Poems of Homer, Iliad and Odyssey briefly. Homer's epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey

FEMALE IMAGE IN HOMER'S ODYSSEY

INTRODUCTION 2

1. HOMERIC EPO IN THE ODYSSEY. 4

1.1. Meaning of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. 4

1.2. Features of the storyline "Odyssey". nine

2. FEMALE IMAGES IN THE ODYSSEY. eighteen

2.1. Image of Penelope. eighteen

2.2. The beautiful nymph Calypso and the insidious sorceress Kirk. 22

CONCLUSION. 29

LIST OF USED LITERATURE .. 31

INTRODUCTION

"Poem" translated from Greek means creation. Poems are poetic stories about remarkable events in the life of prominent personalities. Epic poetry takes its name from Greek word“epos”, which means a story, since any epic work is a story about some event or incident that took place not in the soul of the poet, but in the world around him.

The oldest surviving monuments of Greek literature are the two great poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey", the author of which was considered by antiquity to be Homer. There is no direct historical evidence about the time of the emergence of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the conditions in which they were created, and the totality of the problems associated with these poems constitutes a complex and far from resolved “Homeric question”.

Within our term paper Let's take a look at the Odyssey.

The theme of the "Odyssey" is the wanderings and adventures of the "cunning" Odysseus, king of Ithaca, returning from the Trojan campaign; at this time, numerous suitors woo his faithful wife Penelope, and the son of Odysseus Telemachus goes in search of his father.

The main plot of the Odyssey refers to the type of legends about the “return of the husband” that is widespread in world folklore: the husband, after long and wonderful wanderings, returns home to the moment when his wife is ready to marry another, and - peacefully or by force - upsets the new wedding. With this plot in the Odyssey, a part of another plot is combined, no less widespread among different peoples, – about “a son going in search of his father”; the son, born in the absence of his father, goes to look for him, the father and son meet and, not knowing each other, enter into battle, ending tragically in some cases - the death of the father or son, in others - the reconciliation of the fighting. In the Greek legends about Odysseus, this plot is presented in full, but the "Homeric" poem gives only part of the plot, without bringing it to a battle between father and son.

The Odyssey, to a certain extent, is a continuation of the Iliad, the action of the poem is already attributed to the 10th year after the fall of Troy, but the stories of the characters mention those episodes whose time coincided with the period between the action of the Iliad and the action of the Odyssey. All the most important heroes of the Greek camp of the Iliad, living and dead, are also displayed in the Odyssey. Like the Iliad, the Odyssey was divided by ancient scholars into 24 books.

The composition of the Odyssey is more complex than the Iliad. The plot of the Iliad is presented in a linear sequence, in the Odyssey this sequence is shifted: the narrative begins in the middle of the action, and the listener learns about the previous events only later, from the story of Odysseus himself about his wanderings. The central role of the protagonist is put forward in the Odyssey more sharply than in the Iliad, where one of the organizing moments of the poem was the absence of Achilles, his indifferent attitude to the course of hostilities.

In the Odyssey, only the first line of the story (books 1-4), showing the situation on Ithaca and the journey of Telemachus, is determined by the absence of a hero, and from the 5th book attention is concentrated almost exclusively around Odysseus: the motive of unrecognizability of the returning husband is used, as we have seen, in the same function as the absence of a hero in the Iliad, and yet the listener does not lose sight of Odysseus - and this also testifies to the improvement of the art of epic narration.

HOMERIC EPOS IN "ODYSSEY"

Meaning of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

Homer's poems were a real treasury of the wisdom of the Greek people - "the book of revelation." They did not remain belonging only to the Ionian tribe, among which they were created, but became the common property of the entire Greek people and lived with them throughout its history. Tradition says that Picurgus introduced the performance of Homer's songs in Sparta, Solon - in Athens.

Subsequently, in all Greek states, they became the basis school education. The students memorized separate parts of the poems, and there were many people who knew both poems by heart.
entirely. It was considered an honor for the state to be called the birthplace of Homer. Homer was a favorite poet even in the most remote corners of the Greek world.

Two poems of the legendary ancient Greek poet Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey", who lived in the VIII century. BC, were admired by poets, scientists, great politicians and generals.

During the life of the author, two poems about the gods and heroes Achilles, Hector and Odysseus existed in oral performance. Homer did not write down his poems, and not only because he was blind. Poems were supposed to sound and were intended for hearing, not for the eyes. Homer addressed the audience. He knew the text of the poems by heart and, apparently, was a brilliant performer of it. His poetry required music, space, and an audience. Homer needed not a silent reader, but enchanted listeners. It is believed that, representing the aed Demodoc in the Odyssey, he portrayed himself:

“Toyu sometimes returned with the famous singer Ponton;

His muse at birth bestowed evil and good:

Eyes eclipsed him, bestowed sweet singing for that.

He gave the silvered chair to the singer Pontonoy, and on it he

He sat down in front of the guests, leaning his back against a high column.

Hanging the blind man's lyre on a nail over his head,

To touch her with his hand - so that he can find her -

He gave it to Pontonoy, and brought a basket of food, and pushed

He prepared a table and wine for him to drink whenever he wished.

They raised their hands to the food offered to them; when

The hunger was satisfied with their sweet drink and food

The muse inspired the singer to proclaim about famous leaders,

Having chosen from a song, at that time everywhere uplifted to heaven ...

The songs of Homer became books, probably only a few centuries after the death of the author, although there is evidence that writing was known in Greece and at the time of Homer. The poet's poems were preserved and transmitted by oral tradition bearers and were framed in handwritten texts in the sixth century BC during the reign of the democrat and politician Peisistratus in Athens.

In the III and II centuries BC. the scientists of Alexandria conducted a thorough study of the texts of the poems and, for the convenience of reading and commenting, divided each poem into 24 books (songs), according to the number of letters in the Greek alphabet with which these books were designated. From these times we can talk about two grandiose poetic books of Homer, with a volume of 27803 lines of poetry (15693 in the Iliad, 12110 in the Odyssey).

The Iliad is a poem about the war, or rather 50 days of the tenth year of the war between the Achaeans and the Trojans.

"Odyssey" is a poem about the last 40 days of the journey of the king of Ithaca, the hero of the Trojan War, who returns to his native island for ten years to his wife and son. The action in the poems takes place on earth and on Olympus, in the camp of people and between the gods. Never then will gods, heroes and people stand so close to each other: some are equal to gods, others are humanoid. Fantasy and reality, vivid details of everyday life and majestic grandiose fiction, conveyed by melodious rhythms without rhyming hexameter, amaze readers of different times and peoples. The poems tell about what is close to everyone: about war and peace, life and death, love and anger, friendship and enmity.

With all the monumentalism and divinity, the characters of the poems are very humane. To a certain extent, we can say about them that they are eternal and always modern or modernized by readers. In Achilles, Hector, Odyssey, the poet represents bright personalities, human temperaments and different attitudes towards life. Achilles is an action hero ready for instant action. It is no coincidence that his constant epithet is "swift". In both love and hate, he is an extrovert. Short-tempered and outgoing. Tragic. He knows about his fate and lives one day. He is the most emotional in the poem. First, Homer talks about his anger, then (after the death of Patroclus) about his grief and thirst for revenge. Any delay is unbearable for him. He is unstoppable and, even after killing Hector, continues to torment the dead body. But here Thetis appears before him with a request and an order from Zeus to return the body of his son to the king of Troy. Achilles makes a promise. Explicit compassion and respect for the old man Priam - the father of the murdered opponent - are manifested in the scene of the meeting. Now the anger is gone. A worthy opponent is defeated. We must mourn the dead and adequately prepare for our own death.

The lonely and tragic warrior Achilles in the world of the Homeric epic is confronted by Hector and Odysseus. Hector is the leader of the Trojans, their protector. He is also a great warrior, but a warrior out of necessity, not out of passion. Hector is given surrounded by people close and loving to him: Trojan warriors, father, mother, wife, son. He is a wonderful son and selfless brother. The scene of Hector's farewell to his wife Andromache is one of the most lyrical in the heroic poem. Homer loves both heroes, but it seems to many readers that Hector is closer to him. The last line of the Iliad: “So they buried the body of the horse-riding Hector,” sounds like a line of requiem for all the dead. Hector loves his wife and son, but above this love for him is honor and duty. His younger brother Paris is completely different. For him, love, passion for Elena is above everything in the world. And in this he also has no equal. His other quality is beauty, and in this he is divine and commensurate with Helen of Sparta.

The strength of Odysseus is not in beauty, militancy, or following duty and honor. The main thing in which he excels others is intelligence, endurance, cunning. He wins not by force and passion, but by prudence, the ability to wait and predict the situation. Therefore, in Homer, he is called smart, cunning, and experienced. He never gives in to the first impulse of feelings, and in this he is the complete opposite of Achilles. With his loyalty to Penelope and his distant homeland Ithaca, he looks more like Hector, but an attentive reader of poems will also see features that bring him closer to Achilles. Despite the difference in plots, the culmination of the Iliad and the Odyssey tells about revenge: Achilles avenges Patroclus, Odysseus avenges the suitors. For the sake of revenge, Odysseus postpones the meeting with Penelope and reveals himself only to Telemachus, since he needs the help of his son.

