They took the language of the Hittites, a people that existed during the time the war may have been fought, and modern Greek, and traced the changes in the words from Hittite to Homeric to modern. It is precisely how they measure the genetic history of humans, going back and seeing how and when genes alter over time. For example, they looked at cognates, words derived from ancestral words.
There is "water" in English, "wasser" in German, "vatten" in Swedish, all cognates emanating from "wator" in proto-German. However, the Old English "hund" later became "hound" but eventually was replaced by "dog," not a cognate. It replicates with a fidelity that's just astonishing. By documenting the regularity of the linguistic mutations, Pagel and the others have given a timeline to the story of Helen and the men who died for her -- genetics meets the classics.
Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. That geneticists got into such a project should be no surprise, Pagel said. Get smart. Homer is essentially shared. Today we have an author obsession—we want to know biography all the time.
But Homer has no biography. The Iliad and The Odyssey are like Viking longships. Nobody knows who made them, no name is attached to them, there's no written design or drawings.
They're simply the evolved beauty of long and careful tradition. There are even doubts about when they were composed. The usual date is about B. You believe the tradition began much earlier than that. Make your case. My claim is that the poems, especially The Iliad, have their beginnings around B.
The reason I say that has two strands to it. One is that there are large elements of the Homeric stories, particularly The Iliad , that are shared among the Indo-European world as a whole, all the way from north India through Greece to Germanic and Icelandic stories. There are deep elements in Homer that have nothing to do with Greece or the Aegean.
The second thing is that the situation in The Iliad is very clearly not one in which two deeply civilized nations are opposed to each other. The civilized nation in The Iliad is Troy. It's a well-set-up, organized city, where women lead very dignified lives. Outside Troy is this camp of wild barbarians—the Greeks. The Greeks are Homer's barbarians. The atmosphere in the Greek camp is like gang life in the more difficult parts of modern industrialized cities.
All ideas of rule and law and love count for nothing. The only thing that makes sense is revenge and self-assertion. And that picture of the Greeks doesn't make sense any later than about to B.
After that, the Greeks had arrived in the Mediterranean and started to create a civil society. Before that, they were essentially tribes from the steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian—nomadic, male-dominated, violent. That's the essential drama of Homer: this beautiful city trying to defend itself against these increasingly lawless, violent warriors outside.
That's what The Iliad is about. Bernard Knox , the renowned Homer scholar, says that 3, years haven't changed the human condition. We're still lovers and victims of violence, and as long as we are, Homer will be read as the truest interpretation of humankind. Can we love Homer without loving violence? I think Homer does not love violence in the end. Homer dramatizes violence as one of the aspects of the human condition, but he doesn't celebrate it.
It's a grave misunderstanding to think that Homer is about how beautiful the violent warrior is. The key to that comes at the end of The Iliad. You've had these terrible scenes where Achilles, the great Greek warrior, has killed Hector, the prince of Troy, and tied him to the back of his chariot and dragged him round the walls of Troy with his whole family looking down from the ramparts.
It's not some elegant funeral procession. It's a hectic, brutal moment, and we can only read that with horror in our minds. Michael Longley , the great Irish poet, calls The Iliad "an ocean of sadness. You say these are essentially authorless works. Are there any manuscripts? Tell us about Venetus A. Homer's works were orally transmitted and orally performed poems, ever changing in the mouths of the different people who learned them and told them again.
The Iliad survived for hundreds, if not thousands, of years as a spoken poem and was eventually written down, around to B. But no manuscripts survive from that time. The earliest that survive were found rolled up under the heads of mummified Greek Egyptians in the Egyptian deserts from about to B. But they're just fragments, not the whole Iliad. The oldest complete Iliad is a manuscript found in the doge's library in Venice.
A French scholar discovered it at the end of the 18th century, which is why it's called the Venetus A. It had come to Venice from Constantinople-Byzantium, where it had probably been made in about A.
More importantly, it contained all kinds of marginal notes, the so-called scholia, which had been made by the great editors of The Iliad in the Greek city of Alexandria sometime between the first century B. So what you have in Venetus A is not only the text of The Iliad but also what these ancient commentators thought about it.
One of the exciting things that emerge from that is that in the early days it seems there was no such thing as a single Iliad, no one fixed text, but this wild and variable tradition of the stories, with many different versions in different parts of the Mediterranean, endlessly interacting with itself, like a braided stream in the mountains.
That's a very exciting idea for me—that texts are not fixed, unitary objects but like the mental bloodstream of a whole people. Homer enriched his descriptive story with the liberal use of simile and metaphor, which has inspired a long path of writers behind him. His structuring device was to start in the middle— in medias res — and then fill in the missing information via remembrances.
Tolkien 's The Fall of Gondolin. Other works have been attributed to Homer over the centuries, most notably the Homeric Hymns , but in the end, only the two epic works remain enduringly his.
He was right. The Iliad and The Odyssey have provided not only seeds but fertilizer for almost all the other arts and sciences in Western culture. For the Greeks, Homer was a godfather of their national culture, chronicling its mythology and collective memory in rich rhythmic tales that have permeated the collective imagination.
We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, together with Socrates and Plato, laid much of the groundwork for western philosophy. Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher considered to be the main source of Western thought. He was condemned to death for his Socratic method of questioning.
Ancient Greek philosopher Plato founded the Academy and is the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence in Western thought. Euripides was one of the great Athenian playwrights and poets of ancient Greece, known for the many tragedies he wrote, including 'Medea' and 'The Bacchae.
Ancient Greek statesman Pericles, leader of Athens from — B. Famed Roman poet Virgil is best known for his national epic, the 'Aeneid. Lord Byron is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and is best known for his amorous lifestyle and his brilliant use of the English language.
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