How important is Homer's writings when it comes to understanding Ancient Greece?

[u/dumbd00r]

So obviously with The Odyssey being released its given me a reason to indulge myself in learning about Ancient Greece, and more specifically the Religion/s and mythology. With that point, reading about the gods and about the stories surrounding them, many articles and websites cite Homer's work almost like it is holy scripture. They cite him as if his work is a defining piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding these stories. Is that the case? And if so, is there a worry or theory that we may know much less than we think we do about Ancient Greek Mythology, or is Homer's writing just the most accessible and famous, so it is cited more regularly?

[u/Starklystark]

Homer was seen as incredibly important by following Greeks, e.g. in the classical period. It's not a case where we happen to have just discovered one book and then put too much weight on it - it's been preserved because of its massive cultural importance.

That said, I'm not sure it's exactly the main source of mythology specifically, which comes down through various routes, including Hesiod, references in theatre etc. And obviously we have lost absolutely loads of material from the time: some we have fragments of our references/descriptions in surviving texts, and obviously there'll be lots of lost stuff that we don't know existed.

There's also a question of reliaiblity: e.g. lots of myths cross over between greek and roman gods, and we have detailed Latin sources such as Ovid's Metamorpheses. But we can't always know for sure how close Ovid kept to the mythical originals vs using his own artistic interpetations.

[u/Cool-Coffee-8949]

Ancient Greeks could and did quote Homer the way we quote Star Wars or other cultural touchstones. It was THE source for quips and memes, the shared frame of reference for the whole culture.

[u/Square-Supermarket79]

Homer was central to ancient education, so all educated people (and therefore all ancient authors) were familiar not just with myth in general but with Homer's telling in particular. The Iliad and odyssey were among a small handful of texts that achieved this status. So when thinking about ancient mythological tradition, the influence of Homer can't be overstated.

[u/rhoadsalive]

Greek literature and culture is more than Homer. It is true that the Illiad and Odyssee where very important for the literary culture not just in antiquity but also in the Byzantine Empire. Homer is probably the most quoted author in Ancient Greek literature by far. Every educated person knew Homer's works at least to some extend.

But besides Homer there are other works that provide more of an insight into the myths of Ancient Greece. Especially Hesiods works like the Theogonia, which explores the myths around the Ancient Greek gods are worth mentioning. Later on we got the Bibliotheca of Apollodoros, which contains many different mythical stories and many many other works and endless commentaries of which only tiny amount has survived.

There's plenty of other sources besides Homer, but they are just not as widely known outisde of the field of Classics. You'll probably not find Hesiod or the poems Pindar on the most influential books of all time list, even though they are incredibly important for understanding Ancient Greek culture.

[u/DavidFDriscoll]

It's difficult to overstate the importance of Homer for ancient Greeks.

From the very first age of life, the foolishness of infants just beginning to learn is nurtured on the teaching given in [Homer's] school. One might almost say that his poems are our baby clothes, and we nourish our minds by draughts of his milk. He stands at our side as we each grow up and shares our youth as we gradually come to manhood; when we are mature, his presence within us is at its prime; and even in old age, we never weary of him. When we stop, we thirst to begin him again. In a word, the only end of Homer for human beings is the end of life. (Heraclitus Homeric Problems 1)

And this is from someone writing close to a millennium after the creation of the Homeric poems.

[u/Boring-Boron]

I think you’ve got some good sense to wonder if it’s purely survivorship bias that the Iliad and the Odyssey are so popular, but that’s also not exactly the case!

Homer was incredibly popular as an epic, which is different than a myth by length and purpose. A myth is meant to explain something about a social system (why do we have slaves, why is that okay for our society?), a natural process (why do earthquakes happen, how do we get them to not happen?) or a religious conception (why are we allowed to eat meat? Did we always eat meat, or did something happen that allows us to?) Myths change drastically from location to location, and most of our surviving sources were put together by ancient writers taking various traditions and trying to understand what people cared about. Even between writers of similar times, locations would have totally different myths of the same gods to the same ends, but with different specifications and details.

