'The Iliad' mentions an uppity poet, Thamyris the Thracian, who bragged that he could beat the Muses in a poetry contest and should get to have sex with all of them as his prize.

The poet's words were not his own they belonged to the Muses, a posse of art-inspiring goddesses who could easily take back their gifts. The ancient Greeks believed that these poems were divinely inspired. Having dismissed Homer, Dalby asks who actually wrote down 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey.' The two epics emerged from an anonymous poetic tradition. They become fixed only when written down. Oral epics cannot be transmitted verbatim. This means that Homer is not the author by modern standards of authorship. As Dalby observes, the earliest written sources on Homer (between 500 and 300 B.C.) say he was a singer who lived in the distant past. The truth is, we know virtually nothing about the poet or poets who penned them. In 'Rediscovering Homer,' Andrew Dalby goes further - arguing that a woman probably composed both 'The Odyssey' and 'The Iliad.' These two epic poems, written around 650 B.C., are traditionally attributed to Homer. In 1897, Samuel Butler scandalized Victorian England by claiming that a woman wrote 'The Odyssey.' These subversions of gender roles don't tell us anything about the gender of the author, but they have piqued some scholars' curiosity. (Jan.Many 21st century readers have noticed some delightful gender-bending scenes in 'The Odyssey.' The goddess Athena cross-dresses and calls every shot regarding the fate of the hero, Odysseus, while other female characters, Kirke, Kalypso and Nausikaa, each dally with the protagonist, then shuttle him off, like a toss-around boy, to his next adventure. It's hard to imagine that this latest entry in the Books That Changed the World series will do much to excite further interest in the student or first-time reader of Homer. Things pick up in a chapter examining Homer's imagery, but once again, Manguel trails off without taking his ideas anywhere. But why? Specifics are scarce, while great claims are made-“The epic of Gilgamesh and the stories of the ancient Egyptians stir in our prehistory, but Homer and his poems are the beginning of all our stories”-supported only with more bald assertions.

In one Arabic telling of the Trojan War, Agamemnon is made the “secret protagonist,” we are told. But most of his anecdotes, though engaging, are disconnected from any central argument. ) is perfectly cut out for the job, armed as he is with a wealth of stories about scholars and translators through the ages. It's a great idea: a survey history of how Homer has been read throughout history, taking in Roman Homer, Christian Homer, Alexander Pope's Homer and Homer in Islam, among others.

Iliad odyssey