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Jeez, a guy dips out for a couple thousand years for some well-earned self-care and people begin to question your very existence. Showbiz is brutal.

Keep up the excellent work, Dr Miano 👏

An excellent presentation! Will help resolve some of the arguments we have in this household. Thank you

as we discussed in school a long time ago: The Iliad and Odyssee were not created by Homer, but by someone else with the same name.

I've never been able to fathom the origins of Homer and now I understand why. Thanks for clarifying my lack of clarity on the subject.

His middle name was Jay, last name Simpson, as forseen and told ages ago. Great video though, I enjoy every take on the topic including the ones leaving out city of Springfield, and this particular one is stuffed with useful info! Thank you Mr Miano!

Michael Wood covered much of this topic in his series “In Search of the Trojan War”. Though that series was romanticized a bit, it still bore the seeds of excellent scholarly research. He showed that, even today in Ireland and Turkey, there are professional bards, raised very young, to memorize perfectly and performed epic poems. In Turkey, he showed how professional bards are hired to perform at special events and the men will sit for hours on end, listening to the song.

Thank you so much for this! Please make a similar video on the historicity of Socrates!

Love the video professor. It seems the quality of your videos has also greatly improved. I look forward to more

It's fairly well attested that Homer was the creation of a single author and existed no earlier than April 19, 1987.

Little Iliad … and we’re still waiting for Iliad 2: Dead by Dawn.

Been a long time since I read about swift footed Achilles and Bright Eyed Athene

Thank you, Professor! Great video, very comprehensive! Best regards from Brazil!

Yes he was and he lives in a town called Springfield

Closer to our own time, we have Shakespeare's plays, which were written for performance and must have had a somewhat fluid text since they contain topical references to politics and religion, and some low humour, which may not all have been appropriate for a public theatre or a private performance in a nobleman's house. Like modern comedians, authors, directors and performers must have adjusted their performance to suit the audience. The plays were published unofficially by members of the audience before official editions were sold. In the ensuing four centuries, directors have continued to update, censor, or otherwise "improve" what is performed, even though the published texts stay much the same.

So good as usual. A luxury here in youtube. You have such a clear way of narrating an otherwise complex and unreachabe subject, that keeps us engaged till the end.

Homeric historiography is a fascinating topic! My introduction to the idea the Odyssey came later was a teacher bringing up the psychologist Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis of the development of consciousness and agency that could have taken place between it and the Iliad. The differences in language, geography, and mythological references are so cool to have learned about. Thanks!

Excellent summary, David!

Nicely done, sir!

Majestic and complete video. Great!

Just discovered your channel today. Great work!

I loves me an ancient mystery. Great investigation Prof Miano !

Great, thanks David 👋

Wow thank you. Superb. You have given an excellent update to things I have learned from introductions and much older texts. My notion of 800 bc is properly dispelled. My first inklings into these matters came from an Isaac Asimov text book written in 1960. Always look forward to your new offerings. Still I am eager to learn more about the announcement that they have begun deciphering the Herculaneum carbon scrolls. Any news there you might provide? Thanks again and keep up the good work

Love your work Dr. Miano but I think I mic boom would do you well. I can hear every time you touch your table, thought someone was closing doors in my house. Lol

If my nerd friends and I can spend all day watching the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings movies, I think ancient Greeks could sit through a few chapters of the Iliad.

Deeply fascinating, cheers!

I've always thought (liked to think really) that the original storyteller was remembered, even after the editors got a hold of the story.

That was fantastic! Thanks!

Find the idea that length would limit the oral tradition weak, after all we know Beowulf came from an oral tradition. And it is possible the written down Odyssey was a combination of several poems.

One of your very best videos.

Thank you for another lovely muse on ancient history. Homeric poetry is a universe unto itself, but learning there are modern day likely oral descendants in a way in the balkans was fun to learn.

Robin Lane Fox has written an excellent book on this recently called Homer and His Illiad

Absolutely fascinating. thanks.

