I'm John Batchew, 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, which I had done when I was 19 years old, who was Homer,

Professor? What do we know?

Who was Homer?

It's 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 Misenian 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 BCE, 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, Dactylico Samaritan that we talked about for telling those stories, were told and retold and retold by

performing poets who were making, who are composing their poems as they, 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 alphabet. And some time, probably

fairly soon after that, the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed. And that these monumental written poems

based on this long oral tradition, which respond in extraordinary ways to that oral tradition,

not telling those stories of the Trojan War

in anything like the ways you might expect, because they're composed for an audience who

knows those stories and those characters very well, and who's ready for this extremely

sophisticated approach to how could we retell the story of the Trojan War at a length that

...