FREE THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY PDF Homer,Jan Parker,George Chapman,Tom Griffith | 976 pages | 01 Aug 2000 | Wordsworth Editions Ltd | 9781840221176 | English | Herts, United Kingdom Homer - Wikipedia The Iliad and Odyssey: Historical Background. See our timeline. These "Greeks" are relative late-comers to the area we now call "Greece" and likely originated to the East of Black Sea, around the area now called the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian seas, where Russia, Turkey and N. Iran meet. The story of Prometheus -- shackled to mount Caucus -- shows strong connections between their original culture and that of the Sumerians etc. So these Mycenaean people were both influenced by and influenced other great civilizations even before there was written The Iliad and the Odyssey or, for that matter, writing. Before the Mycenaeans arrived in the region, earlier "Greek" cultures worshipped ancient fertility goddesses probably related to Ishtar, Aphrodite, even Athena and Hera, and appear to have lived a rather peaceable, agricultural lifestyle we assume this because archeological digs show these pre-Mycenaean people lived without military weapons or fortifications From this perspective, The Iliad is a work of military propaganda that justifies Mycenaen control of the most valuable sea passage of age the Bosporusand The Odyssey justifies colonizing Italy and Sicily to the West. These Ancient and even Classical Greeks are best viewed as a culture rather than as a unified people or "nation". Achilles is a king in his own right, as is Odysseus, Menaleaus, Agamemnon etc. This distinction is important to understanding the Iliad : Achilles rightfully sees himself as Agamemnon's equal. Troy is believed to have fallen around BC and The Iliad and Odyssey were not written down until c. We can assume that this is a compilation of various oral tales and that much The Iliad and the Odyssey the narration describes what Greek life and warfare was like in BCE, not BCE. It's a long, meandering epic, but it primarily revolves around the "godlike Achilles'" struggle to confront his hubris and become humanized. Both in scope and type, consider the Trojan war as similar to that between different European factions in WWI The Iliad and the Odyssey WWII, or between the North and South in the American Civil War: this was a seminal, history-shaping event, and an intra -cultural war: a war fought among people of the same basic culture; although the two sides are protected by different gods, all the gods belong to the same basic pantheon or family of what we now call "Greek gods". The Odysseyin contrast, mainly takes place outside of that common culture and describes contact with pre-Mycenaean Mediterranean cultures. The story focuses on Odysseus and his family's struggle to recover from the Trojan war's after effects and, primarily, with Odysseus struggle to make it back home. While the Jews gave Western culture its religious foundation, the Greeks gave us our culture, the parts of our lives we don't even notice because it is the very air we The Iliad and the Odyssey — The Iliad and the Odyssey sense of heroism, of the individual, of the individuals relationship to others, or our very means of expressing our emotions and the way we tell stories. Jewish stories opened our way of conceptualizing God, but the Greeks gave us our way of thinking about ourselves as human beings. The word for this is "humanism" or Greek Humanism. National Geographic Maps. Map including West Asia and Black Sea:. General map of region:. An outline of his travels is located here. NOTE however, that scholars really don't know Odysseus' actual route, if The Iliad and the Odyssey ever was an "actual" Odysseus etc. The Iliad and Odyssey The The Iliad and the Odyssey is set during the Trojan Warthe ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek kingdoms. It focuses on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles lasting a few weeks during the last year of the war. The Odyssey focuses on the ten- year journey The Iliad and the Odyssey of Odysseusking of Ithacaafter the fall of Troy. Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquitythe most widespread being The Iliad and the Odyssey he was a blind bard from Ioniaa region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary. The Homeric Question — concerning by whom, when, where and under what circumstances the Iliad and Odyssey were composed — continues to be debated. Broadly speaking, modern scholarly opinion falls into two groups. One holds that most of the Iliad and according to some the Odyssey are the works of a single poet of genius. The other considers the Homeric poems to be the result of a process of working and reworking by many contributors, and that "Homer" is best seen as a label for an entire tradition. The poems are in Homeric Greekalso known as Epic Greek, a literary language which shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence is Eastern Ionic. Today only the Iliad and Odyssey are associated with the name 'Homer'. These claims are not considered authentic today and were The Iliad and the Odyssey no means universally accepted in the ancient world. As with The Iliad and the Odyssey multitude of legends surrounding Homer's life, they indicate little more The Iliad and the Odyssey the centrality of Homer to The Iliad and the Odyssey Greek culture. Many traditions circulated in the ancient world concerning Homer, most of which are lost. Modern scholarly consensus is that they have no value as history. In the early 4th century BC Alcidamas composed a fictional account of a poetry contest at Chalcis with both Homer and Hesiod. Homer was expected to win, and answered all of Hesiod's questions and puzzles with ease. Then, each of the poets was invited to recite the best passage from their work. Homer chose a description of Greek warriors in formation, facing the foe, The Iliad and the Odyssey from the Iliad. Though the crowd acclaimed Homer victor, the judge awarded Hesiod the prize; the poet who praised The Iliad and the Odysseyhe said, was greater than the one who told tales of battles and slaughter. The study of Homer is one of the oldest topics in scholarship, dating back to antiquity. As a result of the poems' prominence in classical Greek education, extensive commentaries on them developed to explain parts of the poems that were culturally or linguistically The Iliad and the Odyssey. Inthe Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles published the editio princeps of the Homeric poems. These loose songs were not collected together in the Form of an epic Poem till Pisistratus' time, about Years after. Friedrich August Wolf 's Prolegomena ad Homerumpublished inargued that much of the material later incorporated into the Iliad and the Odyssey was originally composed in the tenth century BC in the form of short, separate oral songs, [26] [27] [21] which passed through oral tradition for roughly four hundred years before being assembled into prototypical versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the sixth century BC by literate authors. Within the Analyst school were two camps: proponents of the "lay theory," which held that the Iliad and the Odyssey were put together from a large number of short, independent songs, [21] and proponents of the "nucleus theory", which held that Homer had originally composed shorter versions of the Iliad and the Odysseywhich later poets expanded and revised. Meanwhile, the 'Neoanalysts' sought to bridge the gap between the 'Analysts' and 'Unitarians'. The Iliad and the Odyssey 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. They point to earlier versions of the Odyssey in which Telemachus went in search of news of his father not to Menelaus in Sparta but to Idomeneus in Crete, in which Telemachus met up with his father in Crete and conspired with him to return to Ithaca disguised as the soothsayer Theoclymenus, and in which Penelope recognized Odysseus much earlier in the narrative and conspired with him in the destruction of the suitors. Most contemporary scholars, although they disagree on other questions about the genesis of the poems, agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the apparently imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey in relation to the Iliad. Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness to the Trojan War ; others thought he had lived up to years afterwards. Martin Litchfield West has argued that the Iliad echoes the poetry of Hesiodand that it must have been composed around — BC at the earliest, with the Odyssey up to a generation later. The explanations suggested by modern scholars tend to mirror their position on the overall Homeric question. Nagy interprets it as "he who fits the song together". West has advanced both possible Greek and Phoenician etymologies. Scholars continue to debate questions such as whether The Iliad and the Odyssey Trojan War actually took place — and if so when and where — and to what extent the society depicted by Homer is based on his own or one which was, even at the time of the poems' composition, known only as legends. The Homeric epics are largely set in the east and center of the Mediterraneanwith some scattered references to EgyptEthiopia and other distant lands, in a warlike society that resembles that of the Greek world slightly before the hypothesized date of the poems' composition.