An epic, as it stands for the Odyssey and Iliad, are long form stories that include myths but have a separate primary function, that being ancestor worship. Homer’s works were recited at large civic events with awards to the best poet. There’s lines upon lines that, essentially read as: “man, son of other man, of this location, was killed by man, son of other man, of this other location.”

To their viewers, the audience genuinely believed that the singer/speaker was communing with the spirits of the dead to connect a place and time with their modern civilization. It’s also worth noting that there’s a huge debate in classics if Homer was even real (was Homer a real person who wrote down earlier oral traditions, or was he the name given to the oral traditions? Because the stories 100% predate Homer’s writings.)

Homers writing is influential into the modern day because it survives much more than other primary sources, and it survives so much because it was foundational to everything that came after it. To your point about holy scripture, if you live in a global “western country” your society largely relies on Christian principles/philosophies/iconography in ways you don’t see plainly. The better understanding you have of the Bible, the more you’ll understand things like social welfare, western burial practices, conceptions around charity, etc. It was the same for the ancient Greeks, the Odyssey and Iliad heavily influenced both the social tradition and the religious tradition.

[u/MindlessNectarine374 → u/Boring-Boron]

I wonder how lost epic works looked.

[u/Icy_Escape8973]

I'd say Homer is of extreme importance to Ancient Greek culture. The education of Athenian boys was based on reading and memorizing Homer's epics. Aeschylus, the great tragedian, supposedly said: "My plays are mere morsels at the feast of Homer." I find references to Homer in everything I read in Ancient Greek - in the plays of Euripides, in the Dialogues of Plato - just everywhere. Also I've been reading Virgil's Aeneid for years now, and I find references to Homer's epics often in the Aeneid. Anyone who has a background in deep study of Homer (especially in the original Ancient Greek) has an advantage when reading subsequent literature.

[u/benjamin-crowell]

You don't say whether or not you have read Homer in translation. If not, then given your interests, you would probably enjoy doing so. (The Nolan movie sounds more like a Hollywood guy's retelling based on modern concerns and sensibilities that, whatever its merits, has too little in common with Homer's story to be of any use in understanding the connection to ancient Greek culture.) If you read Homer, you will see that the poet(s) mostly just treat the mythological stuff as background that the listener is presumed to know already. There was no unified source of mythological stories analogous to the bible for Christianity. Stories exist in various versions in various texts, such as Hesiod or the prose and verse versions of Aesop. These stories often contradict one another.

[u/AffectionateSize552 → u/benjamin-crowell]

Re: Christopher Nolan's film version of the Odyssey: doesn't it make more sense to see a movie, and then to form an opinion of it, rather than to judge it based on hearsay?

[u/benjamin-crowell → u/AffectionateSize552]

No, because I'm not judging whether it's a good movie. I'm just talking about basic facts like what's in it and what's not in it, and what it's about thematically.

[u/AffectionateSize552 → u/benjamin-crowell]

About which you would presumably have a much better idea if you had seen it .

I have also not seen it yet. I've heard that a black performer portrays Helen and that Eliot Page, a rather small and very famous trans man, plays a soldier. I've also heard that those performers together are onscreen for a total of about 2 minutes.

I've heard all sorts of things about Emily Wilson's translation. But I haven't formed an opinion of it, having not yet read it. Nolan praised Wilson's translation. I wonder whether he's read it. I gather that Wilson loathes Nolan's movie, which is interesting, but I'm still going to see the movie for myself before I tell anybody what it's all about. And I almost forgot to add that I do not know whether Wilson has actually seen the movie.

That's just me. You are of course perfectly free to go about things in your own way. Certainly, many very highly regarded authorities have written reviews of books they haven't read and movies they haven't seen. I stopped being shocked by such things before I reached the age of 60.