The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (3 page)

He is also one of the most influential authors in the widest sense, for the two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture throughout the Classical age and formed the backbone of humane education down to the time of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. Indirectly through the medium of Virgil's
Aeneid
(loosely molded after the patterns of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
), directly through their revival under Byzantine culture from the late 8th century CE onward, and subsequently through their passage into Italy with the Greek scholars who fled westward from the Ottomans, the Homeric epics had a profound impact on the Renaissance culture of Italy. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the classical European tradition.

Implicit references to Homer and quotations from the poems date to the middle of the 7th century BCE. Archilochus, Alcman, Tyrtaeus, and Callinus in the 7th century and Sappho and others in the early 6th adapted
Homeric phraseology and metre to their own purposes and rhythms. At the same time scenes from the epics became popular in works of art. The pseudo-Homeric “Hymn to Apollo of Delos,” probably of late 7th-century composition, claimed to be the work of “a blind man who dwells in rugged Chios,” a reference to a tradition about Homer himself. The idea that Homer had descendants known as “Homeridae,” and that they had taken over the preservation and propagation of his poetry, goes back at least to the early 6th century BCE.

It was not long before a kind of Homeric scholarship began: Theagenes of Rhegium in southern Italy toward the end of the same century wrote the first of many allegorizing interpretations. By the 5th century biographical fictions were well under way. The Pre-Socratic philosopher Heracleitus of Ephesus made use of a trivial legend of Homer's death—that it was caused by chagrin at not being able to solve some boys' riddle about catching lice—and the concept of a contest of quotations between Homer and Hesiod (after Homer, the most ancient of Greek poets) may have been initiated in the Sophistic tradition. The historian Herodotus assigned the formulation of Greek theology to Homer and Hesiod, and claimed that they could have lived no more than 400 years before his own time, the 5th century BCE. This should be contrasted with the superficial assumption, popular in many circles throughout antiquity, that Homer must have lived not much later than the Trojan War about which he sang.

The general belief that Homer was a native of Ionia (the central part of the western seaboard of Asia Minor) seems a reasonable conjecture for the poems themselves are in predominantly Ionic dialect. Although Smyrna and Chios early began competing for the honour (the poet Pindar, early in the 5th century BCE, associated Homer with both), and others joined in, no authenticated local
memory survived anywhere of someone who, oral poet or not, must have been remarkable in his time.

Modern scholars agree with the ancient sources only about Homer's general place of activity. The most concrete piece of ancient evidence is that his descendants, the Homeridae, lived on the Ionic island of Chios.

Admittedly, there is some doubt over whether the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
were even composed by the same main author. Such doubts began in antiquity itself and depended mainly on the difference of genre (the
Iliad
being martial and heroic, the
Odyssey
picaresque and often fantastic), but they may be reinforced by subtle differences of vocabulary even apart from those imposed by different subjects. The similarities of the two poems are partly due to the coherence of the heroic poetical tradition that lay behind both.

Partly on the basis of the internal evidence of the poems, which is of some use in determining when Homer lived, it seems plausible to conclude that the period of composition of the large-scale epics (as distinct from their much shorter predecessors) was the 9th or 8th century, with several features pointing more clearly to the 8th. The
Odyssey
may belong near the end of this century, the
Iliad
closer to its middle. It may be no coincidence that cults of Homeric heroes tended to spring up toward the end of the 8th century, and that scenes from the epic begin to appear on pots at just about the same time.

But even if his name is known and his date and region can be inferred, Homer remains primarily a projection of the great poems themselves. Their qualities are significant of
his taste and his view of the world, but they also reveal something more specific about his technique and the kind of poet he was. Homeric tradition was an oral one: this was a kind of poetry made and passed down by word of mouth and without the intervention of writing. Indeed Homer's own term for a poet is
aoidos
, “singer.” Ordinary
aoidoi
, whether resident at a royal court or performing at the invitation of a town's aristocracy, worked with relatively short poems that could be given completely on a single occasion. These poems must have provided the backbone of the tradition inherited by Homer. What Homer himself seems to have done is to introduce the concept of a quite different style of poetry, in the shape of a monumental poem that required more than a single hour or evening to sing and could achieve new and far more complex effects, in literary and psychological terms, than those attainable in the more anecdotal and episodic songs of his predecessors.

Even apart from the possibilities of medium-scale elaboration, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
exemplify certain of the minor inconsistencies of all oral poetry, and occasionally the composer's amalgamation of traditional material into a large-scale structure shows through. Yet the overriding impression is one of powerful unity.

The
Iliad
—consisting of more than 16,000 verses, which would have taken four or five long evenings, and perhaps more, to perform—is not merely a distillation of the whole protracted war against Troy. It is simultaneously an exploration of the heroic ideal in all its self-contradictoriness—its insane and grasping pride, its magnificent but animal strength, its ultimate if obtuse humanity. The poem is, in truth, the story of the wrath of Achilles, the greatest warrior on the Greek side, that is
announced in its very first words. Yet for thousands of verses on end Achilles is an unseen presence. Much of the poetry between the first book, in which the quarrel flares up, and the 16th, in which Achilles makes the crucial concession of allowing his friend Patroclus to fight on his behalf, consists of long scenes of battle, in which individual encounters alternate with mass movements of the opposing armies. The battle poetry is based on typical and frequently recurring elements and motifs, but it is also subtly varied by highly individualized episodes and set pieces: the catalog of troop contingents, the formal duels between Paris and Menelaus and Ajax and Hector, Helen's identifying of the Achaean princes, and so on. Patroclus's death two-thirds of the way through the poem brings Achilles back into the fight. In book 22 he kills the deluded Hector. Next he restores his heroic status by means of the funeral games for Patroclus, and in the concluding book, Achilles is compelled by the gods to restore civilized values and his own magnanimity by surrendering Hector's body to King Priam.