Outside of the Greek speaking world, there are plenty of oral traditions that can maybe give us a glimpse into how stories work. For example, there are still many Farsi entertainers who showcase stories from the Shahnameh, or travelling storytellers who may come down and tell you the stories everyone is kinda sorta familiar with. Now, if i were to be the person paying, I'd request of him the stories i like, and the formula kinda stays the same. The details vary slightly, but stories are kinda similar. I'd request, say, the stories of Rostam, and that in itself is a pretty massive tale. Rostam is born of a C section, does 7 out of the 12 labours or Heracles, but is most famous for the love story and tragedy. Basically he has a midnight rendezvous with the daughter of a castellan, and gives her an amulet as a keepsakes. Much later, he hears of an upstart warrior known as Sohrab raised by the enemy, they fight, and are mostly evenly matched. In the end Rostam prevails and delivers a fatal blow but realises that the warrior sohrab wears his amulet, so is his son. Then gradually everyone dies. A professional would need to remember specific names and stuff, which is easily done, and my family and kids get to have a nice hour or two to kill off. I imagine Homer to be that kind of bloke, you hire him out after the harvest is brought in, get your family and friends together, he tells you stories, you put him up for a few days and give him some produce or money, everyone has a great time. The real life dude probably was the best at his job, and is therefore remembered.

I have no idea if these ideas are already part of the debate, but some possibilities that aren't mentioned in the overview in this video come into my head. It seems like the poems were created around the time when writing was once again taking hold in the area. And it seems like there had been an oral tradition for performance poetry at that time. This intersection creates a unique context for the creation of the Homeric epics. For example, it is entirely possible that the works were meant to represent the genre of oral poetry even if they themselves were never meant to be performed. Perhaps the Homeric poems were written poems composed in the style of oral poems, much like the Aeneid, I am told, was written in the style of the Homeric poems. It's alternatively possible that the Homeric epics were both written down and meant to be performed, however they were created in such a way to rely on the performance practices of the time: details lost to us but which would have been well understood at the time of the writing. I don't know the fragmentary nature of the archeological evidence of written poetry at the time the Homeric epics were thought to have arisen, but through the idea of writing for performance practice the existence of various versions could possibly be explained. There is a rough analogy of the intersection of performance and composition in Renaissance and Baroque music. Although in their case, music had been written down for quite some time, still there was an increasing degree to which parts were written out that previously had been interpreted entirely through performance practice. Writing out more of the music allowed more complex music to be made and also allowed the composer more control on the final performance. There was, over time, a decreasing reliance on improvisation and an increasing preference for taking advantage of the greater complexity of music that could be created with full composition. During this period, fully composed pieces both relied on the expertise of performance practice of the period to interpret the music and also had elements of improvisation apparent in their compositional styles even when a piece was never meant to be improvised, or improvised on, during its performance. If the Homeric epics had been written during a time when such a thing was going on, one might expect to end up with a work that seems like it may have arisen over time from an oral tradition.

Most of the Homeric stories were originally oral traditions and stories and some may have gone way back into the proto Indo European past as there are many echoes of them -especially in Indian texts like the story of Odysseus and the suitors.

Question: Couldn't it be that the described Helena in the Iliad is rather Hellas, so, Greece itself?

Learning now what I thought I knew from school. Since I'm older it's not much of a surprise that understanding is evolving. I'm of the opinion it will evolve much further and faster than ever before. So many young mind's overthinking and speculating will likely lead to finds and further understanding.. Now my mortal opinion is expressed I'll get to the Learning part good Sir.

Has there been anymore archaeology done at ithici (ithica)..? I heard that the island that wr thought was ithica was actually not.. I hope u do an episode on this topic.. Love the channel.. All killer, no filler..lol

Thanks Prof. Miano, for your fascinating work. I've read similar analyses of authorship [development] of the Torah and associated texts, the letters of Paul [a.k.a. Saul of Tarsus], the various iterations of the biblical and non canonical associated works, and, of course, the authorship of Shakespeare's works. What I find astounding is how so many of the most important literary works of our civilization are so lacking in certainty! This seems to also be true of the authorship of borrowed non-Western works like the Art of War perhaps authored, if not written in its entirety, by Sun Tzu. This is amazing, fascinating and frustrating, but it certainly provides food for thought. Thanks again for all of your invariably interesting and insightful work.

