Homerus
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
A celebrated Greek poet, the most ancient of all the profane writers. The age in which he lived is not known, though some suppose it to be about 168 years after the Trojan war. Uncertainty prevails, also, as to the place of his nativity, seven cities claiming to be thus honored. These are Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis , Chios, Argos, and Athenae. In his two famous poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, he has displayed the most consummate knowledge of human nature, and rendered himself immortal by the sublimity and elegance of his poetry. In the Iliad he gives a narrative of the siege of Troy, and the Odyssey deals with the wanderings of Ulysses after the fall of the city. Byron, in The Bride of Abydos , calls him "The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle," thus assuming Chios to be his birthplace, Scio being the modern name of the place. Dryden, in his well-known lines commencing "Three poets in three distant ages born," ranks him with Vergil and Milton, giving Homer the palm of "loftiness of thought." One of the old poets thus alludes to his verse: "Read Homer once, and you can read no more, For all books else appear so mean and poor; Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, And Homer will be all the books you need." Honor or Honos. The personification of honor at Rome, to whom temples were built both by Marcellus and by Marius, close to the temples of Honos. Marcellus also built one to Virtus: and the two deities are frequently mentioned together.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The 1900 account presents Homer as a single celebrated poet whose birthplace was disputed among seven cities. The largest shift since then came in the 1920s and 1930s, when Milman Parry's fieldwork on living South Slavic singers showed that the Iliad and Odyssey are built from the repeated formulas of oral composition, so that most scholars now treat "Homer" as the culmination of a long singing tradition rather than a lone author, with the poems taking their present shape roughly in the eighth or seventh century BC. Archaeology has also filled in the world behind the poems: Michael Ventris's decipherment of Linear B in 1952 proved that the Mycenaeans of the supposed Trojan War era wrote an early form of Greek, and renewed excavation at Hisarlik through the twentieth century has mapped a much larger Bronze Age Troy than the entry's readers knew. The literary judgement, and the seven rival cities, stand as they did.
Written for this edition, 2026.