Homer
Homer is hard not to read as a unified and intelligible author. However, it is difficult to avoid feeling at the same time that the Homeric poems are, to some degree, falling apart. Similar phrases and epithets keep recurring in different places with slightly new emphases, and narrative elements in the poems seem often shadily to repeat one another. Achilles is often swift of foot; Hector is very often called ‘horse-taming’; encounters between warriors seem often to be governed by flexible but discernible laws. These features—that modern scholars would attribute to the oral composition of the poems—give the impression that the Iliad and the Odyssey stem from a unified vision, since many of the new turns of phrase that one encounters read like variant versions of idioms that one has already met, and several narrative episodes—say council scenes—seem like revisions of ones that have gone before.
Keywords: Homer, poems, Achilles, Hector, Iliad, Odyssey, epithets, oral composition
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .