60 Fun Facts About Homer

In most ancient biographies, Homer is depicted as having what condition?

Blindness also marks the singer of an early hymn once credited to him, who signs off as a blind man from a rocky island; scholars treat all such biography as legend.

The most widespread ancient tradition made Homer a bard from which region of the Greek world?

Ionia, on the coast of modern Turkey, fits the poems themselves: their Greek is built mainly on the speech of that coast, though scholars treat the ancient biographies as legend.

Pindar is credited with saying Homer came from Smyrna and which island?

Chios was home to the Homeridae, a guild of reciters who claimed to be Homer's descendants and made performing his poems their trade.

What false name does Odysseus give the Cyclops Polyphemus?

Nobody: so when the wounded giant roars that Nobody is hurting him, his neighbours go back to bed, and the Greeks slip out clinging to the undersides of his sheep.

Legend says Homer died after failing to solve a riddle posed by whom?

Boys fishing on the shore told him that what they caught they left behind and what they missed they carried home: they meant their lice. In one telling the baffled poet slipped in the mud and died.

One ancient etymology linked the name Homer to the Greek word for what?

Hostage is what the everyday Greek word homeros meant, but the name was explained in other ways even in antiquity, and modern scholars call its true origin unknown.

Which philosopher wrote that admirers call Homer the poet who "has educated Greece"?

Plato reports the praise in the Republic, then shuts Homer out of his ideal city anyway, allowing in only hymns to the gods and praise of famous men.

The Iliad centres on a quarrel between Achilles and which king?

Agamemnon, made to give up his own captive, seizes Achilles' prize Briseis instead, so the Greeks' best fighter refuses to fight and the Trojans start winning.

Which nymph keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years and offers to make him immortal?

Calypso holds him for seven of his ten years away and promises he will never grow old; he turns her down, and when the gods order his release he sails off on a raft.

Both Homeric epics open with an invocation to whom?

The Muse is asked to sing or tell the story herself, because the poet claims only to pass it on: the goddesses saw everything, he says, while mortals know nothing but hearsay.

Which enchantress turns Odysseus's men into pigs?

Circe drugs the crew's food and shuts them in her sties, but Odysseus, protected by a herb the god Hermes digs up for him, makes her turn them back and then stays a whole year.

Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, but Homer's epics were composed in which metre?

Dactylic hexameter is built on the length of syllables, but English verse runs on stress, so English hexameters can only approximate Homer's metre.

Aeolus gives Odysseus a tightly tied leather bag holding what?

The winds, all but the one blowing him home: within sight of land his crew, sure the bag held treasure, untie it while he sleeps, and the storm drives them all the way back.

Which stock epithet does Homer attach to Dawn?

Rosy-fingered Dawn is a formula: a ready-made phrase cut to fit the metre, which a singer composing aloud could drop in whole each time a new day began.

Which goddess does Homer call "owl-eyed" or "grey-eyed"?

Athena's Greek epithet is glaukopis, which probably meant 'with gleaming eyes'; it shares a root with glaux, the little owl that became her emblem, so translators split between the readings.

Homer's famous phrase "wine-dark" describes what?

The sea is 'wine-dark' again and again in Homer, yet the same Greek word also describes a pair of oxen, one reason readers still argue over what colour he meant.

Which British statesman's 1858 study noted a total absence of blue in Homer's descriptions of nature?

William Gladstone, a future prime minister, counted Homer's colour words and concluded that the Greeks' sense of colour was only partly developed, a claim still argued over today.

Homer often arranges ideas as A, B, C and then C, B, A, a pattern known as what?

Ring composition brings a passage back to where it began, which may have helped singers keep their place while composing aloud; oral poetry is especially rich in it.

Each Homeric epic is divided into 24 books, a division usually credited to scholars in which city?

Alexandria's librarians usually get the credit, but some scholars date the split earlier, and hardly any think Homer planned 24 books; each is still labelled with a letter of the Greek alphabet.

Which 1922 James Joyce novel moves the story of the Odyssey to a single day in Dublin?

Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus: Joyce's wanderer is Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser whose walk around the city on 16 June 1904 is retraced by fans every Bloomsday.

Antiquity held that the Homeric poems were first collected and organised in Athens under which sixth-century tyrant?

Pisistratus also faced an ancient charge of tampering: he or Solon, the tellings differ, was said to have slipped a line into the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships to back his city's claim to Salamis.

Which director's 2026 film The Odyssey stars Matt Damon as Odysseus?

