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No One Knows Whether Homer Was a He Or She, Or Even a Real Person. the Ancient Greeks Believed He Was a Blind, Itinerant Bard Wh

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No One Knows Whether Homer Was a He Or She, Or Even a Real Person. the Ancient Greeks Believed He Was a Blind, Itinerant Bard Wh Homer No one knows whether Homer was a he or she, or even a real person. The ancient Greeks believed he was a blind, itinerant bard who was born in Smyrna (present-day Izmir, Turkey) and lived in Chios (a Greek island near the coast of Turkey). Chios was famous for its epic singers and many people on the island called themselves Homeridae , the descendants of Homer. But these are far from universally-agreed-upon facts. Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos and Athens also claim to be his birthplace Richard Bentley, an 18th century English critic, claimed the Odyssey was written for women with the implication being it might have been written by a woman. To back up this assertion he pointed out that the epic's portrayal of women was realistic, while the male characters were wooden and "hopelessly wrong." The details about shipping, he said, were erroneous (a boat is once described as having rudders in both ends) and there seems to be a lot of details about things men usually don't worry about (there are passages, for example, about folding laundry carefully). The same idea was more forcefully put forward in the 19th century by Samuel Butler. Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography by Alberto Manguel (Atlantic Monthly, 2008) The Iliad and the Odyssey were the first and greatest stories in Western civilization and many of the events described in them took place in present-day Turkey. The 3200- year-old epics were the basis for Greek religion, morality and history and arguably Roman religion, morality and history too. The 5th-century-B.C. Poet Aeschylus claimed that all his plays were merely “slices from the great banquets of Homer.” Plato mentioned him 331 times in his dialogues. Homer's books were the basis of Greek and Roman education. Not only did they define honor and moral conduct for the Greeks, they were the foundations of Western literature. Alexander the Great slept with a copy of the Iliad and traced his maternal ancestry back to Achilles. Latin translations of the Homeric classics helped spur the Renaissance and inspired writers like Dante and Milton to write in the Homeric style. Today it can argued that the ancient texts are the sources of the metaphors that life is a battle (the Iliad ) and life is a journey (the Odyssey ). The Iliad is the oldest surviving European poem. Not a "true story," but based on major events that may have happened, it describes the Trojan War between the Trojans and the Myceneans, which the Trojans lost even though they fought like "ravening lions." Consisting of 24 books written in dactylic hexameter, the Iliad addresses timeless themes like honor, morality, friendship. the horror of war, mortality and death. The Iliad wasn't written down until 500 years after the events it described take place. Yet it rich Bronze details—helmets covered with boar’s tusks, man-size tower shields and 30 Mycenaean kingdoms—that no one in Homer’s time would have known about. Before Homer’s time the story was a poem sung by story tellers who passed it down orally from generation to generation, no doubt with changes made in the story to keep audiences on the edges of their seats. It later provided a model for epic works by Virgil, Dante, and Milton. However the way it was patched together with information from different historical period makes it difficult to use as an accurate historical source for clearly delineated historical periods. The Iliad is set during the Trojan Wars. It is not clear if these wars really took places and if they did it is not clear how accurate the Iliad ’s account of them are. Based on layers of soot found at the archaeological site of Troy, indicating that city had been burned, it seems that ancient Trojans were involved in wars. But the details of these wars is unknown and the soot layers don’t match up exactly with the time the wars described in he Iliad are said to gave taken place (around 1200 B.C.). There are also inconsistencies between the time the wars are said to gave taken place (around 1200 B.C.) and the weapons and military tactics used (which date to 1150-750 B.C.) It is also clear the some of events in the book did not happened unless the Greek gods really existed and influenced the war. According to the Iliad , the Trojan wars were fought around Troy, in present-day northwestern Turkey between the Troy-based Trojans and the Mycenaeans, who lived in southern Greece. The Mycenaeans predate the Greeks of classical Greece and they are sometimes called the Greeks. The Trojan Wars by Diane Thompson, a study of Troy literature; The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War by Caroline Alexander..
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