The Iliad by Homer Read by Sir Derek Jacobi abridged Audio Book CD
Brand New
: 9 Hours 8 CDs abridged This groundbreaking English version by Robert Fagles is the most important
recent translation of Homer's great epic poem. The verse translation has been
hailed by scholars as the new standard, providing an Iliad that delights
modern sensibility and aesthetic without sacrificing the grandeur and
particular genius of Homer's own style and language. The Iliad is one of
the two great epics of Homer, and is typically described as one of the greatest
war stories of all time, but to say the Iliad is a war story does not
begin to describe the emotional sweep of its action and characters: Achilles,
Helen, Hector, and other heroes of Greek myth and history in the tenth and
final year of the Greek siege of Troy.
About Homer
Tradition holds that Homer was blind, and various Ionian cities claim to be his birthplace, but otherwise little is known about his life. There is considerable scholarly debate about whether Homer was a real person, or the name given to one or more oral poets who sang traditional epic material.
Greek Homeros means "hostage." There is a theory that his name was back-extracted from the name of a society of poets called the Homeridae, which literally means "sons of hostages," i.e., descendants of prisoners of war. As these men were not sent to war because their loyalty on the battlefield was suspect, they would not get killed in battles. Thus they were entrusted with remembering the area's stock of epic poetry, to remember past events, in the times before literacy came to the area.
It has repeatedly been questioned whether the same poet was responsible for both the Iliad and the Odyssey. While many find it unlikely that the Odyssey was written by one person, others find that the epic is generally in the same writing style, and is too consistent to support the theory of multiple authors. The Batrachomyomachia, Homeric hymns, and cyclic epics are generally agreed to be later than the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Homer was even at one time credited with the entire Epic Cycle, which included further poems on the Trojan War as well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and his sons. Other works, such as the corpus of Homeric Hymns, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War," ?at?a??µ??µa??a), and the Margites were also attributed to him, but this is now believed to be unlikely.
Scholars generally agree that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent a process of standardization and refinement out of older material beginning in the 8th century BC. An important role in this standardization appears to have been played by the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus, who reformed the recitation of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival. Many classicists hold that this reform must have involved the production of a canonical written text.
Other scholars, however, maintain their belief in the reality of an actual Homer. So little is known or even guessed of his actual life, that a common joke has it that the poems "were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name,". Samuel Butler argued that a young Sicilian woman wrote the Odyssey (but not the Iliad), an idea further pursued by Robert Graves in his novel Homer's Daughter.
Most Classicists would agree that, whether or not there was ever such a composer as "Homer," the Homeric poems are the product of an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (aoidoi). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems consist of regular, repeating phrases; even entire verses repeat. Could the Iliad and Odyssey have been oral-formulaic poems, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phases? Milman Parry and Albert Lord pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture. The crucial words are "oral" and "traditional." Parry started with "traditional." The repetitive chunks of language, he said, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and they were useful to the poet in composition. He called these chunks of repetitive language "formulas."
Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis," wherein a non-literate "Homer" dictates his poem to a literate scribe between the 8th and 6th centuries. The Greek alphabet was introduced in the early 8th century, so that it is possible that Homer himself was of the first generation of rhapsodes that were also literate. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC). |
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