Talk:Homer

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[edit] Infobox/Biography

I appreciate the industry that Botteville is putting into this article, which has been in horrible shape for a long time, but I'm a bit dismayed to see that the article is now written as if there were a real person named Homer. Take, for example, the infobox, which confidently states that the given name of "Homer" was Melesigenes, that his birthplace was Smyrna, that his parents were Cleanax and Critheis, and that his debut work was "Epigram I". The body of the article, too, implies that we should think of Homer as a real person. Yet, if one looks at the academic literature of the last few decades, it's clear that classical scholars regard the ancient biographical tradition as fiction (see, e.g. Mary Lefkowitz's Lives of the Greek Poets), and that few, if any, classicists think that we can know anything about a person named "Homer". This article ought to concentrate on Homeric poetry, rather than biography.

Accordingly, I'm going to get rid of most of the stuff in the infobox. I don't know that we need an infobox to begin with; the picture is nice, but I don't think that the infobox adds anything useful, and when it gives misinformation ("Homer was born in Smyrna"), it's a detriment to the article. --Akhilleus (talk) 21:54, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, please get rid of the infobox. We can't fill in biographical details for somebody for whose life no solid facts exist and whose very historicity has been called into question. At the moment the claim "Born in Smyrna, lived in Chios, died in Ios" is referenced to Kirk (page 190) but it's clear from the context that Kirk is simply relaying information he does not himself believe: "The horror vacui which was an endemic disease of ancient biographers caused a mass of spurious details to be invented, many of them palpably based on innocent passages in the poems themselves, others supplied by local interests or designed to reconcile divergent conjectures. The commonest version to be found in the various Lives of Homer, compiled from the Alexandrian period onward but sometimes incorporating stories from the classical age, is that Homer was born in Smyrna (which became Ionic early in its history), lived in Chios and died in the insignificant Cycladic island of Ios; his name was originally Melesigenes, his father being the river Meles and his mother the nymph Cretheis; he was also descended from Orpheus and coeval with, or even a cousin of, Hesiod, with whom he had a poetical contest on Euboea. Much of this information is recognizably fantastic and nearly all of it probably worthless. Even the association with Smyrna and Chios, the latter backed by the existence there from at least the late 6th century BC, of a rhapsodic guild called the Homeridae or 'descendants of Homer', cannot have been watertight - or there would not have been so many rival claimants, of which Kyme and Colophon were chief but to which several others had been added by the Roman period". The infobox merely puts us on the same level as unreliable ancient biographers trying to fill the vacuum with spurious information. --Folantin (talk) 14:33, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Raising some issues formally

Hello A. I note your changes and your point of view as well as your intended action of removing the box. As preliminary let me say that your changes have been made inconsistently. Now we are saying, Homer does not exist but some believe the Iliad and Odyssey have a single author! And so on for the rest of it. This reminds me of Page's summary of one of the arguments, that there was no Homer but someone of his name wrote the poems. Inconsistencies such as these lead me to think your editorial actions in this case are precipitous.

In any case I believe you are wrong. There is as good a chance that Homer was real as there is that he was not. By selecting one view and excluding all others you are rejecting a large part of Homeric scholarship as pointless. After all if Homer did not exist and we cannot say anything about him then why are all these books and articles being written about the topic? Apparently, in your view, like me (you imply) they are totally wasting their time. If what you say were true, there should not be an article here under the name of Homer. Maybe you would like to try moving it to "Poems formerly attributed to Homer."

I believe you are relying too heavily on Lefkowitz, who is Dalby's main source on Wikipedia. He attritbutes everything to her. I will leave aside for the moment the issue of an author promulgating himself in these articles but the Dalby/Lefkowitz view is not in fact the main view. A brief investigation on the Internet will reveal that. I strongly feel that this article cannot improve as long as you are acting on your current belief that Homer cannot be and certainly is not real. Your suggestion to remove the box would certainly be a detriment to the article. You need to leave room for other points of view. I urge you to investigate and change your mind as soon as possible so that we can get on with the improvement.

