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HOMER

Homer (Homeros) was an ancient Greek poet. Nothing is known with certainty about him, some even doubting whether he ever existed. The most probable opinion is that he was a native of some locality on the sea-board of Asia Minor, and that he lived between 950 and 850 BC. The earliest mention of the name of Homer is found in Xenophanes in the 6th century BC. The common statement that he was blind may safely be discarded. The poems that have been generally attributed to Homer are the Iliad and Odyssey. The Batrachomyomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, and certain hymns to the gods also passed under his name, though belonging to a later period.

The Iliad in its present form consists of twenty-four books, and tells the story of the siege of Troy from the quarrel of Achilles with Agamemnon to the burial of Hector, with subordinate episodes.

The Odyssey is also in twenty-four books, and records the adventures of Odysseus (Ulysses) on his return voyage to his home in Ithaca after the fall of Troy.

Even as early as the beginning of the Christian era, certain Greek critics (the Separatists) maintained that the two poems were the work of different poets, but the general belief continued to be that there was one author for both. The entire system of Homeric criticism, however, was revolutionized in 1795 by F. A. Wolf in his Prolegomena to Homer. He asserted that the Iliad and Odyssey were not originally committed to writing, and were not two complete and independent poems, but originally a series of songs of different poets (Homer and others), celebrating single exploits of heroes, and first connected as wholes by Pisistratus, about 540 BC. Some of Wolf's arguments have been proved erroneous, but since his time the old views in regard to the Iliad and Odyssey have been held by comparatively few of the ablest scholars, though what theory is now the most common is difficult to say.

Among the most conservative theories is that which assigns to Homer a central or basal portion of both Iliad and Odyssey, to which additions by other poets were gradually united; but generally the Odyssey is regarded as of somewhat later date than the Iliad, and not by the poet who produced the Iliad in its original form.
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