To many modern nationalistic Greeks, Homer is like a saint. To question his poems as "facts" or even more his very existence is treated like anti-Hellenic sacrilege.

A d--ned fine lecture, thank you!

Thanks for another informative video! Was Aesop a real person?

I have this long running image in my head of homer just completely defeating his enemy in a freelance rap battle

Absolutely fascinating!! I fully agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey had at least, each one, a single main author and are not a hodge podge of separate poems strung together. It is my understanding linguistic analysis makes that unlikely. Although absolutely none of that means that the poet(s) didn't use and rely on a very well developed tradition of epic poetry for stories and lots and lots of stock phrases. As for the question about whether or not one poet or two wrote the Iliad and Odyssey, I agree that two separate authors is most likely. (Thanks for the info., that there appears to have been an ancient tradition of someone not, initially, named Homer creating the Odyssey. Didn't know that!!) I am although partial to the notion, this is pure speculation, that "Homer" composed the Iliad when "Homer" was young and composed the Odyssey when he was an old man; thus accounting, perhaps, for the differences between the texts. One of my favorite pieces of Classical scholarship is M. I. Finley's The World of Odysseus which sought to at least partially reconstruct the social world of the Iliad and Odyssey. Finley concluded that socially those two poems reflected the social world the late dark ages and early archaic period, not Mycenaean Greece. Of course Finley recognized that there were Mycenaean survivals in the texts, like the predominance of bronze, the boars tusk helmets etc., but the society depicted was quite different. Having read translations of Mycenaean linear b tablets I see a vast social gap between the very bureaucratic social world of the Mycenaean culture, with its many layers of offices, statuses etc., and the far more simple, far more local social world has depicted in the poems. (The almost total lack of writing in the poems, aside from one ambiguous reference is certainly quite different from the mania for record keeping in the Mycenaean world.) And as a side insert it appears that the Mycenaeans assigned far more importance than than archaic or classical Greeks to chthonic gods. In fact it appears Poseidon, has lord of the underworld, earthquakes etc., not Zeus was the chief god. (Or maybe it was a goddess.) Such differences make it highly unlikely that the social world depicted in the poems is that of Mycenaean Greece. Whether or not Finley's placement of the social world is correct is another matter. If those who place the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey sometime in the mid to late 7th century are correct it makes it even less likely that either the Iliad or the Odyssey preserves much accurate history of the so-called Trojan war. A couple of years ago I listened to a recording of someone reciting the Iliad in the original Homeric Greek. I do not understand Greek at all but it is sounded astoundingly good!!! Whoever actually wrote it was a genius!!!

Thank you

Hi Dr. Miano...I would like to hear more about your opinion on the excavations at Keeladi and Adichanalur in India. Some archeologists seem to be of the opinion that Keeladi script is similar to IVC.

11:32 the Iliad has 193,000, reading aloud at 150 wpm that's 21 HOURS. Maybe the ancient greek was more terse, but it still would have been way too long to hear in one sitting.

Sounds like no one can agree on anything about the Iliad and Odyssey. Fascinating lecture

I've always thought that Homer wasn't a single person but rather the name given to the author of these stories that had been around for a long time, a bit like Aesop. I'm also fond of the idea that homer is a title, rather than a name, and it's like our word bard. I've seen scholars that say the text we have for Homer's works are consistent with one person having authored it, i.e the writing style and use of words is consistent, but we dont have the stories in their original oral form and the way ancient books were copied means that we're probably looking at a version copied down by a single scribe who could have easily "polished" the writing to make it consistent.

And a thousand years from now they'll conflate the Homer of Ionia with the Homer of Springfield.

This doesn't happen only in ancient history; people have the same questions about Shakespeare, and he lived only 400 years ago

In the Odyssey, the author introduces herself as Nausica a young lady of Shieria who raises Odysseus naked from the ground with the sound of her harp and song and dresses him and brings him to her home via her mother. If you read the Odyssey and hear the voice of a young lady you will know for certain it is true.

Very interesting, thanks. I wish more people would consider your arguments on the difficulty of transitioning from an oral to a written tradition. The whole foundation of the ancient aliens hypothesis is shattered when oral tradition cannot be taken at face value.

