Homer
Homer names 3 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below. 1 of them is described by more than one encyclopedia.
Homer the greatest name in Greek literature
Described by 2 of the 6 encyclopedias.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the greatest name in Greek literature . Whether Homer is to be regarded as a bard or a circle of minstrels is uncertain. Our actual knowledge is confined chiefly to the fact that the Greeks have two great epics of wondrous beauty, the Iliad and the Odyssey. These poems have from great antiquity been attributed to a blind poet named Homer. Seven Greek cities claim the honor of his birth. No less than eight fragmentary lives of Homer in the Greek language are extant. Critics are of the opinion that the epics named are the work of many minstrels, and that they were handed down from one generation to another as separate ballads, until in an early age of Greek literature, some editor, possibly a Homer, brought them together. One of the strongest arguments for this theory is that different portions of the poems are quite different in style. They were composed evidently long before the art of writing was known in Greece. They contain many thousand verses. Both epics deal with the capture of Asiatic Troy by the Greeks. The Iliad opens with a quarrel between the Greek leader, Achilles, and Agamemnon. The quarrel between these chiefs is described with minuteness. Hector, the hero of Troy, slays Patroclus, the bosom friend of Achilles. Achilles is aroused, patches up a truce with Agamemnon and rushes into battle. He kills Hector. The poem closes with an account of Hector's funeral. The Odyssey relates the return of King Odysseus to Ithaca. During his absence numerous suitors for the hand of his wife Penelope have devoured his living and disgraced his household. Odysseus is delayed by various adventures, but finally comes home in the disguise of a beggar and takes vengeance on those who had invaded his home and annoyed his wife. Memorizing selections from Homer is a regular part of the school work of modern Greece. The Athenian schoolboy recites Homer quite as the American boy recites passages from Longfellow or Lowell. See Achilles ; Agamemnon ; Paris ; Troy ; Odysseus , etc.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a poet of ancient Greece, whose birthplace and date are entirely unknown. Seven cities or more, of ancient Greece, claimed him as a native, and he is generally conjectured to have lived between 1000 B. c. and 700 b. c. He was reputed to have been blind, but the so-called Homeric hymn, from which the legend of him is inferred, is now held to have been of a much later date! than the "Iliad" and "Odyssey." These last-named poems were commonly known as Homer's from a very early period. In 1795, however, a German critic, Friedrich August Wolf, maintained that writing was unknown in Homer's time; that the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were by different authors, put together in the 6th century B. C. The weight of critical authority favors the hypothesis that they were at first the work of a single mind; though certain books and passages have been added. The "Iliad" is the story of the siege of Ilium (Troy), and the attempt to rescue Helen, the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, whom Paris, son of Priam, King of Troy, had abducted. HOMER The "Odyssey" relates the return, through many hardships and adventures, of Odysseus (Ulysses) to his home after by his the siege of Troy, his welcome faithful wife Penelope, and punishment . The style of her presumptuous cuous suitors of these poems is simple and noble, the action rapid, and the theme dramatic and heroic.
Homer WINSLOW, an American artist
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
WINSLOW, an American artist; born in 1836, at Boston, Mass. At the age of twenty-one he began making drawings for "Harper's Weekly," and first gained prominence by his Civil War drawings: "Rations" (1863); "Prisoners from the Front" (1865) and "The Bright Side" (1865). These received favorable notice from European expositions and encouraged Homer to continue his work, which he did, confining himself for a time to pictures from New England life. His most celebrated work has been his pictures of the life at sea in which he has excelled all other American artists. Among his best works are "Lost on the Grand Banks," "Undertow," "Eight Bells," "The Maine Coast." He died in 1910.
Homer LOUISE, an American contralto
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
LOUISE, an American contralto; born in Pittsburgh, Pa. Her Louise Dilworth maiden name was Beatty; in 1895 she married her teacher in harmony, Sidney Homer. After studying in Paris ris she made her début there in "La Favorita" in 1898. The following year she sang at Covent Garden, London, and in Brussels. In 1900 she joined the Metropolitan Opera House, where her success has been such that she has remained a member for over twenty years. Probably her most successful rôle is that of Amneris in Verdi's "Aïda." LOUISE HOMER
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 entry hedges between "a bard or a circle of minstrels," and Collier's in 1921 reports that "the weight of critical authority" favoured a single mind; the question was reframed rather than settled by Milman Parry, whose recordings of illiterate Serbo-Croatian singers in the 1930s showed that the repeated epithets and formulas of the Iliad and Odyssey are the working tools of oral composition. Most scholars now place the poems' fixing in written form around 750-700 BC, at the end of a long oral tradition, so both old positions were partly right. The claim that the poems predate writing in Greece needs one correction: Michael Ventris showed in 1952 that Linear B, used in Mycenaean palaces centuries earlier, records Greek, though it was a bureaucratic script, not one for poetry. Excavation at Hisarlik has continued too, with Manfred Korfmann's work from 1988 revealing a substantial lower city around the citadel identified as Troy.
Written for this edition, 2026.