Christopher Nolan had once been lined up to direct Troy, the 2004 film of the Iliad, before making Batman Begins instead; two decades on, he shot his Odyssey entirely on IMAX film.

Which old friend does Odysseus leave in charge of his household when he sails for Troy?

Mentor gave English its word for a trusted adviser, though in the poem it is often a goddess in his shape who does the advising.

Which comedy by Joel and Ethan Coen, set in 1930s Mississippi, is loosely based on the Odyssey?

O Brother, Where Art Thou? has a one-eyed Bible salesman for its Cyclops and three riverside sirens, though the Coens cheerfully admitted that neither of them had read Homer's poem.

The first printed edition of Homer came off the press in 1488 in which Italian city?

Florence: the text was edited by Demetrios Chalkokondyles, an Athenian who had moved to Italy to teach Greek, and until then every copy of Homer had been written out by hand.

How does Odysseus hear the Sirens' song and survive?

He is tied to the mast on his own orders while the crew row past with wax in their ears; when he begs to be set free, they only bind him tighter.

In Homer's story, whose departure from Sparta with the Trojan prince Paris starts the Trojan War?

Helen is never called the face that launched a thousand ships by Homer: that line was written more than two thousand years later by the English playwright Christopher Marlowe.

Which nymph, the mother of Achilles, begs Zeus to make the Greeks lose until her son is honoured?

Thetis clasps Zeus's knees until he nods his promise; she has also told her son his fate, a long quiet life at home or a short one at Troy with a name that lives for ever.

The Iliad's first word in Greek, menin, names its subject: which emotion of Achilles?

Rage, or wrath, is the announced theme, which is why the poem covers only a few weeks near the end of a ten-year war: it follows one man's anger rather than the whole siege.

Nineteenth-century scholars who insisted each epic was the work of a single inspired poet were nicknamed what?

Unitarians read each epic as one poet's design; their rivals, the Analysts, tried instead to peel away later additions and recover shorter original poems.

What contest does Penelope set her suitors, which only the disguised Odysseus can win?

Stringing his bow defeats every suitor; the ragged stranger then bends it with ease, sends an arrow through twelve axes in a row and turns the weapon on them.

Which god punishes Odysseus with years of wandering for wounding his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus?

Poseidon hears his son pray that the hero reach home late, alone and in another man's ship, to find trouble in his house, and every part of the curse comes true.

Which Greek historian reckoned that Homer had lived about 400 years before his own time?

Herodotus wrote in the fifth century BC, so his guess puts Homer in the ninth; he offered it while arguing that Homer's poems had given the Greek gods their titles and forms.

Odysseus must steer between which pair of monsters, one six-headed and one a whirlpool?

Scylla and Charybdis lie so close together that dodging one means meeting the other; Odysseus picks the beast and loses six men, and English gained a phrase for choosing the lesser evil.

Homer's heroes fight with Bronze Age weapons but dispose of their dead by which later, Iron Age method?

Cremation is how the poems' heroes go, yet the real Bronze Age chieftains were buried in great vaulted tombs, one sign that the epics blend customs from different centuries.

In the Iliad, Odysseus wears a helmet covered with rows of what, a real Mycenaean design?

Boar's tusks, sliced and fixed in rows to a leather cap: archaeologists have found just such helmets, a style long out of use by the time the poems took shape.

In the Odyssey, eating which plant makes Odysseus's scouts forget all thought of home?

The lotus tastes so good that the three men sent ashore want only to stay and keep eating; Odysseus drags them back weeping and ties them under the rowing benches.

Scholars have found especially close parallels between Homer's poems and which Mesopotamian work?

The Epic of Gilgamesh has been described as joining the tragedy of the Iliad to the wanderings of the Odyssey; whether Homer's tradition borrowed from it or shared older story patterns is still debated.

In the 1870s Heinrich Schliemann dug for Homer's Troy at which site in modern Turkey?

Hisarlik had already been dug by Frank Calvert, whose family owned part of the mound; he convinced the far richer Schliemann it was Troy, and Schliemann's first book on it left his name out.

In Schliemann's own account of finding "Priam's Treasure", how was the gold carried off the site?

In his wife's shawl, he wrote, but the detail was invented: Sophia had already left the dig for Athens after her father's sudden death.

Alexander the Great carried on campaign a copy of the Iliad annotated by whom?

Aristotle, his boyhood tutor, prepared the copy, and Plutarch reports that Alexander slept with it and a dagger under his pillow, calling it a portable treasury of military skill.

