60 Fun Facts About Homer

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

The Byzantine Suda even traced his ancestry to a Muse, Apollo or Orpheus.

The most widespread ancient tradition made Homer a bard from which region of the Anatolian coast and nearby islands?

Modern scholars regard all such accounts as legendary.

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

Other writers claimed Cyme, Argos, Pylos and Athens as his birthplace.

Most ancient accounts place Homer's death on which small Cycladic island?

Two epigrams in the Greek Anthology by Alcaeus of Messene commemorate his burial there.

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

The riddle was about lice: what they caught they left, and what they did not catch they carried.

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

Gregory Nagy prefers 'he who fits the song together'.

Which philosopher described Homer as the one who "has educated Greece"?

The same philosopher famously banished the poets from his ideal Republic.

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

The dispute over the captive Briseis unfolds in the last year of the Trojan War.

How long does Odysseus's journey home from Troy take in the Odyssey?

Add the war itself and he is away from Ithaca for two decades.

Both Homeric epics open with an invocation to whom?

Virgil copied the device for the Aeneid.

Which of the nine Muses presides over epic poetry?

She was also the mother of Orpheus.

Homer's poems were composed in which unrhymed metre?

The name comes from the six feet in each line; Virgil used the same metre for the Aeneid.

Homeric Greek is an artificial literary language based mainly on an archaic form of which dialect?

It also mixes in Aeolic features, and was never anyone's spoken language.

Which stock epithet does Homer attach to Dawn?

Silver-footed is Thetis and white-armed is Hera.

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

Epithets mark a permanent quality: Achilles is swift-footed even when sitting in his tent.

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

The same word is used twice for oxen, where it means a reddish colour.

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

He wrote Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age while between spells as prime minister.

The narrative pattern in which ideas appear as A, B, C and then return as C, B, A is known as what?

Scholars still argue whether it was a conscious device or a memory aid.

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

The books are labelled with the letters of the Greek alphabet; very few scholars credit Homer himself.

The Iliad's standard edition runs to roughly how many lines?

The Odyssey is shorter, at just over 12,000 lines.

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

Cicero mentions the story, and scholars call it the Peisistratean recension.

Which scholar, the first head of the great Ptolemaic library, was also the first critical editor of Homer?

He was appointed in 284 BC and doubled as tutor to the royal children.

The word "aristarch", meaning a severe critic, comes from which Homeric scholar who ran the library from 153 to 145 BC?

He is credited with doing most to establish the canonical text of the epics.

Venetus A, the tenth-century codex of the Iliad kept in Venice, is prized above all for what?

Its notes derive from the four-man commentary of Aristonicus, Didymus, Herodian and Nicanor.

The first printed edition of Homer appeared in Italy in which year?

It was produced by the Greek scholar Chalkokondyles.

Which twelfth-century Byzantine scholar wrote an Iliad commentary that fills nearly 4,000 oversized pages in modern print?

His Odyssey commentary adds another 2,000 pages.

In 1664 which French cleric declared that Homer never existed and the poems were cobbled together from unrelated songs?

Fifty years later Richard Bentley decided Homer did exist but as an obscure oral poet.

Which Neapolitan philosopher argued in The New Science (1744) that Homer was "a purely ideal poet who never existed as a particular man"?

He saw Homer as an idea: the Greek people telling their history in song.

Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum, which launched modern debate on the Homeric Question, was published in which year?

He argued the poems began as short oral songs of the tenth century BC, assembled by literate editors four centuries later.

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

Their opponents, the Analysts, split into the lay theory and the nucleus theory.

Milman Parry developed the oral-formulaic theory of Homer after recording living epic singers in which region?

His assistant Albert Lord continued the work after Parry's early death in 1935.

Which section of the Iliad, the Doloneia, do nearly all scholars consider a later insertion by a different poet?

It tells of the night raid by Odysseus and Diomedes on the Trojan camp.

Herodotus said Homer lived how long before his own time, "and not more"?

Barry Powell uses the remark to date the poems to between 800 and 750 BC.

Ancient Greek chronology dated the sack of Troy to which year?

Some scholars now link the myth to the destruction of Troy VIIa around 1220 BC.

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

The poems mix customs from several centuries of Greek history.

During the night raid in the Iliad, Odysseus wears a helmet made from what, a real object of the years 1600-1150 BC?

Such helmets were long out of use by the time the poems were composed.

Iliad 22 describes two springs near Troy, one hot and one cold, where Hector makes his last stand; what have archaeologists found of them?

Some parts of the Homeric world were simply invented.

Scholars have found parallels between the Homeric epics and which Mesopotamian poem in particular?

Whether this reflects direct borrowing or a shared oral tradition is still debated.

In 1873 Heinrich Schliemann announced he had found Homer's Troy at which site in modern Turkey?

Frank Calvert had identified the mound and persuaded a sceptical Schliemann to dig there.

Schliemann later admitted fabricating which story about the gold he called Priam's Treasure?

Sophia was actually in Athens at the time, following her father's death.

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

His tutor gave him the copy and a lifelong passion for the poem.

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

The line, quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, is a complaint about the master's occasional slips.

In Dante's Divine Comedy, Virgil calls Homer what?

Dante himself had no access to Homer's Greek and modelled the Comedy on Virgil, Lucan, Ovid and Statius.

The money Alexander Pope made from translating Homer let him buy a villa in 1719 at which Thames-side spot?

His Iliad appeared in instalments from 1715 to 1720, and there he built his famous grotto.

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

He and Charles Cowden Clarke sat up until dawn reading the Elizabethan translation.

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

He also made prose translations of both epics that are still consulted.

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

Her Iliad followed in 2023.

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

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum; it was commissioned by the Sicilian nobleman Don Antonio Ruffo, who asked for no particular subject.

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

Forty-four figures, from Dante to Poussin, pay homage to the crowned poet.

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

Plutarch attributed it instead to Pigres of Halicarnassus.

The Poetics says the lost Margites stands to comedy as the Iliad and Odyssey stand to what?

Its hero was a fool who knew many things but knew them all badly.

How many hymns make up the collection known as the Homeric Hymns?

The Hymn to Apollo was credited to Homer by both Pindar and Thucydides.

In the legendary Contest of Homer and Hesiod, held at Chalcis, what prize did the winner take home?

Hesiod says he dedicated it on Mount Helicon, where Pausanias was still shown it centuries later.

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

They performed in a signature cloak and carried a staff.

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

He later named his own son Homer too, to show how little the name meant.

Odysseus, whose ten-year voyage home the Odyssey follows, was king of which island?

The Odyssey stresses human perseverance, with Odysseus enduring the punishments of the gods after the fall of Troy.

Who worked with Milman Parry on the oral-formulaic theory after studying Balkan bards?

Lord later noticed that the bards revised and expanded their songs while dictating, a hint at how the epics may first have been written down.

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

The Mycenaean world revealed by the tablets resembles the ancient Near East more than the society Homer describes.

Which poet of Colophon denounced Homer's treatment of the gods as immoral?

Those are the earliest preserved comments on Homer, and they prompted allegorical defences that persisted through the Stoics and into the Renaissance.

Which early allegorist of Rhegium is said to have defended Homer by reading the poems as allegories?

Allegorical readings became so entrenched that Homer came to be pictured as almost a prototypical philosopher.