Homeric Question - Homer's Time Frame

Homer's Time Frame

Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis", wherein a non-literate singer dictates the poem to a literate scribe in the 6th century BC or earlier. The voice of antiquity is unanimous in declaring that Peisistratus, the tyrant of Athens, first committed the poems of Homer to writing and placed them in the order in which we now read them. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems did not exist until established by Alexandrian editors in the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC).

The modern debate began with the Prolegomena of Friedrich August Wolf (1795). According to Wolf, the date of writing is among the first questions in the textual criticism of Homer. Having satisfied himself that writing was unknown to Homer, Wolf considers the real mode of transmission, which he purports to find in the Rhapsodists, of whom the Homeridae were an hereditary school. Wolf reached the conclusion that the Iliad and Odyssey could not have been composed in the form in which we know them without the aid of writing. They must therefore have been, as Bentley has said, a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, loose songs not collected together in the form of an epic poem until about 500 years after their original composition. This conclusion Wolf supports by the character attributed to the Cyclic poems (whose want of unity showed that the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey must be the work of a later time), by one or two indications of imperfect connection, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the authenticity of certain parts.

This view is extended by the complicating factor of the period of time now referred to as the "Greek Dark Ages". This period, which ranged from approximately 1250 to 750 BC, is estimated to have been immediately preceded by the historical counterpart to Homer's Trojan War. The composition of the Iliad, on the other hand, is placed immediately following the Greek Dark Age period. The conflict arises over the question of how Homer could have written about events that preceded his own life by several centuries. This question is complicated by the poet's amazingly accurate depiction of a Mycenaean civilization of which he was not a part, while also containing elements of the Greek culture of his own time.

Further controversy surrounds the difference in composition dates between the Iliad and Odyssey. It seems that the latter was composed at a later date than the former because the works' differing characterisations of the Phoenicians align with differing Greek popular opinion of the Phoenicians between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, when their skills began to hurt Greek commerce. Whereas Homer's description of Achilles's shield in the Iliad exhibits minutely detailed metalwork that characterised Phoenicial crafts, they are characterised in the Odyssey as "manifold scurvy tricksters".