Homer (8th century), the blind bard from Chios, was recognized by Plato and Aristotle, as well as the historian Herodotus (5th/4th century BCE) as the poet who composed the Iliad and Odyssey.
Zeus starts the Trojan War to bring an end to the race of heroes by having Helen kidnapped. The judgment of Paris (son of King Priam of Troy) at Thetis and Peleus’s wedding. The Odyssey describes the war’s aftermath and the Greek heroes’ return home, especially Odysseus’s wanderings. The Odyssey is, therefore, among other things, a nostos, or homecoming. Nostalgia, or a longing for the past, is a cognate of the word.
Epic or epikos (Greek) comes from the Greek word epos, ‘word, song,’ and is related to eipein ‘say.’ This oral expression of song is about the feeling and ethical intent of the speaker rather than the form or subject matter. It is an emotive experience. An epic poem tells a story of deep feeling and ethical significance. You may see this in the stock epithets and traditional phrases. For instance, to speak of Dawn (bk. 5, 1-3) personified, as Homer often does, instead of saying, “the sun came up,” charges the natural world with personality, suggesting its involvement in human affairs.
Elements of the Odyssey’s narrative structure:
- oral tradition, it is being sung
- it has repetitive elements
- a set meter
- uses epithets
- begins in medias res
- common themes, such as revenge, recklessness, belly & consumption, hospitality, sacrifice to the gods, singers and bards (storytellers), homecoming, battle, deception, loyalty, fate, metis (cunning, wisdom, skill and craft), family, kingship, and restoration of power.
Homer’s epics were sung for entertainment and in poetry contests. They were works of memory and spoken aloud even after the papyrus scroll was used and these poems were first written down.
In classical hexameter, the six feet follow these rules:
- A foot can be made up of two long syllables (– –), a spondee; or a long and two short syllables, a dactyl (– υ υ).
- The first four feet can contain either one of them.
- The fifth is almost always a dactyl, and last must be a spondee.
I begin | my song with | the Heli | konian | Muses whose | domain
dactyl | dactyl | dactyl | dactyl | dactyl | spondee