I am not interested in an edit war with you and Dalby so I would like you to revert your edits to my last version. Please do seriously consider it. Meanwhile you and I have raised some issues that need to be before the public as issues and not as an edit war. Since that is so we need to place some templates which according to Wikipedia policy should be done. The issues need to be discussed. That is the approach I am going to take. I have explained all this in the desire to follow policy and not be arbitrary. Best wishes and thank you for your well-meaning edit.Dave (talk) 22:22, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Dave, I don't mean to be rude, but if you don't want an edit war, why are you sticking tags all over the page? Such tactics have the appearance of a temper tantrum, and virtually cry out for a revert. Also, I have trouble understanding why you're setting up Andrew Dalby as some kind of bete noire; I don't think he's edited this article in ages, and he spends most of his wiki time on the Latin wikipedia.
Well, I'm sticking tags all over the article on items that need to be changed. I will go on trying to change them as best I can. There is some question now as to whether you are going to allow me to do that so the issues need to be marked. As for Dalby, he's the one who did much of the basic work on this set of articles and it's his view that is getting insisted upon. Moreover I did hear from him the last article I worked on.
As far as scholarly consensus, Page was writing four decades ago. Things might have changed since then. However, the joke you mention, that Homer's poems weren't written by him but by someone of the same name (which is at least as old as Mark Twain), is somewhat applicable: most of the scholars who believe that both poems were composed by a single author also believe that nothing can be known about this author, and they call him "Homer" for convenience's sake.
If Page is too old for you why is not Kirk, who is just as old? And the joke, someone used it in the article! But the age of the joke or the argument has nothing to do with it. It's the logic that counts. As for Homer, if nothing can be known, why not call him Joe Schmoe? Why Homer? They use Homer because that is the tradition and so is the tradition that he was named Melisigenes, was born in Smyrna and worked in Chios. Why not take the name of Homer off the article and put "Unknown author of the Iliad?" If that information were known to be wrong then I would say leave it all out except in a brief explanation of why all this information is wrong. But, it is not known with certainty to be wrong either. It is not "nothing can be known" but "nothing can be certainly known" and there is a world of difference. If I know something is wrong I don't use it at all but if there is a possibility of its being right, which there is, then I might use it qualifiedly, which is what most of the scholars actually do, such as Kirk and Page.
If you conduct a "brief investigation on the Internet", well, you get what you pay for. Try looking at something like Martin West, "The Invention of Homer," The Classical Quarterly 49 (1999) 364-382 or Gregory Nagy's review of West's Iliad to get some idea of how Homerists are dealing with the "Homeric Question" these days, or get off the internet and read something like Barbara Graziosi's Inventing Homer or the introduction to Kirk's commentary on the Iliad (p. 1: "Antiquity knew nothing definitie about the life and personality of Homer.") --Akhilleus (talk) 04:57, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
That is not how Homerists are handling the Homeric question these days, only your interpretation of how they are handling it these days. I used that very same Kirk in the footnote and he is the very one who said Homer was born in Smyrna. Kirk did not say "Antiquity knew nothing", he said "Antiquity knew nothing definite." Now, antiquity knew nothing definite about most everything it knew. It didn't know much of anything at all for certain. It is possible to question just about everything antiquity said and that is how classicists make their living. But we don't get carried away by it. We present a view as just that, a view, and that is just what I do NOT see happening in this article. We need balance here. There is nothing wrong with putting traditions in the infobox - one might even label them as that - even though they are not definitely known knowledge. Not very much in this life is definitely known I fear and especially not from antiquity.
Now, I'm not actually sure of what your frame of mind is. The changes you made are problematic as far as logic and meaning is concerned. For example, if Pseudo-Herodotus is wrong enough not to contribute any information, why are we mentioning Melisigenes at all, since he comes from Pseudo-Herodotus? You present me with problems to which I cannot adjust! Its the mixture that bothers me. It ought to be one way or the other and if it is the no-Homer way then the whole article needs rewriting but if the possibly-Homer way then what I said is good and useful although I would qualify it now with a note saying it is traditional information but not necessarily accurate.
As far as your reverting all those templates is concerned you are inviting yourself to revert them. I'll just put them on again until I have some confidence that these logical problems are going to be solved. I could revert to the way I had it also. What you seem to be saying is if anyone disagrees with you they are in for an edit war. Those templates are not there because of my temper, they are there because those are problems I saw and still see and would solve if you were not going to interfere. I must say that article will take a lot of solution. Now, if you effectively stop me the article is not going to pass muster next time either. It will just hang around as one of those bad Wikipedia articles no one can do anything about until the attentions of an expert are called for some months or years in the future. Is that what you want? it will take long enough to fix it now as one has to fix the enture set!Dave (talk) 06:15, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Dave, West and Nagy are two of the most prominent--if not the most prominent--Homerists now living. Neither believes that Homer was a real person. West believes that each poem had a different author, and uses "Homer" as a convenient way to designate the author of the Iliad, but he regards the character "Homer" as an invention of the 6th century, and the biographical tradition as a tissue of fictions. Nagy regards "Homer" as a mythological construct. Both men are prolific authors, and have spent plenty of time writing about Homer--no logical conflict there, because Homer is the name for a type of poetry, not a person.
You're reading a different Kirk than me, I guess, because in the 1985 commentary he says "Homer, then, was as much a remote figure to the ancient world as he is to us. Of all the speculations about him of which evidence survives, only Herodotus' calculation of his date and the general agreement that he came from somewhere in Ionia are of much value..." In other words, the rest of the biographical tradition is not of much value.
You seem to think that I like the state of the article. I don't (but I like it even less with these silly tags). But an article relies on the ancient biographical tradition as a source of facts, and confidently states that Homer came from Smyrna, is a worse article than the one that we've got now. --Akhilleus (talk) 06:36, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
I think you are making better sense now. Presenting information about Homer as biographical data is not a balanced view either. I never meant for that to be so. One of the problems is, the article is so long that the changes get evaluated piecemeal so the first changes you make are pounced on before you can get to the others. I can't edit the whole article simultaneously and you can't know what I have in mind for future edits. But if that is the way you think and you are not just some crank plugging a crank theory then I think we need to sit down and take a good look at it. I KNOW the people that you cite have the overall point of view that you related. At the same time, these people are known for their literary, not their archaeological or historical, contributions. Nagy got a prize in literature and Milman and Parry are the giants of the poems, and so is Lord. They are, however only the literary tradition. There's the historical and archaeological as well. I do not know why you would downgrade Page as he is a major historical figure. This is a pretty big field. It is notorious that these literary people don't much care for historical evaluations. In fact the real savants in the field have memorized the Iliad and can put it together themselves. If you cite a line they can usually tell you where it is.
Well. Where does that leave us. The bottom line is, none of these people whether literary or historical totally abandon the Homeric traditions, no matter what they say about their evaluation of those traditions. If there were such an abandonment the whole "Homeric Question" would just vanish! For example, no one bothers now to discuss or preserve the phlogiston theory of fire as it is well-established as a false theory. You probably never heard of it because it is false. What I am saying is, the Homeric Question still exists as the Homeric Question and to present it as solved by the opinions of a few literary giants is not accurate or balanced. They may say that is what they think but they go right ahead and work within the framework of the "Homeric Question" anyway! And we are not talking about different Kirks. Their writing suffers from the same difficulty as ours but when they talk about the life of Homer on the one hand they say it is all bunk but on the other they go ahead and present it anyway! And that is what I am trying to do. I figured the text would make sufficiently clear that these ideas are not to be taken as established fact but only as tradition. In my mind that is balance. This is the world of speculation and theory, not that of scientifically established fact.
So I would say, no, we don't want to present Homer as a biographical fact. But, we do want to present him as a tradition. If you agree with that, how best can that be done? I'm not sure now. The infobox looks good and is consistent with Wikipedia policy. Why can we not do something like what we did for the picture? That is NOT a picture of Homer. It is NOT info. But, Wikipedia often points out that such pictures are ideal portrayals and uses them for their artistic value. They present a tradition. Why can't we put the info in the infobox and qualify it with some statement that it is a tradition but may not be historically accurate? Your extreme view wants us to abandon the Homeric Question as irrelevant and solved beyond doubt totally in the negative. It isn't broad or balanced enough. It isn't solved yet or you would not be seeing any talk or "single- or multiple-author theories." Nagy is still alive you know and on-line. If you were to ask him if he had definitively solved the Homeric Question what do you think he would say? I think he would back down from definitive final solutions but would say he had an opinion or a theory. As far as I know he does not require his students to abandon Homer as totally unhistoric or insist there is no Homeric question. In his books he presents strong cases but he nowhere presents them as exclusively right. That is YOUR idea.
So why don't you think about it some and see if we can't come up with some way to present both the tradition and the qualification that it may not be historic. Now for the templates, I know they are irritating and I always found them so myself. I like beautiful articles and templates are decidedly unbeautiful. But then I saw some totally self-laudatory articles from which the templates had been suppressed and the authors were under the impression they had done something really great and deserved an award for it when what they had said was all wrong! Like citations, which I formerly resisted but now embrace, I embrace templates as indicators that the article needs work. If these indicators were not on there would you be discussing this with me? It's like doing a class paper, "aw gee prof, why did you give me an F? I thought it was a really good paper." The F on this article should stand until it meets minimum standards just so that we will be stimulated to do it! I repeat, the main problems are logical consistency, imbalance, generalities and weasel words without citations and misapprehension of the sources. I'm leaving the infobox problem for you to solve and following my customary method of starting with peripheral material that confuses the main issues tso that the issues can be seen in a clearer light. I wouldn't worry about the templates. The article is more important. it is worth more than 5 minutes of offhand student opinions I do believe. If I had thought I could improve the article without a fight I would have deferred putting them on but your aggressive and originally non-discussional approach scotched that. I'm not in any way saying you shouldn't be that way or else I would suggest you resign from Wikipedia, but I am saying, since you are, we need the mechanism of the templates to keep us going on this. Let's do the research, let's make the balanced presentations, let's put enough time in to earn some respect from the professors. Let's get a passing grade and be of some use to the public. I'm not interested in writing articles only for my own enjoyment. No pain no gain. Thanks for taking the time to present your view properly. I do now see what you mean. Now we need the best decisions.Dave (talk) 13:59, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Right, Dave, I think you can see that plenty of people feel the same way I do about the infobox. And that's because they agree with me that we can't write a biography of Homer. You want this article to discuss the ancient biographical tradition--well, no problem, but that has to be handled in the text rather than through an infobox. Of course, the main article for the ancient biographical tradition is ancient accounts of Homer. --Akhilleus (talk) 17:06, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