No less expressive female images poems. Elena Spartanskaya appears before us at the climax of her biography: because of her the best men wage a bloody war. But she lacks ambition. There is no desire in her to triumph and revel in the power that beauty gives. Tragic is the fate of the homely Andromache, who anticipates the death of her husband.

A completely different Penelope. She is a match for Odysseus: where it is impossible to take by force, she takes by cunning. She is patient, enterprising and true to one goal - to wait for her husband, who promised to return and save Ithaca for him. With her suspicion and caution, she surpassed even Odysseus, and he reproaches her for not immediately throwing herself on his neck, calls her “incomprehensible”, “uncompromising”, “unaffectionate” with an “iron heart”.

Like a wise maiden in a fairy tale, Penelope arranges her test to check the wanderer (after all, twenty years have passed and Odysseus has changed so much) and only after making sure that this is really her husband, and not an impostor, weeps sobbing, “gently kissing her sweet head” and says :

“Oh, do not be angry with me Odysseus! .. do not reproach

I, that not immediately, at the sight of you, I caressed you;

My dear heart, Odysseus, plunged into the great

A trembling fear that I would not be deceived here by some foreigner.

The books of Homer have not only artistic sense, but they are the most important historical and ethnographic source telling about the life of the ancient Greeks. Disputes about the possible historicism of the content of the poems, apparently, will never cease. Topography and archaeological excavations testify in favor of lifelikeness. The recently released American film Troy presents a non-mythological version of heroic events: without a dispute between the gods, without their complicity and interference in the life and death of the heroes, without bright Homeric details and scenes, with a warlike anguish of destructive pathos and love passions of the heroes of action films and thrillers. Apparently, this is a reading of the Homeric plot and images that is close to modern man. We do not notice the pacifism of Homer. In the era of terrorism, Achilles' vengeance is the ideal of human behavior. Like any great book, the Iliad is a mirror in which each era sees itself.

Our lives are permeated with destructive, destructive ideas. The heroes of Homer's poems are also cruel, and only the gods are able to curb them. Achilles, angry at Agamemnon, rushes at him with a sword, but Athena, "only revealed to him, invisible to others," grabs him by the blond curls and orders him to reconcile. Having killed Patroclus, Hector is going to cut off his head from a white neck and hoist it on a stake in reproach. Then Hera sends Iris to warn Achilles about this, and he drives the Trojans away from the body of his friend with a mighty cry, amplified by Pallas Athena. Even the gods are shocked by the mockery of Achilles over the body of Hector and suggest sending Hermes to steal the body, but then they decide to influence Achilles through his mother, the goddess Thetis.

After the extermination of the suitors, Odysseus asks the nanny about the unfaithful slaves, orders them to gather them, orders them, crying, to take out the corpses, wash the tables and chairs from the blood in the hall where the battle took place, and then the son Telemachus cruelly executes them, “pulling their necks with loops”. How it all looks like modern cleansing! The militancy of Odysseus and Telemachus, who are now getting involved in a battle with relatives avenging the dead, can only be stopped by Athena and the angry Zeus, who threw a thunderous arrow into the ground. Thus, peace reigns in the space of Homer's poems.

In the second act of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a wandering troupe appears, and one of the actors, at the request of the prince, reads a monologue in which the Trojan hero Aeneas tells about the capture of Troy and the cruelties of the victors. When the story comes to the suffering of the old queen Hecuba - before her eyes, Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, who was rabid from anger, killed her husband Priam and abused his body - the actor turns pale and bursts into tears. And Hamlet utters the famous, proverbial words:

What is Hecuba? What is Hecuba to him?

And he's crying...

Translation by B. Pasternak

What is Hecuba to modern man, what is Achilles, Priam, Hector and other heroes of Homer to him; what is their torment, joy, love and hate, adventures and battles, which died down and burned out more than thirty centuries ago to him? What takes him back to antiquity, why does the Trojan War and the return to his homeland of the long-suffering and cunning Odysseus touch us, if not to tears, like a Shakespearean actor, then still quite vividly and strongly?

Any literary work of the distant past is capable of attracting and captivating a person of modern times with the image of a vanished life, in many ways strikingly unlike our life today. The historical interest inherent in any person, the natural desire to find out “what happened before,” is the beginning of our path to Homer, or rather, one of the paths. We ask: who was he, this Homer? And when did you live? And did he “compose” his heroes, or do their images and exploits reflect true events? And how true (or how freely) are they reflected and what time do they belong to? We ask question after question and look for answers in articles and books about Homer; and at our service - not hundreds and not thousands, but tens of thousands of books and articles, a whole library, a whole literature that continues to grow even now. Scientists not only discover new facts related to Homer's poems, but also discover new points of view on Homer's poetry as a whole, new ways of evaluating it. There was a time when every word of the Iliad and Odyssey was considered an indisputable truth - the ancient Greeks (in any case, the vast majority of them) saw in Homer not only a great poet, but also a philosopher, teacher, naturalist, in a word - the supreme judge on all occasions. There was another time when everything in the Iliad and the Odyssey was considered fiction, a beautiful fairy tale, or a crude fable, or an immoral anecdote that offended "good taste." Then the time came when Homer's "fables" one after another began to be reinforced by the finds of archaeologists: in 1870, the German Heinrich Schliemann found Troy, near the walls of which the heroes of the Iliad fought and died; four years later, the same Schliemann unearthed "abundant gold" Mycenae - the city of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army near Troy; in 1900, the Englishman Arthur Evans began excavations, unique in terms of the wealth of finds, in Crete - the “hundred-city” island, repeatedly mentioned by Homer; in 1939, the American Bligen and the Greek Kuroniotis tracked down the ancient Pylos - the capital of Nestor, the "sweet-voiced Vitius of Pylos", the indefatigable giver of wise advice in both poems ... The list of "Homer's discoveries" is extremely extensive and has not been closed to this day - and is unlikely to be closed in the near future . And yet it is necessary to name one more of them - the most important and most sensational in our century. During excavations on the island of Crete, as well as in Mycenae, in Pylos and in some other places in the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula, archaeologists found several thousand clay tablets covered with unknown letters. It took almost half a century to read them, because even the language of these inscriptions was not known. Only in 1953, thirty-year-old Englishman Michael Ventris solved the problem of deciphering the so-called Linear B. This man who died in car accident three and a half years later, was neither a historian of antiquity nor a specialist in ancient languages - he was an architect. Nevertheless, as the remarkable Soviet scientist S. Lurie wrote about Ventris, “he managed to make the largest and most amazing discovery in the science of antiquity since the Renaissance.” His name should be next to the names of Schliemann and Champollion, who solved the mystery Egyptian hieroglyphs. Its discovery put into the hands of researchers authentic Greek documents of about the same time as the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, documents that expanded, clarified, and in some ways turned over the previous ideas about the prototype of that society and state that are depicted by Homer.

At the beginning of the II millennium BC. e. Achaean Greek tribes appeared on the Balkan Peninsula. By the middle of this millennium, slave-owning states had formed in the southern part of the peninsula. Each of them was a small fortress with adjacent lands. At the head of each stood, apparently, two rulers. The rulers-kings with their entourage lived in a fortress, behind mighty, cyclopean masonry walls, and at the foot of the wall a settlement populated by royal servants, artisans, and merchants arose. At first, the cities fought with each other for supremacy, then, around the 15th century BC. e., the penetration of the Achaeans into neighboring countries, across the sea. Among their other conquests was the island of Crete - the main center of the ancient, pre-Greek culture of the southeastern region of the Mediterranean. Long before the start of the Achaean conquest, there were states with monarchical power in Crete and a society clearly divided into classes of free and slaves. The Cretans were skilled sailors and merchants, excellent builders, potters, jewelers, artists, knew a lot about art, and were fluent in writing. The Achaeans had previously been strongly influenced by the high and refined Cretan culture; now, after the conquest of Crete, it finally became the common property of the Greeks and Cretans. Scientists call it Cretan-Mycenaean.

The land that constantly attracted the attention of the Achaeans was the Troad in the northwest of Asia Minor, famous for its advantageous location and fertile soil. To the main city of this land - Ilion, or Troy - campaigns were equipped more than once. One of them, especially long, which brought together a particularly large number of ships and soldiers, remained in the memory of the Greeks under the name of the Trojan War. The ancients attributed it to 1200 BC. e. - in terms of our chronology - and the work of archaeologists who dug the Hisarlyk hill after Schliemann confirm the ancient tradition.

