Expert: Maria - 10/15/2007

Question
Hi Maria,

If Homer was blind...how was the Illiad & Odyssey written ? On what ....tablets...wax...parchment & in what manner ?

Many thanks

Eve

USA


Answer
Hello again,

Actually nobody  knows for certain and then can assert that Homer was blind as the details of his life are a mystery: there is no authentic record of who he was, when and where he was born, how long he lived, or even if he was really the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey universally associated with the name of this  wandering poet (“Aoidos” in classical Greek, meaning "singer").

Anyway one thing is certain: both epics were created without recourse to writing, since in the mid-8th century BC., i.e. during Homer’s life more or less, the inhabitants of Greece did not use alphabetic writing yet and then the poems were transmitted orally.

Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate, though it seems that they were written only in the 6th century BC  when Peisistratus, the tyrant of Athens from 560 to 527,first committed the poems of Homer to writing on tablets and reduced them to the order in which we now read them, according to Cicero (On the Orator, book 3, chapter 137).

Best,
Maria