I really love these authorship videos. Really fascinating. Any thoughts on doing one on Sun Tzu?

I am originally a medievalist and I studied most closely an occitan poet called Guillem de Cabestanh. He was a real person (although mysterious etc). He wrote down his poems, it seems, but none of his versions have survived. Instead, we have dozens of derived versions, and they are even all in the same dialect! I had to apply the methods you describe to try and find out about the provenance etc of the different manuscripts beyond geography. One might be tempted to ask how come so many versions. We modern people tend to forget the capacity people had to remember huge texts. The formulaic verses etc help structure the recitation, and some of the versions had formulae which had been borrowed from similar occitan poets. Also, a poem which is recitated must be, recitable=optimised in terms of flow, rhythm etc. ith time, the poem finds its point of equilibrium...in a given dialect at a given time. Author or not, in mainly oral societies, the recitant will take liberties, and then somebody will write down what they have heard, and the recitant has a few books in case memory fails. And these recitants travelled and adapted to the local dialects (a lot of people in the world can change dialect: I am Swiss German and speak 3 German dialects), which results in rhythm/rime etc that do not carry from one dialect to the next: what rimes in my main dialect "Zurituutsch" might not in Alsatian, Hochtuutsch, or Wallisertuutsch. Or the poem remains popular over decades, while the language changes and the recitant will modernise the language, even changing some "objects" as they do not make sense in the new context....or keeping the items and thus giving the poem an antiquated feel. "Homer's" work was subjected to all that, and that was even longer ago than Guillem de Cabestanh 1162-1212 (modern spelling Cabestany). This is why every Muslim's duty to learn the Coran by heart, without changing one iota is a complete outlier.

I remember hearing from somewhere that Homer's details about the layout of the battlements, and chronology of the siege of Troy have been vindicated by archeology, and therefore it's highly likely that Homer was a contemporary if not eyewitness to said siege. Though I don't know about the veracity of this claim

The similar book in India the epic Mahabharata which is also said to have inspired from homers Iliad. It is said to have written by “Vyasa”… and the meaning of Vyasa is the compiler.

There are a number of stories about the heroes of the Trojan war outside of the Iliad. For example the death of Agamemnon, rhe judgement of Paris, and the the Trojan horse. It seems like someone took a number of elements that overlapped and compiled them into a unified story.

Excellent!

Great video - thank you. Wouldn't the narrowing of the origin dates for both poems down to little more than a 100 years and the ancient attribution to one author (even if we don't have concrete evidence of that attribution until 100 years later) point to a single author for both? Is it so certain that the parts of the Odyssey that indicate a more western Greek author weren't later additions?

I believe that Iliad and Odyssey were both part of the cylce of poems about the end of the Mycenaean Age. (The end because we do not know anything about Greek myths/legends with take place after the Trojan War and do not lead with its fallout.) It seems to me that at some time several poets decided to collect all those stories and turn them into a cycle of poems. Sadly most of them seem to be lost.

Thanks!🎉

"repetition and set phrases" and all I can think of is "AND IT CAME TO PASS..."

after watching this my sense is that these works are an assemblage of oral traditions leading to a single (or a single and an apprentice) who had the dual skill of an oral and written historian. this person (or two persons or probably best to think of a small organization of varying skills) decided to create and write this story. this story having a direct lineage from past masters leading to this person that had creative reigns and out came the skeleton of the illiad and odyssey. this skeleton was reworked over centuries, gradually becoming what it is today

Homer is a TV cartoon character.

I can't wait for more charred Vesuvian scrolls to be read. So much knowledge just waiting for us. Maybe some answers to the Homer question is in there. I've been waiting decades for them to be read, I hope I live long enough to find out what's in them... Atlantis anyone? (Hint: Cyclades Plateau)

When I read the Iliad, I immediately thought of the guslar tradition. They recite poems of heroes of old that end up shared, adapted and reworked from one area to the other until you have what are beasically heroic and tragic cycles being told throughout the western Balkans. Also, some personalities who were morally ambiguous at best, played for both sides in conflicts and in any case were not particularly important end up as great heroes for one side (Marko Kraljević), which to me is a warning against reading too much into the historicity of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

That people remember oral poems still resonates today. We call this the various genres of music. Songs learned as a child can be remembered as an old person. So a lyric that may be a hundred years old can still be appreciated in a modern setting. As things are, due to our ability to have original recordings, there are many young people that are discovering songs that are 50-100: years old.

