Homeric scholarship is the study of any Homeric topic, especially the two large surviving epics , the Iliad and Odyssey . It is currently part of the academic discipline of classical studies . The subject is one of the oldest in education.
114-678: The Aithiopis ( / iː ˈ θ aɪ ə p ɪ s / ; Greek : Αἰθιοπίς , Aithiopís ), also spelled Aethiopis , is a lost epic of ancient Greek literature . It was one of the Epic Cycle , which told the entire history of the Trojan War in epic verse. The story of the Aethiopis lands chronologically after the Homeric Iliad , and could be followed by that of the Little Iliad . The Aethiopis
228-545: A Greek warrior who was the son of Nestor and a great favourite of Achilles. Achilles then kills Memnon, and Zeus makes Memnon immortal at Eos' request. But in his rage Achilles pursues the Trojans into the very gates of Troy, and at the Scaean Gates he is killed by an arrow shot by Paris , assisted by the god Apollo . Achilles' body is rescued by Ajax and Odysseus . The Greeks hold a funeral for Antilochus. Achilles's mother,
342-570: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with Latin words , they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary ; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin . Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian , which, by most accounts,
456-552: A fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes , a limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in
570-556: A faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill . The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on
684-531: A foreign language. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, " Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near
798-587: A gift of the latter. He later placed it in an expensive casket captured from the Persian king, Darius, from which it was called "the Casket Homer". The anecdote, if true, reveals a belief by Aristotle's circle in an authentic text, as well as editorial activity to recapture it. Alexander was a Homer enthusiast. Aristotle's approach to Homer and statesmanship was different from Plato's. Politics and Poetry were two of his research topics. His theoretical treatise, Politics
912-464: A head. His review of Villoison's edition of the scholia acknowledged that they proved conclusively the oral transmission of the poems. In 1795, he published his Prolegomena ad Homerum , in which he argued that the poems were composed in the mid-10th century BCE; that they were transmitted orally; that they changed considerably after that time in the hands of bards performing them orally and editors adapting written versions to contemporary tastes; and that
1026-444: A historical source") stands out. Schliemann , who began excavating Hisarlik in the 1870s, treated Homer as a historical source from an essentially Unitarian viewpoint. Broadly speaking, Analysts tended to study the epics philologically, bringing to bear criteria, linguistic and otherwise, that were little different from those of the ancient Alexandrians. Unitarians tended to be literary critics who were more interested in appreciating
1140-502: A lay on Achilleus' anger (lines 1-347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis (430–492) and the scenes in Olympus (348-429, 493-611); book 2 is a separate lay, but containing several interpolations such as Odysseus' speech (278–332); and so on. (Lachmann also tried to apply Analyst principles to the mediaeval German Nibelungenlied .) Kirchhoff 's 1859 edition of the Odyssey argued that
1254-522: A line from Hesiod to λ630 ( Odyssey Book 11). Diogenes Laërtius relates that in the time of Solon the Iliad was being “rhapsodized” ( rhapsodeisthai ) in public recitations. One of Solon's laws mandates that, in such performances, one rhapsode was to pick up where the previous left off. The involvement of a state official in these rhapsodizations can be explained by their being performances at state-sponsored sacred festivals. Cicero says that previously
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#17328477788901368-493: A master copy, but it had been lost. Not having a theory of oral transmission, Villoison regarded the poems as “extinct.” The problem then became to distinguish which of the purchased verses were spurious. The opposite view, expressed by Friedrich August Wolf in ‘’Prolegomena ad Homerum’’, 1795, is that Homer never wrote the Iliad . The variant manuscripts seen by the Alexandrines were not corruptions, but rhapsodic variants, as
1482-430: A minor character, Pylaemenes, in combat; but later, at 13.758-9, he is still alive to witness the death of his son Harpalion. These have been humorously described as points where Homer "nodded off," from which comes the proverbial phrase " Homeric Nod ." Aristotle 's Homeric Problems , which does not survive, was probably a response to Zoilus. Critical editions of Homer discuss three special steps in this process. First
