Talk:Homer

Historicity of the Iliad

"Recently scholars have also debated the historicity of Brad Pitt's manboobs in the cinematic adaptation of the Iliad, 'Troy', with some suggesting that the real historical Achilles' man-paps must have been less toned and considerably flabbier. This theory is outlined by Prof. Brian Chest of Queen's College Cambridge in his seminal article 'Iliadic Nipples: where 'Troy' went wrong'; however his theory is rather lacking support."

This should obviously be removed, shouldn't it? Even if there is a paper of this name, which I highly doubt, it's obviously not very relevant to the material. DeadCow 17:03, 8 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's vandalism. I've removed it twice. The contributors who added it User:131.111.8.99 and User:131.111.8.101 are probably the same person; we'll see if it creeps back in... Akhilleus 18:38, 8 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the Info. I should have removed it right away, but I haven't been active on wikipedia for too long. DeadCow 23:20, 8 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Polytonic Greek

For the most part, I don't see the value in putting all the polytonic Greek in this article. It increases visual clutter, especially when the Greek words are followed by a transliteration into Latin characters, and the Greek words are probably helpful only to those readers who already know some classical Greek. Anyone who's looking specifically for the Greek titles of the epics will probably turn to more specialized references. I'd keep the Greek version of Homer's name, but do we really need to spell out the polytonic Greek titles of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the War of Frogs and Mice (Batrachomyomachia)? Better to just give the transliterations, I say. --Chris Lovell 00:02, 22 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree for the most part, except that I do think it's worth giving the names of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey in Greek. Petrouchka 04:12, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hipparchus and the Panathenaia

Quoth the article:

The poems appear to go back to at least the eighth century B.C.E., and were first written down at
the command of the Athenian ruler Pisistratos, who feared that they were being forgotten. He made a law that any bard or singer who came to Athens must recite as much as he knew of Homer for the Athenian scribes, who recorded each version and collated them into what we now know as the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer is also rumored to have written a third, comic, epic,
but if it ever existed, no fragments of it have been found.

I'm suspicious of these statements. Do you have any sources to cite? There is nothing wrong with putting speculative theories and even rumors in here, but we should cite sources in that case to maintain good scholarship. -- hajhouse

No, I don't have sources to cite: this is what I learned when I studied classical Greek, 20-odd years ago. Only the last sentence counts as rumor, I think. I'll see if I can find something, but it may take a while before I get to this. --Vicki Rosenzweig

Apparently the tradition that Pisistratus commissioned the writing down of the Homeric epics has been deleted from the article, but has crept back in with attribution to Pisistratus's son Hipparchus instead, which seems to me even more questionable. Since it's back in, anyway, I was thinking of changing the attribution back to Pisistratus, since as far as I know, the entire story is only supported by an ancient tradition, and the tradition specifies Pisistratus, not Hipparchus. --Arkuat 06:26, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)

IMO mentioning tradition is fine, so long as it is clearly identified as a tradition. These are the sorts of things you learn when you study Homer. — B.Bryant 09:10, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Speaking as a teacher of Greek literature, the Peistratos/Hipparchos theories are conjectural and controversial. Citing them is far from NPOV. Some sources (e.g. anything written by Gregory Nagy) will claim the Peisistratean recension as fact; most will regard it as hypothetical at best. --Petrouchka 20:41, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A short comic epic attributed to Homer in antiquity, Batrachomyomachia, still survives, but modern scholars think it is a later work in the Homeric style. — B.Bryant 09:10, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Um...Nagy argues against a Pisistratean standardized text more stridently than anyone... Bacchiad

Most of what has been said here about the Pisitratean tradition sounds sensible to me, but given the long history of the tradition, and the fact that many "well-informed" people who come to this article for the first time may be familiar with that tradition, it ought at least to be mentioned and briefly debunked. In the current version of the article, a search for the syllable "strat" turns up nothing. --arkuat (talk) 09:18, 27 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Odysseus

According to history, a Roman Emperor visited the Oracle at Delphi and asked "who was Homer?" The Oracle told him that Homer was the Great-Great-Grandson of Odysseus.

