Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic

by Barbara Graziosi

How was the poet Homer imagined by ancient Greeks? This book looks at stories circulating between the sixth and fourth centuries BC about his birth, name and origin, blindness and his relationship to other poets and his descendants. The work studies the ancient reception of the Homeric poems, and looks at it in relation to modern representations of Homer, ancient and modern conceptions of authorship, and the "Homeric Question".

Genres: Classics, History

300 pages, Paperback

First published April 25, 2002

About the author

Arts and Humanities director of Durham’s Institute of Advanced Study and Professor of Classics and Ancient History.

Reviews

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically deals with the question, "Who was Homer?". The book does so by examining ancient as well as modern approaches to the question. While, at times technical, all quotations from non-English sources have been translated, making the book easy to read.

[Erini Allen]

How do ancient sources represent the figure of Homer? This question launches Graziosi’s study, which reaches back to the sixth and fourth centuries BC, cataloguing how ancient sources describe, debate, and imagine the poet “Homer.”

The book is divided into six chapters, each tackling a different issue around Homer: his birth, name and place of origin, dating, blindness and closeness to the gods, his relationship to other poets, and the “heirs” of Homer. The latter refers not to putative biological heirs (though she does discuss the Homeridae) but to how different ancients framed their relationship to the poet.

One of the most valuable assets of this study is the way it models a way of thinking about ancient sources, neither “believing” them or “doubting” them but examining them as a way to reveal the assumptions that animate them. This enables Graziosi to reveal what modern assumptions that have shaped the way the poems have been studied and interpreted. While I may not always agree with her conclusions, the study is fascinating and a pleasure to think with. This is a study I have returned to again and again.

[The Kid · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was looking for a book that would tell me how Homer was received in the archaic and classical periods. It is because I have this paper on Thucydides right now and I wanted to situate how Thucydides uses/sees/understands Homer in the context of other prior/(near)contemporary uses/visions/understandings. There was some frustration. It took me some time to find what I was looking for. I have no idea why. But anyways, here, I found it. This is a great work for anyone interested in classical reception in general. I'll let Barbara sum up the task of her book:

"In this book, I have focused on how the ancient Greeks imagined Homer and have deliberately failed to discuss whether their representations were true to the 'real' poet(s) of the Iliad (and the Odyssey). Instead, I have suggested that ancient depictions of Homer can be history for us in that they express how ancient audiences received the Homeric poems." (p.236)

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Homer's identity described by many people from 8th century BC until the present day. Some perspectives are way more credible and interesting than others.