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Homeric epic of the poem Iliad and Odyssey. Homer is a legendary ancient Greek poet-storyteller. Ancient Greek period of development of antique literature

Homer by Antoine-Denis Chaudet, 1806.

Homer (ancient Greek.
About half of the found ancient Greek literary papyri are excerpts from Homer.

Nothing is known for certain about the life and personality of Homer.

Homer - the legendary ancient Greek poet-storyteller

It is clear, however, that the Iliad and the Odyssey were created much later than the events described in them, but earlier than the 6th century BC. e., when their existence was reliably recorded. The chronological period in which modern science localizes the life of Homer is approximately the 8th century BC. NS. According to Herodotus, Homer lived 400 years before him, other ancient sources say that he lived during the Trojan War.

Homer bust in the Louvre

Homer's place of birth is unknown. Seven cities argued for the right to be called his homeland in the ancient tradition: Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos, Athens. According to Herodotus and Pausanias, Homer died on the island of Ios in the Cyclades archipelago. Probably, the Iliad and Odyssey were built on the Asia Minor coast of Greece, inhabited by Ionian tribes, or on one of the adjacent islands. However, the Homeric dialect does not provide accurate information about the tribal affiliation of Homer, since it is a combination of the Ionian and Aeolian dialects of the ancient Greek language. There is speculation that his dialect is one of the forms of poetic koine, formed long before the supposed time of Homer's life.

Paul Jourdy, Homère chantant ses vers, 1834, Paris

Traditionally, Homer is portrayed as a blind man. It is most likely that this idea is not based on the real facts of his life, but is a reconstruction characteristic of the genre of antique biography. Since many outstanding legendary soothsayers and singers were blind (for example, Tiresias), according to ancient logic, linking the prophetic and poetic gifts, the assumption of Homer's blindness looked very plausible. In addition, the singer Demodoc in the Odyssey is blind from birth, which could also be perceived as autobiographical.

Homer. Naples, National Archaeological Museum

There is a legend about the poetic duel between Homer and Hesiod, described in the essay "The Competition of Homer and Hesiod", created no later than the 3rd century. BC e., and according to many researchers, and much earlier. The poets allegedly met on the island of Evia at the games in honor of the deceased Amphidemus and each recited their best poems. King Paned, who acted as a judge in the competition, awarded the victory to Hesiod, since he calls for agriculture and peace, and not for war and carnage. At the same time, the audience's sympathies were on Homer's side.

In addition to the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer is credited with a number of works that were undoubtedly created later: Homeric hymns (VII-V centuries BC, along with Homer are considered the most ancient examples of Greek poetry), the comic poem Margitus, etc. ...

The meaning of the name "Homer" (it is first encountered in the 7th century BC, when Callinus of Ephesus called him the author of "Thebaida") was tried to explain back in antiquity, the options "hostage" (Hesychius), "following" (Aristotle) were proposed. or “blind man” (Efor Kimsky), “but all these options are just as unconvincing as modern proposals to attribute to him the meaning of“ adjuster ”or“ accompanist ”.<…>This word in its Ionian form Ομηρος is almost certainly a real personal name "(Boura S.M. Heroic poetry.)

Homer (about 460 BC)

A.F. Losev: The traditional image of Homer among the Greeks. This traditional image of Homer, which has existed for about 3000 years, if we discard all the pseudo-scientific inventions of the later Greeks, comes down to the image of a blind and wise (and, according to Ovid, also poor), necessarily an old singer, creating wonderful tales under the constant guidance of his inspiring muse and leading the life of some wandering rhapsode. We meet similar features of folk singers in many other peoples, and therefore there is nothing specific and original in them. This is the most common and most widespread type of folk singer, the most beloved and most popular among different peoples.

Most researchers believe that Homeric poems were created in Asia Minor, in Ionia in the 8th century. BC NS. based on mythological legends about the Trojan War. There is late antique evidence of the final edition of their texts under the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus in the middle of the 6th century. BC e., when their performance was included in the festivities of the Great Panathenae.

In antiquity, Homer was credited with the comic poems "Margit" and "The War of Mice and Frogs", a cycle of works about the Trojan War and the return of heroes to Greece: "Cypriot", "Ethiopis", "Little Iliad", "The Taking of Ilion", "Returns" ( the so-called "cyclical poems", only small fragments have survived). There was a collection of 33 hymns to the gods called Homeric Hymns. During the Hellenistic era, the philologists of the Library of Alexandria Aristarchus of Samothrace, Zenodotus from Ephesus, Aristophanes from Byzantium (they also divided each poem into 24 songs according to the number of letters in the Greek alphabet) did a great job of collecting and refining the manuscripts of Homer's poems during the Hellenistic era. The name of the sophist Zoilus (4th century BC), nicknamed the "scourge of Homer" for his critical statements, has become a household name. Xenon and Gellanic, the so-called. "Dividing", expressed the idea of the possible belonging to Homer of only one "Iliad"

Jean-Baptiste Auguste Leloir (1809-1892). Homère.

In the 19th century, the Iliad and Odyssey were compared with the epics of the Slavs, skaldic poetry, Finnish and Germanic epics. In the 1930s. American classical philologist Milman Perry, comparing Homer's poems with a living epic tradition that still existed at that time among the peoples of Yugoslavia, found in Homer's poems a reflection of the poetic technique of the aedi folk singers. The poetic formulas created by them from stable combinations and epithets ("swift-footed" Achilles, "shepherd of nations" Agamemnon, "smarty" Odysseus, "sweet-spoken" Nestor) enabled the narrator to "improvise" to perform epic songs consisting of many thousands of verses.

The Iliad and The Odyssey entirely belong to the centuries-old epic tradition, but this does not mean that oral creativity is anonymous. “Before Homer, we cannot name anyone's poem of this kind, although, of course, there were many poets” (Aristotle). The main difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey from all other epic works, Aristotle saw in the fact that Homer does not unfold his story gradually, but builds it around one event - the basis of the poems is the dramatic unity of action. Another feature that Aristotle also drew attention to: the character of the hero is revealed not by the descriptions of the author, but by the speeches uttered by the hero himself.