The Trojan War turned out to be the eve of the collapse of the Achaean power. Soon new Greek tribes appeared in the Balkans - the Dorians - just as wild as their predecessors, the Achaeans, were a thousand years ago. They went through the entire peninsula, displacing and subjugating the Achaeans, and completely destroyed their society and culture. History turned back: a tribal community reappeared in the place of the slave-owning state, maritime trade died out, the royal palaces that survived from destruction were overgrown with grass, arts, crafts, and writing were forgotten. The past was also forgotten; the chain of events was broken, and individual links turned into legends - into myths, as the Greeks said. The myths about heroes were for the ancients the same indisputable truth as the myths about the gods, and the heroes themselves became an object of worship. Heroic traditions were intertwined with each other and with myths about the gods. Circles (cycles) of myths arose, connected both by the sequence of facts underlying them, and by the laws of religious thinking and poetic fantasy. Myths were the soil in which Greek grew heroic epic.

Every nation has a heroic epic. This is a story about a glorious past, about events of paramount importance that were a turning point in the history of the people. Such an event (or at least one of such events) was the great campaign against Troy; legends about him became the most important plot basis of the Greek epic. But from the time when the epic was created, these events were separated by three or even four centuries, and therefore the pictures of the bygone life, remembered with extraordinary accuracy, were joined by details and details borrowed from the life that surrounded the creators of the epic unknown to us. At the very foundation of the myth, much remained untouched, but much was reinterpreted into new way, in accordance with new ideals and views. Multi-layeredness (and, therefore, inevitable inconsistency) was originally feature Greek epic, and since it was in constant motion, the number of layers increased. This mobility is inseparable from the very form of its existence: like all peoples, the heroic epic among the Greeks was oral creativity, and its written consolidation marked the last stage in the history of the genre.

M. Kulikov, M. Tuzhilin www.lib.ru

"Iliad. Odyssey»: Fiction; Moscow; 1967

Way to Homer

What is Hecuba? What is Hecuba to him?

And he's crying...[Translated by B. Pasternak]

Any literary work of the distant past is capable of attracting and captivating a person of modern times with the image of a vanished life, in many ways strikingly unlike our life today. The historical interest inherent in any person, the natural desire to find out “what happened before,” is the beginning of our path to Homer, or rather, one of the paths. We ask: who was he, this Homer? And when did you live? And did he “compose” his heroes, or do their images and exploits reflect true events? And how true (or how freely) are they reflected and what time do they belong to? We ask question after question and look for answers in articles and books about Homer; and at our service - not hundreds and not thousands, but tens of thousands of books and articles, a whole library, a whole literature that continues to grow even now. Scientists not only discover new facts related to Homer's poems, but also discover new points of view on Homer's poetry as a whole, new ways of evaluating it. There was a time when every word of the Iliad and Odyssey was considered an indisputable truth - the ancient Greeks (in any case, the vast majority of them) saw in Homer not only a great poet, but also a philosopher, teacher, naturalist, in a word - the supreme judge on all occasions. There was another time when everything in the Iliad and the Odyssey was considered fiction, a beautiful fairy tale, or a crude fable, or an immoral anecdote that offended "good taste." Then the time came when Homer's "fables" one after another began to be reinforced by the finds of archaeologists: in 1870, the German Heinrich Schliemann found Troy, near the walls of which the heroes of the Iliad fought and died; four years later, the same Schliemann unearthed "abundant with gold" Mycenae - the city of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army near Troy; in 1900, the Englishman Arthur Evans began excavations, unique in terms of the wealth of finds, in Crete, the “hundred-city” island, repeatedly mentioned by Homer; in 1939, the American Bligen and the Greek Kuroniotis tracked down ancient Pylos, the capital of Nestor, the “sweet-voiced Vitius of Pylos,” the indefatigable giver of wise advice in both poems… The list of “Homer’s discoveries” is extremely extensive and has not been closed to this day—and is unlikely to be closed in the near future . And yet it is necessary to name one more of them - the most important and most sensational in our century. During excavations on the island of Crete, as well as in Mycenae, in Pylos and in some other places in the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula, archaeologists found several thousand clay tablets covered with unknown letters. It took almost half a century to read them, because even the language of these inscriptions was not known. Only in 1953, thirty-year-old Englishman Michael Ventris solved the problem of deciphering the so-called Linear B. This man, who died in a car accident three and a half years later, was neither a historian of antiquity nor an expert in ancient languages - he was an architect. Nevertheless, as the remarkable Soviet scientist S. Lurie wrote about Ventris, “he managed to make the largest and most amazing discovery in the science of antiquity since the Renaissance.” His name should be next to the names of Schliemann and Champollion, who unraveled the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Its discovery put into the hands of researchers authentic Greek documents of about the same time as the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, documents that expanded, clarified, and in some ways turned over the previous ideas about the prototype of that society and state that are depicted by Homer.

At the beginning of the II millennium BC. e. Achaean Greek tribes appeared on the Balkan Peninsula. By the middle of this millennium, slave-owning states had formed in the southern part of the peninsula. Each of them was a small fortress with adjacent lands. At the head of each stood, apparently, two rulers. The rulers-kings with their entourage lived in a fortress, behind mighty, cyclopean masonry walls, and at the foot of the wall a settlement populated by royal servants, artisans, merchants arose. At first, the cities fought with each other for supremacy, then, around the 15th century BC. e., the penetration of the Achaeans into neighboring countries, across the sea. Among their other conquests was the island of Crete - the main center of the ancient, pre-Greek culture of the southeastern region of the Mediterranean. Long before the start of the Achaean conquest, there were states with monarchical power in Crete and a society clearly divided into classes of free and slaves. The Cretans were skilled sailors and merchants, excellent builders, potters, jewelers, artists, knew a lot about art, and were fluent in writing. The Achaeans had previously been strongly influenced by the high and refined Cretan culture; now, after the conquest of Crete, it finally became the common property of the Greeks and Cretans. Scholars call it the Cretan Mycenaean.

The land that constantly attracted the attention of the Achaeans was the Troad in the northwest of Asia Minor, famous for its favorable location and fertile soil. To the main city of this land - Ilion, or Troy - campaigns were equipped more than once. One of them, especially long, which brought together a particularly large number of ships and soldiers, remained in the memory of the Greeks under the name of the Trojan War. The ancients attributed it to 1200 BC. e. - in terms of our chronology - and the work of archaeologists who dug the Hisarlyk hill after Schliemann confirm the ancient tradition.

Every nation has a heroic epic. This is a story about a glorious past, about events of paramount importance that were a turning point in the history of the people. Such an event (or at least one of such events) was the great campaign against Troy; legends about him became the most important plot basis of the Greek epic. But from the time when the epic was created, these events were separated by three or even four centuries, and therefore the pictures of the bygone life, remembered with extraordinary accuracy, were joined by details and details borrowed from the life that surrounded the creators of the epic unknown to us. At the very foundation of the myth, much remained untouched, but much was reinterpreted in a new way, in accordance with new ideals and views. Layering (and, therefore, inevitable inconsistency) was originally a characteristic feature of the Greek epic, and since it was in constant motion, the number of layers increased. This mobility is inseparable from the very form of its existence: like all peoples, the heroic epic among the Greeks was oral creativity, and its written consolidation marked the last stage in the history of the genre.

The performers of epic works and at the same time their co-creators, co-authors were singers (in Greek, “aeds”). They knew by heart tens of thousands of poetic lines that were inherited and God knows who and when composed, they owned a set of traditional means and techniques that also passed from one generation of poets to the next (this includes various repetition formulas for describing similar or in accuracy of recurring situations, and constant epithets, and a special poetic meter, and a special language of the epic, and even the very range of plots, quite wide, but still limited). The abundance of stable, unchanging elements was a necessary condition for independent creativity: freely combining them, intertwining them with their own poems and half-verses, the aed always improvised, always created anew.

Most modern scholars believe that Homer lived in the 8th century BC. e. in Ionia - on the western coast of Asia Minor or on one of the nearby islands. By that time, the Aeds had disappeared, and rhapsodic reciters took their place; they no longer sang, accompanying themselves on the cithara, but recited in a singsong voice, and not only their own works, but also those of others. Homer was one of them. But Homer is not only an heir, he is also an innovator, not only the result, but also the beginning: in his poems lie the origins of the spiritual life of all antiquity as a whole. The Byzantine Michael Choniates (XII-XIII centuries) wrote: “Just as, according to Homer, all rivers and streams originate from the Ocean, so any verbal art has its source in Homer.”

There is an assumption that the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" really conclude a centuries-old tradition of improvisational creativity - that they were the first examples of a "great epic" fixed in writing, from the very beginning they were literature in the truest sense of the word. This does not mean, of course, that the text of the poems known to us does not differ in any way from the original, as it was written down or “pronounced” at the end of the 8th or beginning of the 7th century BC. e. It contains many later inserts (interpolations), in other cases very lengthy, up to a whole song; there are probably quite a few abbreviations, cuts, and stylistic corrections that should be called distortions. But in such a “distorted” form, it dates back almost two and a half thousand years, in this form it was known to the ancients and accepted by them, and trying to return it to its original state is not only impossible in essence, but also pointless from a historical and cultural point of view.

