Table of Content
- Do you capitalized mythology when using it as Greek mythology?
- Between Achilles and Odysseus, which one could be considered a better hero than the other?
- The Odyssey Major Work Data Sheet
- Compare and Contrast Bronze Age Greece to Classical Greece
- What key traits do the stories seek to impart to the listeners?
- Homer's Influence In Ancient Greek Literature
- Ancient Greek
- What is mythology used for?
The earliest modern Homeric scholars started with the same basic approaches towards the Homeric poems as scholars in antiquity. The allegorical interpretation of the Homeric poems that had been so prevalent in antiquity returned to become the prevailing view of the Renaissance. Renaissance humanists praised Homer as the archetypically wise poet, whose writings contain hidden wisdom, disguised through allegory. In western Europe during the Renaissance, Virgil was more widely read than Homer and Homer was often seen through a Virgilian lens.
Finally, audiences are drawn to the concept of death and the afterlife and how Homer explores the concepts of memorialization and remembrance of the heroic archetype. Most importantly, audiences learn through the ideas of Plato of Homer as “an educator” of Greece. The argument that Virgil stole the Iliad to write the Aeneid about Roman history shows how vital the text is as a way of teaching vital social customs and beliefs to the ordinary citizens.
Do you capitalized mythology when using it as Greek mythology?
The idea that the Homeric poems were originally transmitted orally and first written down during the reign of Peisistratos is referenced by the first-century BC Roman orator Cicero and is also referenced in a number of other surviving sources, including two ancient Lives of Homer. From around 150 BC, the texts of the Homeric poems seem to have become relatively established. After the establishment of the Library of Alexandria, Homeric scholars such as Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and in particular Aristarchus of Samothrace helped establish a canonical text. Other scholars hold that, after the poems were created in the eighth century, they continued to be orally transmitted with considerable revision until they were written down in the sixth century. After textualisation, the poems were each divided into 24 rhapsodes, today referred to as books, and labelled by the letters of the Greek alphabet. Most scholars attribute the book divisions to the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria, in Egypt.
Although Homer is thought to have lived in the early Archaic Age, the subject matter of his epics is the earlier, Bronze Age, Mycenaean era. Between then and when Homer may have lived there was a "dark age." Therefore Homer is writing about a period about which there is not a substantial written record. Homer's two epic poems have become archetypal road maps in world mythology. The stories provide an important insight into early human society, and illustrate, in some aspects, how little has changed.
Between Achilles and Odysseus, which one could be considered a better hero than the other?
He is the first source to look for information on Greek myth and religion. Much speculation surrounds when Homer was born because of the dearth of real information about him. Guesses at his birth date range from 750 BC all the way back to 1200 BC, the latter because The Iliad encompasses the story of the Trojan War, so some scholars have thought it fit to put the poet and chronicler nearer to the time of that actual event. But others believe the poetic style of his work indicates a much later period. Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), often called the father of history, placed Homer several centuries before himself, around 850 BC.
By the time all is said and done in the master myth of the Odyssey, the character of Odysseus has become fully adapted to his ultimate role as the multiform central hero of this epic, a fitting counterpoint to the monolithic central hero of the Iliad, Achilles. This ultimate adaptation of Odysseus demonstrates his prodigious adaptability as a character in myth. That is why he is called polutropos at the very beginning of the Odyssey, that is, ‘the one who could change in many different ways who he was’ .
The Odyssey Major Work Data Sheet
It does not follow, however, that the myths conveyed by the poetry of Homer and Hesiod are consistently older than the myths conveyed by the poetry of lyric. In fact, the traditions of Greek lyric are in many ways older than the traditions of Greek epic, and the myths conveyed by epic are in many ways newer than the myths conveyed by lyric. The poems were composed in unrhymed dactylic hexameter; ancient Greek metre was quantity-based rather than stress-based. These habits aid the extemporizing bard, and are characteristic of oral poetry. For instance, the main words of a Homeric sentence are generally placed towards the beginning, whereas literate poets like Virgil or Milton use longer and more complicated syntactical structures.
The Greeks regarded the great epics as something more than works of literature; they knew much of them by heart, and they valued them not only as a symbol of Hellenic unity and heroism but also as an ancient source of moral and even practical instruction. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the Classical European tradition. Ancient Greece have always been attributed to the shadowy figure of Homer, little is known of him beyond the fact that his was the name attached in antiquity by the Greeks themselves to the poems.
Compare and Contrast Bronze Age Greece to Classical Greece
Homer’s style, whoever he was, falls more in the category of minstrel poet or balladeer, as opposed to a cultivated poet who is the product of a fervent literary moment, such as a Virgil or a Shakespeare. The stories have repetitive elements, almost like a chorus or refrain, which suggests a musical element. However, Homer’s works are designated as epic rather than lyric poetry, which was originally recited with a lyre in hand, much in the same vein as spoken-word performances. The Greek poet Homer was born sometime between the 12th and 8th centuries BC, possibly somewhere on the coast of Asia Minor.