Anon contribution moved here for discussion. According to what history? Which Roman Emperor? Source and date of the story? Sounds good, but needs backup before inclusion in the article. Anyone? WBardwin 21:17, 22 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This site says it was Hadrian, and the response was that Homer was Odysseus's grandson. --JW1805 03:28, 23 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Homer Simpson

Anon contribution removed here for discussion. WBardwin 00:54, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The ideal of Homer was the inspiration for the Simpsons character of the same name. Although the animated character has evolved over the years to the character we know today, some earlier versions were a good likeness of the traditional image of Homer, in fact an episode was written (but never animated or released) in which Homer the animated character was blind. Many are skeptical of this, mostly because of the TV character's lazy nature, but if considered in a deeper sense the elements of a storyteller make sense in keeping with the show's anti-moral additude. (posted by 152.163.100.69 (talk · contribs))

Sounds like utter nonsense to me. --JW1805 ^(Talk) 02:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think you mean "Sounds like a troll to me." Chris Lovell 05:27, 21 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Someone adopt this article!

The Homer article needs to be about 6x longer. Calling all Lit. people... JDG 01:03, 24 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

it is indeed a disgrace. I have dumped the (hopelessly outdated and OCR-garbled) {{1911}} version at Homer/1911, so we can at least work from that. It weighs 104k! From the state of the present article, we should be glad to reach at least the 1911 standard; we may then catch up on the last century once we get there... dab (ᛏ) 22:28, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

not really a good idea, since ideas about Homer have changed so much over the last century that a 1911 article would be considered misinformation by a healthy majority of current classicists. If you think we need to start over, just start over--using an old encyclopedia article as the core ensures that the new article will be guided by the concerns, mistakes, etc. of 1911. Akhilleus 03:42, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My idea isn't to replace the present article. The point is that the present article so far doesn't even have most of what was scholars believed in 1911, let alone in 2005. My suggestion is that you go through the 1911 article and pick cherries with informed judgement. And frankly, passages like

The crucial words are "oral" and "traditional." Parry started with "traditional." The repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and they were useful to the poet in composition. He called these chunks of repetitive language "formulas."

would be more at home on simple:, so I don't think the present article has much to lose. And another thing, it is very easy to underestimate 19th century scholarship. Sure, they didn't know Mycenaean, and Troy was hardly excavated, but that's it; they had all the testimonies about Homer we have today. And these guys were giants; there are no philologists like the 19th and early 20th century elite now, we really just depend on their results. dab (ᛏ) 09:43, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

We don't "just depend on their results." There's been a lot of progress made since 1911 in understanding Homer; in particular, Lord and Parry's research on oral poetry has transformed the study of Greek epic so much that the major concerns of late 19th/early 20th century Homeric scholarship have either dropped off the radar or been substantially reframed. Few Homeric scholars now try to sort out which parts of the poem were interpolated by later authors into Homer's "original text"; criticism of the poems' "inconsistencies" have been replaced by efforts to understand the aesthetics of oral poetry. I don't underestimate the great achievements of earlier generations of scholars, but at the same time let's recognize that we have, in fact, built on those accomplishments, and we've replaced old controversies with new questions.

So, despite the poor quality of the current article, *something* about oral poetry needs to be at the beginning of the article, as it's impossible to understand what's going on in modern Homeric scholarship without knowing about oral poetry.

As for what's been added so far from the 1911 Britannica, I don't think it's very helpful in its current form--it's too long, and it includes a lot of information that is only relevant to people doing research on ancient biographical traditions of Homer (which, as the Britannica text itself says, don't give us good historical evidence). What's more, it's not very clearly written--for instance, it's hard to understand what the argument of those six numbered paragraphs is. I think a section on ancient testimonia is a good idea, but it should be shorter and clearer. I also think it should come after a clear statement of modern scholars' takes on the Homeric question, so I've moved the "Ancient Accounts of Homer" down in the article. Akhilleus 03:34, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

