Homer’s Odyssey | Beautiful Editions & Collector’s Guide

Homer and the Oral Tradition

The Odyssey — the 24-book epic following the wily King Odysseus of Ithaca on his impossible ten-year voyage home from the Trojan War — probably reached somethin close to its surviving form during the late eighth or seventh century BCE, after developing through a long oral tradition. It depicts a Bronze Age world of gods and monsters, faithfulness and cunning, longing and homecoming. But who composed it? Tradition names Homer: a blind bard, possibly from the Ionian coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), who also composed the Iliad. Seven cities in antiquity claimed him as a native son, but no-one could prove the case for any of them.

The question of authorship (known since the 19th century as the “Homeric Question”) has fascinated scholars ever since. The Iliad and Odyssey differ noticeably in style and temperament: the Iliad is martial, tragic, and formally structured, the work of a poet at full power; the Odyssey is witty, magical, and novelistic in feel. Aristotle famously suggested that the Odyssey was Homer’s old-age work. Others have argued the two poems were composed a century apart by different hands entirely.

In the 1920s, American classicist Milman Parry observed that the poems are saturated with formulaic repeated phrases and epithets — “rosy-fingered Dawn,” “wine-dark sea,” “resourceful Odysseus” — always appearing at the same metrical position in a line of verse. Parry concluded these were the building blocks of oral composition: prefabricated phrases that performing bards could deploy in the heat of live recitation, improvising a vast epic from memory. The poems, in other words, emerged from a tradition of performance — fluid, evolving, shaped by countless voices over centuries — before being written down.