For both Dave and A. If either of you do not mind a third opinion, I have a sugggestion that could help. This infobox appears to be the central point of contention in this discussion, because having an infobox somehow signifies that, in fact, Homer is a real person and deserves to have a quick reference biography. Does this have to be the case? Could this not simply be an issue of word choice and placement? I am no expert in Wiki editing, surely, but why no simply say in the infobox that this is an assumed identity? why not have a footnote referencing the other part of the article describing this debate and what Homer's assumed name, birthplace, birth year, etc? If you absolutely must, just make two infoboxes, each detailing a different view oh this illusive "Homer" (though I am not sure how the of Collected Authors infobox would necessarily differ), and have a section explaining the reason for them. Don't continue to engage in this "métaphysico-théologo-cosmolo-nigologie" just for the sake of it.
With any analytical work, its integrity relies on the integrity of its authors. Authors gain integrity through a strong foundation in their reasoning and in their facts. Ideally, they would provide the names of other authors with whom they share their opinions to back up their statements (just a small hint). Because this is a Wiki, this works authors could be anyone with a computer and internet. It is all that much more important then for the authors to be consice but conclusive in their statements for it to work.
(Phew!) Thanks for letting me get on my soap-box there (not as though you had a choice in the matter but...); I'm done. Oh and please don't discredit the name. Thanks.--Loonybin0 (talk) 00:15, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] All the templates

