Was Homer a Marge?

10 comments on “Was Homer a Marge?”

1. T-Bone says:
   August 29th, 2006 at 2:12 pm

   Jesus, this is the kind of tripe that makes modern liberal arts studies such a joke at universities.

   You take a literature class and what do you do, study the aesthetic power of shakespeare? No, you read articles on how he was probably a homosexual.

   You take a philosophy class expecting to learn about Socrates mind, instead you get a lecture on how Socrates was black and all greek philosophy is stolen from Egypt.

   Nietzsche was gay. Cleopatria was a man. Judas was a marian.
   etc. etc.

   what a joke.

2. T-Bone says:
   August 29th, 2006 at 2:16 pm

   I mean, his entire argument is “well, a lot of other poets were women”

   This counts as scholarship these days?

3. rachel says:
   August 30th, 2006 at 11:23 am

   Samuel Butler argued for this in the nineteenth century. Always fun to see Victorian crackpottery make a comeback.

4. Franklin Carter says:
   August 30th, 2006 at 2:36 pm

   The key sentence in the story is this one:

   “Aside from the poems themselves, no concrete clues exist to identify their author . . .”

   When no evidence exists, reputable scholars draw no conclusions. They suspend judgment.

   Professor Dalby can argue for the femininity of the poet, but he’s just speculating.

   I’m going to forward this Discovery story to my friend Tom in Greece. Tom is a classical scholar who reads and writes in Greek. I’m sure he’ll have better information.

5. T-Bone says:
   August 31st, 2006 at 8:44 am

   “When no evidence exists, reputable scholars draw no conclusions. They suspend judgment.”

   Yep. And, while it kind of sounds weird to say it, I agree with the “emeritus” professor.

   If there is no evidence who the author was except for the myth of the blind poet Homer AND the book (here the Iliad) reads like a stereotypical male war epic in a lot of ways, why assume anything else?

6. Anne C. says:
   August 31st, 2006 at 12:48 pm

   I think the best thing about this story is the name Snodgrass.

7. Franklin Carter says:
   August 31st, 2006 at 3:47 pm

   My friend Tom (the classical scholar in Greece) responded to my e-mail yesterday. Tom’s letter is long, and I didn’t seek permission to reprint all of it, but he says in part:

   “Basically, there is no Homer, only generation after generation of people improvising slightly on a basic story (which solidifies when Pisistratus has it written down in the fifth century).”

   Tom supports this point of view by citing historical anachronisms in the Illiad and the Odyssey. He says, for example, that the Illiad refers to “the use of chariots and one-on-one combat at the same time, when in fact these belonged to two different eras.”

   “Millennia before the advent of archaeology, or even the modern notion of history,” Tom continues, “a bard or rhapsode improvising along would very easily insert details which some other rhapsode had added centuries before and which had been passed on to him.”

   In short, “Homer” is ascribed to be the author of epic poems that were in fact created or modified by unknown Greek poets working in an oral tradition over several generations.

   If the Illiad and the Odyssey were created by several people, then I suppose some of them could have been women. (That’s my guess, not Tom’s.) But we still don’t know the names, and hence the genders, of the contributors. We cannot say for certain that they were all men, all women, or both men and women.

8. Anne C. says:
   August 31st, 2006 at 6:59 pm

   Maybe we should ask Russell Smith what he thinks.

9. ZW says:
   August 31st, 2006 at 9:35 pm

   Didn’t Christopher Logue write The Iliad? I’m confused.

10. Franklin Carter says:
    September 1st, 2006 at 8:12 am

    I’d read a Russell Smith newspaper column on the “classic” male fashions worn by the ancient Greeks.

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