Norwich bulletin., 1922-07-27
Famous Literary Mysteries
Did Homer Write the nIiad and the
 Odyssey?

Did Homer Write the IIiad and the
 Odyssey?
 Was Homer a blind poet of genius ranking with the greatest of singers or did the Homeric poems, as they have come down to us, represent the work of many poets whose writing were moulded into the Iliad and Odyssey by some an- cient editor? That Homer is histor- ieal person there has never been any doubt. Seven cities of ancient Greece through which, according to tradition, the living Homer begged his bread, claimed the honor of his birth when he was dead. But that controversy was mild compared with that of twenty-five scholars of the world took sides in de- batting the problem of the Hemeric poems.
 The ancient Greeks never doubted the historical existence of Homer. Although he was 'the poet" to them in a special sense, yet they knew nothing of him as a person. There are eight Greek bio- graphies of him extant, but none of them have any historical value, one having been written by Plutarch and another falsely ascribed to Herodotus
 Homer was generally assumed to have lived a century or a century and a half after the Trojan war (B. c. 11S3), but others made the period as late as $50 B. C. But scholars no longer ask where Homer was born or where he lived, but in what regions and tribes of Greece epic poetry was perfected, and in what centuries the Iliad and Odyssey received their present form. Not that all would deny that any poet Homer ever lived, but for the reason that all authentic in- formation regarding him perished be- yoHd recovery. Even in his poems his personality is kept entirely in the back ground.
 Certain critics taking the meaning of the name Homer to mean united pre- sented the argument that the name did not apply to an individual, but was ra- ther used to designate the members of guild of Doet-singers
 Until the nineteenth century most scholars thought the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey analogous to that of the Paradise Lost, written by a single poet on a definite plan. In 1795 Freder- iclz August Wolf. of Halle, published a famous volume of prolegomena to Ho- mar, in which he maintained that the art of writing was unknown to the Greeks of Honer's time; that such long poems would not and could not have been composed without the aid of writ ing; that the different says constitut- ing them were not put together until the sixth century before Christ, and that the Iliad and Odyssey were not by the same author. Wolf's arguments are not all convincing, but his work gave the 1 first strong impetus to what is called 1 the higher criticism of ancient litera- ture''
 In 1887 Laehmann, of Berlin, brought | forward arguments from internal evi- dence the original unity of the poems urging that inconsistencies prove a diff | ference of authorship. Some parts ot the poem are evidently suggested by other parts so that now scholars are | pretty well agreed that some books and passages are of comparative latt l origin, while in the ultimate analysis | men are still widely divided. 1 Recent discoveries have somewhat discredited the theories Of the scholars mentioned, for we knew that Greek so- 1 ciety in the time assigned to Homer
 was by no means primitive but was fal older in an advanced civilization. espec | iany suited. with it's wealthy and lux urious courts, to foster poets to sing ot | glorious deeds; also that writing Is faI | older in Greece than Wolf supposed. The 1 controversy is still continuing among | scholars, as to whether Homer is re
 sponsible for the fine poetry credited tC 1 him.