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Visit booths.co. UK. I'm John Bachelors, Professor Emily Wilson.

She's at the University of Pennsylvania where the students are very very fortunate to have a new version of the Iliad rendered in English

in an dynamic pentameter asking the question as I wish I had done when I was 19 years old

who was Homer, Professor?

What do we know?

Who was Homer is a very difficult question,

which is still viciously argued about

among Homerist scholars. What we know is that for many centuries after the

collapse of so-called mycenaean civilization there was no writing or literacy in the

Greek-speaking world. During that period for many centuries,

so for many centuries before the 8th century B.C. there was no writing and yet during

that period these extraordinary stories were being developed about the great cities of the past, including Thebes and Troy, and the great heroes of the past, including Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and so on.

Those stories and that rhythm that Tilly Kaysameter that we talked about for telling those stories

were told and re-told and re-told performing poets who were composing their poems as they went along.

Then at some point in the 8th century, writing came to the Greek-speaking world, taken from the Phoenicians, they developed the Phoenician

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