Literature begins and ends with Homer.

James81

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I deliberatley chose a controversial statement to draw people in, and it worked!

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it read that giant post.
 

BenPanced

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I think this opinion takes a narrow view of the world origins of story telling. Ancient Homeric texts influenced WESTERN story tellers, most certainly, but what about ancient stories from China and Japan. There are ancient stories all over the world that arose independent of European influenced stories. What about the stories of the tribes of Africa, or the Maori, the Cree?

Literature begins and ends with humans having stories to tell to each other. That is all.
Considering how these stories flourish independently of each other, then and now, I agree it's difficult to say when literature "began". Even pinpointing such a nebulous concept of "modern" literature is tenuous, at best.
 

Shar-Jan

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You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it read that giant post.

We're all readers here are we not? :p

I did have some awesome pictures, but Imageshack decided to bork them all up.

I read something interesting today. During Achilles' rage in book 21 he fights a river God. If you read this carefully it could be that Achilles is fighting the river. On the other hand, he could just have easily fallen in and is thrashing about.

Theres a bit of farce in it as well.
 

Deleted member 42

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it read that giant post.

You have the time to make an inane comment post, but aren't willing to actually read the thread?

OK . . . I guess that pretty much says it all.
 

IceCreamEmpress

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Gee, I would say that literature began long before Homer and hasn't ended yet.
 

sassandgroove

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So are we talking about where lit began and ends, the Iliad, the Odyssey, or how we should dismiss Homer because he didn't have our world view?
 

Shar-Jan

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To reiterate, the thread title was merely a way of fostering some debate and getting people involved. Can't deny it worked.

Western literature certainly began with Homer, but the Mesopotamians and others in the East had been writing for ages already, Gilagamesh and certain parts of the Old Testament predate Homer. And as for literature ending, I don't think we'll ever see his like again but thats no reason for everyone to put down their pens. Otherwise we wouldn't have Cormac McCarthy.

Heres a question: Aenid or Iliad?

Personally, I think the Aenid is too heavily influenced on Homer. The first half is the Odyssey and the second half is the Iliad. Virgil lets his own politics become too far involved, and Aenias is a little too perfect for my liking.
 

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Western literature certainly began with Homer

Err, no, actually, it doesn't. Sure, the canon does, but no, literature does not.

First of all, I'm going to take "literature" literally--that is, associate it with letters, and hence written text.

The Hindu epic texts are from roughly the same era, give or take a couple of centuries. Both depict iron age cultures; both are Indo-European, and are more similar than they are different.

The reason we hear more about Homer is because the renaissance suddenly discovered Greek (again); Sanskrit had to wait until the seventeen hundreds for Europe to re-discover it, and Sanskrit never caught up with Classical Greek.

That said, there's a fair amount of early Irish literature that also describes an Iron age culture and that was written down sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries.

The oldest complete ms. of the Illiad dates from the tenth century (Venetus A or Marciano Gr. Z. 454 [= 822); that's the same as the date for the ms. of Beowulf, and a number of Irish texts, too.

I'm not dissing Homer; merely trying to place the poet(s) work in a context.
 

Doug Johnson

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Modern literature definitely ends with Homer. Will anyone ever come up with a more profound observation than:

"Beer, the cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems."
 

Shar-Jan

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I was meaning literature as being distinct from writing, as in written down stories rather than chronicles of kings, or other early attempts at historical records. I know thats flawed reasoning but I'm flawed. If we consider written records of any kind as 'literature' then it begins with the ancients in Mesopotamia. When your deep in the mists of time like this there's tons of grey areas (EG the books of the Nevim, are they attempts at fact or allegorical fiction? No one knows, likely no one every did know)

The oldest complete ms. of the Illiad dates from the tenth century (Venetus A or Marciano Gr. Z. 454 [= 822); that's the same as the date for the ms. of Beowulf, and a number of Irish texts, too.

Fragments of it certainly were kicking around for much time previous. Virgil definetely had access to it or he wouldn't have been able to plagarise it so well. We know some people added in bits (book 10 anyone? Theres no way thats Homer) but the plotting remains so consistent throughout that I think its unlikely anything considerable was changed. Medieval monks had a knack for butchering the pagan texts to fit in with their own beliefs, and the Iliads sex and paganist overtones are still pretty overt. Compare it to the Torah, now thats had so many revisions over the years that it's just plan bizarre in places.
 

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Yes, there are extant fragments, and yes, Virgil almost certainly had access to a written text, but you're sort of missing a number of points.

My points are:

1. You're making sweeping generalizations about the canon, and about Western literature, and about poetry.

2. You're ignoring, completely, the fact that Homer's Illiad and Odyssey were very definitely oral-formulaic compositions, orally composed and orally delivered, though you do allude to it in your reference to "poets" plural.

3. Homer was lost to the West from about the fifth century to roughly the fifteenth; in other words, he wasn't an influence on a thousand years of poetry. Chaucer, like Boccacio, and others, wrote about Homeric heroes, like Troilus, without access to the Illiad.

Finally, this bit:

Medieval monks had a knack for butchering the pagan texts to fit in with their own beliefs, and the Iliads sex and paganist overtones are still pretty overt.

It's just wrong, particularly the references to "butchering." Yes, they do seem to have left out bits--but as you say, they also seemed to have managed to conserve, pagan references and all, a hell of a lot. When we look at mss. using various kinds of scanning techniques, like cat scans, and ultraviolet, we find that the bits that were erased were not so much differences in subject matter (censoring the dirty bits) as a desire to tell a "better" version of the story. It's far more common to see a scribe apologizing for including "dirty" or "pagan" materials, than it is to see them excised--and yes, often we can tell because we have alternate versions of the same story.

Which proves that writers haven't changed that much. . .
 

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Now then -- Like others, I prefer the Odyssey.

Of late, I've been enamored of Fagles' translation; partially because the audio version is enormously fun to listen to, and that goes for both the Illiad and the Odyssey.
 
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Shar-Jan

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Fair enough about Homer having plenty of antecedents and being essentially out of play for a millenia. He did essentially create Greek trajedy, in the figure of Patroclus a few hundred years before that emreged proper.

In my opinion, despite the Odyssey being fantastic (Polyphemus is awesome), it just doesn't have the thing to it that the Iliad did. Theres more emotional involvement in one horse dying than there is in all the killing of the suitors. Although the Iliad does get a little samey and often turns into a catalogue of Greek and Trojans.
 

Ken

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in some ways, though, even if Homer had been an atrocious author literature would've still begun and ended with him for the simple fact that he was "the first." Life is rich in detail, but short in substance, ultimately leaving very little to be said about it.
 

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in some ways, though, even if Homer had been an atrocious author literature would've still begun and ended with him for the simple fact that he was "the first." Life is rich in detail, but short in substance, ultimately leaving very little to be said about it.

Except he's not definitely the first; there's a multi-century long debate about whether or not Homer or Hesiod came first--and he's only even "early" in Greek literature; there are a number of works, and authors, that predate Homer.
 

Ken

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point about Homer not really being the first, acknowledged, Medievalist. When it comes to facts your word is as good as the Britannica's to me ;-)

ps Simpson may not have much to do with literature but he's sure one funny cat :-D