Medieval illustration for the Iliad

The language of Homeric poems - exclusively poetic, "supra-dialectal" - has never been identical with lively colloquial speech. It consisted of a combination of Aeolian (Boeotia, Thessaly, the island of Lesbos) and Ionian (Attica, island Greece, the coast of Asia Minor) dialectal features with the preservation of the archaic system of earlier eras. Metrically designed the songs of the Iliad and the Odyssey, rooted in Indo-European epic creativity, hexameter - a poetic meter in which each verse consists of six feet with the correct alternation of long and short syllables. The originality of the poetic language of the epic was emphasized by the timeless nature of events and the greatness of the images of the heroic past.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) - Homer and his Guide (1874)

G. Schliemann's sensational discoveries in the 1870s and 80s. proved that Troy, Mycenae and the Achaean citadels are not a myth, but a reality. Schliemann's contemporaries were struck by the literal correspondence of a number of his finds in the fourth shaft tomb at Mycenae with Homer's descriptions. The impression was so strong that the era of Homer for a long time became associated with the heyday of Achaean Greece in the 14-13th centuries. BC NS. In the poems, however, there are also numerous archaeologically attested features of the culture of the "heroic age", such as the mention of iron tools and weapons or the custom of cremating the dead. In terms of content, Homer's epics contain many motives, plot lines, myths gleaned from early poetry. In Homer, you can hear the echoes of Minoan culture, and even trace the connection with Hittite mythology. However, the main source of epic material for him was the Mycenaean period. It was in this era that the action of his epic takes place. Living in the fourth century after the end of this period, which he strongly idealizes, Homer cannot be a source of historical information about the political, social life, material culture or religion of the Mycenaean world. But in the political center of this Mycenaean society, however, objects identical to those described in the epic (mainly weapons and tools) were found, while some of the Mycenaean monuments show images, things and even scenes typical of the poetic reality of the epic. The events of the Trojan War, around which Homer developed the actions of both poems, were attributed to the Mycenaean era. He showed this war as an armed campaign by the Greeks (called the Achaeans, Danians, Argives) under the leadership of the Mycenaean king Agamemnon against Troy and its allies. For the Greeks, the Trojan War was a historical fact dating back to the XIV-XII centuries. BC NS. (according to the calculations of Eratosthenes, Troy fell in 1184)

Karl Becker. Homer sings

Comparison of the evidence of the Homeric epic with the data of archeology confirms the conclusions of many researchers that in its final edition it took shape in the 8th century. BC e., and the most ancient part of the epic, many researchers consider the "Catalog of ships" ("Iliad", 2nd canto). Obviously, the poems were not created at the same time: The Iliad reflects the idea of a person of the “heroic period”, “The Odyssey” stands, as it were, at the turn of another era - the time of the Great Greek colonization, when the boundaries of the world assimilated by Greek culture were expanding.

For a man of antiquity, Homer's poems were a symbol of Hellenic unity and heroism, a source of wisdom and knowledge of all aspects of life - from military art to practical morality. Homer, along with Hesiod, was considered the creator of a comprehensive and orderly mythological picture of the universe: the poets "compiled genealogies of gods for the Hellenes, provided the names of the gods with epithets, divided their dignity and occupations, drew their images" (Herodotus). According to Strabo, Homer was the only one of the poets of antiquity who knew almost everything about the oecumene, about the peoples inhabiting it, their origin, way of life and culture. Homer's data as authentic and trustworthy were used by Thucydides, Pausanias (writer), Plutarch. The father of the tragedy, Aeschylus, called his dramas "crumbs from the great feasts of Homer."

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Homer and the shepherds

Greek children learned to read from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer was quoted, commented on, and explained allegorically. By reading selected passages from Homer's poems, the Pythagorean philosophers called for the correction of souls. Plutarch reports that Alexander the Great always had a copy of the Iliad with him, which he kept under his pillow along with a dagger.

The epic as a literary genre goes back to the oral tradition of folk singers. Legends about the Trojan War were formed over several centuries and were clothed with art forms by the aedi. This is how two great epic poems developed: the military-heroic "Iliad" and the fabulous everyday life "The Odyssey". The ancient Greeks attributed their creation and final reaction to one of the Aedi, whom the legend calls Homer. There is no reliable information about Homer even in ancient times. According to the ancients, seven cities argued for the honor of being called the homeland of Homer: Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos and Athens. The interpretation of the name of Homer was already occupied by the ancients. His name was considered a household name, meaning "blind". But one thing is important: it was the greatest name of a genius who managed to surpass centuries and millennia with his works. The Athenian tyrant Lysistratus creates a kind of scholarly commission that worked on the work of Homer and arranged the scattered parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the right order. This work means that the completion of the poems belongs to the VIII-VII centuries. BC. Consequently, the creator of the poems is a representative of the Greek transition from tribal life to the state one.

The content of the Iliad and Odyssey is based on legends from the cycle of myths about the Trojan War. The Iliad tells about the events of the 10th year of the war, and tells about the wrath of Achilles, king of Phthia. The leader of the Achaean army, Agamemnon, takes away his captive Briseis; The offended Achilles refuses to participate in the battles and returns to the army only after the death of his best friend Patroclus. In revenge for the death of a friend, he entered into a duel with the leader of the Trojan army, Hector, who was responsible for the death of Patroclus, and killed him.

The Odyssey is a fairy tale poem. It tells about the events that took place after the end of the Trojan War, about the return to his homeland of one of the Greek military leaders Odysseus, the king of Ithaca. In the structure of the "Odyssey" he uses - the first in the world literature the method of transposition (presentation of past events in the form of the story of the Odyssey).

One of the reasons for the immortality of the Homeric epic is its humanism. Homer glorified above all the courage of man, valor, love for the homeland, loyalty in friendship, wisdom in advice, respect for old age. This turns out to be consonant with all eras and all peoples.

The protagonist of the Iliad, Achilles, is proud, terrible in his anger, personal resentment makes him neglect his duty, nevertheless, he has moral concepts that, in the end, make him redeem his guilt before the army. Love for a friend turns out to be stronger than pride. He rushes into battle with tenfold strength and puts the Trojans to flight, kills Hector and desecrates his body, avenging the death of a friend, But when old Priam, an unhappy father who has lost his beloved son, comes to him, Achilles softens, his anger subsides and he shows generosity ... This glorification of the humanity of the hero is one of the manifestations of Homeric humanism.

Homer does not welcome war, and often we observe elements of rejection of war and its horrors in the work of Homer:

"Oh, may enmity reap from the gods and from mortals, and with it hateful anger, which drives the wise into a frenzy!"

Homer's humanism, compassion for human grief, admiration for the inner virtues of man, courage, and fidelity to duty reach the brightest expression in the scene of Hector's farewell to Andromache. This is one of the most striking episodes of sacrificial love in world literature.

Homer's characters are static, one-sided. Each hero has his own face, different from the others: Odysseus is cunning, Agamemnon is haughty, Paris is pampered. Elena is beautiful, Penelope is a faithful and wise wife, Hector is courageous. One-sidedness in the image is due to the fact that they appear in only one setting, and, accordingly, all the features of their characters cannot appear. As for the development of characters, it is not yet available to Homer, and such attempts at depiction will appear only at the end of the 5th century. BC, in the work of Euripides. In order to depict the movement of the soul, the poet uses a very peculiar technique: the intervention of the gods. This technique is characteristic of the epic tradition and is intended, apparently, to raise the spirit of the heroes, since only the worthy are led here.

