Why Read Homer: His Transcendent Legacy

By Adam Sedia

Featured in New Lyre Spring 2021

Why should we read about the gory details of the siege of a Bronze-Age city half a world away, or the fantastic marine adventures of a king of that same age and place? What does reading Homer have to benefit us in our day? Before answering this question it should be remarked: but we do.  

Against all odds, not one but two ancient epics of Homer have survived. They continue to be translated and re-translated, read, taught, and adapted for film and television. The question, then is less “Does Homer have a place?” than “Why does Homer continue to have a place?” 

This essay does not argue so much that Homer should continue to be read as much as explore why Homer continues to be read. The stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey are so familiar that they are known almost second-nature. Delving past this edifice of culture familiarity and into the texts themselves reveals a startling originality and a sense of human emotions so perceptive that the Bronze-Age characters and their interactions seem shockingly familiar to us. The ability to transcend time and place through human characteristics is the key to the timelessness of Homer’s poetry. 

I. Who was Homer? 

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scholars began to question the very existence of Homer as an individual, instead viewing the two epics as collections of different songs assembled into a disjointed whole. (West, pp. 384-85.) After studies of Balkan oral epic poetry conducted in the early twentieth century, however, a new consensus has emerged that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are each the work of a single author who worked with earlier material to assemble a narrative with a single overall design. (Id., pp. 386-88.) Though some scholars date the authorship as early as the tenth or ninth century B.C., the present consensus places it most likely between 750 and 600 B.C. (Id., pp. 391-92.) 

Some scholarship attributes the Iliad and the Odyssey to different authors based on differences in style and worldview, with the author of the Odyssey imitating the style of the Iliad. (Id., p. 388.) Still others refuse to contradict the consensus of antiquity that a single author produced both poems. (Id., pp. 388-89.)  

This article treats Homer as a real man, a poet, who authored not only the Iliad but also the Odyssey as integral works, as well as the Homeric Hymns. This view, not unintentionally, coincides with how the ancients viewed Homer.  

Perhaps we would do well to respect the ancients’ judgment on that matter. After all, they existed closer in time to the real Homer than we did. And indeed, the existence of Troy and the Trojan War themselves were deemed mere fables until Heinrich Schliemann unearthed archeological evidence of both Troy and the Mycenaean civilization in the nineteenth century. Now, the world, the cities, and the kings about which Homer sang are matters of the archaeological record. Is it helpful to second-guess the ancients’ attribution to Homer, who were closer in time to him than he was to the events of the Trojan War?