1596-434: A moment of glory in battle, but Achilles kills her. The Greek warrior Thersites later taunts Achilles, claiming that he had been in love with her, and Achilles kills him too. Achilles is ritually purified for the murder of Thersites. Next another Trojan ally arrives, Memnon , son of Eos and Tithonus , leading an Ethiopian contingent and wearing armour made by the god Hephaestus . In battle, Memnon kills Antilochus ,
1710-529: A significant proportion of the terminology is still in use today ( obelus , athetising , etc.). From the scholia a great deal is known about his guiding principles, and those of other editors and commentators such as Zenodotus and Aristophanes of Byzantium . The chief preoccupations of the Alexandrian scholars may be summarised as follows: To a modern eye it is evident that these principles should be applied at most on an ad hoc basis. When they are applied across
1824-503: A single mind. Nitzsch's writings cover the years 1828 to 1862. In his Meletemata (1830) he took up the question of written versus unwritten literature, on which Wolf's whole argument had turned; and in his 1852 Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen ("The oral poetry of the Greeks") he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems and their relation to other, non-extant, epics which narrated the story of
1938-682: A small fraction of all the preserved scholia ...,” from which it can be seen that the opinions, elucidations and emendations to the Iliad and Odyssey in manuscript texts far outweigh those texts in numbers of pages. By the Classical Period the Homeric Question had advanced to the point of trying to determine what works were attributable to Homer . The Iliad and the Odyssey were beyond question. They were considered to have been written by Homer . The D-scholia suggest that they were taught in
2052-518: A word beginning with a consonant), but leōs is short, long. In Fick's view, lāos was left to prevent change to leōs. The opposition, therefore, dates to after 540 BCE, corresponding to the period of the Peisistratean edition. This coincidence suggests that the modern Iliad , which descends from a text the Alexandrian scholars called “the Vulgate,” is linked to the Peisistratean edition. Proving it, however,
2166-479: A written edition by Peisistratos, some credible, some not. A few mention the establishment of a Peisistratean school. In others, Hipparchus (son of Peisistratos) published the edition and passed a law that it must be read at the Panathenaic Games , which began in 566 BCE, before the tyranny of his father, from 561 BCE. Peisistratos was succeeded by his sons in 527 BCE. The linguist, August Fick , hypothesized
2280-522: A “metamorphosis of the originally Achaean Iliad into its present Ionic form.” By Achaean he meant Aeolic Greek , and by Ionic form, Ionic Greek . He based his theory on the partial substitution of Ionic words for Aeolic ones; i.e., where the Ionic forms fit the meter, which was Dactylic hexameter , they replaced the Aeolic, but where they did not, the Aeolic was left intact. For example, Atreidēs, “sons of Atreus,”
2394-766: Is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine , the United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout
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#17328477788902508-465: Is also sometimes difficult to know what exactly the Alexandrians meant when they rejected a passage. The scholia on Odyssey 23.296 tell us that Aristarchus and Aristophanes regarded that line as the end of the epic (even though that is grammatically impossible); but we are also told that Aristarchus separately rejected several passages after that point. Exegesis is also represented in the scholia. When
2622-742: Is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of the Balkans , Caucasus , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system
2736-528: Is an Inspired Teacher , and must not be banished from the curriculum. If we get beneath the literal meaning, we find him teaching the highest truth." In the Republic , however, Plato denies that children can distinguish literal and allegorical truth and advocates censoring the myth-makers, including Homer. The Republic expresses a concept of a society established according to the Platonic ideal, in which every aspect
2850-474: Is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek toponyms . The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian , and Turkish . During
2964-504: Is another issue. Between the hypothetical Peisistratean edition and the Vulgate recension of the Alexandrines is a historical gap. Fick's work indicates a connection, which also is suggested by the peripatetic associations of the Library of Alexandria (below). Moreover, some of the D-scholia redated to the 5th century BCE indicate that some sort of standard Iliad existed then, to be taught in
