad. It is said to have written by “Vyasa”… and the meaning of Vyasa is the compiler.

[@rubenducheny2788]

Excellent!

[@jerrycornelius5986]

In the Odyssey, the author introduces herself as Nausica a young lady of Shieria who raises Odysseus naked from the ground with the sound of her harp and song and dresses him and brings him to her home via her mother. If you read the Odyssey and hear the voice of a young lady you will know for certain it is true.

[@Brandyalla]

This doesn't happen only in ancient history; people have the same questions about Shakespeare, and he lived only 400 years ago

[@jlworrad]

The evidence for Shakespeare is as solid as almost any of his contemporaries and for a man of his position in his time. We can be pretty sure he lived and he wrote. Homer on the other hand is completely misty.

[@sampagano205]

This isnt really a useful comparison, because there really isn't anything to the Shakespeare authorship question, whereas the homer situation is actually up for debate.

[@baddna9447]

Very interesting, thanks. I wish more people would consider your arguments on the difficulty of transitioning from an oral to a written tradition. The whole foundation of the ancient aliens hypothesis is shattered when oral tradition cannot be taken at face value.

[@courtneyriley185]

😮 my mouth dropped.....thank all the Rome and Greek gods for you , David! 😂 You teach this 34 year old so much that I was misled about for years!!!!

[@Taharqo.saved.the.Hebrew]

What about the Egyptian God's which inspired the Greek God's who inspired the Roman God's

[@courtneyriley185]

@@Taharqo.saved.the.Hebrew these "gods" all over lapped. You're simply wrong.

[@RustingSol]

Hi Dr. Miano...I would like to hear more about your opinion on the excavations at Keeladi and Adichanalur in India. Some archeologists seem to be of the opinion that Keeladi script is similar to IVC.

[@32582657]

Solzhenitsyn was able compose and memorize poems of many thousands of lines while in the Gulag, when he did not have an opportunity to write things down. He stated that the capabilities of memory seemed to expand in prison. So it is plausible that very long epic poems could have been memorized and passed on without being written.

[@heatherrocchi6232]

"repetition and set phrases" and all I can think of is "AND IT CAME TO PASS..."

[@marshallmkerr]

A d--ned fine lecture, thank you!

[@Les537]

Thanks, Doc.

[@jrizzuti]

Homer is a TV cartoon character.

[@sebolddaniel]

Sounds like no one can agree on anything about the Iliad and Odyssey. Fascinating lecture

[@TheGabrielbowater]

The microphone buzz on this is pretty rough. You could run it through Audacity's noise reduction filter or something

[@welcometonebalia]

Thank you.

[@JMM33RanMA]

Thanks Prof. Miano, for your fascinating work. I've read similar analyses of authorship [development] of the Torah and associated texts, the letters of Paul [a.k.a. Saul of Tarsus], the various iterations of the biblical and non canonical associated works, and, of course, the authorship of Shakespeare's works. What I find astounding is how so many of the most important literary works of our civilization are so lacking in certainty! This seems to also be true of the authorship of borrowed non-Western works like the Art of War perhaps authored, if not written in its entirety, by Sun Tzu. This is amazing, fascinating and frustrating, but it certainly provides food for thought. Thanks again for all of your invariably interesting and insightful work.

[@oker59]

I didn't think I'd ever get into the question of whether Homer was a real person. Then again, I didn't think I'd read Homer's main books - the Iliad and Odyssey(there's all kinds of stuff attributed to Homer), or Greek Mythology at all! I remember watching this "In Search of" episode about Homer and the city of Troy back in the 1980s. I liked it; today, I consider it and maybe a few more episodes about the only good episodes in the series. Even though about the only interesting thing to say about Troy is Heinrich Schliemann. The episode about Troy and Jericho are kind of complementary. Both Troy and Jericho are about the Bronze age collapse(when viewed from a Modern Archaeology lens). But anyways - I didn't read Homer in high school or college. I just decided one fine day to read the Iliad because I wanted to read about the Trojan horse. I'm temped to say that I was inspired after re-watching the "In Search of" episode about Troy. I was probably re-watching it just because I remembered enjoying it in my 80s youth. I just decided to read Homer's books, only to be disappointed that there was no Trojan horse in the Iliad! That's mentioned briefly in the Odyssey . . . I went into Homer without a teacher telling me how great it is. What blew my mind was all the nature poetry. It wasn't just the Nature Poetry, but the density of it. The Iliad is saturated with amazing Nature Poetry that explains all kinds of observations of the natural world to human behavior to the swaying of spears in a phalanx. I wasn't into Homer to know whether he existed or not. And, I grew up hearing Homer is amazing; but, I just hadn't had a reason to read it. But, when I got to the Odyssey, I was struck by the lack of Nature Poetry. Or how comparatively few of these Nature Poetries are in the Odyssey. Without googling "the Homer problem" or "was Homer a real person?" In a brief moment, I kind questioned whether Homer was a real person. Who could do all that Nature Poetry in the Iliad? And, why is the Iliad and Odyssey a good deal different feel?

