Iliad and Odyssey

The Iliad, in roughly 15,700 lines, takes a narrow slice of the Trojan war: Agamemnon's seizure of Achilles' prize, the withdrawal of Achilles from the fighting, the death of Patroklos in his armour, the killing of Hektor, and finally Priam coming by night to ransom his son's body. The Odyssey, some 12,100 lines, splits between the wanderings, told largely as Odysseus' own retrospective narration at the Phaeacian court, and the slower business on Ithaca of testing loyalties and destroying the suitors.

For the study of Greek religion the poems matter less for doctrine than for portraiture. The Olympians appear as a household with a hierarchy and grievances. They take sides, deceive each other, are wounded, sulk, and are constrained by Zeus and, at moments, by fate. Divine intervention is constant but psychologically continuous with human motive: a god puts courage into a warrior, and the warrior is still the one acting.

The poems also record practice. Sacrifice is described in procedural detail, from the sprinkled barley to the thigh bones wrapped in fat, along with libation, prayer formulae, oath-taking, supplication, prophecy from birds and entrails, funeral rites and cremation, and the horror attached to a corpse left unburied. Much of what is known about how Greeks approached the gods before the classical period comes from these descriptions, embedded in narrative rather than set out as instruction.

The two poems do not agree about death. The Iliad's dead are shades without strength, and Achilles in the Odyssey tells Odysseus he would rather be a hired labourer alive than king among the dead. Yet the same book of the Odyssey shows Minos judging and Tantalus and Sisyphus punished, and elsewhere Menelaus is promised the Elysian plain rather than death. These are not reconciled, and the poems were never expected to reconcile them.

Antiquity attributed both poems to Homer, a blind poet variously located on Chios or Smyrna, about whom nothing is reliably known. From the eighteenth century scholars argued that the poems were composite, assembled from shorter lays. The decisive intervention came in the 1930s, when Milman Parry and his assistant Albert Lord went to Yugoslavia to record illiterate South Slavic singers performing long heroic songs. Parry had already shown that Homeric diction is systematically formulaic: fixed epithet-and-name combinations that fill particular metrical positions, arranged with great economy and little redundancy. The fieldwork showed living singers doing the same thing, composing in performance from a stock of formulas and typical scenes rather than reciting a memorised text.

That reframed the question. The poems are the product of an oral tradition of long standing, and their unusual composition is a technique, not a symptom of patchwork. It does not settle whether one poet gave each poem its final shape, and most scholars accept a monumental composer for each while disputing whether it was the same person. The Odyssey's language is slightly later than the Iliad's. The written fixing is usually placed in the eighth or seventh century BCE.

The texts were edited at Alexandria by Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus, who compared manuscripts and marked suspect lines with critical signs. The division of each poem into twenty-four books, one per letter of the Greek alphabet, comes from this scholarship. The tenth-century Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad preserves, in dense marginal scholia, a great deal of that lost Alexandrian commentary.

Homer occupied a position in Greek life that has no exact modern equivalent. Boys learned letters on the poems and memorised long stretches; papyri from Egypt show Homeric texts vastly outnumbering everything else. Rhapsodes performed them at festivals, including the Panathenaia at Athens, where a rule required the poems be recited in order. Cities and aristocratic families traced descent from Homeric heroes and used the poems in territorial arguments. Alexander is said to have carried a copy on campaign.

None of this made the poems doctrine. There was no Homeric orthodoxy, no requirement of assent, and no institution that could have enforced one. Greeks argued about the poems freely and sometimes rewrote them: Stesichorus produced a version in which Helen never went to Troy, and philosophers from Xenophanes onward attacked the poets for attributing theft, adultery and deception to gods.

Plato made the sharpest version of the case. In the Republic he has Socrates propose excluding most of Homer from the education of the guardians, on the grounds that a god cannot be the cause of evil, cannot change shape, and cannot lie, so the passages showing gods quarrelling, grieving or deceiving are simply false and corrupt the young who hear them. He also objects that poetry works by imitation and stirs the emotions it should discipline. The complaint is instructive: it shows the poems were central enough to be worth attacking, and that a Greek could reject their theology entirely without leaving his religion.