The Iliad tells about one episode of the last, tenth, year of the Trojan War - the wrath of Achilles, the most powerful and brave among the Greek heroes, offended by the supreme leader of the Achaeans, the Mycenaean king Agamemnon. Achilles refuses to participate in the battles, the Trojans begin to gain the upper hand, drive the Achaeans to the very camp and almost set fire to their ships. Then Achilles allows his beloved friend Patroclus to join the battle. Patroclus dies, and Achilles, having finally renounced his anger, avenges the death of his friend by slaying Hector, the protagonist and protector of the Trojans, the son of their king Priam. Everything important in the plot of the poem comes from myths, from the Trojan cycle. The Odyssey is also connected with the same cycle, telling about the return to his homeland after the fall of Troy of another Greek hero - the king of the island of Ithaca Odysseus. But the main thing here is not a myth: both main plot components of the Odyssey - the return of a spouse to his wife after a long absence and amazing adventures in distant, overseas lands - go back to a fairy tale and a folk story. The difference between the two poems is not limited to this, it is noticeable in the composition, and in the details of the narrative, and in the details of the worldview. Already the ancients themselves were not sure whether both poems belonged to the same author, and there are many supporters of this view in modern times. And yet, more likely - although, strictly speaking, exactly the same provable - seems to be the opposite opinion: there are still more similarities between the Iliad and the Odyssey than different ones.

Dissimilarity and direct contradictions are found not only between the poems, but also within each of them. They are explained primarily by the above-mentioned multi-layered Greek epic: after all, in the world that Homer draws, the features and signs of several eras are combined and adjacent - Mycenaean, pre-Homeric (Dorian), Homeric in the proper sense of the word. And next to the Dorian ritual of burning corpses - Mycenaean burial in the ground, next to Mycenaean bronze weapons - Dorian iron, unknown to the Achaeans, next to the Mycenaean autocrats - powerless Dorian kings, kings only in name, but in fact tribal elders ... In the last century, these contradictions led science to the fact that the very existence of Homer was called into question. The idea was expressed that Homeric poems arose spontaneously, that is, by themselves, that this is the result of collective creativity - like a folk song. Less decisive critics acknowledged that Homer did exist, but assigned him the comparatively modest role of an editor, or rather a compiler, who skillfully brought together small poems belonging to different authors, or, perhaps, folk ones. Still others, on the other hand, acknowledged Homer's copyright in most of the text, but attributed the artistic integrity and perfection of the Iliad and the Odyssey to some editor of a later era.

Scientists tirelessly uncovered ever new contradictions (often they were the product of scientific imagination or scientific captiousness) and were ready to pay any price to get rid of them. The price, however, turned out to be too high: not only Homer, but also the virtues of his “imaginary” creations, torn to shreds by the merciless feathers of analysts (this is how the overthrowers of “one Homer” are called), turned into a fiction, a fiction. This was sheer absurdity, and over the past fifty years the opposite view, the unitary view, has taken over. For the Unitarians, the artistic unity of the Homeric heritage is undeniable, which is directly felt by any unbiased reader. Their goal is to reinforce this feeling with the help of a special “analysis from the inside”, an analysis of those rules and laws that, as far as one can judge, the poet himself set for himself, those techniques that make up Homer’s poetry, that worldview that underlies it. So, let's look at Homer through the eyes of an open-minded reader.

First of all, we will be puzzled and attracted by the similarity, the closeness of the ancient to the modern. Homer immediately captures and immediately from the subject of study becomes a part of our “I”, as any favorite poet becomes, dead or alive - it doesn’t matter, because the main thing for us will be an emotional response, an aesthetic experience.

Reading Homer, you are convinced that much in his view of the world is not only eternal and enduring truth, but also a direct challenge to all subsequent centuries. The most important thing that distinguishes this view is its breadth, the desire to understand different points vision, tolerance, as they would say today. The author of the heroic epic of the Greeks does not harbor hatred for the Trojans, the undisputed culprits of an unjust war (after all, it was their prince Paris who offended people and offended the divine law by kidnapping Helen, the wife of his hospitality, the Spartan king Menelaus); let's say more - he respects them, he sympathizes with them, because they also have no other choice but to fight, defending their city, wives, children and their own lives, and because they fight courageously, although the Achaeans are stronger and more numerous. They are doomed; True, they themselves do not yet know this, but Homer knows the outcome of the war and, a generous winner, sympathizes with the future vanquished. And if, according to the poet himself, “holy Troy” is hated by the gods “for the guilt of Priamid Paris”, then Homer is higher and nobler than the Olympian gods.

The breadth of the look is inspired by kindness, humanity. It is hardly coincidental that European literature is opened by a call for kindness and a condemnation of cruelty. Justice, which people are obliged to observe and protect the gods, is in mutual love, meekness, friendliness, complacency; lawlessness - in ferocity, in heartlessness. Even Achilles, his exemplary hero, is not forgiven by Homer for the "lion's ferocity", and to this day this is not a common curse of common vice, but a living experience for which people throughout their history have paid so much and every time again. Homer's humanity is so great that it overcomes even the inherent features of the genre: usually a heroic epic is a song of war, as a test that reveals best forces souls, and Homer indeed glorifies war, but he already curses its misfortunes, its ugliness, its shameless desecration of human dignity. The first, apparently, comes from the primitive morality of the barbarian Dorians, the second from the new morality of law and peace. She had to subjugate the universe, and to this day it cannot yet be said that this task has been solved. That's where Homer meets Shakespeare, and we meet both, that's what Hecuba is to us! We perfectly understand the horror of old Priam, who mourns in advance his ugly and inglorious death:

Oh well done young man.

No matter how he lies, fallen in battle and torn to pieces by copper, -

Everything with him and the dead, whatever is open, is beautiful!

If a gray-haired beard and a gray-haired head of a man,

If the shame of a murdered old man is defiled by dogs, -

There is no more miserable fate for unfortunate people!

And no less, no worse, we understand Shakespeare's furious protest against the fate that allowed this to happen:

Be ashamed, Fortune! Give her a break

Oh gods, take the wheel.

Break the rim, break the spokes

And roll its axis from the clouds

To hell![Translated by B. Pasternak]

The humiliation of a person by injustice, violence is a shame and torment for each of the people; villainy throws its brazen challenge to the entire world order, and, therefore, to each of us, and, therefore, everyone is responsible for villainy. Homer had a presentiment, Shakespeare clearly understood.

But tolerance nowhere never turns into tolerance for evil, timidity before it, an attempt to justify it. The firmness of the ethical position, the serious and strict unambiguity in relation to life, so characteristic of Homer (and of the ancient tradition as a whole), has a special attractive force in our eyes. “The inviolability of the rock of values”, from Homer to the present day - the ineradicability of goodness and honesty in the face of malice and betrayal, the eternity of craving for beauty despite the temptations of the ugly, the “eternity” of maxims and commandments that seem to other simpletons to be born only yesterday or even today - carries joy and encouragement. And there is no need to suspect that such unambiguity of assessments is the result of primitive, primitive complacency, which does not understand what doubt is; no, under it is hidden the organic self-confidence of a healthy intellect, a healthy feeling, confidence in one's right (and in one's duty!) to decide and judge.

For a healthy feeling and a healthy intellect, life is a great gift and the most precious asset, despite all its disasters, torments and grave vicissitudes, despite the fact that Zeus speaks from heaven:

…Of creatures that breathe and crawl in the dust

Truly, there is no more unhappy person in the whole universe!

But the immortal cannot understand mortals, and the poet is not only nobler, but also wiser than his gods. He accepts reality calmly and sensibly, he catches in it the rhythm of alternating joys and sorrows and sees in such an alternation an immutable law of being, and resolutely says “yes” to being, and “no” to non-being.

Decisively, but not unconditionally, because he looks into the face of death with the same fearlessness and calmness as he looks into the face of life. The inevitability of death cannot and should not poison the joy of earthly existence, and its threat should push one to dishonor. One of the best and most famous passages in the Iliad is the words of the Trojan hero Sarpedon to a friend before a battle:

Noble friend! when now, refusing to scold,

We were with you forever, ageless and immortal,

I myself would not fly ahead of the army to fight,

I would not drag you into the dangers of a glorious battle.

But now, as always, countless deaths

We are surrounded, and a mortal can't miss them, can't avoid them.

Together forward! or for the glory of whom, or for the glory themselves!

Homer's worldview is the highest calmness and enlightenment of the spirit, which has experienced both violent delight and violent despair and has risen above both - above the naivety of optimism and the bitterness of pessimism.