[@oker59]

I can't help mentioning some personal stuff about how I can't believe how far I've gotten into Homer and Greek Mythology. Then again, I can't believe I've read the Bible. I remember trying to explain some stuff to some online atheist I had never met till then something about the Bible. He said "I don't need to read the Bible to know there's no God." I had to point out to him that "yea, I said the same thing when I was very young." I got into Biblical Archaeology around 2001 when I found Israel Finkelstein's "The Bible Unearthed." For the first time, I saw that someone can make sense of the Biblical mess. And, I found that studying Old Testament Archaeology, for one, reveals a bit of a mystery - the Bronze Age Collapse. The Old Testament doesn't mention the Bronze Age collapse; but, when you study the Biblical Archaeology, that becomes the central mystery. Well, I soon found the Jesus Christ as a Sungod comparative mythology idea. And, I found myself getting into Mythology of all kinds. I think I can faintly remember thinking I would never get into Homer and Greek mythology. I was "just" getting into the Mythology of the Old Testament and New Testament through books like Tim Callahan's "Secret Origins of the Bible" and other such books. I don't remember when I first heard of Sir James Frazer's "The Golden Bough." I had heard it was old and antiiquated and . . .. wrong. But, I eventually got through it and found it amazing! I then found Robert Graves "The Greek Myths."

[@oker59]

I found Robert Graves "The Greek Myths" in my local library. Actually, I had seen it in the mythology sections of my college library; but, thought that could only be an encyclopedia. Who wants to read an encyclopedia of Greek myths? Especially a 1000 pages! But, I found it again at my local library with a curious cartoon cover - brightly colored. i decided to read the intro; and, I was hooked. The importance of a good intro! I soon bought a copy through amazon. Good thing, because the conservative librarians soon got rid of it! I found that Greek Mythology proves Sir James Frazer's "The Golden Bough" in spades. Almost every section, for a thousand pages proves "The Golden Bough" over . . . and over . . . and over again. But, I never thought I'd get into the question of Homer's existence. In my experience on Biblical scholarship, I was sure people write books and scholarly article on it. That just sounds like getting into way to much. But I suppose that is a kind of legit question. Did Jesus Christ exist? How about Homer?

[@oker59]

Well, here I am getting into the question of whether Homer existed by watching your video. This is the reason why you should do videos like this. To get people into it!

[@raywhitehead730]

Boars Tusk helmet: book ten of Homers Iliad. That discription, places Homer in the Tenth century, BC. My best guess. Homer, in Greek and Roman times, was often depicted as a bald, blind fat man, riding a turtle.

[@dustyhughes1049]

there’s a lot of people in world have the same first name and it becomes very easy to get confusion

[@cyan1616]

I can't wait for more charred Vesuvian scrolls to be read. So much knowledge just waiting for us. Maybe some answers to the Homer question is in there. I've been waiting decades for them to be read, I hope I live long enough to find out what's in them... Atlantis anyone? (Hint: Cyclades Plateau)

[@TGBurgerGaming]

Some olive farmer is gonna find a stone with the words "The society of No Homers." and that will change everything.

[@onbedoeldekut1515]

Of course complete works can be memorised easily. Think of how you could probably sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody word for word, or any number of the epic songs you've grown to love, which are as much a part of your personal cultural heritage as the works of Homer and his contemporaries were to the people and bards of their and following times.

[@UNUSUALUSERNAME220]

But those details can be remembered because you hear those things over and over. I know plenty of people who still get the words wrong, or don't even know them after hearing the same tune a hundred times. Radio, Mtv, records and tapes meant that you had access to that song as often as you wanted. Some of those albums came with the lyrics written out on the sleeve, so there was no question of what they lyric was. Hearing a song or poem a couple of times would not be enough exposure to it for the average person to remember it verbatim, at least I couldn't.

[@pcatful]

Are there other ancient stories, even from other cultures about the same subjects? I think that would have bearing. Maybe further computer analysis of the different variations can help solve the issue, like historical genetics has done for lineages (and migrations etc.) of people.

[@jrojala]

Love an ancient mystery!

[@petrapetrakoliou8979]

Language changes over time and Homer's poems are full of archaisms, because poetry preservs ancient forms of speech. The best option for dating Homer's poems is linguistics. This video was not bad.

[@erikvanderheeg5729]

There are only two alternatives: Either the Illiad and Odyssey were written by Homer or they were written by a completely different person with the same name!

[@resonant_theories]

you are correct they practiced oral tradition as profession, not hobby. But that was also an indication of how deep stories in time they were telling. Think of it like this, they did not have television or games or anything else back then.

[@resonant_theories]

Lyrics were older than Rapsodes and they all taught from elder ones.. so who were the elder ones in the case of Lyrics? Some information had to be learned, surely for poetry's sake something would have been inflated and added. But they must have had to search for information from older sources.