A Classicist Believes that Homer Directly Dictated the Iliad, and Was Also an Excellent Horseman

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Iliad is the world’s greatest epic poem—heroic battle and divine fate set against the Trojan War. Its beauty and profound bleakness are intensely moving, but great questions remain: Where, how, and when was it composed and why does it endure?

To explore these questions is today’s guest, Robin Lane Fox, a scholar and teacher of Homer for over 40 years. He’s the author of “Homer and His Iliad” and he addresses these questions, drawing on a lifelong love and engagement with the poem. He argues that the poem is the result of the genius and single oral poet, Homer, and that the poem may have been performed even earlier than previously supposed a place, a date, and a method for its composition—subjects of ongoing controversy. Lane Fox considers hallmarks of the poem; its values, implicit and explicit; its characters; its women; its gods; and even its horses.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Scott here with another episode of the History Unplugged podcast.
0:07.0	The most popular book in Antiquity was The Iliad, Alexander read it obsessively, and it mostly achieved its final form in Alexandria during the
0:15.0	Talimid dynasty which means you can be pretty sure that you're reading the same thing
0:18.3	that Romans did but for such a famous book very little is known about the author
0:22.3	Homer ancient legend says that he was blind book, very little is known about the author, Homer.
0:23.0	Ancient legend says that he was blind, and because he lived in the Greek Dark Ages,
0:27.0	around 800 BC or so, there's simply no surviving documentation about him.
0:31.0	More recently, some researchers have wondered if the Iliad that we have is even the one that he composed.
0:37.0	It's argued that he did create the epics, the Odyssey, and the Iliad,
0:40.0	but they were remembered and transmitted orally for centuries until they were finally written down,
0:44.0	meaning there was a long game of telephone that could have altered its form.
0:47.0	But according to one scholar of Homer, Robin Lane Fox,
0:50.0	Homer himself had his epics dictated, meaning what we read today is from his mouth to our brain,
0:56.0	and we can also glean all sorts of autobiographical information from his epics, such as he was most likely a horseman,
1:01.6	because he seems to show quite a bit of familiarity with the subject in his stories.
1:05.0	To explore these questions is today's guest, Robin Lane Fox, and he's the author of Homer and his Iliad,
1:10.0	and addresses these questions which draw from a lifelong love and engagement with the poem.
1:14.5	We look at the Homera Day, a group of people who performed the poem for centuries, until it was written
1:19.0	down and distributed across Greece, somewhere around the 6th century of D.C., one
1:23.4	had arrived in Alexandria, and why its themes truly are timeless.
1:27.0	Hope you enjoy this discussion with Robin Lane Fox.
1:29.3	And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for word from our sponsors.
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