5/21/2023 0 Comments Hesiod homeric hymns(For a bit more information about the historicity of Homer, you can read this article I published in July 2019.) The figure whom we call “Homer” was not a historical figure, but a legendary one. Many bards had a role in composing the epics and they have no single author. The consensus of professional classical scholars for the past century has been that the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral epics that were composed over the course of many years. Homer, “the greatest and most divine of poets”Īs I have noted in several previous articles on this website, it is highly unlikely that Homer was ever a real, historical individual. These poems held a revered status that is paralleled in our own culture only by the revered status of the Bible itself, but yet it would be a mistake to call the Iliad and the Odyssey “the ancient Greek Bible.” It can sometimes be difficult for modern audiences to understand the sheer importance of the Homeric Poems in ancient Greek culture. Of these poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey were the most important and influential. The Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, and the Homeric Hymns formed the foundation for all of ancient Greek literature and they were the basis for a large swathe of ancient Greek culture.
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