clearer, yes (so fix it); shorter, no: this article was ridiculously short, and we should be aiming at som 50k, if not 100k as in Britannica. The text I added was written in 1905, but it was written by expert scholars. If it stands out from the rest of the article, this is because it's quality is several orders of magnitude above the rather childish writeup we had so far. It should be our aim to elevate the entire article to a similar standard, rather than pulling the 1905 piece down. Expanding the 1905 piece with 20th c. scholarship is a different matter entirely. I agree with your points about oral poetry and the "interpolations", this is certainly on our todo list here. You have to understand that I'm not proposing dumping the 1911 article here and be done. My proposal is to take excerpts of the 1911 article, and then begin working on them. Since the article has been languishing in stubby shape for ages, that at least seems a way to proceed. Maybe you will be so annoyed with the outdated scholarship that you'll sit down and contribute a comprehensive overview of recent research? That would be brilliant. (see m:Darwikiansm). dab (ᛏ) 10:05, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I understand that you want to use the 1911/1905 material as the starting point for a better article; I just don't think it's a very good starting point. To concentrate just on the "Ancient Accounts of Homer" section, I don't think it's very helpful for this article. What, after all, is the purpose of this article? It's not for classical philologists, since there are plenty of specialized sources available for them to turn to; it's for the general reader (perhaps I should say general web surfer). For this person, this section on ancient biographical accounts is not very helpful--it mentions a bewildering array of ancient place-names and texts for someone who isn't familiar with ancient Greece (I find it a bit confusing, and I actually study this stuff).

What's more, it has been agreed for a long time that the ancient biographical sources don't give us useful information about "Homer"--they rather tell us what later Greeks thought about Homer. So a comprehensive overview of the biographical tradition is out of place in this article, just as a comprehensive survey of 17th century biographies of Shakespeare would be out of place in a Shakespeare article. What I'd rather see is a short paragraph in the main Homer article about the unreliability of the ancient biographies with a link to a separate page like Homer (ancient biographies) vel sim.

Anyway, I don't see the point of making the article even 50k long. Right now, it's only 34k, and there's too much yawn-inducing stuff about 19th century German dissertations in it already. This is an encyclopedia article; it should be short and succinct. Akhilleus 07:28, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I see your point. I strongly believe that WP should aim at being at least as detailed as Britannica, if possible, much more detailed; however, we can always branch stuff out to sub-articles, which is what I am proposing below; so yes, this article can be a very readable 20k piece, with lots of detailed sub-articles. dab (ᛏ) 01:17, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Having recently noted a number of problems with the article as it stand, I have now posted on my user page a suggested structure for a revised version of the article. Comments please! My own main comment at the moment is that I think a detailed account of Homeric scholarship should be put in a separate article, because it's a very weighty subject. Cheers, --Petrouchka 02:24, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Batrachomyomachia

I don't know much Greek but I'm pretty sure the article currently spells "Batrachomachia" in the Greek text before the link to batrachomyomachia. Bueller? Anyone? Matt Gies 22:48, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

yes, the mice were missing; I've added them back in. dab (ᛏ) 09:56, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a plan. The Table of Contents ~~below~~ seems like a good set of subtopics, although some of them are main articles in their own right (the Iliad and Odyssey). "Historicity" is partially covered by the article "Troy," although I think the Odyssey ought to be considered in this topic as well. Akhilleus 05:47, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

yes, Odyssey and Iliad can be sections here (as in the Britannica article), and still be full-fledged articles of their own. We began to discuss the historicity stuff on Troy, but there should maybe be a Historicity of the Iliad article soon. I don't know what we can say about the "historicity of the Odyssey". This will surely be minor in comparison to the Iliad, and should at first maybe be kept as a section at Historicity of the Iliad. dab (ᛏ) 10:43, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

English Translations

(The following would apply to any work not originally written in English.) As many casual readers will only read Homer once, is there a place in this article to compare the effectiveness (affectedness?) of the various English translations? I would hope that after 400 years Chapman's Homer is public domain, but have there been better free or non-free translations since then? Are there translations that should be avoided?