The epic tells about the events and affairs of the collective, and has little interest in an individual person. Homer's gods are anthropomorphic: they have all human weaknesses, and sometimes even vices. They differ from people only in immortality.

The poetic technique of Homer's epic possesses:

1) A solemn hexameter.
2) Constant epithets (only Achilles in the Iliad has 46 epithets).
3) Detailed comparisons. Extensive speeches of the characters. Repetitions, long dialogues, hyperbole, verbal formulas (fell like an oak tree).

The narration is always carried out in an epic dispassionate tone: there are no signs of the author's personal interest in it, thanks to this, the impression of the objectivity of the presentation of events is created.

In Russia, interest in Homer began to manifest itself little by little with the assimilation of Byzantine culture, and especially increased in the 18th century, the era of Russian classicism.

The complete translation of the Iliad, the size of the original, was made by N.I. Gnedich (1829), "Odyssey" by V. Zhukovsky (1849). These translations are still considered the best.

The absence of any information about the personality of Homer, as well as the presence of contradictions, stylistic inconsistencies in the poems, gave rise to the so-called "Homeric question", i.e. a set of problems associated with the study of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, first of all, with the authorship of these poems.

Already in 1664, the French abbot d "Obinyak expressed the idea that the Iliad was composed of separate songs and was not a single work of one author. At the end of the 18th century, the German scientist Wolf believed that among the poets who performed the Iliad and Odyssey the greatest Homer was famous, and hence the alleged authorship.

In the discussion that flared up around these problems, two main hypotheses emerged: analytical, i.e. dismembering the epic into separate independent works, and unitary, protecting the unity of the poems. In addition to the analytic and unitary, there were also various compromise theories.

For example: supporters of the theory of the main core assumed that the original text was gradually overgrown with additions, insertions, introduced by various poets; not one, but three, four poets participated in the compilation of the epic, hence the first, second, third editions, etc. Representatives of another theory saw in Homer's poems the unification of several "minor epics".

For example: Adolf Kirchhoff believed that there are four independent narratives in "Odessa": Odysseus's journey before he got to Calypso, the journey from Calypso's island to Ithaca; the journey of Telemachus; return of Odysseus to his homeland. The majority of modern researchers, including the remarkable scientist I. Tronsky, the author of a solid university textbook on the history of ancient literature, adhere to the unitary theory. Nevertheless, the specific history of the formation of the Homeric epic is a question that has not yet been resolved.

The work of Hesiod can be attributed to the post-Homeric epic. Hesiod (VII century BC) - the first real name in ancient literature. Tradition attributes to him the authorship of two poems - "Works and Days" and "Theogony".

"Works and Days" is the only example of a didactic epic that has come down to us. The poem has no plot. Hesiod appears in the poem as a moralist and poet of agricultural labor. The poem is a collection of teachings, practical and agricultural advice to brother Perse.

"Theogony" is the first attempt by the Greeks to systematize the genealogy of the gods and the history of the origin of the world.

Key concepts

Epic, national epic, heroic epic, didactic epic, composition, place and time of creation of Homeric poems. The Trojan cycle of myths, the myth of Helen, the myth of the Trojan horse. The content of the Iliad, the content of the Odyssey, the artistic features of the Odyssey, permanent epithets, Hesiod.

1. Outline the essence of the "Homeric question".
2. The theme of war and its solution by Homer (to give an analysis of this problem).

Literature

1. Homer "Iliad" am. edition.
2. Homer "Odyssey" am. edition.
3. Hesiod "Works and Days", "Theogony" lub. edition.
4. IM Tronsky "History of ancient literature" M. 1988.
5. A.F. Losev "Homer" M. 1960.
6. G. Anpetkova - Sharova, E. Chekalova. Ancient literature. Tutorial. L. 1989

Quote post by Barucaba

Homer by Antoine-Denis Chaudet, 1806.

Homer (ancient Greek.
About half of the found ancient Greek literary papyri are excerpts from Homer.

Nothing is known for certain about the life and personality of Homer.

Homer - the legendary ancient Greek poet-storyteller

Homer bust in the Louvre

Paul Jourdy, Homère chantant ses vers, 1834, Paris

Homer. Naples, National Archaeological Museum

Homer (about 460 BC)

Jean-Baptiste Auguste Leloir (1809-1892). Homère.

Medieval illustration for the Iliad

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) - Homer and his Guide (1874)

Karl Becker. Homer sings

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Homer and the shepherds

Every people of ancient and distinctive education has an ancient, deeply rooted, but not solid and not stable, modified and multiplied poetic devotion, which little by little it learns to protect from the distant initial, not inviolable to people gods. This is how the people draw up sacred texts, the study of which fosters generations and gives the first reasons for the development of science about words and the art of verbalism, history, religious education and philosophical speculation.

This was also the meaning of Homer's poems in Greece. They signified, for the entire fragmented into many political body of the Hellenic world, the nationwide connection, the consciousness and materialization of which was the vital need of the nation, not united by the state union; why has long been separate cities, by legislative means, introduce the public proclamation of passages from Homer by rhapsodic reciters into the obligatory circle of the festive rite and from the VI century are stocked up for storage in state archives, certified by the lists of Ilyada and Odyssey. On Homer, from clan to clan, the Hellenes learned from childhood - both at home, and in schools, and on the square - about what Hellenism is, how the high order of the ancient rch and its "sacred" lad, the original disposition and the cherished custom, knowledge of the paternal gods and the memory of dear heroes. From Homer, whose poems were recited by heart over the course of long centuries, were studied intently,

were interpreted in many ways, - the Hellenes developed their poetry (late epic, choral lyrics, and finally - tragedy), and the grammar of their native language, and the first principles of ethics, poetics, dialectics, rhetoric, and their sacred history, and plastic ideals of art (such as pictorial, in the V century, the famous lines of the first song of Ilyada, pp. 528-530, determined the artistic concept of Phidia during the creation of the Olympic statue of Zeus and forever established the iconographic type of the almighty father of gods and people), - until finally came the time of critical thought and on that Old Homer's learned wit and aesthetic exactingness first tested their strength and refined themselves to complete independence from the tradition consecrated by the centuries. Then the little old man, inspired by the divine Muses, turned into one of the exemplary, "canonical", or "classical" poets, into the simple-minded, "good" Homer, into an artist to become the other authors of literary literature, extraordinarily skillful, although in many ways still not perfect, endowed with incomparable power of genіya, but not at all infallible and sometimes offending refined taste.

Homer and humanism.

Already ancient philology has already conceived this path of comparing Homer with the creators of an artificial epic, - the path along which the new European thought went from the XIV century, since the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio, when Homer, known to the Middle Ages only by hearsay, as an elder brother and great the wizard Virgil on the poetic Parnassus, appeared in more tactile outlines, as a result of the first acquaintance with his poems, partly already in the original, according to old lists, parsed with the help of foreign scientists of the Greeks, and then books and books and for in 1488, in Florence, the enlightening activity of the Byzantine emigrants-humanists, already of the second generation, ended, by the way, with the first edition of Homer's poems, edited by the Greek Dimitri Khalkondila.

