Exploring beyond the Odyssey

If we were to leap out of the pages of the epic, the best place to start would be the one from whom the story is said to have first emerged. Homer. The author of the Odyssey is a being of many mysteries. One of the greatest mysteries lies in the very existence of Homer! Scholars have grown puzzled about the true identity of Homer for centuries, and have constantly debated the conundrum of whether Homer was a single author, a group of people, or even a name used by a lineage of writers. Samuel Butler, an author from the early 19th Century, even theorised that Homer was not a man but a young Sicilian woman! This mystery, and the journey to study and uncover it, came to be known as the Homeric question. Famed scholars and critics of history, including Richard Bentley, the founder of historical philology, and Friedrich August, the founder of modern philology, have emphasised and spoken upon the fluid-like nature of the text, which gave it the structure of an oral narrative. Aspects like repeated phrases and the manner in which the text is delivered formulated the theory that the Odyssey, alongside the Iliad, were both products of oral-formulaic composition. This is where oral poets improvise and create poetry through repetitions and ready-made or established phrases. Two pioneers in the study and research of Homeric epics, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, pointed out that the repetitions found in these kinds of epics were inherited from the poet’s ancestors, and were known as “formulas”. So, it was theorised that Homer had passed down the narration of the Odyssey through oral means. However, despite the mystery behind Homer’s appearance, there exist many visual artworks of the poet and how many perceive the mysterious identity. How is this? Well, that would have to do with the fact that they are visual representations of what each artist believed Homer to look like. Also, theories on the poet’s appearance had been made by writers from ancient times. For example, the word Homeros holds two prominent meanings. One being ‘hostage’, which made people believe that Homer had been a captive or born into captivity, and the other being ‘blind’, which created numerous visuals and artworks of the poet being portrayed as blind. It served as a likely piece of evidence that the epic was orally narrated. It was also believed to be no coincidence that one of the characters of the Odyssey, Demodocus (the poet who performed three narrative songs during Odysseus’s stay at Phaeacia), was described as blind.