Homer
Homer is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, widely thought to be the first extant works of Western literature. He is considered by many to be the earliest and most important of all the Greek writers, and the progenitor of the whole Western literary tradition. He was a poetic pioneer who stood at a pivotal point in the evolution of Greek society from pre-literate to literate, from a centuries old bardic tradition of oral verse to the then new technique of alphabetic writing.
Nothing definite is known of Homer the historical man, and indeed we do not know for sure that such a man ever existed. However, of the many conflicting traditions and legends that have grown up around him, the most common and most convincing version suggests that Homer was born at Smyrna in the Ionian region of Asia Minor (or possibly on the island of Chios), and that he died on the Cycladic island of Ios.
Establishing an accurate date for Homer's life also presents significant difficulties as no documentary record of the man's life is known to have existed. Indirect reports from Herodotus and others generally date him approximately between 750 and 700 BCE.
The characterization of Homer as a blind bard by some historians is partly due to translations of the Greek "homêros," meaning "hostage" or "he who is forced to follow," or, in some dialects, "blind." Some ancient accounts depict Homer as a wandering minstrel, and a common portayal is of a blind, begging singer who travelled around the harbour towns of Greece, associating with shoemakers, fisherman, potters, sailors and elderly men in the town gathering places.
Exactly what Homer was responsible for writing is likewise largely unsubstantiated. The Greeks of the 6th and early 5th centuries BCE tended to use the label “Homer” for the whole body of early heroic hexameter verse. This included not only The Iliad and The Odyssey, but also the whole Epic Cycle of poems relating the story of the Trojan War (also known as the Trojan Cycle), as well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and other works, such as the Homeric Hymns and the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia (The Frog-Mouse War).
By around 350 BCE, the consensus had arisen that Homer was responsible for just the two outstanding epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Stylistically they are similiar, and one view holds that The Iliad was composed by Homer in his maturity, while The Odyssey was a work of his old age. Other parts of the Epic Cycle (e.g., Kypria, Aithiopus, Little Iliad, The Sack of Ilion, The Returns and Telegony) are now considered to be almost certainly not by Homer. The Homeric Hymns and Epigrams of Homer, despite the names, were almost certainly written significantly later, and therefore not by Homer himself.
Some maintain that the Homeric poems are dependent on an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets. The Greek alphabet was introduced (adapted from a Phoenician syllabary) in the early 8th century BCE, so it is possible that Homer himself (if indeed he was a single, real person) was one of the first generation of authors who were also literate. At any rate, it seems likely that Homer's poems were recorded shortly after the invention of the Greek alphabet, and third-party references to The Iliad appear as early as about 740 BCE.
The language used by Homer is an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with mixtures from certain other dialects such as Aeolic Greek. It later served as the basis of Epic Greek, the language of epic poetry, typically written in dactylic hexameter verse.
In the Hellenistic period, Homer appears to have been the subject of a hero cult in several cities, and there is evidence of a shrine devoted to him in Alexandria by Ptolemy IV Philopator in the late 3rd century BCE.
Dactylic Hexameter:
The meter consists of lines made from six ("hexa") feet. In strict dactylic hexameter, each of these feet would be a dactyl, but classical meter allows for the substitution of a spondee in place of a dactyl in most positions. Specifically, the first four feet can either be dactyls or spondees more or less freely. The fifth foot is frequently a dactyl (around 95% of the time in Homer). The sixth foot is always a spondee, though it may be anceps. Thus the dactylic line most normally looks as follows:
— U | — U | — U | — U | — u u | — X
Hexameters are frequently enjambed, which helps to create the long, flowing narrative of epic. They are generally considered the most grandiose and formal meter.
An English language example of dactylic hexameter, in quantitative meter:
Down in a | deep dark | hole sat an | old pig | munching a | bean stalk
As the absurd meaning of this example demonstrates, quantitative meter is extremely difficult to construct in English. Here is an example in normal stress meter (the first line of Longfellow's "Evangeline"):
This is the | forest pri | meval. The | murmuring | pines and the | hemlocks