Odyssey of Homer - Harvard Classics - Volume 22 PDF ebook
By the ancient Greeks the authorship of their two great works, the *'Iliad" and the "Odyssey," was ascribed to Homer. Tradition as to the birthplace of this poet varied greatly, but the place most favored was Smyrna in Asia Minor. It was related also that the poet was blind, that he made his hom£ in the island of Chios, and that he died in Los.
The siege of Troy, which forms the subject of the "Iliad" and is the occasion of the wanderings of Odysseus, is unknown to history. Modern archaeological research has, indeed, unearthed in Asia Minor a site which may plausibly be identified with the Homeric city, and it is entirely possible that here there once occurred a struggle between two peoples inhabiting the shores of the Aegean Sea; but no discovery has been or is likely to be made such as to render Homer's story of the war in any strict sense historical.
Whatever may be the truth as to the method of composition of the two epics, it may safely be surmised that they were preceded by a mass of legend that had in time gained a certain amount of cohesion and become in a sense national. But the constituent elements of this legend would have come together from a great variety of sources, and many incidents in both poems can be paralleled in the folk tales of widely scattered peoples.
This story of the blinding of the Cyclops, Polyphe- mus, is found as a separate tale in several countries where no Greek influence can be traced; the adventure in the isle of Circe appears in an Indian collection of tales; the descent into Hades is told by the South Sea Islanders; and the central situation of the return of a far-traveled warrior to a wife who fails to recognize him occurs in stories all over the world.
In the "Odyssey," these and a hundred other incidents are combined into a single plot of the most admirable structure, with almost perfect unity of atmosphere, the whole being placed in the social setting of the kingly age of Greece.