The words of Sarpedon, calling on a friend to fight, urge the reader to think about how free a person is in Homer - whether he has freedom of choice, free will, or is bound by “higher forces” hand and foot. The question is extremely complex, and the answers are contradictory, because the ideas about the gods and Fate, combined in the Greek epic, are contradictory. Quite often, people really complain that they are nothing more than toys in the hands of the gods, and they blame the insidious celestials for all their troubles and mistakes, but if this is so, why are the gods indignant at the lies committed by people? Then this is their, divine, untruth, and Homeric morality loses its foundation. No matter how you interpret these complaints (and they can also be explained psychologically, for example, by an attempt to justify oneself, to shift one's own guilt onto someone else's shoulders), it is very difficult to smooth out the contradiction. Yes, it's useless. Moreover, we will meet enough places where a person makes a decision consciously, sensibly weighing all the pros and cons, without any help (or insidious prompting) from above, and therefore is obliged to bear responsibility for his act. Similar to man in everything, the gods of Homer and here act in purely human roles: they give advice - just like the wise old man Nestor, they participate in fights - just like mortal heroes, sometimes even with less luck than mortals, do not disdain to interfere and in the little things of earthly life. They are able to help a person or harm him, but they cannot decide his fate - not one of them, not even Zeus.

The fate of man is predetermined by Fate, the highest power in the world, to which the gods themselves obey. They are the servants of Fate, the executors of her decisions; to bring closer or to postpone what is appointed by Fate - that's all they are capable of. Their main advantage over people is knowledge, wisdom, foresight of the future (as well as the main cause of human unrighteousness, sin is ignorance, spiritual blindness, stupidity), and they willingly use this advantage to inform the mortal in advance that "it is destined for him by fate" . And this is very important, because within the framework of what is predetermined, within the framework of necessity, there is almost always room for freedom. Fate offers a dilemma: if you do this, you will survive, if you do otherwise, you will die (which means “despite fate to descend into the abode of Hades”). The choice is an act of free will, but once it is made, nothing can be changed in its consequences. Hermes inspired Aegisthus so that he would not encroach on the life of Agamemnon when the king returned from a campaign against Troy, and would not marry his wife. Aegisthus remained deaf to the admonition of God and, as Hermes warned him, suffered punishment at the hands of the son of the slain.

Reading Homer, you are convinced that there are times when banal, captured clichés, which have long lost their meaning and expressiveness, suddenly come to life. He is indeed a "genius of poetry" and indeed an "artist of the word." He draws and sculpts with a word, created by him is visible and tangible. He possesses a sharp eye that is unique even among fellow geniuses, and therefore the world of his vision - the most ordinary objects in this world - is sharper, more distinct, more meaningful than what is revealed to any other gaze. I would like to call this quality, following Marx, childishness, because only in the early years, only a child has such vigilance. But Homer's childishness is also a bright sun that permeates the poems, and admiration for life in all its guises (hence the general elation of tone, epic majesty), and an inexhaustible curiosity for details (hence the countless, but never tiring details). Childishness is finally manifested in the way the artist relates to his material.

The writer of modern times, as a rule, struggles with the material, he organizes the word and the reality behind it is precisely the process of organization, the transformation of chaos into space, disorder into order. The closer to today, the more noticeable the struggle, the less the artist tries to hide it from prying eyes, and often defiantly exposes the resistance of the material to the public. The ancient writer did not know this resistance, in Homer the subject is not yet opposed to the object (society or even nature): so the child does not realize the opposition of “I” and “not-I” for a long time. The organic feeling of unity weakened over the centuries, but up to the very end of the ancient tradition did not completely disappear, and this gives to any ancient book, and especially to Homeric poems, a special integrity that cannot be confused with anything and which attracts us and pleases - in contrast. The same feeling, perhaps, is embodied in Homer's contemporary plastic and vase painting, usually referred to as archaic. Looking at the "kuros" (sculptures of young men in full height), on their restrained, constrained power and blissful smile, looking at vases and clay figurines, each of which is rightly called a masterpiece, you think about with what freedom and carelessness, with what wise oblivion of everyday hardships and worries, with what childish confidence in the future and the ancient artist perceived the world with confidence in it. That's why the lips smile, that's why the eyes are so wide open - with curiosity for everything in the world, with dignity and calmness, which miraculously combine with expression, bold expressiveness of movements in the strings of people and animals.

The same with Homer. "Static" sketches alternate with "dynamic" ones, and it's hard to say which one works better for the poet. Compare:

The mantle was woolen, purple, double

He is clothed; golden beautiful with double hooks

The mantle was held on with a plaque; master on the badge skillfully

A formidable dog and in his mighty claws he has a young

Doe sculpted…

…in amazement that badge

She brought everyone. Chiton, I noticed, he wore from a wonderful

Fabrics, like a film, removed from the head of a dried onion,

Thin and light, like a bright sun; all women seeing

This wonderful fabric, they were inexpressibly surprised at it.

This is how the huge Telamonides came out, the stronghold of the Danaev,

Grinning with a formidable face, and sonorous strong feet

He walked, speaking widely, hesitating with a long-ranged spear.

What to give preference to, let everyone decide for himself, but in any case, remember that it is unfair and absurd to reproach the Homeric epic for being primitive, for being unable to depict movement.

Visibility, visibility, as the main quality of Homer's poetry, makes it possible to explain a lot in the Iliad and Odyssey. The consistent personification of everything abstract (Resentment, Enmity, Prayers) becomes clear: what cannot be grasped by the gaze simply does not exist for Homer. Complete concreteness is understandable - but just human likeness, but precisely concreteness, materiality - of the images of celestials. Concreteness inevitably reduces the image, and only here, in a heightened sense of reality, and not in any way in primitive free-thinking, we must look for the reason for what seems to our perception to be a mockery of the gods: the gods of Homer are quick-tempered, vain, vindictive, arrogant, rustic, not alien to them and physical flaws. Homeric mythology is the first that we know from the Greeks; no one knows what is in it from generally accepted religious beliefs, what was added by the poet’s fiction, and it can be assumed with a high probability that the later, classical ideas about Olympus and its inhabitants are in many ways directly borrowed from the Iliad and the Odyssey and their origin owe to the artistic gift of the author of the poems.

Concreteness and in general somewhat reduces the elation of tone, epic majesty. One of the means that created this elation was the special language of the epic - originally unspoken, composed of elements of various Greek dialects. At all times, it sounded distant and lofty to the Greeks themselves, and already in the classical era (5th century BC) it seemed archaic. The Russian translation of the Iliad, made by N. I. Gnedich about a hundred and fifty years ago, perfectly reproduces the alienation of the epic language, its elevation above everything ordinary, its antiquity.

Reading Homer, you are convinced that not only the appearance of the world, its face - when smiling, when gloomy, when formidable - he was able to portray, but also the human soul, all its movements, from the simplest to the most complex, were led by the poet. There are real psychological discoveries in the poems, which even now at the first meeting - the first reading - amaze and are remembered for a lifetime. Here is the decrepit Priam, secretly appearing to Achilles in the hope of receiving the body of his murdered son for burial,

unnoticed by anyone, enters the rest and, Pelida

Falling at his feet, he hugs his knees and kisses his hands, -

Terrible hands, his children killed many!

Undoubtedly, the poet himself knew the price of these lines: it’s not for nothing that he repeats them a little lower, putting them into the mouth of Priam himself and supplementing them with a direct “psychological commentary”:

Brave! you are almost gods! take pity on my misfortune,

Remembering Peleus' father: I am incomparably more pitiful than Peleus!

I will experience what no mortal has experienced on earth:

Husband, murderer of my children, I press my hands to my lips!

Or another example - another discovery: grief both unites and at the same time separates people. The slaves sob together, mourning the murdered Patroclus, but in their souls each one laments her own grief, and the enemies Achilles and Priam are also crying, sitting nearby:

Taking the elder's hand, he quietly turned it away from him.

Both of them remembering: Priam - the famous son,

Wept bitterly, at the feet of Achilles prostrate in the dust,

King Achilles, sometimes remembering his father, sometimes his friend Patroclus,

He cried, and their mournful groan was heard all around the house.

Or else - every very strong feeling is two-faced, mournful enlightenment is hidden at the bottom of inconsolable crying, sweetness is hidden behind furious anger:

Hateful anger, which drives even the wise into a frenzy,

He is in the birth of sweeter softly flowing honey.

Psychologism, combined with the gift of the artist - the constant desire not to tell, but to show - gives the epic the qualities of a drama: the characters are revealed not from the outside, but directly, in the speeches of the characters. Speeches and remarks take up about three-fifths of the text. In each of the poems, there are about seventy-five speaking characters, and all these are living faces, you cannot confuse them with each other. The ancients called Homer the first tragic poet, and Aeschylus claimed that his, Aeschylus, tragedies are just crumbs from Homer's magnificent table. Indeed, many famous, psychologically perfect episodes of the Iliad and the Odyssey are scenes that seem to have been specially written for the theater. Among them are Hector's meeting with Andromache in the VIth song of the Iliad, the appearance of Odysseus before the Theakian princess Nausicaa and the "recognition" of his old nurse Eurycleia in the VI and XIX songs of the Odyssey.