Whew. I'm worn out with putting templates on this awful article. I cannot believe it was ever nominated for anything. But having said that I now need to give my critique.

The main problem is logic. Some of you want to adopt a narrow point of view, that there was no Homer and biographical information about him is false just because he did not exist. Well, you cannot do that and still talk about the possibility of a single author and the historicity of Homer. If there is no Homer then most of the article just goes away and the universities may as well just fire their Homer professors because now they don't have a job anymore, as pure fantasy is a business for Hollywood.

But apart from the main problem of adopting many stances as the one true stance, each individual section contains so many non-sequiturs I cannot tag them all. Nearly every argument is misstated. No one thinks that Schliemann demonstrated the Trojan War. He demonstrated there was most likely a city called Troy and it most likely was at Hissarlik. And the historicity problem has not much to do with internal inconsistencies. That is a textual problem. The historicity problem is whether or not any of the persons, places, things and events of the poems are historical and starting before Schliemann those questions have had primarily archaeological answers. Was there a settlement at such-and-such a place? Did the boar's tusk helmet exist? And that part about the linguistic continuity between Linear B and Homer is really too much. Let me state here and now that there is no Linear B in Homer and no Homer in Linear B. If you mean, was the Homeric dialect related in any way to Mycenaean Greek, that is not the same question at all.

So, first we have to get off on the right foot. As goes the foundation so goes the house. There are multiple points of view on Homer and multiple Homeric questions and any other stance is going to make logical presentation of the material impossible. You can at most speak of most popular views and the views put forward so far in this article as "most scholars today" and all those other weasel words are actually minority views and sometimes a very small minority.