The
Odyssey
tends to be blander in expression and sometimes more diffuse in the progress of its action, but it presents an even more complex and harmonious structure than the
Iliad
. The main elements include the situation in Ithaca, where Penelope, Odysseus's wife, and their young son, Telemachus, are powerless before her arrogant suitors as they despair of Odysseus's return from the siege of Troy, as well as Telemachus's secret journey to the Peloponnese for news of his father, and his encounters there with Nestor, Menelaus, and Helen. Odysseus's dangerous passage, opposed by the sea-god Poseidon himself, from Calypso's island to that of the Phaeacians, and his narrative of his fantastic adventures after leaving Troy, including his escape from the cave of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, follows. His arrival back in Ithaca, solitary and by night, at the poem's halfway point, is followed by his meeting with
his protector-goddess Athena, his elaborate disguises, his self-revelation to the faithful swineherd Eumaeus and then to Telemachus, their complicated plan for disposing of the suitors, and its gory fulfillment. Finally comes the recognition by his faithful Penelope, his recounting to her of his adventures, his meeting with his aged father, Laertes, and the restitution, with Athena's help, of stability in his island kingdom of Ithaca.

Homer's influence seems to have been strongest in some of the most conspicuous formal components of the poems. The participation of the gods can both dignify human events and make them seem trivial—or tragic. It must for long have been part of the heroic tradition, but the frequency and the richness of the divine assemblies in the
Iliad
, or the peculiarly personal and ambivalent relationship between Odysseus and Athena in the
Odyssey
, probably reflect the taste and capacity of the main composer. The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
owe their unique status to the creative confluence of tradition and design, the crystalline fixity of a formulaic style, and the mobile spontaneity of a brilliant personal vision. The result is an impressive amalgam of literary power and refinement. The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, however, owe their preeminence not so much to their antiquity and to their place in Greek culture as a whole but to their timeless success in expressing, on a massive scale, so much of the triumph and the frustration of human life.

(b. 525/524 BCE—d. 456/455 BCE, Gela, Sicily)

A
eschylus, the first of classical Athens's great dramatists, raised the emerging art of tragedy to great heights of poetry and theatrical power. He grew up in the turbulent period when the Athenian democracy, having
thrown off its tyranny (the absolute rule of one man), had to prove itself against both self-seeking politicians at home and invaders from abroad. Aeschylus himself took part in his city's first struggles against the invading Persians. Later Greek chroniclers believed that Aeschylus was 35 years old in 490 BCE when he participated in the Battle of Marathon, in which the Athenians first repelled the Persians. If this is true, it would place his birth in 525 BCE. Aeschylus's father's name was Euphorion, and the family probably lived at Eleusis (west of Athens).

Aeschylus was a notable participant in Athens's major dramatic competition, the Great Dionysia, which was a part of the festival of Dionysus. He is recorded as having participated in this competition, probably for the first time, in 499 BCE. He won his first victory in the theatre in the spring of 484 BCE. In the meantime, he had fought and possibly been wounded at Marathon, and Aeschylus singled out his participation in this battle years later for mention on the verse epitaph he wrote for himself. His brother was killed in this battle. In 480 BCE the Persians again invaded Greece, and once again Aeschylus saw service, fighting at the battles
of Artemisium and Salamis. His responses to the Persian invasion found expression in his play
Persians
, the earliest of his works to survive. This play was produced in the competition of the spring of 472 BCE and won first prize.

Around this time Aeschylus is said to have visited Sicily to present
Persians
again at the tyrant Hieron I's court in Syracuse. Aeschylus's later career is a record of sustained dramatic success, though he is said to have suffered one memorable defeat, at the hands of the novice Sophocles, whose entry at the Dionysian festival of 468 BCE was victorious over the older poet's entry. Aeschylus recouped the loss with victory in the next year, 467, with his Oedipus trilogy (of which the third play,
Seven Against Thebes
, survives). After producing the masterpiece among his extant works, the
Oresteia
trilogy, in 458, Aeschylus went to Sicily again.

Aeschylus wrote approximately 90 plays, including satyr plays as well as tragedies; of these, about 80 titles are known. Only seven tragedies have survived entire. One account, perhaps based on the official lists, assigns Aeschylus 13 first prizes, or victories. This would mean that well over half of his plays won, since sets of four plays rather than separate ones were judged. According to the philosopher Flavius Philostratus, Aeschylus was known as the “Father of Tragedy.”

Aeschylus's influence on the development of tragedy was fundamental. Previous to him, Greek drama was limited to one actor and a chorus engaged in a largely static recitation. (The chorus was a group of actors who responded to and commented on the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation.) The actor could assume different roles by changing masks and costumes, but he was limited to engaging in dialogue only with the chorus. By adding a second actor with whom the first could converse, Aeschylus vastly increased the drama's possibilities for dialogue and dramatic tension and allowed more variety and freedom in
plot construction. Although the dominance of the chorus in early tragedy is ultimately only hypothesis, it is probably true that, as Aristotle says in his
Poetics
, Aeschylus “reduced the chorus' role and made the plot the leading actor.”