The Iliad & The Odyssey by Homer (Full Version)

by Homer

Overview

While Homer's existence as a historical person is still a topic of debate, the writings attributed to the name have made their mark not only on Greek history and literature, but upon western civilization itself. Homer's epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, laid the foundation upon which Ancient Greece developed not only its culture, but its societal values, religious beliefs, and practice of warfare as well.

This publication features the Samuel Butler translation, and while it strays from the poetic style reproduced by more well known translators like Robert Fagles and Robert Fitzgerald, the vision of the epics as if they were prose found in modern novels take their best form under Butler's most capable hand.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013717725
Publisher:	Maran State Books
Publication date:	01/04/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	243,701
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Homer (ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος, Homēros) is a legendary ancient
Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic
poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The ancient Greeks generally
believed that Homer was a historical individual, but modern
scholars are skeptical: no reliable biographical information has
been handed down from classical antiquity, and the poems themselves
manifestly represent the culmination of many centuries of oral
story-telling and a well-developed "formulaic" system of poetic
composition. According to Martin West, "Homer" is "not the name of
a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name." The poems
are now widely regarded as the culmination of a long tradition of
orally composed poetry, but the way in which they reached their
final written form, and the role that an individual poet, or poets,
played in this process is disputed. By the reckoning of scholars
like Geoffrey Kirk, both poems were created by an individual genius
who drew much of his material from various traditional stories.
Others, like Martin West, hold that the epics were composed by a
number of poets. Gregory Nagy maintains that the epics are not the
creation of any individual; rather, they slowly evolved towards
their final form over a period of centuries and, in this view, are
the collective work of generations of poets. The date of Homer's
existence was controversial in antiquity and is no less so today.
Herodotus said that Homer lived 400 years before his own time,
which would place him at about 850 BC; but other ancient sources
gave dates much closer to the supposed time of the Trojan War. For
modern scholarship, "the date of Homer" refers to the date of the
poems' conception as much as to the lifetime of an individual. 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.",i.e.
somewhat earlier than Hesiod, and that the Iliad is the oldest work
of western literature. Over the past few decades, some scholars
have been arguing for a 7th-century date. Those who believe that
the Homeric poems developed gradually over a long period of time,
however, generally give a later date for the poems: according to
Nagy, they only became fixed t