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The Search for the Real Homer1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Extract

I am not of course going to talk about a very concrete person, a little bearded man who lived in Chios or Smyrna. Yet that there was someone called Homer, who was primarily responsible for the creation of the Iliad at least, I take for granted, and accordingly spare you the old jokes. They applied to an entirely different situation in scholarship from the one we have today, and the cause of the difference is the realization that the Homeric poems are in essence oral rather than written poetry.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1973

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References

page 124 note 2 Fenik, B., Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad (Hermes Einzelschriften xxi, Wiesbaden, 1968), especially 6 f.Google Scholar

page 125 note 1 See e.g. my Homer and the Epic (paperback, Cambridge, 1965), ch. 1.Google Scholar

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page 127 note 1 Homer and the Epic, 192–7.Google Scholar

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