Homers Bio :: Essays Papers

Homers BioBiography of Homer (?-? BC)Beyond a few fragments of information, historians and classicists can all speculate about the life of the man who collected the Iliad and the Odyssey. The details atomic number 18 few. We do not even exist the one C in which he lived, and it is difficult to say with absolute certainty that the same poet composed some(prenominal) works. The Greeks attributed both of the desperates to the same man, and we have little hard evidence that would dupe us doubt the ancient authorities, but uncertainty is a regular feature of learned work dealing with Homers era of Greek history. The Greeks hailed him as their greatest poet, as well as their first. Although the Greeks recognized other poets who composed in Greek before Homer, no texts from these earlier poets survived. Perhaps they were lost, or perhaps they were never written spileHomer himself was probably on the cusp between the tradition of oral poetry and the new plan of written language. Texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey existed from at least the sixth century BC, and probably for a considerable span of sequence before that. These two great epic poems also had a life in performance through the centuries, nonrecreational artists made their living by reciting Homer, performing the great epics for audiences that often know great parts of the poem by heart. It is impossible to pin down with any certainty when Homer lived. Eratosthenes gives the traditional date of 1184 BC for the death of the Trojan War, the semi-mythical event which forms the basis for the Iliad. The great Greek historian Herodotus stray the date at 1250 BC. These dates were arrived at in a very pass judgment manner Greek historians usually used genealogy and estimation when severe to find the dates for events in the distant past. But Greek historians were far little certain about the dates for Homers life. Some said he was a present-day(a) of the events of the Iliad, while others placed him s ixty or a hundred or several hundred years afterward. Herodotus estimated that Homer lived and wrote in the ninth century BC. He almost certainly lived in one of the Greek city-states in Asia Minor. All of the traditional sources say that he was blind. Over the course of millennia of scholarly speculation, prevailing theories about Homer and his relationship to his work have had time to change and change again.