So, we need some sources on all generalities and we need issues and problems correctly stated. If it did not sound incredibly paranoid I would suggest that certain cliques out there have a vested interest in making sure this article is a bad as possible. And when the views are stated the statements need to be consistent with what is elsewhere in the article.

Now, recently the box I extended was tampered with on the grounds there there is no Homer and therefore all this biographical information is wrong. Well, we don't know if it is right but we don't know if it is wrong either. The Smyrna theory is the most mainstream so I would suggest you put that right back! We need mainsteam here not wierdo off-the-wall theories that Homer was a woman or there was no Homer at all promulgated by Wikipedia editors with loyalties elsewhere than this article.

I want to see a good article and the narrow-viewists have thrown up an obstacle, their narrow view. Of course I care about the article. I would not spend time on it if I did not think it was worth spending time on! So that is why those templates are on there. If the article had passed inspection and had been rated as good you wouldn't be reading this now. So stretch and grow you obstructionists. I will be checking on this from time to time to make what improvements I can and see what its status is but I can't spend all my Wikipedia time on it. If the article has to go down to Hades leaving its words to the dogs and vultures because of the great wrath of Wikipedia editors then so be it.Dave (talk) 05:28, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Dave, I have just read your long post and I am not sure what issues you are actually raising. I really don't see a problem with stating there is no consensus on the historicity of Homer, or the century in which he would have lived. Why is there a "totally disputed" tag here? What are you disputing? You just littered the article with citation requests. That's not helpful. I frankly don't care if Homer was a blind chap from Smyrna. It's a tradition worth reporting, but for all practical purposes, the "Homer" article is on the authorship of the Homeric epics. dab (⁳) 17:07, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Hello Bachman. I am glad you stepped in as I did not really want this to be an individual confrontation. I accept you as a 3rd party. I thought I made the issues clear. Are we going to present Homer as someone totally fictional so that the Homeric Question is solved and closed or are we going to leave open the possibility that the traditional Homer is to some degree true? Is that unclear? Maybe the totally disputed is too strong. The article is after all on the authorship of the epics and not on the biography of Homer. I don't care either if Homer was a blind chap from Smyrna. I just thought that stating he definitely was not was not balanced and NPOV. Another tradition thinks he is a blind chap from Smyrna. So, since we are talking about authorship and the Homer authorship is a possibility, let's not contradict ourselves by asseting there is no Homer. We can say, such and such a school thinks there was no Homer. That's what I was disputing. That's true I did litter the article somewhat with cites and vagues. The things I did mark the article for are still true. It will take a while to change them all. I wanted to make the point that they needed to be changed. So I think the templates were helpful in that regard. I don't object to your taking them off now that the point has been made. The source and biographical-type data is being offloaded onto other articles anyway so those long sections probably will be reduced to introductions to other articles. The intro is still full of generalities but then intros usually are. What I thought was unhelpful and the thing that sparked all this was Achilleus' arbitrary action in making a major assertion without discussion and using only generalities for backup. The templates were the only way I could get him to discuss. I see you have tidied things up a bit. I will take another look possibly taking off the totally disputed tag. I don't mind an article favoring the no-Homer theory, but I do mind the idea that no other theory can be valid. I trust that this winds this up for the time. For the box- well, 8th century is fine and "classics" saves us a lot of trouble and the box does not imply there cannot have been a Homer so it seems OK. Thanks for solving that. Remember that solution in case someone else changes it. As far as my being long-winded is concerned, I only talk when these issues come up and they seem to require words to get the point across. I trust you have got the point now and we can get on to other things.Dave (talk) 18:06, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

obviously, we will observe WP:RS and WP:DUE. That's really all there is to say to it. I am not aware we ever favoured either position. Nor should we, unless academic mainstream clearly swings one way. I am not aware of it doing so. I don't think the question is so much "disputed" in the mainstream than, much rather, regarded as rather moot. dab (⁳) 19:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] outline