Only the representation of the organic nature of the cultural and historical process, which first dawned on Giovanni-Battista Vico at the end of the 17th century, and, in particular, the organic growth of folk poetry, developed in the 18th century by Herder, forced to put a sharp line between the epic, artificial ., the poems of Virgil, Dante, Ariost, Tasso, Camoens) and the folk epic, y the Greeks - the epic of Homer.

II.
Homeric question.

Fridrich August Wolf (Prolegomena ad Homerum, 1795), following in the footsteps of several predecessors (of whom special merit belongs, along with Vico, the 17th century writer, Abbot d'Obigny), with the energy he proclaimed such an early era of the impossibility of , as the era of the creation of Homeric poems, which did not yet know writing, and the need to examine them as a collection of heterogeneous epic tales, collected and presented in more or

less orderly order only in the VI century. BC, by the scholarship of the pravschikov, by order of the Akinsk tyrant Pisistratus.

This scholarship caused an extraordinary commotion in the entire educated world and found both enthusiastic adherents and ardent opponents. Schiller, with annoyance, wondered how such a great poet like Goethe could treat favorably this scholarship, which overlooked the living face of Homer the poet; however, Goethe little by little returned to the historical reality of Homer. The famous "Homeric question" began; and the closest (1837) stage in the development of Wolf's intended view of Homer, as a legendary image, under whose guise a multitude of diverse pavtsov is hiding, was Lachman's theory of the disintegration of Ilyada, with careful study of the need for a number of ballad, which this scientist more or less arbitrarily tried to extract from the connection the whole and to distinguish.

From the end of the 18th century, the idea of Homer, as a simple symbol of the folk singer-storyteller, and of the ancient epic in general, as of an unnamed, impersonal, non-artificial, organically-popular creation, prevailed. This view was based on two premises, which were two exaggerations: the antiquity of the Homeric world was recognized as primitive antiquity, and its culture is more integral and single-phase, less divided and multi-component, which it turned out to be in the later historical study. It was an abstract ideology that cherished the ideal of the "organic era", the golden, infantile era of the naive and almost unconscious epic, which, as the philosopher Schelling wrote, refers to "such a general state where there is no opposition between personal freedom of things and the natural enter the same track of the historical process ”. The impression of the first acquaintance with the folk epic of other countries, in particular with the Serbian epic songs, the performers of which are the poor singers with gusli or bandura, so vividly reminiscent of the traditional, simple Homer, with his "kygara" or "small form" to see in Homer's creativity the unimportant expression of the patriarchal-Hellenic, innocently clear view of the world, the direct manifestation of the tribal poetic genius, the creation of folk poetry, which has not yet stood out from itself, nor even a uniquely creative group.

But nevertheless, philologists-scribes, free from such general premises, busy first of all not with establishing broad perspectives, but with an accurate investigation of the verbal monument to be studied, it was clear that in front of them it was not a formless heap of narratives and was an epic, but a strictly thought out traces of deliberate and skillful processing. The conviction that Homer's poem is an artistic whole, that it is the essence of complete creation, forms the basis of the conservative direction in disputes about Homer. His defenders, like the ancient scholars of the Alexandrian period, would like to confine themselves to the discovery and elimination of individual late insertions that distorted the original by Homer. So, Nitch (G. W. Nitzsch, speaking for the first time with his defense of tradition

in the thirties of the past) considers Homer to be the true author of the great poems ascribed to him, from which they are subject to exclusion only for reasons of suspected particular in each individual case; Homer's work consisted in the artistic development and replenishment of all the epic material that had come down to him from an earlier period; widely and freely using the epic tradition, he partly compiled it, partly independently modified and enriched it.

Already G. German, the founder of the newest philology, namѣtil (in 1831) the third point of view: a complex and multifaceted epic could grow out of the original simple epic grain. The task of the study therefore became the disclosure of the first Ilyad in the Ilyad, and the original Odyssey in the Odyssey. In addition to this, it was necessary to find out how this nucleus developed, what post-postal depositions were left on it, as it were in layers, of a new era, how they were brought into connection with the root composition of a different narrative, which was previously alien to it.

On this principled basis is based the interpretation of the growth of Iliada from the relatively short poem "About the oppression of Achilles", or "Achilleids", given by the Englishman Grotom in his classic "History of Greece" (1846). Groth's attempt was extremely fruitful; the compromise offered by him - to agree to the assumption that Homer, the author of Achilleis, himself expanded it to the size of Ilyada - could not satisfy, of course, anyone; but it was not so much about the creator as about the creation of the Homeric epic, about its emergence and its transformations, about the clean lines of the original architectural plan in a colossal building cluttered with extensions and restructuring. The investigators set about searching for the "great Ilyada"; All sorts of criteria were used to distinguish more ancient from more later elements in the existing composition of the epic. B. Nize (in the book "On the Development of Homeric Poetry", 1882) reduced the Homeric question to the problem of the successive guild creativity of pavtsov, which showed significantly different from the creativity of the people. A. Fikk (1881 and later) dared to remove from Homer his Ionian outfit and poems, recorded in the Ionian dialect, to declare common retellings of the original Ilyada and Odyssey, composed by the Aeolians in Aeolian. K. Robert ("Studien zur Ilias", 1901) in a peculiar way used the newest data of archeology to determine the relative antiquity of the constituent parts of the Ilyada according to the type of weapon, in them it is mentioned, proceeding from the opposition between the old Mycenaean monuments of military life and the remnants of more late not without some self-delusion by the harmony of the results obtained by this method, Robert tried to prove that the archaeological signs of antiquity are confirmed by the predominance of the Aeolian elements in the language, - which gives him the opportunity to restore the basic "song of Achilles"; and it cannot be denied that this hypothetical restoration, being compressed by the extract from the Ilyada, transposed into the Aeolian dialect, produces an unexpected, whole and vivid impression with its simplicity, lyrical tone of epic and concentrated tragic energy. Many scientists, however, not convinced by any of a number of attempts of critical wit to solve the "Homeric question", remained with

I believe that the last one is generally indecipherable and that, in addition to private results, all the work on it did not lead to any general conclusion worthy of becoming in place of the ancient legend about Homer, the creator of Ilyada and Odyssey.