Homer however, has many great achievements that are noteworthy including being the author of the wildly famous Greek stories the Iliad and the Odyssey, creating other short stories for Greek Mythology and otherwise and creating his own writing style. Homer has been one of the most influential person in history and that same history shows it very clearly. Through what we know about Homer, he was very successful and influential to today’s society. The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and continued archaeological investigation has increased modern scholars' understanding of Aegean civilisation, which in many ways resembles the ancient Near East more than the society described by Homer. Some aspects of the Homeric world are simply made up; for instance, the Iliad 22.145–56 describes there being two springs that run near the city of Troy, one that runs steaming hot and the other that runs icy cold. Archaeologists, however, have uncovered no evidence that springs of this description ever actually existed.
Homeric poetry, in the process of evolving as an oral tradition, reflects the realities of Greek civilization all the way from the middle of the second millennium BCE to the seventh century BCE and perhaps even later. This formulation, which takes into account the testimony of Homeric poetry as an ongoing system of communication and the successive layers of archaeological evidence, represents an evolutionary model . Homeric poetry, as the primary epic mediator of myth, remakes the perceived past into such a sacred age by way of deliberately privileging realities perceived as belonging to a past age of heroes. Such realities can be tested by comparing them with corresponding realities ascertained independently by way of empirical approaches.
The myths that Pindar’s song marks as ‘false’ have to do with things heard and not seen (Olympian 1.46–48). As I argue in the companion piece, “Lyric and Greek Myth,” such myths are ‘false’ not because they are myths but only because they are myths that differ from the master myth privileged by Pindar, and that master myth is notionally the only myth that can be ‘true’ at the moment of telling it. While the myths that are ‘false’ can merely be heard, details from the alternative myth that is ‘true’ can actually be visualized, that is, literally seen (Olympian 1.26–27). The epic failure of Ajax is a foil for the epic success of Odysseus, which is made possible by the poetic craft of Homer’s Odyssey. Just as the craftiness of Odysseus prevents Ajax from inheriting the armor of Achilles, so also the craft of Homer prevents Ajax from inheriting the epic status of being called ‘the best of the Achaeans’ after the death of Achilles. In the Odyssey, that epic status is earned by Odysseus through his own epic experiences after the death of Achilles (BA 2§§12–18).
Albert Lord noted that the Balkan bards that he was studying revised and expanded their songs in their process of dictating. Some scholars hypothesize that a similar process of revision and expansion occurred when the Homeric poems were first written down. The question of by whom, when, where and under what circumstances the Iliad and Odyssey were composed continues to be debated. It is generally accepted that the two works were written by different authors. It is thought that the poems were composed at some point around the late eighth or early seventh century BC.Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity; the most widespread account was that he was a blind bard from Ionia, a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey.
These anomalies point to earlier versions of the Iliad in which Ajax played a more prominent role, in which the Achaean embassy to Achilles comprised different characters, and in which Patroclus was actually mistaken for Achilles by the Trojans. Following World War I, the Analyst school began to fall out of favor among Homeric scholars. It did not die out entirely, but it came to be increasingly seen as a discredited dead end.
A major point of convergence for archaeology and the study of Homeric poetry is the story of the Trojan War – or, more accurately, Trojan Wars – and the degree to which the Iliad and the Odyssey reflect the realities of the late second millennium BCE . His character undergoes the most fantastic imaginable adventures of the mind during his journeys – and the most realistic personal experiences when he finally reaches his home in Ithaca. The psychological realism of this hero’s character when we see him at home with himself tempts us to forget about the fantastic journeys of his psukhē in alien realms. Our mentality as modern readers invites us to see Odysseus at home as “reality” and Odysseus abroad as “myth,” as if the myth of the hero contradicted the reality of the hero. From here on, the tales Odysseus tells are masterpieces of mythmaking as embedded in the master myth of the Odyssey.
Just as the framing epic about the anger of Achilles is technically a speech-act, a muthos, so too is the framed epic about the anger of Meleager. Conversely, just as the framed epic about Meleager is a poetic recollection of the klea ‘glories’ of heroes of the past, so too is the framing epic about Achilles. That framing epic, which is the Iliad, is a poetic recollection by the Muse whom the master Narrator invokes to sing the story of the anger of Achilles . As the narrator of a framed epic, Phoenix does not have to invoke the goddesses of memory, the Muses, since the Narrator of the framing epic has already invoked them for him. Homer’s Iliad tells a modern audience much about the lives of the Ancient Greeks and the text’s survival for a prolonged period of time after its original conception demonstrates the extent to which memory was a vital belief and social custom of the Ancient Greeks. Audiences are also introduced to the archetype of the hero and how that manifests in a patriotic but collective group when mythologizing is used during times of strife to raise morale in people.
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