Homer Couldn't Have Written the Iliad, But He Probably Dictated it Word for Word

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 56 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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Scott here with another episode of The History of Floyd Podcast.
0:07.5	The Iliad is the world's greatest epic poem, a heroic battle and divine fate set against the Trojan War.
0:12.6	But there are a lot of questions about its origin.
0:14.9	Where, how, and when was it composed, and why does it endure?
0:18.4	We believe that it was attributed to a poet named Homer,
0:21.1	the popular count is that he was blind, but that just brings up more questions than it does answers. How is it transmitted for centuries before it was committed to pen and paper? To explore these questions in today's rebroadcast episode is our 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 all these questions and says he has an answer.
0:39.1	He argues that the poem is a result of the genius and single words, for over 40 years. He's the author of Homer and his Iliad, and he addresses all these questions
0:37.6	and says he has an answer. He argues that the poem is a result of the genius and single
0:41.5	oral poet Homer, not a collection of people, not the consolidation of a general oral history
0:46.6	that was finally filtered down, and that the poem may have been performed even earlier than
0:50.1	previously supposed. Most of all, he argues, Homer orally dictated the poem to someone who
0:55.1	wrote it down because so much about the poem suggests that it was created in a definitive form,
1:00.1	not a whole bunch of variations of oral history that were finally cobbled together at one point.
1:03.9	Hope you enjoyed this discussion with Rob and Lane Fox.
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