As for the Odyssey, which presented few reasons for the suspicion of its integral composition and artistic unity, like the Ilyada, it became a subject of deep critical study only half a century ago, when A. Kirkhhoff (“Homer's Odyssey, 1818 unmasking the "great-Odyssey" in it, came to the conclusion about its emergence from the ancient adhesion of two essentially different primordial tales, which underwent further serial expansion, with the introduction of new, initially alien to her circle, epic elements. On the soil of Kirchhoff's search, the dedicated Odyssey "Homer's Study" by Vilamowitz-Mellendorff (1884) arose. An overview of the Homeric question, as it seems to be in our days, and a versatile criticism of all the opinions expressed on this issue by the reader will be found in the 2nd edition of P. Cauer's book "Basic Questions of Homeric Criticism" *.

In general, it can be said that the theory of extensions, coming from Herman, took a firm place in the history of the Homeric question, and is still open, although it cannot be argued that the efforts of scientists managed, with complete reliability and exact certainty, to establish the relative age of all the individual components of the epos to present an undeniable picture of the formation of cash poems from their ancient and simple prototypes.

III.
Aeolian beginning in
іonіyskom epicѣ.

This newest study inevitably limits the already outdated doctrine of the all-folk character of Homeric poetry. Between the two extremes - equating Homer with the creators of artificial epics and presenting the authors of Iliada and Odyssey as simple retelling of the fact that, little by little, by virtue of some natural process, spontaneously arose in impersonal, universal, between creativity These two extremes establish a third possibility, which has all the signs of historical and philological likelihood for itself - the ability to see creativity in Homer's poems in many ways still close to the folk, but already different from it,

* P. Gauer, "die Grundfragen der Homerkritik," 2. Aufl., Leipz. 1909.— In the Russian language, the study of the Homeric question is devoted to. Sokolov, 1868, "Homer's question" (Works of N. N. Sokolov, St. Petersburg, 1910, pp. 1-148) and Shestakov's two-volume work "On the origin of Homer's poems" (Kazan, 1892-1899). From the literature about Homer in Russian, let us also name the translated work of Jebb (“Homer. Introduction to Iliad and Odyssey”, 1892) and the original historian D. M. Petrushevsky “Society and the State in Homer." The history of Greek literature is the most meaningful and relevant to the modern state of scientific research, the chapter of the volume of Homer's epic in the books of V. Christ (W. Christ, "Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur", 5. Auflage, bearb. von W. Schmid, Sün. 85, - in volume 7, "Handbuch der klass. Alterthums-Wissenschaft" by Ivan Müller).

not similar neither in its principles nor in its reasons and tasks to the fruits of artificial writing and poetic individualism, but still calculated for the aesthetic assessment of listeners and deliberately pursuing certain goals of cultural and moral impact on society. It is no longer possible to say: the poet Homer is inconceivable; he only has not been proven as a historical person, for there is not a single any reliable evidence of his personality among the later stories and fables about the wandering slaptsѣ-rhapsodist. But since creation itself testifies to the creator, the name of Homer rightly reveals for us the lists of Hellenic poets; only his face, as it were, doubles and multiplies for us, and we do not know - and, apparently, we will never know - whether the creator of the original Achilleis bore the name of Homer, or whether the creator of some parts of Ilyada was also a genetic and already more individual gift undoubtedly a more late era, or, finally, the last collector and organizer of the vault that has come down to us? The father of the Homeric epic was several in several generations, and the name "Homer" itself remains mysterious and almost only symbolic.

That Homeric poems are not pure folk art, although, on the other hand, it is not individual creativity, but, on the contrary, cumulative and gradual, it will become clear from the conditions for the emergence and successive transmission of the ancient Hellenic epic. There is no doubt that the birthplace of great poems was the Ionian colonies in Asia Minor; these poems are the creation of the Ionian genia, artistically perceptive, universally versatile, mentally flexible and agile, full of harmony, grace and a sense of peace; and dialect them - dialect ancient Ionian. Ho the language of the poems surprises the researcher with the abundance of eolisms interspersed into him, i.e. features of the Aeolian dialect. Let us add to this that the hero, to whose glorification Ilyada is dedicated, - Achilles - is the hero of the Aeolian, initially alien to the Ionian tribe. Hence the opinion that the original Ilyada - the song about Achilles' power - was a tribal epic of ardent and warlike, courageously straightforward, lyrically soulful Aeolians and that she was composed in the Aeolian dialect; hence the attempts to get closer to the impression that this primordial epic was supposed to produce, by transposing the Ionian hexameters that have come down to us in the Aeolian. This opinion and these attempts are contradicted, by the way, the fact that the eolisms are scattered in the Ilyad more or less equally, whereas they should have been absent in parts of a later origin, and that the verses of the existing text do not form by themselves such translation into the Aeolian folklore is conjugated with some modifications in the text, with its intended adaptation to the Aeolian warehouse.

So, probably another view, according to which Ilyada arose in the community, where the Aeolians used to sit, and then the Ionians thought, so that the language of the local people was more or less confused. In its further development, the epic preserved the original features of the dialect of the ancient Aedov: for many centuries, the language of epic poetry remained a kind of dialectical variety, conventional poetic speech, different from the living speech of the Ionian tribe. it

The historical conclusion from the observation of the language completely corresponds to the most reliable of the legends about the homeland of Homer, who, competing and arguing among themselves, considered seven Greek urban communities to be their fellow countryman and citizen. Namely, in Smyrna we find, as a part, those historical conditions, about which we spoke: before the Ionians finally ousted the Aeolians from it, both tribes killed one and the other a beautiful seaside city in that distant coastal era, when the colonization began with its little beginning. къ XI century BC X.

IV.
Thessalian epics.

But it is obvious from the above that the songs of the glories of the heroes, which formed the first basis in the building of the slowly created Ilyada, were the songs of the Aeolian. They were brought with them to Asia Minor by the tribes, who originally lived in Aessalia, to the south of Mount Olympus, which remained for the migrants as a mountain of gods. All the gods have their homes on it; on it and at its foot, in the Pierii, the Muses also live, delighting in the music of the gods and reminiscent of the old ones. They knew the Aeolian Aeolians and the silver-footed sea goddess, Thetis - the wife of Peleus (originally the god of Mount Pelion), and have long been accustomed to mourning the woeful fate of Thetidin's son - the beautiful Achilles (aka, by his patronymic - Pelis, a short life), to whom the full but poisoned by bitter losses and doomed to die out after Achilles defeated another hero - Hector.

