mountains-their constancy is conveyed by the traditional language. The sun rises each day in familiar
terms; Achilles remains swift however inactive he may be. Set against this formulaic backcloth are the
unique, terrible events. The sun sets as ever, but Hector is dead. In Homer we have a supremely pervasive
counterpoint of static and dynamic, the constant and the ephemeral. This owes much to the essential style
of the poetry.
Homer and History
The old question of whether Homer was one poet or many has, then, been largely displaced by the new
question of Homer's relation to his tradition. The other great Homeric controversy, which goes back to
even earlier than Wolf, is still as lively as ever, and has in fact captured more widespread interest than the
scholars' obsession with multiple authorship. How 'true' is Homer? What is the relation of the Iliad and
Odyssey to any historical reality? Was there ever a Greek siege of Troy? Did the Phaeacians exist, and if
so where?, etc., etc. The issue of the 'truth' of Homer has often been connected with the question-in most
respects a very different one-of the historicity of the Old Testament. This should sound the warning that
we must ask questions appropriate to the work. Inappropriate questions will lead to false answers.
While there have always been a few who are happy to regard the events of the poems as fiction set in a
world which is largely the creation of poetic fantasy, there have been many more who have passionately
believed that Homer is, more or less, history. They seized on Robert Wood's reports in the eighteenth
century that the topography and natural history of Turkey corroborated Homer's accuracy. They drew
more comfort from the archaeological discovery in the late nineteenth century that there really had been a
great Mycenaean civilization. The romantic fabrications of Heinrich Schliemann clearly satisfied a
popular desire by 'verifying' Homer.
Most vindications of Homer's historicity have claimed him as an accurate record of the Mycenaean Age
of about 1400-1100 BC. A few, however, have claimed him as a record of his own contemporary world
(say ninth or eighth century). But, against this latter, it seems inevitable that a distant world of heroes calls
for a way of life different from that of the audience (they eat roast meat every day, for example); and that
it has to be free from blatant 'anachronisms' known to be recent innovations-hence, for example, the
absence of literacy from the poems. The most influential modern claim for this historicity of Homer, M.I.
Finley's World of Odysseus, looks neither to the Mycenaean past nor Homer's present, but the 'Dark-Age'
Greece of about 1050-900 B.C. He claims that Homer accurately records that world in such
anthropological aspects as social and kinship structures, moral and political values, and general world-
view.
Although archaeologists continue to dispute, it is now generally agreed that various elements of the
material world of Homer are derived from different periods. Fighting weapons and armour, for instance,
are all bronze, while iron is a rare metal: this preserves the metallurgy of the Mycenaean (Bronze) Age.
On the other hand, the dead are cremated rather than buried, and this is a post-Mycenaean Iron Age
practice. In some places the heroes carry huge Mycenaean shields, in others the smaller 'modern' sort. The
material world seems to come from different times, spread over many centuries, and as likely as not from
different places also. In this respect it is very like the language of the poems and the explanation must