3078-596: Is attested by Flavius Josephus in Against Apion . He said that the poetry of Homer was “preserved by memory ... and assembled ... later from the songs.” The link missing from the evidence, apart from the circumstantial, is the connection between the texts produced by Peisistratus and the Alexandrine Vulgate. What is lacking is either an “Athenian prototype,”, or a conjectural “Wolfian vulgate,” or multi-text assembled from oral variants wrongly marked as spurious by
3192-409: Is common to see modern scholars refer to such allegorising in the scholia as "inferior" or even "contemptible". As a result, these texts are now rarely read. The 18th century saw major developments in Homeric scholarship, and also saw the opening phase of the discussion which was to dominate the 19th century (and, for some scholars, the 20th): the so-called " Homeric question ". Homer was first seen as
3306-535: Is important enough to compile. Certain types have been distinguished; scholia have lines of descent of their own. Eleanor Dickey summarizes the most important three, identified by letter as A, bT, and D. A, "the Venetian scholia", are the scholia of Venetus A , a major manuscript of the Iliad , dated to the 10th century, and located in the Biblioteca Marciana (Library of St. Mark's) of Venice . The sources of
3420-558: Is listed in Diogenes Laërtius ' Life of Aristotle as "Six books of Homeric problems". Of the 93 quotations, Mitchell Carroll says: “Aristotle’s hearty veneration for Homer is shown by the numerous citations of the Iliad and the Odyssey in his works, and by the frequent expressions of admiration occurring in the Poetics ; ….” , Despite this enthusiasm, Monro notes that the “poetical quotations are especially incorrect,” with regard to
3534-497: Is monitored and controlled under the guidance of a philosopher-king drafted from ascetic poverty for the purpose. It was not a popular view. The archetype of Hellenistic libraries was that of the Lyceum in classical Athens. Its founder, Aristotle , had been a student, and then an associate, at Plato ’s Academy . He was Plato’s star student, but as a metic , or resident foreigner (he was still Greek), he could not own property or sponsor
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3648-462: Is much uncertainty about its date. Ancient sources date Arctinus to the eighth century; but the earliest artistic representations of one of the most important characters, Penthesilea , date to about 600 BC, suggesting a much later date. In current critical editions only five lines survive of the Aethiopis ' original text. We are almost entirely dependent on a summary of the Cyclic epics contained in
3762-497: Is not a presentation, like Plato's, of an ideal state according to some philosophy, but is a presentation and classification of real states as they were then, discovered by research. Similarly, Homer does not play a role in any censorial evaluation of Aristotle as a critic, but appears in a professional study of poetry, the Poetics , with regard to the difficulty with some of his language. Aristotle's main study of Homer did not survive. It
3876-607: Is opposed to Poseidon because fire is opposed to water. Allegory is also represented in some surviving ancient monographs: the Homeric Allegories by an otherwise unknown 1st century BCE writer Heraclitus , the 2nd century CE Plutarch 's On the Life and Poetry of Homer , and the works of the 3rd century CE Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry , particularly his On the Cave of the Nymphs in
3990-510: Is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary , Romania, and Ukraine. It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . The phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary of the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to
4104-816: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern Homeric scholarship#Neoanalysis Scholia are ancient commentaries, preserved in
4218-518: Is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora . Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around
4332-758: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek . In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , 'whatever') from ότι ( óti , 'that'). Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,
4446-630: Is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with
4560-572: Is the hypothetical "Peisistratean recension". There is a long-standing, but somewhat old-fashioned, tradition in modern scholarship which holds that in the mid-6th century BCE the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus had the Homeric epics compiled in a definitive edition. It is known that under Peisistratus, and later, rhapsodes competed in performing Homer at the Panathenaic festival ; and a scholion on Iliad 10.1 accuses Peisistratus of inserting book 10 into
