HOMER

Sonia AlbertazziMilagro Azofeifa

• According to the Center for the Electronic Reconstruction of Historical and Archaeological Sites from the University of Cincinnati very little is known about the life of Homer.

• He was probably a bard ,a poet and singer who composed and recited verses on heroes and their deeds. (Merriam-Websters Dictionary).

• There is a hymn in honor of the god Apollo that stated that Homer was a blind man from Iona, south of Troy in Asia Minor (modern Turkey).

• Homer is considered the first literary artist and the father of epic poetry.

He is the author of The Iliad and the Odyssey which depict the culture, beliefs customs and traditions of ancient Greece.

According to the article, only The Bible, Shakespeare and Dante can be compared to Homer in literary importance and influence.

• The fact that Homer alone wrote those pieces of art has been contested by many, but no evidence has been found that proves that he was not the author.

• Homer’s work was and continues to be very important and knowledge of his verses was considered part of Greek’s education.

• Even if one believes that Homer didn´t write the Iliad and the Odyssey, the fact that he collected the stories and put them together as a whole, requires magnificient skill on his part.

• It is important to notice that Homer’s poems were oral creations, not literary ones.

• He created his poems as he performed them, adapting the stories from oral tradition.

• The texts we read are later transcriptions of his work.

. Homer's verses were probably first written around 700 BC, soon after the Greeks invented their own alphabet which was based on Phoenician alphabet.

They are composed in 12 syllable lines with one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones.

• Homer’s epics were based on the poet’s memory and improvisation.

• Some of the phrases such as “fleet-footed

Achilles” evidence the author´s effort to fit his language to the metric and to aide his audiences to understand the poems.

• These stories were told on a single occasion; for example, after a meal.

• The Iliad is about the Trojan War, specifically about the combat between Achilles and Hector which brings about Troy’s fall.

• Homer’s characters are remarkable temperamental people who live in a world in which honor is the highest virtue and where violent death is almost certain.

The Odyssey is staged after the fall of Troy.

Odysseus, the protagonist is a survivor and a more human hero, who struggles for ten years to return to his home in Ithaca.

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