New research revealed the presence, in local Aessalian cults and heroic traditions, a number of heroes collected from Homer under the walls or in the walls of besieged Troy. The physical presence, in the historical era, from ancient times glorified tombs serves as a reliable sign by which we can judge the place of the primordial veneration of the hero and the homeland of the world associated with him. The coffin of Hector, the main hero of Troy and the dangerous enemy of the Greeks according to Homer, even in the time of Pausania, leaving us with a description of his journey through Greece (II century A.D.), was one of the revered city shrines of seven times. It seems that Hektor in the most ancient epic tales, which captured the Aeolians, to their homeland, the memory of their warlike movements from the north, from the Aessalya, to middle Greece, to the valley of the Sperhei river, played the role of the defender of the Aeolians in the north. According to one piece of information saved by Plutarch, from the Attic genealogies of Istra, who is generally an unreliable historian, but in this case, obviously, he wrote down an old local legend - Alexander, whose name in Kessalia was Paris, was mastered by the Patrokilom Boyuh, y rѣ ... And on this example, we see that the stories of the Homeric epic about the battles under the walls of Troy turn out to be a mirage reflection of the intertribal battles that took place in European Greece even before the colonists were evicted to Asia Minor. And if Homer's Alexander-Paris fights only

with the Thessalians, and if, according to the legend, he fell from the hands of the Thessalian, Philoktetus, then here the faithfulness of the late epic to its primordial sources, the Aeolian heroic dreams, was transferred a long time after the faces and events were taken away from the soil. alien to them, semi-ideal world. Equally, the seaside Aiva in Asia Minor, the city of Andromache destroyed by Achilles (Ill. VI, 397), is no more than a projection of the city of Aiv in the Phthiotid region; Andromache also belongs to the ancient Aeolian circle of epic legends, and Elena, as a goddess, was the subject of a religious cult in the Aessalia.

With such a stock of local legends about the gods and native heroes, at the head of which he stood, next to his friend Patroklom, doomed to the premature death of Achilles, the Aeolian immigrants came to Asia Minor, where the cultures were waiting for newcomers in life and new conditions.

V.
Dogomeric polytheism.

The main change in the sphere of religious representations, which determined the general shift in the world outlook and created a new basis for epic creativity, naturally followed from the very fact of resettlement: this was the loss of local cults, - the imposed meaning, sacred and rituals

The religion of the era that preceded the resettlement consisted of the veneration of gods of different glory and strength, the host of whom was lost at the lower levels in the chaotic multitude of overflowing spontaneous, but almost always precisely localized demons, and heroes were revered. This polytheism was for the most part diversity; centrifugal forces were in it more than centripetal forces. Even such a primordial commonality to all Hellenism and a rise from the pre-Hellenic roots of religious representation, such as the idea of the supreme Zeus, or Dina, were so non-divine among different tribes and clans that they were united only by the name of the deity, coming from the race itself. But just as the difference in rituals led to the creation of new ones, established by the rite, the name to which the gods responded in different ways and which were needed in a significant amount to persistently attract divine help, ward off the threat and in every possible way affect the supernatural power of the conspiracy and in the name, then the multi-name of the deities and the variety of designations applied to the same religious understanding served as a new impetus for the dismemberment and fragmentation of the fundamental unity of religious foundations. Hence, the obscuring of the original meaning of many objects of private-tribal variance resulted; little by little it was forgotten, for example, that the name "Amphitrion" was once only a local name for Zeus, his cult nickname, and the admirers of Amphitron, after becoming

admirers of the common Hellenic Zeus, they have retained the memory of Amphitryon only as a demigod, a hero, and finally - just as the anciently revered earthly father of the hero Hercules (among the Romans - Hercules), the heavenly parent of which Zeus was declared to be the mother of a dispute and remained unresolved.

But, in addition, the numerous deities, which later became common Hellenic, are at first the exclusive property of individual tribes. So, existed from time immemorial antiquity, "from the Pelasgians" going, the cult of Zeus the prophetic oak and Mother Earth in Dodon (Ill. XVI, 234; Od. XIV, 327 and XIX, 296), retained its local, epyrotic character how he conquered, already in the era of Homer, the general recognition of the Hellenic world as the cradle of the ancient and sacred oracles; local character has veneration of Mother Earth and in beotiyskikh espiyakh; Lady Hera is from the beginning and predominantly the goddess of the Argivian Achaeans, etc. This colorful material of local worship had to undergo a slow process of collection, a gradual unification into a grandiose system of universal religion, which was never formed Even in the period of completion of the unifying work, it retained in its harmonious and organized whole sufficient independence and, as it were, self-government of individual local religions.

In this unifying work, the first stage was passed hand in hand with the development of epic poetry in Asia Minor colonies and its rise by direct influence: the Ionian singers were the first collectors of the Hellenic era. After them, the powerful centers of the priesthood, in particular the Delphic oracle and some other local temple communities, for example, the community in Yespiyakh, acquired great significance; this last one had an immediate impact on the second great epic school of Greece - the Beotian school of Hesiod, which significantly supplemented the teaching of the Ionian, Homer school by introducing into it a multitude of primordial ideas and ideas of a religiously-metaphysical, unattractive, or non-religious order of hers. "Father of history", Herodotus (5th century), no doubt right, expressing the general opinion of the nation about the role of the epic in the creation of national religion with the following words: "Homer and Hesiod taught the Hellenic gods; they distributed the sacred names belonging to each of the gods, and a part of the dominion peculiar to each, and a form of veneration appropriate to each; they clearly described the image of each deity. "

It is not surprising, therefore, that the first search for a new religious consciousness, the first search for religious truths more spiritual and morally elevated, begins with polemics against Homer's teaching and, in a lesser degree, Hesiod. So, the rhapsodist-philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon (5th century) rebukes Homer and Hesiod that “they attributed a lot of false things to the gods, they charged them with a lot of things that are justly considered shameful and worthy of censure by people.” On the other hand, one cannot deny the solidity of the view of Aristotle, who calls the first Hellenic "theologian" of Hesiod:

In Homer, we do not find a systematic study of the gods. He does not know anything about the divine cosmogony (compare, however, Ill. XIV, 201, where the Ocean is called theôn génesis, "the parent of the gods", - a thought in which the ancients saw confirmation of the Galesian scholarship about the moist fundamental principle of the universe); the world exists for him once given, statically determined; How it arose, how it was created - the bird is indifferent. And it is not the being of the gods that occupies him, but their intervention in human dul, their historical interaction with people: everything that he tells about them is prompted by the pragmatism of narration about the fate of heroes; In passing, he reveals what is necessary for the listener of heroic "glories" about them. But what he discovers is important and determinative for the fate of the whole religion, it is imprinted on its unconsolidated surface with indelible lines - and the writer knows what he is imprinting, because his deliberately set goal and consistently defunct task is to solidify a lot and into the popular consciousness for all eternity.

Honoring heroes.