Link to Merry

I'm unsure from context whether the link to Merry was intended to point to a publisher or an author, but in either case, it is innacurate, as the Merry page is currently a redirection to Meriadoc Brandybuck. I will be modifying it to be a disambig - does anyone know what the link on this page was supposed to be to? Lokicarbis 22:41, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

ah, it appears somebody blindly wikified all authors' names, without bothering to google their full names. That was not very smart, and I would revert it if I could be bothered. dab (ᛏ) 23:25, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

List of problems with this article

I have looked this article over this morning and feel there are numerous problems with it. I outline these below for discussion and/or emendation. Most of the problems stem from the fact that most of it is about a century out of date. It's a long list of suggestions/errors -- but most of the bulk comes from the suggested bibliography. (Finding the ISBNs was the most time-consuming bit of this, so I hope that will be adopted!) --Petrouchka 01:47, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Having looked further up the discussion I now see that the 1911 Britannica version has been put here only recently. Give me some time (I've got a lot on my plate right now) and I'll see if I can whip up something that'll address some of my suggestions below, even if only in a piecemeal fashion. --Petrouchka 01:10, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As noted above in the section "Someone adopt this article", I've now posted on my user page a fairly detailed outline for a suggested restructuring of the article. Comments please -- I'll wait at least a week before proceeding. My main comment is that I think a detailed account of Homeric scholarship should have its own article, given that it's a sub-discipline on the same scale as, say, Shakespearean studies. --Petrouchka 02:30, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just a quick comment here, hopefully I'll be able to be more detailed later. But it seems to me that your outline is superior to what's on the page now. The only caveat is that if you follow your outline in detail, the article may end up with too much detail about fairly arcane scholarly debates--e.g., does Wikipedia really need info on theories of the development of dactylic hexameter? (And if it does, should that be on the Homer page, or the Dactylic Hexameter page?) Like I say in another comment on this page, I think the article should be short and succinct. But your outline will vastly improve the page. Hopefully I will be able to make some contributions, but other scholarly duties are taking up my time...Akhilleus 08:37, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've now written most of a new article on Homeric scholarship. This should cut down the size of the Homer article once I've revised it, checked dates, and added bibliographical references, which should be tomorrow or early next week. Thanks for the comment, initial thoughts don't always turn out right ... Petrouchka 22:58, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK I've been delayed by having to put together new course schedules; so I guess I can't guarantee a watchful eye on this article all the time. But I'll still have a go at composing something to work from. The Homeric scholarship article should be up in the next 24 hours or so. Apologies for the delay. Petrouchka 04:11, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Homeric scholarship article is up now; it reused the relevant material from this article. I've therefore greatly abbreviated the relevant section in this article. I've also excised stuff in the discussion page (below) which has now been taken care of. Petrouchka 03:32, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Opening section

Only the Iliad, Odyssey, and Margites were consistently ascribed to Homer in antiquity. In other cases other authors were *more usually* cited; often a work has no other name associated with it but ancient writers will still refer to "the author of the Thebaid" rather than to "Homer", indicating their own lack of knowledge. I suggest that "spurious" works be kept separate.
"Tradition held that Homer was blind" on the basis of a passage in one of the Homeric hymns, known since antiquity not to be contemporary with the Homeric epics.
More than just Ionian cities laid claim to Homer
Nowadays the question isn't about whether "the same poet" is responsible for the two epics, though some few do persist with questions like that. In the Anglo-Saxon world the poems are most frequently seen as traditional, which makes the question of authorship kind of silly (it's kind of like asking who "wrote" a myth). These days the question is more about identifying the ways in which different strands of tradition play off against one another -- this is the case in both the Anglo-Saxon "oralist" school and the Germanic "neoanalyst" school.

2. Ancient accounts of Homer

Basically sound, at a first glance, but enormously too long considering the almost complete lack of interest in the topic these days.

5. Homeric style

Matthew Arnold's view has been influential -- among translators -- but stating it as fact is hardly NPOV.
4th paragraph is speculative, and should be treated in a separate section on "Homer and oral tradition" or similar. It is not verifiable, but should be preserved -- it is a corollary of much modern theorising about Homeric tradition(s).

6. Historicity of the Iliad

The tradition of exploring textual inconsistencies in the poem is relevant to the Homeric Question, not to the historicity of the Iliad.
Should outline the main questions involved in discussing the historicity of the Iliad:

was there a city of Troy?
was the city of Troy sacked?
was Troy sacked by Greeks?
was Troy sacked by a pan-Hellenic army under Mycenaean leadership?
were there historical individuals named Agamemnon, Achilleus, Odysseus, Aias, Nestor, Priamos, Hektor, Aineias?
were these historical individuals at Troy?
did they sack Troy?

Omissions

Section on Homeric scholarship (e.g. a new section 3.4) should have sections on the major trends in present-day scholarship, viz. oral tradition, Neoanalysis, and perhaps narratological schools of thought -- appropriately NPOV of course.

