Translated by George Chapman, with Introductions by Jan Parker.
Hector bidding farewell to his wife and baby son, Odysseus bound to the mast listening to the Sirens, Penelope at the loom, Achilles dragging Hector’s body round the walls of Troy – scenes from Homer have been reportrayed in every generation.
Hector bidding farewell to his wife and baby son, Odysseus bound to the mast listening to the Sirens, Penelope at the loom, Achilles dragging Hector’s body round the walls of Troy – scenes from Homer have been reportrayed in every generation. The questions about mortality and identity that Homer’s heroes ask, the bonds of love, respect and fellowship that motivate them, have gripped audiences for three millennia.
Chapman’s Iliad and Odyssey are great English epic poems, but they are also two of the liveliest and readable translations of Homer. Chapman’s freshness makes the everyday world of nature and the craftsman as vivid as the battlefield and Mount Olympus. His poetry is driven by the excitement of the Renaissance discovery of classical civilisation as at once vital and distant, and is enriched by the perspectives of humanist thought.
Homer
The two earliest surviving poetic works of ancient Greece, the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' are attributed to 'Homer', but it seems likely that no such individual existed, the works being developed over an extended period of time until they achieved their final form in the 6th century BC. Whatever their origins, these epic poems were a major influence in the development of Greek culture.
Homer is a legendary ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad (the oldest work of Western literature) and the Odyssey. The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was an historical individual, but most scholars are sceptical. No reliable biographical information has been handed down from classical antiquity, and the poems themselves seem to represent the culmination of many centuries of oral story-telling and a well-developed formulaic system of poetic composition. According to Martin West, an internationally recognised scholar in classics, classical antiquity and philology, Homer is “not the name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name.”
The date, or indeed the fact, of Homer’s existence was controversial in antiquity and is no less so today. Herodotus said that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him around 850 BC. But other ancient sources give dates much closer to the supposed time of the Trojan War. The date of the Trojan War was given as 1194–1184 BC by Eratosthenes, who strove to establish a scientific chronology of events, and this date is gaining support in light of recent archaeological research.
For modern scholarship, ‘the time of Homer’ refers to the date of the poems’ conception as much as to the lifetime of Homer. The scholarly consensus is that the Iliad and the Odyssey date from around the eighth century BC, the Iliad being earlier than the Odyssey, possibly by some decades. Over the past few decades, some scholars have argued for a seventh century BC date. Those who believe that the Homeric poems developed gradually over a long period of time however, generally give a later date for the poems. On the other hand, according to Gregory Nagy, they became fixed texts only in the sixth century BC. Alfred Heubeck, the German classical philology scholar, states that the formative influence of the works of Homer in shaping and influencing the whole development of Greek culture was recognized by many Greeks themselves, who considered him to be their instructor.