Alongside with the above-described polytheism and unusually developed demonology, which determined all life and demanded from a man, at each of his actions, special foresight in relation to invisible forces, by this action, which was especially affected by the magic and religion. in European Greece before colonization, they were heroic cults. We have already seen how the hero's understanding was developed through the obscurity of the face of the original deity. According to some scientists, all heroic cults grew out of this root: all heroes are forgotten, debauched gods. According to others, on the contrary, heroes are deified ancestors. In any case, the very relegation of the gods to the category of heroes is conceivable only on the basis of the already existing cult of ancestors, to which many phenomena of primitive religious life and culture are generally reduced. Most importantly, the conflicting sides of manners are that some of the heroes are the former gods, relegated to the struggle against their own counterparts, established in the nationwide war under a different name, to the level of the underground strong, other tribes of the same old heroes ancestors of immemorial past, underground strong, able to harm the living from under the earth and sending them from the underground childbirth and an abundance of earthly fruits. The sacrifice is demanded by both gods and heroes; but the rite essentially distinguishes these two kinds of sacrifices, giving the sacrifices in honor of the heroes the character of the offerings to funerals, sent down to the underworld, performed not on altars, but on “hearths” and on tombs. Distinctive for heroic cults is their direct and irreplaceable connection with the burial place of legendary heroes-relatives; That is why it can be said, as we have already said, that the hero is at home there, where the legends are preserved in the memory, as a material prikrѣpa of a cult, his coffin, a mound or a cave.

Vi.
Loss of local cults.

It’s clear that the immigrants, leaving their homeland, and religiously broke away from its soil, for they left their native graves, associated with the veneration of their relatives. The old cult of heroes had to die for these immigrants as a specific part of religious life, and the host of heroes, torn away from their relatives ashes, became only an ideal heritage of tribal memory, unstable and vague. This memory has preserved only their names, several main features of their generic characteristics, and even everything that has managed to take the form of pѣsen (ôimai) about the glories (kléa) of ancient valiant husbands.

If Ilyada is replete with aeolisms, this testifies, first of all, to the fact that it was based on the Aeolian songs of glory. Assimilated in a short time and by the neighbors of the Ionians, who fought with the Aeolians because of new places, drove them out and were displaced by them, were confused by them to the partial confusion of dialects, - these songs introduced their legendary new historical changed beyond recognition. The images of Achillov, Patroklov, Hektorov, Aleksandrov were given in psennom legend as if hanging in the air, characteristically outlined, but ghostly, homeless; they could be attached to other places of action, introduced into a different connection of events that are more close to the life experienced. And this life was full of events: the so-called Tevuran war had just ended, in which the newcomers had to win place by inch for their settlements from the indigenous inhabitants of the country; Her vicissitudes immediately merged with the legendary heritage of the old tales, the memories of her were adorned with the name of Achilles and multiplied the number of feats of the Old Father hero. All this composition of the tale, with the addition of other Thessalian, which are the epics of Pirin, Driant and Usek, who entered the battle with the fierce children of the mountains, Lapins and Centaurs (Il. I, 263; compare XII, also 127-194), as the tale of the campaign of seven heroes against the iv (Ill. IV, 376 f., 405 f.), the Aetolian, as the miѳ of Meleager and the Kalidon hunt (Fig. IX, 529 f.) and many others, - was adopted by the Ionian gene, who was given, as it were, to melt him in his furnace and pour it into a new, harmonious unity - at what, of course, the legends of a foreign tribe, and without that already shaky and changed their original outlines, with even more freedom and less memory of prototypes were used in the purpose of establishing a general Hellenic collection of heroic glories and a general Hellenic picture of the divine world order.

New warnings.

But not only, with the departure from the ancient shrines, the tangibility of the heroic tradition was lost, the ritual life in the area of heroic cults was interrupted, certain sketches of heroes were erased, but also a whole number of foreign powers in the root changed the old fathers. So, - and this was the main event of the new era of religious consciousness, - a new powerful alien entered the former cathedral of the gods, the Asia Minor god, from the "land of the holy" - Likia, - Apollo, - a terrible, golden shoulder and silver bow

behind the shoulders, sounding terribly, is the god of the pestilent, who dimly falls from afar into people and animals with his deadly arrows, cruelly revenge against the people who do not respect the lands and shrines belonging to him, who send pestilences to health and are appeased by the sea - "peanami" - such a formidable god that according to a very ancient hymn created by the Homeric school, all the gods stand up and tremble at the appearance of an alien, except for one father of the gods, Zeus, and even Anollonova's mother, Letho (Lato, Rom. Lat

Homer's poems Iliad and Odyssey were created in the first third of the 1st millennium BC. NS. in that area of ancient Greece, which was called Ionia. There were probably a lot of compilers of these poems, but the artistic unity of the poems presupposes some unknown individual author who remained in the memory of all antiquity and all subsequent culture under the name of the blind and wise singer Homer.

Plot

The Iliad and Odyssey convey only isolated moments of Trojan mythology. Therefore, it is necessary, as far as possible, to familiarize oneself with Trojan mythology as a whole in order to more clearly and distinctly distinguish the plot of the Iliad and the Odyssey in it.

Events before the Iliad. In Trojan mythology, the "Iliad" is preceded by a huge number of myths that were set forth in a special poem "Cyprus" by Stasin of Kiprsky, which has not come down to us. From these myths, we learn that the causes of the Trojan War are associated with cosmic events. Troy was located in the northwestern corner of Asia Minor and was inhabited by a Phrygian tribe. The war between the Greeks and the Trojans, which is the content of Trojan mythology, was supposedly predetermined from above.

It was said that the Earth, burdened with a huge human population, turned to Zeus with a request to reduce the human race, and Zeus decided to start a war between the Greeks and the Trojans for this. The earthly cause of this war was the abduction of the Spartan queen Helen by the Trojan prince Paris. However, this abduction was justified purely mythologically. One of the Greek kings (in Thessaly), Peleus, married the sea princess Thetis, daughter of the sea god Nereus. (This leads us into the depths of centuries, when such marriages for the primitive consciousness seemed to be a complete reality.) All the gods were present at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, except for Eris, the goddess of strife, who therefore planned to take revenge on the gods and threw the goddesses a golden apple with the inscription “Most Beautiful”. The myth narrated that Hera (Zeus' wife), Pallas Athena (Zeus' daughter, goddess of war and crafts) and Aphrodite (also Zeus' daughter, goddess of love and beauty) were claimants for the possession of this apple. And when the dispute of these three goddesses reached Zeus, he ordered Paris, the son of the Trojan king Priam, to resolve this dispute.

These mythological motives are of a very late origin. All three goddesses had a long mythological history and were presented in ancient times as harsh creatures. It is clear that the above mythological motives could take place only towards the end of the communal-clan formation, when the clan nobility arose and became stronger. The image of Paris speaks of an even later origin of this myth. It turns out that a person already considers himself so strong and wise, he has gone so far from primitive helplessness and from fear of demonic beings that he can even make a judgment on the gods.

The further development of the myth only deepens this motive of man's relative fearlessness before gods and demons: Paris awards the apple to Aphrodite, and she helps him to kidnap the Spartan queen Helen. The myth emphasizes that Paris was the most handsome man in Asia and Elena was the most beautiful woman in Europe.

