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  • CHAPTER XXXIX (b) - THE HOMERIC POEMS AS HISTORY

  • Edited by I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, E. Sollberger
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 September 1975, pp 820-850

  • Summary

    Oral tradition in an age of illiteracy also included oral poetical tradition. The Iliad and Odyssey are traditional poems which incorporate elements from the Bronze Age background of their formal subjects, from the Ionian environment of the singers to whom the poems in their developed form belonged. The evidence of language takes on a new importance against the background of archaism and innovation. The Homeric language is an artificial amalgam, in which a predominantly Ionic dialect is interspersed with Arcado-Cypriot, Aeolic, and even a few Attic forms. The degree of detailed Bronze Age knowledge preserved in the poems does suggest that heroic poetry on this subject must have established itself at least within some two or three generations of the final Mycenaean cataclysm around 1125 BC. The chapter also discusses the continuity and discontinuity of tradition from Bronze Age down to Homer, before ending with a note on the poems during the Dark Age and after.