4674-518: The Chrestomathy attributed to an unknown Proclus (possibly to be identified with the 2nd-century AD grammarian Eutychius Proclus ). Fewer than ten other references give indications of the poem's storyline. According to Davies, Memnon as the helping warrior in the Aethiopis corresponds to Amazon Queen Penthesileia displaying a kind of symmetry in its plot: "two major allies come to help Priam and are killed by Achilles; these are Penthesileia , from
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4788-507: The Aethiopis , in the next epic in the Cycle, the Little Iliad , or in both. Events told in the story of the Aethiopis were popular among ancient Greek vase painters . Especially popular scenes are the death of Penthesilea, and Ajax's retrieval of Achilles' corpse. Despite being poorly attested, the Aethiopis is frequently cited in modern scholarship on the Homeric Iliad . It is one of
4902-486: The Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It
5016-405: The Iliad , or source. Larger compendia are relatively recent. One that has already become a standard is the 7-volume compendium of A- and bT-scholia by Hartmut Erbse . Volumes 1–5 are reserved for a number of books of the Iliad each, amounting to some 3000 pages, approximately. The last two volumes are indices. And yet, Dickey says of it. “The seven volumes of Erbse’s edition thus represent only
5130-527: The Iliad . But there is little evidence for a Peisistratean recension, and most present-day scholars doubt its existence; at the very least it is disputed what is to be understood by the term "recension". The second and third key moments are the critical editions made by the 3rd and 2nd century BCE Alexandrian scholars Zenodotus of Ephesus and Aristarchus respectively; both of these scholars also published numerous other works on Homer and other poets, none of which survive. Zenodotus' edition may well have been
5244-510: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan , and Greek has a central position in it. Linear B , attested as early as
5358-459: The Odyssey are less in number but are still in the order of dozens . The inventory is incomplete, and new finds continue to be made , but not all these texts contain scholia. No compendium has collated all of the Homeric scholia. Following the Principle of Economy : the allocation of scarce publication space to overwhelming numbers of scholia, the compilers have had to make decisions about what
5472-550: The Trojan War , the so-called Epic Cycle . However, most Unitarian scholarship tended to be driven by literary interpretation and was therefore often more ephemeral. Even so, many scholars who examined the archaeology and social history of Homeric Greece did so from a Unitarian perspective, perhaps out of a wish to avoid the complexities of Analysis and Analysts' tendency to re-write each other's work indefinitely. Niese 's 1873 Der homerische Schiffskatalog als historische Quelle betrachtet ("The Homeric catalogue of ships studied as
5586-492: The nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in
5700-501: The nominative case , is Ionic, but the genitive plural is Atreidaōn, an Aeolic form, instead of the Ionic Atreideōn, which does not fit the meter. Fick uses the device to date the transformation. Old Ionic lēos, “people,” is used in post-Homeric lyric poetry, but the Iliad uses lāos, an Aeolic form. Lēos was displaced by Ionic leōs after Hipponax , c. 540 BCE. Lēos and lāos have the same meter, long and short (or two longs before
5814-421: The 11th century T, the "Townleian" scholia, so designated because the manuscript, Townleyanus, was once in the collection of Lord Townley , and a lost manuscript, b, whose descendants include the manuscript known as Venetus B. The bT manuscripts descend from an earlier manuscript, c. The bT-scholia are termed exegetical , as opposed to critical. The D scholia, or scholia Didymi, named erroneously for Didymus, are
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#17328477788905928-552: The 12 ships from Salamis in the Athenian camp, proving that Athens owned Salamis in the Trojan War. Others denied the theory, Strabo said. The story implies that Peisistratos or Solon had some authority over a presumed master text of the Iliad , and yet Athens at the time had little political power over the Aegean region. Strabo was not the only accuser. Plutarch also accuses him of moving
6042-465: The 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into
6156-517: The 7th or 8th century CE (the latest bT scholia). The same scheme applies to the Odyssey , except that A scholia, mainly of the Iliad , are in deficit. There are no printed works publishing all the scholia on the Iliad and Odyssey . Only partial publications according to various principles have been possible. The first was that of Janus Lascaris in 1517, containing the D-scholia. Some subsequent works concentrate on manuscripts or parts of them, others on type of scholia, and still others on books of
