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Homer's Use of the Past
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
Extract
Of the sources of Homer in the literary sense we can know nothing. There is no antecedent, no contemporary literature extant; and no analysis of later works will yield anything that can be proved to represent a literary tradition earlier than Homer. Archaeology, however, which has made the origins of Hellenic culture in some degree intelligible, has at least furnished a solid stage and a veritable background for the action of the Iliad. How much did Homer know of the past? A systematic examination of the archaeological data which the poems offer suggests that he knew a great deal; knew it with a precision which cannot be explained away as fortuitous, and about so remote a past that we must postulate a stream of tradition traceable much further back than the siege of Troy. For the purposes of this paper Homer means the author of the Iliad in substantially its present form, whose floruit the present writer would not put earlier than the ninth century, and the term is used, without prejudice, for the author of the Odyssey also. Eratosthenes' date of 1184 for the fall of Troy is assumed less because it came to be accepted as the standard date in antiquity than because it fits so well into what we know of the history of the Mediterranean world at that time.
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- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1929
References
1 Klio, xiv.: = Myres and Frost, The Historical Background of the Trojan War.
2 SirEvans, Arthur now brings down the lower limit of the period to 1450, The Shaft Graves of Mycenae, p. 89Google Scholar.
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23 Rodenwaldt, Tiryns, II. Pl. XIII.
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25 The subject of defensive armour in Homer has been treated in greater detail by the present writer in Liverpool Annals, 1928.
26 Crete appears to be (in the Minoan Age) the home of the body-shield in both its forms, and here its use later than 1400 is attested by monuments. A gem from Crete representing a duel with the old armature (Furtwängler, and Loeschcke, , Myk. Vasen, Textb. Pl. E 30Google Scholar) belongs to the L.M. III. period, and another found by Mr. Forsdyke in a cemetery of Knossos in 1927 to the very end of that period (B.S.A. xxviii. Pl. XIX. viib. 5). It is, of course, possible that the Cretans carried their big shields to Miletus and that they lingered there till supplanted by the Ionian panoply in the seventh century. The ring from Boeotia now in the Ashmolean, (J.H.S. xlv. p. 26Google Scholar, fig. 30) is ascribed to the L.M. III. period.
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