Wrong, but not bullshit! The final version of the Iliad and much but not all of the text was almost certainly the work of a single individual, who we call Homer. Whether or not the same individual composed the Odyssey is still a matter of debate. There are details in the Iliad which offer strong evidence that earleir tales and versions were being woven into the poet's own work creating contradictions within it. Critics differ on how to handle these. A particular case is the varying number of persons involved in the embassy to plead with Achilles. There are a few details in it which may be very ancient, such as a boar's tooth helment and the body shield of Ajax, which the poet almost certainly had never seen examples of but which are accurately described. So fragments of the poem may be several centuries old. But the account James gives, while still believed by some, is almost certainly incorrect. It is bullshit to call it mere bullshit.
It is hard to believe that the Odyssey and the Iliad were by the same person. And given the crudeness of early writing technology, I find it impossible to believe that they were the result of written compositionl After all Milton, not trained in an oral tradition, nevertheless composed PL orally. And managed to weave all sorts of subtle ties into the poem.
Carrol
Chris Doss wrote:
>
> It's sort of interesting that nobody in ancient Greece believed this to my knowledge, which is probably because it is bullshit. There actually probably was a poet named Homer who composed the basics of the poems.
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
>
> Aristocratic privilege? Homer? What could that even mean? 'Homer', as Giambattista Vico explained more than three hundred years ago, was not an historic individual, but the collective name for a folktale teller.
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