These myths undoubtedly reflect the long-standing clashes of the European Greeks, who were looking for enrichment for themselves through war with the population of Asia Minor, who by that time had a high material culture. The myth embellishes the bleak history of ancient wars and idealizes the past; understanding this in the future will be very useful to us when analyzing the work of Homer as a whole.

The abduction of Elena plunges into great anguish her husband Menelaus. But then Menelaus's brother, Agamemnon, one of the main characters in the Iliad, the king of Argos, neighboring Sparta, appears on the stage. On his advice, the most famous kings and heroes from all over Greece are convened with their retinues. They decide to sail to the shore of Asia Minor, not far from which Troy was located, to attack the Trojans and return the kidnapped Elena. Among the summoned kings and heroes, the cunning Odysseus, the king of the island of Ithaca, and the young Achilles, the son of Peleus and Thetis, enjoyed particular influence. A huge Greek fleet lands an army a few kilometers from Troy. The Greeks set up their camp here and attack Troy and its allies living nearby. For nine years, the war has been waged without a noticeable preponderance of one side or the other.

Events of the Iliad. The Iliad covers the events of the tenth year of the war, shortly before the fall of Troy. But the fall of Troy itself is not depicted in the Iliad. Events in it take only 51 days. However, the poem gives the most intense depiction of military life. From the events of these days (and there are a lot of them, the poem is overloaded with them), you can get a vivid idea of the then war in general.

The main line of the story is occupied by songs I, XI, XVI - XXII. This is a story about the anger of Achilles and the consequences of this anger. Achilles, one of the most prominent leaders of the Greek army near Troy, is angry with the chosen commander of Agamemnon for taking from him the captive Briseis. And Agamemnon took this captive because, at the behest of Apollo, he had to return his captive Chryseis to her father, Chris, the priest of Apollo under Troy. Song I depicts the squabble between Achilles and Agamemnon, the departure of Achilles from the battlefield, his appeal to his mother Thetis, who receives from Zeus a promise to punish the Greeks for this. Zeus does not fulfill his promise until the XI Canto, and the main line of the narrative in the Iliad is restored only in it, where it is said that the Greeks are suffering serious defeats from the Trojans. But in the following songs (XII - XV) there is also no development of the action. The main line of the narrative is renewed only in Canto XVI, where Achilles's favorite friend, Patroclus, comes to the aid of the oppressed Greeks. He speaks with the permission of Achilles and dies at the hands of the most prominent Trojan hero Hector, the son of Priam. This forces Achilles to return to fighting again. The XVIII song tells how the god of blacksmithing Hephaestus prepares a new weapon for Achilles, and the XIX song tells about the reconciliation of Achilles with Agamemnon. In song XX we read about the resumption of battles, in which the gods themselves are now participating, and in song XXII - about the death of Hector at the hand of Achilles. This is the main narrative line in the Iliad.

A huge number of scenes unfold around her, which in no way develop the action, but extremely enrich it with numerous pictures of war. Thus, songs II - VII depict a series of duels, and songs XII - XV are simply a war with varying degrees of success for the Greeks and Trojans. Canto VIII speaks of some military failures of the Greeks, as a result of which Agamemnon (IX) sends ambassadors to Achilles with a proposal to reconcile, to which he responds with a sharp refusal. Songs XXIII - XXIV tell about the funerals of the fallen heroes - Patroclus and Hector. Finally, Song X was already in antiquity considered the latest insertion into the Iliad. It depicts the night scouting expedition of Greek and Trojan heroes into the Trojan Plain.

Events after the Iliad; These events were described in the most detailed way in other poems dedicated to Trojan mythology. There were whole poems that have not come down to us, which were a continuation of the Iliad. Such are the poems "Ethiopis", "Little Iliad", "The Fall of Troy", "Returns".

These poems portrayed Achilles' duel with the Amazonian Penthesileia, an ally of the Trojans who came to their aid after the death of Hector. The duel ended with the death of Penthesileia. Achilles himself died from the arrow of Paris, which was directed by Apollo. It was said that at the suggestion of Odysseus, the Greeks built a huge wooden horse, inside which a Greek military detachment was housed. The rest of the Greeks boarded the ships and, pretending to sail home, hid behind the nearest island. A Greek who was left on the shore near a wooden horse explained to the Trojans the imaginary reason for the construction of the horse - it was supposedly a gift to Pallas Athena. The Trojans installed a wooden horse in Troy, and at night the Greeks who had settled there came out of it, opened the gates and burned the city. There were many different kinds of epic stories about the return of the Greek leaders from Troy. About the return from Troy of Odysseus was narrated by a poem named after him and preserved to us.

Odyssey events. The events in this poem are not portrayed as scattered as in the Iliad, but nevertheless it is not devoid of difficulties in acquainting with the course of the action described in it.

It takes 10 years for Odysseus to return home and, full of all sorts of adventures, creates a large jumble of events. In fact, the first three years of Odysseus' voyage are depicted not in the first songs of the poem, but in songs IX - XII. And they are given in the form of the story of Odysseus at a feast with a king, to whom he was accidentally thrown by a storm. Then it is learned that Odysseus many times got to good people, then to robbers, then to the underworld.

In the center of Canto IX is the famous episode with the one-eyed man-eater (Cyclops) Polyphemus. This Polyphemus locked Odysseus and his companions in a cave, from where they got out with great difficulty. Odysseus, having fed Polyphemus with wine, managed to gouge out his only eye.

In Song X, Odysseus gets to the sorceress Kirk, and Kirka directs him to the underworld for a prophecy about his future. Canto XI is a depiction of this underworld. In Canto XII, after a series of terrible adventures, Odysseus finds himself on the island of the nymph Calypso, who keeps him for seven years.

The beginning of the "Odyssey" just refers to the end of Odyssey's stay with Calypso. It tells about the decision of the gods to return Odysseus to his homeland and about the search for Odysseus by his son Telemachus. These searches are described in songs I - IV of the poem. Songs V - VIII depict the stay of Odysseus, after sailing from the nymph Calypso and a terrible storm at sea, among the good-natured people of the Faecians, with their good king Alkinoy. There Odysseus talks about his wanderings (songs IX - XII).

From Canto XIII to the end of the poem, a consistent and clear picture of events is given. First, the phaeacs deliver Odysseus to his native island of Ithaca, where he settles with his swineherd Eumey, as his own house is besieged by local kings, who have been claiming the hand of Penelope, his wife for many years, selflessly guarding the treasures of Odysseus and by various tricks delaying her marriage with these suitors. In songs XVII - XX, Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, penetrates from Eumey's hut into his house to investigate everything that is happening in him, and in songs XXI - XXIV, with the help of faithful servants, he interrupts all the suitors in the palace, hangs unfaithful maids, meets with Penelope, who had been waiting for him for 20 years, and still pacifies the uprising against him on Ithaca. The house of Odysseus is filled with happiness, interrupted by a ten-year war and his ten-year adventures.