Are there other ancient stories, even from other cultures about the same subjects? I think that would have bearing. Maybe further computer analysis of the different variations can help solve the issue, like historical genetics has done for lineages (and migrations etc.) of people.

Thanks for another thoughtful and balanced view! We had grossly misleading theories of collective folk orality acting as unconscious quasi-author for New Testament texts in Older Form Criticism (K L Schmidt, Dibelius and Bultmann and a massively influential school based on them, around the 1900s-1920s, influential until today) , comparing ancient texts with the likes of Sadhu Sundar Singh orality rather than with other ancient texts. This theory was especially bizarre in the face of quite coherent texts claimed to be the result of an unsoncious folk/community process within a few decades, opposed to centuries. From my view, in his Poetics, Aristotle had a much smarter view on works like the Odyssey than modern proponents of either insane degrees of orality or insane assumptions of authorial genius. Aristotle was modern enough to compare "Homer's" works with other hero epics like Panyassis' Heracles stories, observing a striking difference: while Panyassis seemed to have collected and retold all Heracles stories available into a merely additive (epeisodion) account, putting episode after episode, Aristotle saw a much better organized (epeisodic) whole in a text like the Odyssey, where parts (without too much overall digression) were related to the whole in a meaningful way: a clear signal of well done authorship - but not claiming it happened without any relation to former tradition (may it have been oral and/or written). Seeing that overarching conecpt of the whole is not the same as extreme unitariansm, which from my view is just as much a nonsensical view on ancient texts (hardly any of them is "unitarian": many show tensions, breaks, historic errors, tendencies etc.) as is pure oral theory. After all I can see, as soon ancient writing is established, oral and written communication simply coexists, but with written works gaining massive importance for intertextuality over time. And last not least modern linguistic genre research like SFL shows how both being part of existing genre conventions, and working as author within and beyond these conventions, is part of the same process, aimed at practical social goals. Every "either - or" (either collective oral or authorial written, either just convention or genius author etc.) is plain nonsense by defintion.

When were theaters established? Oral or written, they were performed, so an understanding of the theater would add to the conversation.

The microphone buzz on this is pretty rough. You could run it through Audacity's noise reduction filter or something

Love an ancient mystery!

Some olive farmer is gonna find a stone with the words "The society of No Homers." and that will change everything.

there’s a lot of people in world have the same first name and it becomes very easy to get confusion

Is Hesiod - Works and days subject to similar analysis?

😮 my mouth dropped.....thank all the Rome and Greek gods for you , David! 😂 You teach this 34 year old so much that I was misled about for years!!!!

Thank you.

Of course complete works can be memorised easily. Think of how you could probably sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody word for word, or any number of the epic songs you've grown to love, which are as much a part of your personal cultural heritage as the works of Homer and his contemporaries were to the people and bards of their and following times.

The occurrence of stories or references from an established date does not place a lower bond on the text. The narrative, in its main features, could have existed in Mycenaean time. These later materials may simply be insertions.

What would be your guess as to why Homer was acredited for the Odyssey in ancient times?

I am having a blast watching this video! I study the Hebrew Bible with a Jewish girlfriend who knows some Hebrew. We have the best time discovering for ourselves what the intent might be through accessing the word roots and making up our own minds. So cool!