Editions (texts in Homeric Greek)

For many Wikipedia users, it's not going to be immediately clear that "editions" means "text in the original language." From being a TA in mythology and civ classes I sometimes wonder how many students who read the Iliad and Odyssey ever understand that it's possible to read the poems in Greek (indeed, sometimes I wonder how many of them truly understand that the poems were composed in a different language than English). Even the fact that the title Homeri Opera is in Latin is potentially confusing. So it's important, I think, to make it clear that "editions" refers to texts in Greek. That's why I put in the explanatory parenthesis.

We should try to remember that most of the audience aren't classicists, and so don't know the tools of the trade. "Commentaries" is another term that's going to be opaque to some readers. If you have ever taken--or especially, taught--intermediate Latin or Greek, you know through hard experience that using a commentary is an acquired skill. People who don't read classical or biblical texts have very little knowledge or experience of the commentary!

Furthermore, it might be a good idea to reorganize the bibliography a bit. Again, I think the target audience of this article should be the general reader--someone who knows a little bit about ancient Greece and Greek poetry, but not someone who's taken a bunch of Greek classes, let alone graduate seminars. So if this person consults the bibliography, the two categories of books that they're looking for are probably 1) good translations and 2) good general introductions to the individual epics, and maybe Homeric poetry in general. In other words, they're probably not going to be so interested in West's new edition, in Wolf's Prolegomena, or even in A New Companion to Homer. Something more along the line of Stephen Tracy's Story of the Odyssey, maybe. I'm not sure what a comparable work on the Iliad would be. Perhaps general works should go first in the bibliography, then more specialized studies, then editions and commentaries; translations can be a separate section at the end, as it is now. Akhilleus 23:44, 31 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You're quite right, and I agree with your suggestions -- except that I think it is necessary to keep in details of commentaries and Greek texts (where else would a reader find this info?) -- but moving it further down the bibliography is certainly a good idea. Petrouchka 03:47, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I see your point; how about moving the paranthesis out of the header, then? It makes the ToC look awkward. I would welcome a section "general introductions" or similar in the literature list. dab (ᛏ) 07:59, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Quoting the opening of the Iliad

Is it really a good idea to include the opening of the Iliad in Greek and a few English translations? It's interesting, all right; but since Homer has been translated by so outrageously many people, I think a separate article on Translations of Homer would be a better idea than adding to an already overlong article.

(BTW Chapman's translations should be added to the bibliography - I don't have a reference just now though. A public domain copy of Chapman is available online somewhere or other.) Petrouchka 04:17, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

we can always branch stuff out; it began with a list of only the oldest/best known translations (Pope, Butler, Lang), and has grown from there. There cannot be that many translations, I figure the list is almost complete now. But the question is, why not list the translations at Iliad and Odyssey, respectively, instead of here. dab (ᛏ) 07:56, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'll move the opening lines of the Iliad to Homeric Greek which is sadly neglected anyhow. dab (ᛏ) 08:00, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ummmm ... I think there's on the order of fifty translations, just into English. 130.195.86.38 20:53, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sources used by Homer

The Epics of Homer are no doubt the second "most popular texts" of all times (second only to the Bible).

It is strange that no sources used by Homer are mentioned in this article, who in turn has inspired hundreds of writers, such as Virgil.

After the burning of Bibliotheca of Alexandria most of these sources have been lost, but fragments did survive.

In Orphicorum Fragmenta for example, compiled by Otto Kern [1] there is mention of pre-Homeric works in several fragments. Here are two examples:

There was a poet called Oeagrus after Orpheus and Mousaeus who first composed (a poem) based on the Trojan War (vol.2, 23).
...while Orpheus wrote:

Template:Polytonic
Sing, O goddess, the anger of Demeter who is bearing goodly fruit

he (Homer) rephrased

Template:Polytonic
Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus (vol.3, 48)

I was just wondering if these sources are insignificant or unreliable, or otherwise not worth mentioning.--Odysses 12:46, 1 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Orpheus is a legendary figure. The Orphic poems are usually thought to postdate Homer, at least in written form. The idea that Homer used written sources is not widely accepted anymore; the passages you quote here are good examples of formulaic oral poetry. Akhilleus 20:00, 1 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Orpheus was an Argonaut. He lived one generation before the Trojan War, therefore prior to Homer.