6270-582: The Alexandrines. The Homeric classicists of the 19th century believed they had inferred a Voralexandrinsche Vulgata , “Pre-Alexandrine Vulgate,” to use the expression of Arthur Ludwich. This was a hypothetical 4th- and 5th-century BCE version of the Alexandrine Vulgate. The latter had to have had precedents. The problem was to prove it. Ludwich assembled a list of all the lines put forward as quotations from Homer in pre-Alexandrine authors: some 29 authors plus some unknown fragments, amounting to about 480 verse , or “lines.” D.B. Monro used this database to compare
6384-486: The Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet , with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit
6498-425: The Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than
6612-491: The Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet. Greek has been written in
6726-629: The Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: Many aspects of the syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow
6840-661: The Greek-Albanian border. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. Prior to the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community
6954-480: The Nymphaeum, at Mieza . Alexander became an enthusiastic member of Aristotle’s inner circle. Immediate association was terminated within a few years when Alexander assumed the duties of monarch after the assassination of his father in 336/335. His main duty was to lead a planned invasion of the east to settle the rivalry with Persia. During it he kept by his bedside a manuscript of Homer personally emended by Aristotle,
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#17328477788907068-519: The Odyssey and Homeric Questions . Many extracts from Porphyry are preserved in the scholia, especially the D scholia (although the current standard edition, that of Erbse , omits them). Allegorical interpretation continued to be influential on Byzantine scholars such as Tzetzes and Eustathius . But allegorising non-allegorical literature has not been a fashionable activity since the Middle Ages ; it
7182-458: The Ur- Odyssey had comprised just books 1, 5-9, and parts of 10-12, that a later phase had added most of books 13-23, and a third phase had added the bits about Telemachos, and book 24. The climax of Analysis came with Wilamowitz , who published Homerische Untersuchungen ("Homeric studies") in 1884 and Die Heimkehr des Odysseus ("The homecoming of Odysseus") in 1927. The Odyssey , he argued,
7296-553: The Vulgate (Ludwich's Zusatzversen ), From Iliad IV. Monro asserts “... whatever interpolated texts of Homer were then current, the copy from which Plato quoted was not one of them.” Aristotle's quotations do not have the same purity, which is surprising. For about 20 years they were at the same school, the Platonic Academy . The Platonic view of Homer is exceptional for the times. Homer and Hesiod were considered to have written myths as allegory. According to J.A. Stewart, "… Homer
7410-404: The acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography . After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system),
7524-402: The ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of
7638-429: The artistry of the poems than in analysing them. But artistic merit was the unspoken motivation behind both schools of thought. Homer must at all costs be hallowed as the great, original, genius; everything good in the epics is to be attributed to him. So Analysts hunted for errors (as Zoilus had done), and blamed them on incompetent editors; Unitarians tried to explain errors away, sometimes even claiming they were really
7752-401: The board the results are frequently bizarre, especially as no account whatsoever is taken of poetic licence . However, it should be remembered that the reasoning seems persuasive when built up gradually, and then it is a very difficult mindset to escape: 19th century Analyst scholars (see below) adopted most of these criteria, and applied them even more stringently than the Alexandrians did. It
7866-440: The books of Homer were “confused” ( confusos ), but that Peisistratos “disposed” ( disposuisse ) them as they were then. A scholion on Iliad , Book K, in manuscript T, says that they were “arranged” ( tetachthai ) by Peisistratos into one poem. Apparently the impromptu composition of shorter poems on a known theme was forced into a continuous presentation by Solon, and edited by Peisistratos. A number of other fragments testify to
7980-547: The cultural products of an entire people; and Wood ’s 1769 Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer argued emphatically that Homer had been illiterate and the epics had been transmitted orally. (Less fortunately, Wood drew parallels between Homer and the poetry of the supposed Scottish oral poet Ossian , published by James Macpherson in 1765; Ossian turned out later to have been wholly invented by Macpherson.) The scholar Friedrich August Wolf brought matters to
