Homer, The Father Of Western Culture & Literature

Homer is acknowledged as the Western world’s great man of letters albeit controversies concerning his identity but modern scholarship has proved the authenticity of his works and his life as a travelling bard in Ancient Greece.Eminent historians like Herodotus and Thucydides locate him in time and in place ; the former who lived between 485-425 BC situated him four centuries before his epoch about 850 BC.The latter established him as the author of the Delian Hymns to Apollo who requested his audience to commemorate him as a poet and “a blind old man of craggy Chios”.As a travelling rhapsodist Homer entertained the kings and lords of the city-states throughout the Greek world ; but there were times when a tyrant ruler appreciating a certain poet retained him permanently in his palace by blinding him.Yet scanty information about this strolling minstrel could be gleaned from his later epic “The Odyssey” in the character of Phemius offering his service to Odysseus that rendered credibility to his existence. Homer’s two great epic poems were masterpieces of western literature existing before the invention of writing that continued to survive over the centuries through generations by bards who passed them down orally.About 180 B.C.

they were collected and collated by Aristarchus of Samothrace in the Alexandrian Library who divided them into the present 24 books, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet.Later Classical Greece especially the Athenian empire of the fifth century B.C.regarded the poet as the core of its literary, historical and moral learning whereas his impact on modern literature since the Renaissance has never subsided.Expressions borrowed from his “Odyssey” are quite predominant in our personal lives while modern psychology is abundantly influenced by Homer in the talk of protean personalities and the Freudian oedipal situations.Scientists still go back to Homer for names of elements and organs while he still inspires archaeologists in excavating the past. His influence on Western writing goes back to the Ancient Greek dramatists like Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus who were inspired by the story telling and the characters created in the Illiad and Odyssey.Homer’s invention of the character and the technique of the flashback now used in novel writing can be dated back to his epic poems.The development of characters like Achilles, Agamemnon and Odysseus and the themes of revenge and war, death and survival are compelling in his works.These characters were rich, deep and multidimensional ; their motivations absolutely believable given the context of their lives whereas the ample description of the heroic combat and the tender scenes in the Illiad are unique.The characteristic distinction of the Homeric style is also the employment of the epithet in his works later applied in English by writers through the modification of a noun with a compound adjective like wine-dark sea, earth-shaking or Richard, the Lion-Hearted, Ivan the terrible.

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