If you look at a list of the most influential books ever written, as rated by literary critics you will notice that there is probably an author who has no last name who is on that list; his name is written only as "Homer". Believe it or not this author is credited with writing two of the greatest stories ever written and no one knows who he actually was, although there are some who say he lived in Ionia , and the greeks themselves said he was blind. Regardless of who he was or where he was from, he was a poet through and through and is influence on Greek history was Titanic (pun intended).
The two books he wrote are The Illiad and The Odyssey, in reality these are not novels but are actually a form of Greek liturature called epic poems. So how can they be called poems when The Illiad is close to 600 pages of text and The Odyssey Close to 400 pages? In early Greece there were men who made a living as poets but not like those we know today. They actually memorized these epic poems and people would pay to have these men recite them, In fact they often would have been performed as songs with instrumentation at some presentations. It is believed that Homer himself was actually one of such men.
Although it is believed that both of these stories had been performed for many generations before Homer was even born. The reason Homer gets credit for these stories is because he was the first person to write them down. Before this point in history almost all Greek poems and stories were passed down orally with men depending solely on their memories to recite hours of text. But Homer changed everything when he decided to write his version down and his works became pieces that were taught in greek schools for hundreds of years to help pass societal morals and ideas down through generations. These same ideas and morals that would breed democracy and later conquer the known world through Alexander.
I also enjoyed reading this in our textbook. I like how in this blog Team One mentioned that the ideas in these epic poems were taught to generations after them, keeping these morals of their society alive. People would most likely read them, and tell them to their children to teach good morals. It's amazing that most reasearches believe Homer was blind, yet they call him the first real writer. At least he took the initiative to have someone write these epic peoms down. I was doing some reasearch and discovered he had no previous literature to use as models or anything. It's amazing how for an estimated 600 years these stories have been passed down from generation to generation who knows what the first story started out like and what other elaborate details others added. Thanks to Homer we can enjoy classical literature and since he was basically the start of writing these stories others had examples to follow, and after him were many more great writers. I read something in the text that caught my eye on why Homer's writing's were so significant: "The peot is concerned with human responsibility and motivation, and for these reasons his work stands at the very beginning of the Western literary tradition"(65).
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Margaret Leonetti
When I first read about the passing of word and story without being written I was very surprised. I had always just assumed that Homer not only wrote The Illiad and The Odyssey but they were original stories he created not passed down by word of mouth. It's impressive and somewhat depressing that people who we consider fairly primitive because of their technological advances and slightly crude living and societal make up of the time, had the mental capacity to recite a 600 page story from memory alone. Makes me wonder if we aren't going backwards with our dependence on technology in our society. I guess I went off on a tangent there but these stories are so impressive and well written its hard not to think we may be taking a step back
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