8094-488: The development of scholarship per se revolved around three goals: The first philosopher to focus intensively on the intellectual problems surrounding the Homeric epics was Zoilus of Amphipolis in the early 4th century BCE. His work Homeric Questions does not survive, but it seems that Zoilus enumerated and discussed inconsistencies of plot in Homer. Examples of this are numerous: for example, in Iliad 5.576-9 Menelaus kills
8208-520: The earliest and largest group. They occur primarily in the 9th century Z (Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale ), and the 11th century Q, but also in some others, such as A and T. The D scholia were once thought to be the work of the 1st century BCE scholar Didymus; they are now known to go back to 5th and 4th century BC school manuscripts, pre-dating the Alexandrine tradition, and representing “the oldest surviving stratum of Homeric scholarship.” Some are also called
8322-404: The early 19th century that was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of
8436-602: The epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute
8550-493: The epics, as they now stood, were encrustations of second-rate later material around a pristine kernel: a hypothetical "Ur- Iliad ". Conversely, Lachmann 's 1847 Betrachtungen über Homers Ilias ("Studies on Homer's Iliad") argued that the Iliad was a compilation of 18 independent folk-lays, rather as the Finnish Kalevala actually was, compiled in the 1820s and 1830s by Lönnrot : so, he argued, Iliad book 1 consists of
8664-415: The errors and additional lines. This is not the expected result if Aristotle had received the pure edition from which Plato had quoted. Monro's solution is to adopt the view of Adolph Römer, that the errors can be attributed to Aristotle personally, and not to variant manuscripts. This was obviously not history's final verdict. Many ancient Greek writers discussed topics and problems in the Homeric epics, but
8778-665: The first to divide the Iliad and Odyssey into 24 books. Aristarchus' edition is probably the single most important moment in the whole history of Homeric scholarship. His text was more conservative than Zenodotus', but it became the standard edition of Homer for the ancient world, and almost everything in modern editions of Homer passed through Aristarchus' hands. Like Zenodotus, Aristarchus did not delete passages that he rejected, but (fortunately for us) preserved them with an annotation indicating his rejection. He developed Zenodotus' already sophisticated system of critical symbols to indicate specific kinds of issues with particular lines, and
8892-452: The following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki , the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in
9006-550: The fulcrum between two opposed schools of thought, the Analysts and the Unitarians . The issue came about in the context of 18th-century interest in popular lays and folktale, and the growing recognition that the Homeric epics must have been transmitted orally before being written down, possibly much later than "Homer" himself. The Italian philosopher Vico argued that the epics were the products not of an individual genius poet but rather
9120-439: The infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of the dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn
9234-463: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A , has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek , is the earliest known form of Greek. Another similar system used to write
9348-439: The margins of manuscripts. The term marginalia includes them. Some are interlinear , written in very small characters. Over time the scholia were copied along with the work. When the copyist ran out of free text space, he listed them on separate pages or in separate works. The works of Homer have been heavily annotated since antiquity. The number of manuscripts of the Iliad is currently (2014) approximately 1800. The papyri of
9462-621: The membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë . It is also an official minority language in the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek
9576-441: The modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it. Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and
9690-583: The most important paradigms used in Neoanalytic scholarship on Homer because of strong similarities between its story of Achilles, Antilochus, and Memnon, and the Iliadic story of Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector; the claim that such a similarity exists is known as the "Memnon theory". Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized : Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized : Hellēnikḗ )
9804-546: The north, and Memnon , from the south, both (in strong contrast to the Trojan allies of the Iliad ) dwelling in remote fantasy lands. It rather looks as if Penthesileia and Memnon were early conceived as a corresponding pair. The poem opens shortly after the death of the Trojan hero Hector , with the arrival of the Amazon warrior Penthesileia who has come to support the Trojans. She has