A long time ago this outline for improving the article was posted on User:Petrouchka's userpage: [1]. Even though I've never done anything about implementing it, I think the outline is worth following; it has the virtue of concentrating on Homeric poetry, which is what this article is really about. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:34, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

indeed. when we discuss "the date of Homer", we are talking about the date of the poems. This may be obvious to insiders, but it may be worth pointing out to readers in general to avoid the appearance of a "dispute" or "contradiction" where there is none. dab (⁳) 19:36, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree with that all right. The general readership are not educated in classics so you have to "hold their hand" to some degree. Other than that any consistent scheme looks good to me. Since I am working almost exclusively on Grade B articles I am mainly concerned about the correctness and clarity of what it says and how it looks; i.e., the format. I know after my bout with the templates it may not seem so right now but it is. I recognize that there are a lot of different ways to approach a subject. I wonder petrouchka is not working on this article. Maybe he gave up. So what I will be doing here is checking the accuracy and consistency and readability. The outline and new ideas or implementation of old ones I must bow out of. I notice we seem to have got some new interest going. Well the topic is worth it. See you around, minimally I hope.Dave (talk) 21:20, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "chain of custody

what was the earliest known manuscript of Homer and where is it? I know that a genuine ROMAN manuscript of Virgil is in the Vatican, but what about the Illiad

[edit] Lead

I'm modifying the lead, and here's why:

This sentence is a bit wordy. More problematically, Homer is not necessarily the oldest known Greek poet; the Greeks thought Hesiod was earlier, and believed that Orpheus and other poets were earlier. While many moderns like to make Homer the oldest (then you get to say things like "The Iliad is the first and greatest work of Western literature"), there's a pretty fierce controversy over the dating of the poems, such that one could claim Hesiod as the first Greek poet. Also, the Homeric Hymns are usually not considered by modern scholars to be by the same composer as that of the epics.
Two quick points on this. You are right and wrong. 'the Greeks thought' refers to general opinion from the late 5th to early 4th centuries, as we have it. Hesiod is a particular problem, but as early as Herodotus at least (Book 8 from memory) the mythic figures of Musaeus and Orpheus (add Linus etc.) were dismissed as being older than Homer. Secondly your suggested version is wrong, since you says 'Homer is'. Homer is a name attached to epics, about whom legendary material abounds, but we do not know if he existed as an individual. In challenging my prose you completely missed the point. Look at the German wiki article, which is more concise, and on this, quite correct. Some formulation along the lines I have suggested 'name given to' is therefore required. I will address your other changes tomorrow.Nishidani (talk) 22:32, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
I've looked at the German version, and while it's vastly better than our article here, that doesn't mean that it's the best possible version. You sound rather Nagy-like when you say that we can't say "Homer is", and in some ways I agree with you, but I think we should avoid convoluted prose, especially in the lead. Starting "Homer is a legendary ancient Greek poet..." would address your point, I think.
The Herodotus quote you're thinking of is 2.53, "for I believe that Homer and Hesiod were 400 years before my time--and no more than that. It is they who created for the Greeks their theogony;...Those who are spoken of as poets before Homer and Hesiod were, in my opinion, later born." But Herodotus says that's his own opinion; he's disagreeing with what seems to be the common idea that Orpheus, etc. came first. --Akhilleus (talk) 04:25, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
  • Though no secure biographical information has been transmitted about this Homer, these works took shape towards the end of the 8th century BCE in the Ionian colonies of Asia Minor.
Assumes that there's universal agreement on this date, and there isn't. A lot of scholars go for a 7th-century date these days.
Again you misread. 'Took shape' does not mean final composition of what we now have. But the text can be improved. In the meantime name the scholars and the sources, so I can handle each point more precisely.
Well, I'm sorry for misreading, but I think it's pretty natural to understand "took shape" as equivalent to "reached the form that we have now." I suppose that shows that it's best to be precise. One thing to keep in mind also is Graziosi's statement that "Disagreements about the date of Homer...are linked to more fundamental differences over what Homer represents in the first place," i.e. questions of dating are entangled with notions of what/who Homer is. Here's a partial list of the date ranges scholars go for:
9th century: Irad Malkin, Returns of Odysseus (this is an idiosyncratic opinion, and probably not worth mentioning in the article)
8th century: Ian Morris, "Use and Abuse of Homer", Richard Janko, Homer, Hesiod, and the Hymns, Barry Powell, etc. (consensus position for most of 20th century)
7th century: M.L. West, "The Date of the Iliad," Museum Helveticum 52:203-19, W. Burkert, Robin Osborne, Making of Greece pp. 156-160 (dominant position of last 20 years or so, according to Janko)
Nagy's crystallization model, probably most lucidly stated in Homeric Questions Ch. 2, esp. p. 42; poems become gradually more stable over time, w/a definitive period in 6th-4th cent BC (first texts of Homer during this period), and rigid textual stability after 150 BC or so
Sorry that list is incomplete, I can try to fill it in if you think it would be helpful. --Akhilleus (talk) 04:25, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
  • The poems are now generally believed to represent the culmination of a long tradition of orally composed poetry in which the relative weight of an individual poet and of bardic guilds like the Homeridae is much disputed.
It's not so much the relative weight of an individual vs. the Homeridae, but between individual authorship and collective composition.
Then evidently you haven't understood much about what oral composition means. I suggest you reread Parry and Lord onwards. Someone working in an oral tradition always takes on a huge amount of collectively sung material.
I'm sorry, I don't see how what I wrote contradicts what you just said. This sentence seems to be getting at the issue of whether the poems have one (or two) author(s), or whether the poems are the collective creation of many poets, with no single person responsible for the poems' design and cohesion. I differ with what you wrote in the article, because of the importance your text gives to "bardic guilds like the Homeridae"--it's not at all clear that the Homeridae are best characterized as a "guild", and most treatments of the Homeridae and rhapsodes contrast them with the aoidos--the aoidos is a fully oral poet, the rhapsode is a derivative performer of relatively fixed "texts" (see the Burkert article cited in rhapsode); thus, the aoidos is fully part of the process of oral composition, the rhapsode, not so. But the difference between aoidos/rhapsode, as well as who the Homeridae were, are best dealt with in the body of the article (and the details are probably best left to sub-articles)--in the lead, it's better just to focus on the contrast between individual composition/authorship and not mention technical terms like rhapsode. --Akhilleus (talk) 04:25, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
(a)You write:

