Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have fascinated listeners and readers for over twenty-five centuries. In this volume of original essays, collected to honor the distinguished career of Emily T. Vermeule, thirty-four leading experts in Homeric studies and related fields provide up-to-date, multidisciplinary accounts of the most current issues in the study of Homer. The book is divided into three sections. The first section treats the Bronze Age setting of the poems (around 1200 B.C.), using archaeological evidence to reveal how poetic memory preserves, distorts, and invents the past. The second section explores the early Iron Age, in which the poems were written (c. 800-500 B.C.), using the strategies of comparative philology and mythology, literary theory, historical linguistics, anthropology, and iconography to determine how the poems took shape. The final section traces the use of Homer for literary and artistic inspiration by classical Greece and Rome.
Iron, we repeat, is in the poems a perfectly familiar metal. Ownership of bronze, gold, and iron, which requires much labour (in the smithying or smelting), appears regularly in the recurrent epic formula for describing a man of wealth. Footnote: Iliad, VI. 48; IX. 365-366; X. 379; XI. 133; Odyssey, XIV. 324; XXI. 10.] Iron, bronze, slaves, and hides are bartered for sea-borne wine at the siege of Troy?
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Excerpt from The Age of Homer Mr. Paley and Mr. Sayce have put forward their views with regard to the late age of the Homeric poems (that is, of the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey as we now have them) from a critical examination of their language. I would here wish to express in a few notes my further doubts with regard to the early date of the Homeric poems founded on the knowledge they evince of the art of a late date. Before discussing the date of the art as it appears in the poems, I shall endeavour to point out some evidences of the rudeness and imperfection of Greek civilization and language in the seventh century, about a century and a half after the supposed date of Homer. I must in the first place confess myself a thorough sceptic with regard to the early date usually assigned to the Iliad in its present form, and I accept the theories so convincingly put forward by Mr. Paley. The mythology, the art and science, the language appear far too advanced for an early period of literature. The mythology is too grand; the conceptions too magnificent for that period; the archaisms seem too often unreal, imitative and affected; besides, the arts which would have been required to carry out the conception of the Shield of Achilles would have been enough to task the genius of a Phidias. From what we know of the rudeness of Greek art in the seventh and sixth centuries B. C., there is every reason to believe About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