Amazing video on Homer's legitimacy. Please do a similar analysis on the legitimacy of the 2 Hindu epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana

I didn't think I'd ever get into the question of whether Homer was a real person. Then again, I didn't think I'd read Homer's main books - the Iliad and Odyssey(there's all kinds of stuff attributed to Homer), or Greek Mythology at all! I remember watching this "In Search of" episode about Homer and the city of Troy back in the 1980s. I liked it; today, I consider it and maybe a few more episodes about the only good episodes in the series. Even though about the only interesting thing to say about Troy is Heinrich Schliemann. The episode about Troy and Jericho are kind of complementary. Both Troy and Jericho are about the Bronze age collapse(when viewed from a Modern Archaeology lens). But anyways - I didn't read Homer in high school or college. I just decided one fine day to read the Iliad because I wanted to read about the Trojan horse. I'm temped to say that I was inspired after re-watching the "In Search of" episode about Troy. I was probably re-watching it just because I remembered enjoying it in my 80s youth. I just decided to read Homer's books, only to be disappointed that there was no Trojan horse in the Iliad! That's mentioned briefly in the Odyssey . . . I went into Homer without a teacher telling me how great it is. What blew my mind was all the nature poetry. It wasn't just the Nature Poetry, but the density of it. The Iliad is saturated with amazing Nature Poetry that explains all kinds of observations of the natural world to human behavior to the swaying of spears in a phalanx. I wasn't into Homer to know whether he existed or not. And, I grew up hearing Homer is amazing; but, I just hadn't had a reason to read it. But, when I got to the Odyssey, I was struck by the lack of Nature Poetry. Or how comparatively few of these Nature Poetries are in the Odyssey. Without googling "the Homer problem" or "was Homer a real person?" In a brief moment, I kind questioned whether Homer was a real person. Who could do all that Nature Poetry in the Iliad? And, why is the Iliad and Odyssey a good deal different feel?

Of course he existed. I saw him. I was there...

what happened to the Ancient History being politicized video? I had saved to watch it later... and it was removed?

Do more Greek historry

What was his last name?

I was reading The Odyssey in portuguese and there was always a repetition: "Penélope, a mais cordata entre as mulheres", imagine my shock when later they changed the cordata to another word, this took me out and I wondered if it was a mistake by the translator or he choose it because it was added by another writer. Also, do you believe is there any chance to find copies of the lost epic cycles or it is all gone? Not fragments but the full texts.

Thanks for this, David. I have previously used apps to learn 13 languages, and wondered if there are any such apps that could be used to learn ancient Hellenic, Akkadian etc. Are you aware whether any are available, or the potential for profit in getting one off the ground? I know I'd be throwing my money at the developer!

Thanks, Doc.

Greetings from the BIG SKY of Montana. I've read 'most' of Homer's writings and I'd have to say those works are from one guy.

I believe people have always had a drive to preserve history. Before writing I'm sure they devised ways to do that.

There was a book published in 1991 (in paperback, 1996) titled "HOMER AND THE ORIGIN OF THE GREEK ALPHABET" by Barry B. Powell. The basic thesis is that somebody adapted the consonants-only Phoenician script at some point, purposely altering it so as to be able to represent ALL the sounds spoken by Greeks -- not just the consonants, but also the vowels. For example, 'aleph' -- which is a kind of consonantal glottal stop in languages like Hebrew -- was changed to represent the vowel 'ah', and spelled 'A', of course -- which is differentiated by transliteration with Heb. aleph, usually using an apostrophe ['] to denote that it isn't a vowel like alpha. Powell's book is quite a marvelous work of scholarship, and it wouldn't surprise me if it were correct in its thesis. Imagine if somebody back then was so enamored of the ILIAD and ODYSSEY that he or she, hearing it recited, wanted desperately to have a written version of it available, so as not to lose it to faulty memory for future generations, and then got the wonderful idea to take an existing script -- the Phoenician one, which only had consonants -- and modify it so as to be able to represent the sounds of Greek, including the VOWELS.

yeah, you should talk about style.How did you manage to put this 2 mismatching colors on you ?

I believe the etymology of the word Homer could be ὁμοῦ (homoû, “together”) + the ἀρ- (ar-) found in ἀραρίσκω (ararískō, “to fasten, join”) - so the actual name is a play on words that it was fastened together -- the word for slave it itself connected to these terms

2nd coment Heasiods Theogeny & works and days where already 1hundred year's old when homers stuff starts to get recorded 18 century peeps would use the bible to practice literacy archaic greeks probably used Heisieod & then homer for the same reason So by the classical times greek peeps already had these works without necessarily knowing about thare origins