'it's not at all clear that the Homeridae are best characterized as a "guild".

. Nothing is clear about high antiquity. I had in mind Kirk's reasonable remark:'that there was some sort of guild-organization ihn Chios as early as the 6th century at least, claiming a special relationship with Homer, need not be doubted; and it survived there, apparently in a degenerate form, at least until Plato's time'. I can't think of anything on this subject that cannot be disputed, in wording or detail. But one must start somewhere.Nishidani (talk) 10:30, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
(b)You write:

'most treatments of the Homeridae and rhapsodes contrast them (Homeridai) with the aoidos. the aoidos is a fully oral poet.'

I'm quite aware of the distinction, as I am aware of the fact that Pindar, at Nem.2,1ff. connects Homeridai and aoidoi. I.e.Οθεν περ και Ομηριδαι ραπτων επεων τα πολλ'αοιδοι αρχονται'. It's best to be specific. I don't understand expressions like 'most treatments'(by the way I appreciate the bibliographical list you provided, on request, last night)Nishidani (talk) 10:44, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
  • Antiquity held that a single poet composed these works; modern scholarship is more sceptical.
Actually, there were Hellenistic critics who believed that the epics had separate authors; this should be covered in the body, not the lead.
Indeed they will be. And I was writing the lead. All you need to have done was insert 'generally' to clarify your point.
Ok, I tried to reintegrate this into the text. --Akhilleus (talk) 04:25, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Obviously, the lead is hardly complete; it needs to handle dating in more detail, and it needs to discuss Homeric poetry--what its form and subject is, what the ancients and moderns thought about it. One quote from Aristotle hardly suffices. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:45, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I found the (mis)quote in the text, checked it against Aristotle and gave a proper sourcing. This is a juvenile pastiche of sub-sophomoric quality, and no one for several months has done the clean-up job it requires. I began today, and will be quite happy to go through the piece, if I find other editors ready to help clean the existing muck, rather than essentially revert to what is in any case a text full of lacunae, and flaccid statements. regards Nishidani (talk) 22:43, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
The article obviously needs a lot of work, and I wish you luck in the task and will help where I can, but I do want to make sure that the article reflects the range of opinion in current scholarship (which is quite broad on some points). I think that the authorship/date of the poems is of less concern to the general reader than things like style, themes, and reception. --Akhilleus (talk) 04:25, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Revision

I'll try to deal with the points of the lead in sequence. A general consideration. The lead can only be refinished when we have the substance of the article. To expect perfection in the lead while the text languishes in the disastrous state one finds it in now, is to make a preliminary drafting more arduous than is necessary.