9918-399: The noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However, the morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language . Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks
10032-521: The objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world . It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It
10146-706: The older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian , South Slavic ( Macedonian / Bulgarian ) and Eastern Romance languages ( Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian ). Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics , physics , astronomy , democracy , philosophy , athletics , theatre, rhetoric , baptism , evangelist , etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as
10260-498: The original genius of Homer, or at the very least that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed by different poets. In this they followed in the steps of ancient scholars like Zoilus and the so-called "separatists" (χωρίζοντες chōrizontes , the best known of whom, Xenon and Hellanicus, are nonetheless very obscure figures). Among Analysts, Hermann 's 1832 De interpolationibus Homeri ("On interpolations in Homer") and 1840 De iteratis apud Homerum ("On repetitions in Homer") argued that
10374-546: The other metics. Consequently, after the death of Plato, not having been appointed director, he departed Athens for an educational opportunity in Mysia , which fell through when Mysia was captured by the Persians. He was subsequently hired by his boyhood companion, now Philip II of Macedon , to tutor the latter’s teen-age son, the future Alexander the Great , on whose behalf he built a school,
10488-477: The papyrus fragments can be specimens.” According to Monro, based on Ludwich, Plato is the most prolific quoter of Homer, with 209 lines. Next most is Aristotle, with 93 lines. Of the 209, only two differ from the Vulgate, in Iliad Book IV, which Ludwich termed Kontaminiert , “corrupted.” Several were marked as spurious (Ludwich's aufser ) by the Alexandrians. There was only one instance of four lines not in
10602-435: The percentage of non-Vulgate lines in the quotes with a control group, the non-Vulgate lines in the fragments of the papyri known to him then. Judging from the fragments, 60 of the 480 lines ought to be missing from the Vulgate. The number is only 12, from which Monro concludes: “The quotations, in short, prove that there was a pre-Alexandrian vulgate agreeing much more closely with the modern vulgate than with any text of which
10716-435: The poems' apparent artistic unity came about after their transcription. Wolf posed the perplexing question of what it would mean to restore the poems to their original, pristine, form. In the wake of Wolf, two schools of thought coalesced to oppose one another: Analysts and Unitarians. 19th-century Analysts argued that the epics were composed by many hands, a hodge-podge of interpolations and incompetent editing that concealed
10830-617: The product of his primitive time by the Scottish scholar Thomas Blackwell , in An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735). Another major development was the enormous growth of linguistic study on Homer and the Homeric dialect . In 1732, Bentley published his discovery of the traces left in the text of Homer by the digamma , an archaic Greek consonant that was omitted in later, classical, Greek orthography . Bentley showed conclusively that
10944-629: The scholia are noted at the end of each book. There are basically four. The hypothetical original text of the scholia, a manuscript of the 4th century CE, is therefore called, in German, the Viermännerkommentar (VMK), "four-man commentary", where the men are Aristonicus , Didymus , Herodian , and Nicanor . Their comments, and these scholia, are termed "critical" . A-scholia are found in other manuscripts as well. Venetus A contains some bT scholia. The bT-scholia have come down to us through two sources:
11058-441: The scholia minora and the scholia vulgata, the former name referring to the short length of many. These are glossaries. Among the non-minor scholia are mythological (allegorical) aetia , plots, and paraphrases, explaining the meanings of obscure words. The order of precedence and chronological order of these Iliad scholia is D, A, bT, and other. Material in them probably ranges from the 5th century BCE (the D scholia) to as late as
11172-528: The scholiasts turn to interpretation they tend to be most interested in explaining background material, e.g., reporting an obscure myth to which Homer alludes; but there was also a fashion for allegory, especially among the Stoics . The most notable passage is a scholion on Iliad 20.67, which gives an extended allegorical interpretation of the battle of the gods, explaining each god as symbolic of various elements and principles in conflict with one another, e.g., Apollo