Reading Homer, you are convinced that both poems (especially the Iliad) are a miracle of composition, and you marvel at the insane courage of analysts who claimed that these virtuoso constructions formed by themselves, spontaneously, spontaneously. It is hard to doubt that the arrangement of the material was rigorously and carefully considered—that is precisely why all the themes once started are exhausted so completely, the action is so densely concentrated. It took the author of the Iliad only eleven verses to introduce the listener (or reader) to the heart of the matter, to the very thick of things; in eleven lines of the exposition, the main theme of the entire work is revealed - the wrath of Achilles, and the reason for anger, and the circumstances that preceded the quarrel of the leaders, and even the divine background of the events ("Zeus' will was done"). Immediately after that, the action begins, which lasts until the main theme dries up completely. Neither the murder of Hector, nor the desecration of his body, nor the magnificent funeral of Patroclus, nor the funeral games in honor of a friend bring peace to Achilles. Only after a meeting with Priam does a turning point occur: the soul, clouded by rage and despair, seems to be enlightened, washed by the tears that the killer and the father of the murdered shed together. And then the same enlightened completion of the second theme - Hector's theme, which is inseparable from the main one, was born by it and complements it. There is no epilogue in the Iliad, and right up to the last, final line: “So they buried the body of the horse-riding Hector,” the denouement lasts, with all its spirit reminiscent of the denouement of a tragedy. Reminiscent of the tragedy and the pace of the narrative, uneven, impetuous, replete with sharp, unexpected turns - in tragedy they are called ups and downs. The main vicissitudes decide the fate of the hero and decisively direct the action to the climax and denouement. In the Iliad, the role of the main vicissitudes is played by the death of Patroclus, the climax is the death of Hector.

And the episodes and images of the Iliad are united around main theme and the protagonist, forming a tightly connected system. All the events of the poem fit into nine days (however, if we count the "empty intervals" between the clots of action, fifty-one days are typed). "Odyssey" is built a little differently, more loosely. Here there is no such concentration of action, such a close interweaving of its various lines (although there are also nine “effective” days). The images are also more independent of each other: there are no such psychologically complementary or opposing pairs as Achilles - Hector, or Achilles - Diomedes, or Achilles - Patroclus, the connections between the characters are mainly external, plot. But we must remember that the poet faced the most difficult task - to outline the ten-year background of the return to Ithaca, to tell about the ten-year wanderings of the hero. It turns out that the large dispersion of the action was set by the plot itself.

Studying the construction of poems, scientists discovered in Homer a special compositional style, which they called "geometric". Its basis is a keen sense of proportion and symmetry, and the result is a consistent division of the text into triptychs (triple division). Thus, the first five cantos of the Odyssey constitute a structure of two triptychs. First: the advice of the gods and their intention to return Odysseus to his homeland (I, 1 – I, 100 ) – Telemachus and suitors in Ithaca (I, 101 – II) – Telemachus visits Nestor in Pylos (III). Second: Telemachus visits Menelaus in Sparta (IV, 1 – IV, 624 ) - suitors in Ithaca (IV, 625 – IV, 847 ) - the council of the gods and the beginning of the path of Odysseus to his homeland (V). The second triptych, as it were, mirrors the first one, resulting in a symmetrical arrangement of elements on both sides of the central axis. Of course, this is not the result of calculation, but of an innate gift: the author, most likely, was unaware of his own geometrism. For us, the readers, geometry is revealed directly. We talk about it indistinctly and vaguely, calling it general harmony, grace, proportionality. But be that as it may, we enjoy this uninvented, unintentional proportionality, perhaps in contrast to the deliberate asymmetry that is becoming the aesthetic norm in modern times.

With all that, one cannot insist that the composition of poems - and not only composition - is completely free from flaws, from the point of view of the modern reader. The remains of the primitive creative method of the ancient singers are found both in tedious lengths and in plot repetitions that sharply reduce entertainment (for example, in early XII songs of the Odyssey, the sorceress Circe tells in advance and in some detail about the adventures that will be the content of the same song), and in the so-called law of chronological incompatibility: Homer cannot depict simultaneous and parallel actions, and therefore draws them at different times, following one after another . By the grace of this law, Homeric battles look like chains of duels - each pair of fighters patiently waits for their turn, and the order is strictly observed within the pair - opponents never hit at once.

The notorious “epic (or even Homeric) calmness” could also be added to the list of flaws, because pure, unalloyed objectivity, complete disinterest are dead and do not belong to art. But while "Homeric calm" is often considered a necessary feature of the epic style, it is a fictional feature. Homer by no means withdraws from the judgment of what is happening. Having arranged the scenery and released the actors on the stage, he no longer interferes in the game, but he does not hide all the time behind the scenes, but every now and then he goes out to the audience and talks to them, commenting on what is happening; sometimes he turns to the Muse and to the actors. Scholars have calculated that such "direct statements" make up about 1/5 of the entire text. The most remarkable part of them is, undoubtedly, the author's (or epic) comparisons. AT ordinary comparison, no matter how figurative it may be, each word is directed to the most complete image of the compared. If Odysseus pretends to complain:

…But everything passed;

I'm just straw now, for straw, however, and the former

You can easily recognize the ear, -

here everything “goes into action”: I am now like threshed straw, but just as it is easy to guess from the straw what kind of ear it was carrying, so you, looking at me, will guess what kind of person I was before. But when it is said about the junior commanders who are building an army for battle:

…Just like wolves

Beasts of prey, in whose hearts boundless audacity,

Koi horned deer, plunged into the wilds of the mountain,

Brutally tormented; all have their mouths stained with blood;

After a whole flock to the black source they roam;

There, with their flexible tongues, the muddy water of the stream

Lokchut, burping the blood he had swallowed; beats in their Persians

Indomitable heart, and their wombs are swollen, -

In battle such are the Myrmidon leaders and builders of the hosts

Soared around Patroclus, -

then actually three lines out of ten are assigned to the comparison: the leaders of the Myrmidons surrounding Patroclus looked like wolves. The remaining seven are a special picture, in fact, nothing related to the surrounding text. It was once believed that the author's comparisons only decorate the epic, but do not carry any functional load. Now they think differently: authorial comparisons are a way out of conditional, poetic reality into the world that truly surrounded the singer and his listeners; the feelings of the listeners, changing their direction, seemed to get a rest, in order to then turn to the fates of the heroes with new tension. If the author's comparisons were to serve as an emotional contrast to the main narrative, it is clear that the themes for comparisons were borrowed mainly from civilian life. In the Iliad, more spiritual, monumental and gloomy, comparisons are also monumental; in the Odyssey they are shorter and simpler, and everyday motifs predominate, probably in contrast to the wonders of the fairy tale. We have seen how the Homeric epic comes into contact with the drama. In the author's comparisons, he becomes the real lyric. Reading Homer, you rejoice at the meeting with each new comparison, stop and slowly say out loud - one, two, three, enjoying his charm, freshness, courage and at the same time complete naturalness, unintentionality.

As if in the sky about a clear month host

The stars seem beautiful if the air is windless;

Everything around opens - hills, high mountains,

Dales, heavenly ether opens up all boundless;

All the stars are visible; and the shepherd, marveling, rejoices in his soul,

So many between black ships and deep-deep Xanth

I saw the fires of the Trojans.

So the plowman thinks of a sweet evening, the whole day

A fresh field with a couple of oxen furrowing mighty

With a plow, and cheerfully he sees off the day with his eyes to the west -

He drags himself home with a heavy foot, he cooks his dinner.

So Odysseus rejoiced when he saw the inclination to the west of the Day.