The first point. I am not enamoured of any one approach, Nagy's or any one else's. 'Homer' is a name, attached to the two epics and several other pieces. To state this is not to wed Nagy's thesis. We do not know if the word represents an (a) individual who composed the two epics ascribed to him (b) two individuals, one who composed the Iliad, the other the Odyssey or (3)several compositors (since other hands are at work in the Homeric Hymns, Margites etc., ascribed to 'Homer' in antiquity, there is obviously a technical problem in saying, as does the German text, or as this text did, that 'Homer' is a Greek poet, or the first named Greek poet etc. For these reasons, I think one cannot avoid using a formula of the kind: 'Homer is the name given to' the composer(s) to whom the creation of the two epics, and some other works, was ascribed. An elegant way of addressing this crux, so that we do not prejudice the fact of our lack of knowledge or scholarly consensus, can be worked out. But, as far as I can see, one has no alternative than to write the incipit re 'Homer' in such a way that he is not said to be a poet, unless we begin by saying Greeks thought of him as a single poet. By writing 'Legendary' the phenomena of this crux are saved, and we can leave it at thats for the moment. Nishidani (talk) 09:28, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Move the header authorship debate?

The header text is dominated (cloyed, I'd say) by discussion of authorship, an issue to which a) there is no conclusive resolution and b) there are widely varying academic accounts. This protracted discussion at the top of the page (where the most essential/overview information is supposed to go) is hurting the article as a whole. Your average visitor doesn't want to read "Academic A says this, but B says this and C says this weird thing and that A is an idiot, oh and here are a few more people who say these things." I propose a simplified alternative paragraph:

The identity of Homer is disputed. By tradition "Homer" referred to a single person, but modern scholarship suggests the the epics were composed by separate poets[?], or that the epics are not the creation of any individual, but rather slowly evolved towards their final form over a period of centuries[?]. The scholarly consensus is that "the Iliad and the Odyssey date from the extreme end of the 9th century BC or from the 8th, the Iliad being anterior to the Odyssey, perhaps by some decades."[4]*

  • - The phrase "scholarly consensus" is contradicted b/c it is followed by two separate views in the current article.

This would shorten the header text significantly, and if there is any info I skipped over (I left out the contradicting academic views on the date of composition) it would be much better served with a foot citation rather than a nebulous (not to mention specialized) reference to this-or-that critic.

If you feel it is necessary to keep the information in the article, it should be relegated to the "Problems of authorship" section.

Justin Parnell (talk) 22:00, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree the lead is problematic. Its unclear how much of the opening you are suggesting to replace. I think we still need an opening sentence directly to the point:

Homer (ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος, Homēros) is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Jwy (talk • contribs)

Well, I'm not a fan of the lead as it stands, but the fact that there's a controversy over the authorship of the Homeric poems is one of the essential things to know about this topic. After all, if you're consulting a typical article about an author, you expect to learn when s/he was born/died and what s/he wrote at the beginning. If we have no real biographical information about Homer, and if some people think that there wasn't even such a person, it's pretty hard to say when he lived or died, and saying what he wrote is problematic...and we haven't begun to say anything about oral poetry yet. So sure, the intro may be overly convoluted, but at the same time the topic is inherently complex. Still, the lead sentence that Jwy proposed above might be a place to start. --Akhilleus (talk) 03:36, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I wholeheartedly support Jwy's lead sentence there, though I would also maybe support adding a clause like "although in modern times, the extent of his authorship is debated." Maybe. The subject is inherently complex, sure, but that doesn't mean we hit people with that complexity in the lede. In undergraduate-level classics courses, students continue to be taught (by omission, perhaps, but still) that Homer was one guy, and he wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, the end. Not that this is what we should be telling people, but the question of authorship is not one that should be placed first. The lede should be an (extremely) brief summary of salient points; you put the most general information up front, and save the sticky stuff for later. Ford MF (talk) 11:55, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Well I'm apparently two generations older than many others worrying about the 'complexity' of the lead. It looks straightforward to me. How much paring down to get the simplest gist in an eyeblink do youngsters require these days? The subject is complex, its exposition in the lead is not. Nishidani (talk) 12:06, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Well, I'm hardly a youngster, but I think the fact that the lede takes up an entire screen before you even get to the TOC or the article or what people mean when they say "Homer" is a problem. Ford MF (talk) 12:29, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
The lead to the article on Shakespeare takes up a whole screen, no one objects. I strenuously oppose (post)modern attempts to soundbite the classics, and press for catchy snippet editing of complex narratives. The problem is resolved by clear syntax. What is the hurry in having to scroll down a tad, after reading a full screen for, on checking, 15 seconds? Are we reduced to this anal level of informational reductionism? Cui bono? Nishidani (talk) 15:21, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
The difference is that the lede for Shakespeare contains what we know about him, while the lede for Homer largely consists of what we do not. Prickly problems are best introduced in the article, not the opening paragraph. See also WP:LEDE. Ford MF (talk) 15:38, 10 June 2008 (UTC)