11286-507: The schools. These broad events are circumstantial evidence only. Nagy says, “As of this writing, Homeric scholarship has not yet succeeded in achieving a definitive edition of either the Iliad or the Odyssey.” He quotes the view given by Villoison , first publisher (1788) of the scholia on Venetus A , that Peisistratus, in the absence of a written copy, had given a reward for verses of Homer, inviting spurious verses. There had been, in other words,
11400-404: The schools; however, the language was no longer self-evident. The extensive glossaries of the D-scholia were intended to bridge the gap between the spoken language and Homeric Greek . The poems themselves contradicted the general belief in the existence and authorship of Homer. There were many variants, which there should not have been according to the single-author conviction. The simplest answer
11514-450: The sea nymph Thetis , comes with her sisters and the Muses to lament over Achilles's body. Funeral games are held in honour of Achilles, at which his armor and weapons are offered as a prize for the greatest hero. A dispute over them develops between Ajax and Odysseus. There the Aethiopis ends; it is uncertain whether the judgment of Achilles' armor, and subsequent suicide of Ajax, were told in
11628-462: The sophistication of his analysis that 20th century Analysts seem to have found difficulty in moving forward from where Wilamowitz left off; and over the course of the following decades attention drifted away, particularly in the English-speaking world. Nitzsch was the earliest scholar to oppose Wolf and argue that the two Homeric epics showed an artistic unity and intention that was the work of
11742-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis , used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of
11856-400: The three poems, the "old Odyssey " (most of books 5-14 and 17-19) had in turn been compiled by a Redaktor from three even earlier poems, two of which had originally been parts of longer poems. Like most other scholars caught up in the opposition between Analysis and Unitarianism, Wilamowitz equated poetry that he thought poor with late interpolations. But Wilamowitz set such a high standard in
11970-426: The vast majority of metrical anomalies in Homeric verse could be attributed to the presence of digamma (though the idea was not well received at the time: Alexander Pope , for one, satirised Bentley). Important linguistic studies continued throughout the next two centuries alongside the endless arguments over the Homeric question, and the work by figures such as Buttmann and Monro is still worth reading today; and it
12084-568: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses , with some being exclusive between them. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or
12198-549: Was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of
12312-546: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe
12426-428: Was compiled about 650 BCE or later from three separate poems by a Bearbeiter (editor). Subsequent Analysts often referred to the hypothesised Bearbeiter as the "B-poet" (and the original genius, Homer himself, was sometimes the "A-poet"). Wilamowitz' examination of the relationship between these three layers of the Odyssey , further complicated by later, minor, interpolations, is enormously detailed and complex. One of
12540-404: Was often attributed by ancient writers to Arctinus of Miletus who lived in the 8th century BC (see Cyclic poets ). The poem comprised five books of verse in dactylic hexameter . Very few fragments of the Aethiopis survive today; Proclus 's summary of the poems' contents establishes the narrative framework of the epic. The Aethiopis was probably composed in the seventh century BC, but there
12654-418: Was the linguistic work of Parry that set in motion a major paradigm shift in the mid-20th century. Another major 18th century development was Villoison 's 1788 publication of the A and B scholia on the Iliad . The Homeric question is essentially the question of the identity of the poet(s) of the Homeric epics, and the nature of the relationship between "Homer" and the epics. In the 19th century it came to be
12768-409: Was to decide which of the variants was most likely to represent a presumed authentic original composition and to discount the others as spurious, devised by someone else. Strabo reports an account by Hereas accusing Peisistratos , tyrant of Athens, r. 561-527 BCE, or Solon (638-558 BCE), sometime eponymous archon and lawgiver, starting 594 BCE, of altering the Iliad s Catalogue of Ships to place
12882-566: Was under the control of the Frankish Empire ). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios . Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect
12996-653: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado , some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet . The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage
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