SIMON MARKISCH

I. Introduction.
The works of Homer, the poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey", are the first monuments of ancient Greek literature known to us in time, and at the same time, in general, the first monuments of literature in Europe. Containing a huge amount different kind legends and being very significant in size, these poems could not appear suddenly, in the form of the work of only one brilliant writer. Even if they were compiled by one poet, they were compiled on the basis of centuries-old folk art, in which modern science establishes a reflection of the most diverse periods of the historical development of the Greeks. These works were recorded for the first time only in the second half of the 6th century. BC. Consequently, the folk materials for these poems were created even earlier, at least two or three centuries before this first recording, and, as modern scholarship shows, the Homeric poems reflect even more ancient periods of Greek history.
The plot of the Homeric poems are different episodes of the Trojan War. The Greeks fought wars in Asia Minor for many centuries. However, it was the war with Troy that was especially imprinted in the memory of the ancient Greeks, and many different literary works were devoted to it, and, in particular, several special poems.
For a long time, the events described in Homer's poems were considered fiction, beautiful legends clothed in beautiful verses that have no real basis. However, amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was lucky after many failures to uncover the strata of ancient cities on the hill of Hisarlik in Asia Minor (on the territory of modern Turkey), where Homer's "Holy Troy" once stood. Following this success, Schliemann set about excavating Mycenae and Tiryns, ancient cities mentioned in Homer's poems. He discovered many monuments of exceptional historical significance, and his discoveries marked the beginning of the study of the Mycenaean period in the history of Greece.
Through the efforts of archaeologists, historians and philologists, a broad picture of the life of the ancient Greek tribes in the pre-Homeric and Homeric eras was recreated. However, in Homer's poems there are references to iron weapons, which the Mycenaean era did not yet know. Apparently, the heroic epic of the ancient Greeks developed gradually on the basis of the historical reality of several eras and finally took shape in the 8th century BC. But among the numerous literary works of antiquity that have come down to our time, none of them had such a strong influence on the further development of human culture as the Iliad and the Odyssey.
II. Homer in the history of ancient culture.
The Greeks believed that the epic poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were composed by the blind poet Homer. Seven Greek cities claimed to be the birthplace of the poet. At the same time, there is no reliable evidence about Homer, and in general it cannot be considered proven that both poems were written by the same person. Both poems contain ancient legends, "tales of travelers" and evidence of the Mycenaean era, and at the same time, the clarity of the plot and the relief of the characters' characters make the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" unlike oral epic poems. At the time of Peisistratos, both poems were already known in their final form. Apparently, the author of the Iliad was an Ionian and wrote the poem around 700 BC. on the rich material of the Trojan battles. All the events of the Iliad take place within a few weeks, but it is assumed that the reader knows the entire background of the Trojan War. It is possible that the Odyssey was written later by the same author. The relations of the heroes of the Odyssey are more intricate, their characters less "heroic" and more refined; the author shows his profound knowledge of the countries of the eastern Mediterranean. There is a very close logical connection between the poems, and it is possible that the Odyssey was conceived as a continuation of the Iliad. Alexander the Great always carried a volume of the Iliad with him, but the Odyssey still seems to be a more original work.
It can be assumed that the blind old man Demodocus, depicted in the eighth song of the Odyssey, singing in front of the guests of King Alcinous on the island of feaks, served as a kind of prototype for the idea of Homer himself in ancient times. Scientists are still arguing about whether there really was a brilliant creator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, or whether each poem had its own author, or whether they were disparate songs brought together by some editor.
Already in ancient times, questions about the author, place and time of the appearance of Homeric poems were devoid of any certainty. Perhaps only before Herodotus, the Greeks considered Homer the real author of both poems and even of the entire cycle.
All available 9 ancient biographies of Homer are full of fiction and are the latest forgery. So, for example, the biographies of Homer, signed by the names of Herodotus and Plutarch, contradict what Herodotus and Plutarch themselves say about Homer.
For all the ancient Greeks, the Iliad and the Odyssey were not only favorite reading. They were taught in schools. Teenagers and young men learned in valor on the examples of the heroes of ancient legends.
How widely the poems of Homer were known can be judged by an interesting find made in the Northern Black Sea region, where prosperous Greek colonies were located in ancient times. This is a piece of stone on which the beginning of Homer's verse from the Iliad is carved - "The stars have advanced ...". Since the inscription is not finished and made with errors, scientists assume that it was carved either by a beginner stone cutter or by an apprentice carver who performed the exercise. But this piece of stone with an unfinished verse, carved in the 2nd century BC, is valuable as a testament to how great the glory of Homer was. On the northernmost edge of the Greek ecumene (inhabited world), simple artisans knew the verses of the Iliad.
The distribution and, perhaps, the very creation of the poems took place with the help of the Aeds - the singers mentioned by Homer (Demodocus at Alcinous, Phemius on Ithaca). Later, the poems were distributed by professional singer-reciters, the so-called. rhapsodes ("song stitchers"). Then they began to be called Homerids, about which it is alleged that at first they were singers from the Homer family, but later all other singers began to be called that. The name of one Homeridian, Cyneph of Chios, who, according to legend, inserted many of his own poems into Homer, has been preserved. In the VIII-VII centuries, the Homerids spread throughout Greece. Entire competitions of rhapsodists are established in various places, especially in Athens at the Panathenaic festivals. Sources speak of the decree of Solon (a legislator in Athens in the first half of the 6th century BC) regarding the execution of the Iliad and the Odyssey exclusively in Panathenaia, and, moreover, in a certain, strictly sequential order.
As for the first recording of Homer's poems, later sources (Cicero, Pausanias, Elian, etc.) attribute it to a special commission under Peisistratus in Athens. The late nature of these sources has led some scholars to doubt the existence of a commission under Peisistratus, which, however, is an unnecessary criticism. Homer's poems were recorded no later than the 6th century BC. and was of national importance.
Consider summary poems.
III. "Iliad".
In the Iliad, the Olympian gods are the same actors like people. Their transcendental world, depicted in the poem, is created in the image and likeness of the earthly world. Gods from ordinary people were distinguished only by divine beauty, extraordinary strength, the gift to turn into any creature and immortality.
Like people, the supreme deities often quarreled among themselves and even were at enmity. A description of one of these quarrels is given at the very beginning of the Iliad, when Zeus, sitting at the head of the feasting table, threatens to beat his jealous and irritable wife Hera because she dared to object to him. Lame Hephaestus persuades his mother to accept and not quarrel with Zeus because of mortals. Thanks to his efforts, peace and fun reign again. Golden-haired Apollo plays the lyre, accompanying the choir of beautiful muses. At sunset, the feast ends and the gods disperse to their halls, erected for them on Olympus by the skillful Hephaestus.
The poems consisted of songs, each of which could be performed separately, as an independent story about a particular event in the life of its heroes, but all of them in one way or another are related to the Trojan War.
The reason for the Trojan War was the abduction of Helen, the wife of King Menelaus, by Paris, the son of the Trojan king Priam. Insulted, Menelaus called for help from other kings. Among them were Diomedes, Odysseus, Ajaxnes and Achilles. The Achaean warriors occupied the plain between Troy and the sea, pulled the ships ashore and set up their camp, from which they made sorties, plundering and ruining small settlements. The siege of Troy lasted 10 years, but only the last year of the war is described in the poems. (Here it should be noted that Homer calls the Greeks Achaeans, calling them also Danaans and Argives, and not at all Greeks and not even Hellenes, as the Greeks themselves began to call themselves later).
Beginning with the third song of the Iliad, there is a description of the battles between the Achaeans and the Trojans. The gods actively intervene in these battles between individual heroes. The poem ends with a description of the solemn burial of the heroic leader of the Trojans, Hector.
The Iliad vividly reproduces the phenomena real life and life of the ancient Greek tribes. Of course, the description of wartime life prevails, moreover, the poem is saturated with a realistic depiction of scenes of death, cruel mutilations, and death convulsions. However, the battle is most often depicted not as a mass battle, but as a duel between individual heroes, distinguished by strength, valor and martial arts. But the exploits of the heroes, so colorfully described by Homer, do not obscure all the horrors of war from the poet's gaze. He reproduces scenes of violence and merciless cruelty of the winners with bright and accusatory realistic colors. Homer does not sympathize with the brutality of war. He contrasts them with episodes full of human feelings, such as the farewell of the Trojan leader Hector with his wife Andromache before the decisive battle for his native city, as the crying of Queen Hecuba or the prayers of King Priam in Achilles' tent. Here, the poet makes his beloved hero, Achilles indomitable in anger, raging in a thirst for revenge, soften and shed tears along with Priam. An equally serious counterbalance to the vivid depiction of ferocious battles between the warring parties is detailed description scenes of peaceful life that were depicted by Hephaestus on the shield of Achilles. With great warmth, the poet speaks of fat fields with ears of grain laden with grain, of numerous herds grazing in the valleys, of lush vineyards, and, most importantly, of hardworking people who created all this abundance, enjoying the fruits of their labors and the peace of a peaceful life.
The duration of the Iliad covers 51 days. But from this number it is necessary to subtract those days on which events are not displayed, they are only mentioned (the plague in the camp of the Achaeans, the feast of the Olympians among the Ethiopians, the burial of heroes, Achilles' abuse of Hector, the preparation of firewood for Hector's fire). Thus, in the Iliad, only 9 days from the last year of the Trojan war are depicted.
IV. "Odyssey".
The capture of Troy by the Achaeans with the help of cunning was described in one of the songs of the Odyssey. The blind singer Demodocus, singing the cunning king Odysseus, recounted the whole history of the construction of a huge wooden horse, inside which the bravest of the Achaeans hid. At night, after the Trojans dragged the monstrous horse inside the fortress walls, the Achaean warriors came out of the horse's belly, captured and destroyed the "sacred" Troy. It is known that the ancient Greeks had apocryphal poems that described in detail the further events of the Trojan War. It spoke about the death of the valiant Achilles, who died from the arrow of Paris, the culprit of the Trojan war, and about the construction of a wooden horse fatal to the Trojans. The names of these poems are known - "Small Iliad", "Destruction of Ilion", but they have not reached our time.
The main content of the "Odyssey" is the legend of the return of Odysseus to Ithaca after the end of the war with Troy. This return continued for a very long time and took 10 years. In cantos IX-XII, Odysseus himself tells of his wanderings after sailing from Troy during the first three years.
First, Odysseus and his companions enter the country of wild people - kikons, then to peaceful lotophages, then to the island of the Cyclopes, where the Cyclops Polyphenes, a savage and cannibal, ate several of Odysseus's companions and almost destroyed him.
Then Odysseus gets to the god of the winds Eol, then he gets to the robbers of the lestrigons and to the sorceress Kirk, who kept him for a whole year, and then sent him to the underworld to find out his future fate.
By a special cunning trick Odysseus passes by the island of Sirens, half-women, half-birds, who lured all travelers to him with their voluptuous singing and then devoured them. On the island of Trinacria, Odysseus's companions devour the bulls of Helios, for which the god of the sea Poseidon destroys all the ships of Odysseus; and only one Odysseus escapes, nailed by waves to the island of the nymph Calypso. He lives with Calypso for 3 years, and the gods decide that it is time for him to return home to Ithaca. Over the course of several songs, all the adventures of Odysseus are described on the way home, where at this time the local kings are courting Penelope, Odysseus's faithful wife, who has been waiting for him for 20 years.
As a result, Odysseus nevertheless gets to the house, together with his son Telemachus, kills all the suitors, and, having suppressed the rebellion of the suitors' supporters, reigns in his own house and starts happy peaceful life after a 20 year break.
Despite the fact that Odysseus' journey home lasted 10 years, the Odyssey covers even less time than the Iliad and the action takes place over 40 days.
"Odyssey" can also be set out on separate days, during which the events depicted in it take place. It is quite obvious that the compiler or compilers of the poem divided the image of what is happening by day, although in Homer this division is not quite exactly expressed in some places.
If we sum up the distribution of action by day in the Odyssey, it should be noted that out of 40 days, at least 25 days do not find a detailed presentation for themselves. Those. of the 10 years of Odysseus' wandering, the poem depicts only the last days before Ithaca and a few days in Ithaca. About the rest of the time, i.e. in essence, about 10 years, either is told by Odysseus himself at a feast at Alcinous, or they are only mentioned.
Undoubtedly, the Odyssey is a much more complex work of ancient literature than the Iliad. Studies of the "Odyssey" from a literary point of view and from the point of view of possible authorship are ongoing to this day. As a result of a review of criticism of the Odyssey, one can come to the following conclusions:
1. In the "Odyssey" a combination of elements of two independent poems is found. Of these, one can be called the "Odyssey" proper, and the other "Telemechia".
2. "Odyssey" represented the return of Odysseus from Calypso through Scheria to his homeland and his revenge on suitors in a conspiracy with his son, as it is depicted in the XVI song. Penelope recognized her husband here after the suitors were killed by him.
3. The author of this ancient "Odyssey" himself already used more ancient songs: he combines a separate song "Calypso", a free fantasy on the theme "Kirk", with "Theakis", his processing of the story in the third person into the story of Odysseus himself is noticeable.
4. In "Telemachia", which tells about the journey of Telemachus to Pylos and Sparta, a decline in the art of composition is noted in comparison with the "Odyssey". The combination of "Calypso" with "Theakia" is done so skillfully that the coherence and sequence of the story is completely irreproachable. On the contrary, in "Telemachia" Telemachus' journey itself and the stories of Nestor and Menelaus to him are very weakly connected with the rest of the action of the poem, and even direct contradictions open up here for the attentive reader.
5. The epilogue of the "Odyssey" is a contamination of separate parts of the two above-mentioned poems and more ancient origin than the final edition of the Odyssey.
6. The activity of the last editor of the Odyssey was to combine parts of the ancient Odyssey, Telemachia and that processing of the epilogue, which was mentioned. The editor's inserts are characterized by some features of the language, the borrowing of many verses from ancient poems, and the ambiguity and inconsistency of the presentation. In some cases, the inserts are based on extracts from ancient sources. The editor also introduces the content of cyclic poems into the Odyssey.
V. Translations of Homer.
The Old Russian reader could find references to Homer (Omir, as he was called in Russia, following the Byzantine pronunciation) already in the "Life" of the first teacher Cyril, and read about the Trojan War in the Byzantine world chronicles translated already in the Kiev era.
The first attempt at a poetic interpretation of small fragments of Homer's poems belongs to Lomonosov. Trediakovsky translated in hexameter - the same meter in which Homer wrote the novel by the French writer Fenelon "The Adventures of Telemachus", written based on the "Odyssey", or rather "Telemachia", which was mentioned above. "Telemachia" Trediakovsky contained a number of inserts - direct translations from Greek. In the second half of the 18th century, Homer's poems were translated by Yermil Kostrov. In the 19th century, translations of the Iliad by Gnedich and the Odyssey by Zhukovsky were made, which were melting into classics. Regarding the translation of Gnedich, Pushkin first wrote the following epigram in hexameter:
"Kryv was a Gnedich poet, the deceiver of the blind Homer Sideways is one with the model, and his translation is similar." Then Pushkin carefully blacked out this epigram and wrote the following:
"I hear the silent sound of the divine Hellenic speech
I feel the shadow of the great old man with a confused soul.
After Gnedich, the translation of the Iliad was also carried out by Minsk, and then, already in Soviet time- Veresaev, but these translations were not so successful.
Translation of the "Odyssey" after Zhukovsky long time no one did, and yet, almost 100 years after Zhukovsky, the Odyssey was translated by Shuisky, and then by Veresaev, but again, these translations did not receive such wide distribution and recognition.
VI. Conclusion.
The poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey", attributed to the blind old man Homer, had a huge, incomparable influence on the entire history of ancient culture, and later on the culture of modern times. The great skill of the composer of these poems, their epoch-making, brilliance, coloring attracts the reader to this day, despite the huge temporal gap that lies between them.
Unfortunately, a great many questions related to Homer's poems have not yet been resolved, and are unlikely to be resolved someday. The question of the authorship of these poems is especially acute, but nothing really definite can be answered to this question, just as it was impossible to answer a hundred and a thousand years ago.
When writing this work, we did not set ourselves the goal of answering any questions, but simply tried to make some small general review about Homer and his poems.
LITERATURE.
1. Homer "Iliad", M., "Pravda", 1984.
2. Homer "Odyssey", M., "Pravda", 1984.
3. Losev A. F. "Homer", M., 1960.
4. Shestakov S. "On the Origin of Homer's Poems", Kazan,
1892.
5. Stahl I. V. "Odyssey" - a heroic poem of wanderings", M., "Nauka", 1978.