The Orphicorum Fragmenta, do not exclusively include the Orphic Hymns. They also include a selection of passages by various ancient writers relevant to Orpheus, two of which I quoted above, hence, they are not oral poetry. Passage 1. for example is by Claudius Aelianus in Varia Historia, 14.21, while passage 2 is indicated as Just. To Greeks 17b. which I think refers to Junianus Justinus.

It would be reasonable to assume that no matter how genius Homer was, he too must have had some reference material. Everyone after him did.--Odysses 17:50, 3 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think you'll find too many scholars who think there was a "real" Orpheus. Orphic poetry is universally thought to be pseudepigraphic--i.e., it's falsely attributed to Orpheus. If I'm not mistaken, not even Kern, whose edition you cite, thought that Orpheus wrote this stuff. Homer is usually dated somewhere in the 8th to 6th century BCE. Even the Greeks thought that he lived long after the Trojan War--see Herodotus 2.53.2-3, where he says that Homer lived 400 years before his time, and 2.145.4, where he says that the Trojan War happened 800 years before his time. The dating of Orphic poetry is pretty chaotic, but the earliest seems to be from the 6th century BCE, and most of it is later than that. The best work on Orphic poetry in English is probably Martin West's The Orphic Poems (Oxford 1983). Walter Burkert also has some interesting stuff, but that's more about Orphic cult than Orphic poetry.

So, Justin is wrong--Homer cannot be rephrasing Orpheus, since the Orphic poem is later than Homer. It's worth noting that this is Justin Martyr, the 1st century CE Christian apologist, from a work called the Hortatory Address to the Greeks, in a passage where he's trying to show that Homer was a monotheist. This is not exactly a discerning work of literary history--Justin has an argument to make, and it's not one that is faithful to Homer's actual words.

Your larger question is what sources Homer is using. The Homeric epics are oral poetry, or perhaps oral-derived poetry, composed either without writing or with little use of writing. Homer doesn't have a library at his disposal; instead, he's working within an oral tradition, made of of myths of the Trojan War, the birth of the gods, the deeds of Herakles, etc. That's his "source", if you like--myths transmitted orally. Some scholars see allusions between the Iliad and the Odyssey, but usually argue that the epics have a long period of development alongside each other as orally transmitted poems that get committed to writing later.

One of the features of oral poetry, at least as seen in the archaic Greek and south Slavic traditions, is formulaic composition--that is, certain phrases and story patterns are repeated throughout the poetry--phrases like "swift-footed Achilles" or "Demeter who bears goodly fruit" and story patterns such as the return of the hero, or the withdrawal-devastation-return pattern seen in the Iliad and the Hymn to Demeter. Mēnis is a key term for both the Iliad and the Hymn, and it looks like Justin is quoting an orphic version of the Demeter/Persephone story which highlights this by using what was probably a formulaic opening. You can imagine an archaic bard singing a story about the wrath of, say, Hera, and beginning, "Sing, goddess, the wrath of ox-eyed Hera..." The idea of the boulē Dios, the "will of Zeus," which is found at the fifth line of the Iliad, is another conventional phrase found in epic proems--it's also in the beginning of the Kypria. ¨

So it's Justin Martyr, not J. Justinus as I thought it was. From your above comprehensive and solid documentation, it is clear that these are not quotes of older scripts either. No doubt that Orphism was influenced by Homer and not the other way round.

Good work! Thanks Akhilleus. --Odysses 14:57, 5 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

the bust

the bust that was at the top of the article is sometimes identified as Homer on the internet, but the British Museum plaque says it was formerly identified as Seneca, and then as Hesiod. [2]. There is actually a "Homer" bust at the BM, [3], maybe we can get an image of that. dab (ᛏ) 06:57, 31 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think this site has gotten the plaques mixed up. I took this photo, and I'm pretty sure it was Homer. The two busts are next to each other, and I think the author of this site made a mistake. See this site which has them properly identified. --JW1805 (Talk) 17:52, 31 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I would like to add an external link to the World of Biography entry

Homer Biography probably the most famous portal of biography to this article. Does anybody have any objections?