welcome to my brain

Dr. Powers mentioned something a few weeks ago in class about how Homer might have never even existed, and it got me really interested. No, I'm not talking about Homer J. Simpson, I'm talking about Homer, the ancient Greek epic poet, who wrote the poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Well, that's what I learned in school, anyway, and that's what I've always believed, because my teachers told me that. Apparently, this has been a widely-debated question for a long time, as it has its own name: The Homeric Question!

The main sub-questions in that question are: Who is Homer? Is the work of "Homer" by one author, or multiple authors? and, by who and when were these works composed?

According to M.L. West's article "The Invention of Homer," the epic poems of Homer are actually the collective work of generations of poets.

So, why should we believe that someone named Homer couldn't have existed? How in the world could someone attempt to prove that? West writes: "Homer is not a traditional Greek name, and hard to account for as such. No person is actually known to have been named Homer from before Hellenistic times." A Wikipedia article on the Homeric question examined the probability that the name Homer reflected the fact that there were multiple authors, not just one person:

"As further evidence for the theory that Homer is really a name for a series of oral-formulas, or equivalent to "the Bard" as applied to Shakespeare, the Greek name Homēros is etymologically noteworthy. The word is identical with the Greek for "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."

Also, a Wikipedia article (I know, Wikipedia isn't the most reliable, but I think this is pretty accurate) says that 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. This raises the question: "Could the Iliad and Odyssey have been products of Oral-Formulaic Composition, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phases?" This oral tradition is typical of epic poetry in a primarily oral culture. And the article says that poets within an oral tradition often create and modify their tales when they perform them, so the chance of one author named Homer actually borrowing pieces from other poets is likely.

So, the chances of Homer actually existing seem to be slim. I'd be interested in doing more research on the viewpoint that Homer did actually exist, because it seems like the research I found mostly focused on proving that he didn't exist.

On a really funny note, when I went to Google images and typed in "Homer" to try and get a picture of what he supposedly looked like, all I could find were pictures of Homer J. Simpson. Awesome! Maybe the creators of "The Simpsons" named him Homer because he's so dumb, and it's funny that he would be named the same name as the wise, classical poet. Haha!