"Even good Homer nods" comes from which Roman poet's Ars Poetica?

Horace was complaining, not excusing: he says he is vexed whenever good Homer dozes off, then concedes that sleep may well creep over so long a work.

In Dante's Divine Comedy, where does the pilgrim meet Homer, walking sword in hand ahead of other ancient poets?

Limbo, the first circle of Hell, holds the virtuous who died unbaptised; Homer is hailed there as the sovereign poet, and the group honours Dante by making him its sixth member.

Which English poet grew rich translating Homer into rhyming couplets and moved to a Thames-side villa on the proceeds?

Alexander Pope earned enough from his Iliad and Odyssey to live free of any patron, and the money paid for his move to a villa at Twickenham, where he created a famous garden and grotto.

Which Romantic poet wrote the 1816 sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"?

John Keats wrote it after sitting up all night over the translation with a friend; its famous slip gives Cortez the first sight of the Pacific that really belonged to Balboa.

Which Victorian novelist argued in an 1897 book that the Odyssey was written by a young woman?

Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon, argued that the poet was a young Sicilian woman and that the poem's coastline was Sicily's; his plain prose translations of both epics are still read.

Whose 2017 translation of the Odyssey was the first complete English version published by a woman?

Emily Wilson wrote it in brisk iambic pentameter and held herself to exactly as many lines as the Greek original; her Iliad followed in 2023.

Which artist's 1653 canvas shows a philosopher contemplating a bust of Homer?

Rembrandt painted it for a Sicilian collector, Antonio Ruffo, who seems to have asked only for a half-length figure; it was shipped from Amsterdam to Messina, and New York's Metropolitan Museum bought it in 1961.

Ingres's 1827 painting The Apotheosis of Homer was commissioned as a ceiling for which Paris landmark?

The Louvre was to have it on a ceiling of its new Charles X galleries, but the canvas was later taken down to hang with the museum's other paintings, and a copy went up in its place.

The Batrachomyomachia, a comic mini-epic once credited to Homer, is a parody of the Iliad about a war between which creatures?

Frogs and mice go to war after a frog king dives and lets the mouse riding on his back drown; the mice are winning until Zeus sends in an army of crabs.

Which son of Odysseus sets out at the start of the Odyssey to find news of his missing father?

Telemachus has the poem's first four books to himself, visiting two kings who fought at Troy; the hero the poem is named after does not appear until the fifth.

One of the Homeric Hymns tells how Demeter searched for which abducted daughter?

Persephone is carried off by Hades, and her grieving mother stops every seed from sprouting until the girl is returned; ancient readers mostly credited the hymn collection to Homer, hence its name.

In the legendary Contest of Homer and Hesiod, why did the king crown Hesiod?

He sang of peace and farming, the king ruled, while Homer sang of war and slaughter; the crowd had called for Homer to win, and Hesiod went home with a bronze tripod.

The word "rhapsode", for the professionals who performed Homer, comes from a Greek verb meaning what?

To sew songs together is the literal sense, since the performer stitched passages of epic into one recital; Pindar also punned on a second reading, singer with the staff, after the rod they carried.

Which cartoonist named a famous television character after his father Homer, who was himself named after the poet?

Matt Groening raided his own family for names: his parents were Homer and Margaret and his sisters Lisa and Maggie, while Bart is an anagram of 'brat'.

Odysseus, whose long voyage home the Odyssey follows, was king of which island?

Ithaca is where his wife Penelope held off a crowd of suitors while he was away, weaving a burial shroud by day and secretly unpicking it at night.

In the Iliad, whose death at Hector's hands drives Achilles back into battle?

Patroclus had gone out in Achilles' own armour to rally the Greeks, and Hector stripped it from his body, so Achilles had to wait for a new set before taking revenge.

Whose 1950s decipherment of Linear B reshaped scholars' understanding of the Bronze Age Aegean?

Michael Ventris was an architect, not a professional scholar: hooked at 14 by a lecture on the unread tablets, he announced on the radio in 1952 that their language was an early form of Greek.

Which Greek thinker, who said horses would draw gods like horses, denounced Homer's gods as immoral?

Xenophanes also noted that Ethiopians picture their gods as dark and snub-nosed and Thracians theirs as blue-eyed and red-haired; the greatest god, he held, is like mortals in neither body nor mind.

In the Odyssey, who knows the disguised Odysseus at once on his return, then dies moments later?

His dog Argos, too weak to get up, could only drop his ears and wag his tail, and Odysseus brushed away a tear in secret rather than give up his beggar's disguise.