Any literary work of the distant past is capable of attracting and captivating a person of modern times with the image of a vanished life, in many ways strikingly unlike our life today. The historical interest inherent in any person, the natural desire to find out “what happened before,” is the beginning of our path to Homer, or rather, one of the paths. We ask: who was he, this Homer? And when did you live? And did he “compose” his heroes, or do their images and exploits reflect true events? And how true (or how freely) are they reflected and what time do they belong to? We ask question after question and look for answers in articles and books about Homer; and at our service - not hundreds and not thousands, but tens of thousands of books and articles, a whole library, a whole literature that continues to grow even now. Scientists not only discover new facts related to Homer's poems, but also discover new points of view on Homer's poetry as a whole, new ways of evaluating it. There was a time when every word of the Iliad and Odyssey was considered an indisputable truth - the ancient Greeks (in any case, the vast majority of them) saw in Homer not only a great poet, but also a philosopher, teacher, naturalist, in a word - the supreme judge on all occasions. There was another time when everything in the Iliad and the Odyssey was considered fiction, a beautiful fairy tale, or a crude fable, or an immoral anecdote that offended "good taste." Then the time came when Homer's "fables" one after another began to be reinforced by the finds of archaeologists: in 1870, the German Heinrich Schliemann found Troy, near the walls of which the heroes of the Iliad fought and died; four years later, the same Schliemann unearthed "abundant gold" Mycenae - the city of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army near Troy; in 1900, the Englishman Arthur Evans began excavations, unique in terms of the wealth of finds, in Crete - the “hundred-city” island, repeatedly mentioned by Homer; in 1939, the American Bligen and the Greek Kuroniotis tracked down the ancient Pylos - the capital of Nestor, the "sweet-voiced Vitius of Pylos", the indefatigable giver of wise advice in both poems ... The list of "Homer's discoveries" is extremely extensive and has not been closed to this day - and is unlikely to be closed in the near future . And yet it is necessary to name one more of them - the most important and most sensational in our century. During excavations on the island of Crete, as well as in Mycenae, in Pylos and in some other places in the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula, archaeologists found several thousand clay tablets covered with unknown letters. It took almost half a century to read them, because even the language of these inscriptions was not known. Only in 1953, thirty-year-old Englishman Michael Ventris solved the problem of deciphering the so-called Linear B. This man, who died in a car accident three and a half years later, was neither a historian of antiquity nor an expert in ancient languages - he was an architect. Nevertheless, as the remarkable Soviet scientist S. Lurie wrote about Ventris, “he managed to make the largest and most amazing discovery in the science of antiquity since the Renaissance.” His name should be next to the names of Schliemann and Champollion, who unraveled the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Its discovery put into the hands of researchers authentic Greek documents of about the same time as the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, documents that expanded, clarified, and in some ways turned over the previous ideas about the prototype of that society and state that are depicted by Homer.

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Poems of Homer, Iliad and Odyssey briefly. Homer's epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey

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