Chronology

The Iliad takes shape. Greece is two or three generations out of the Dark Age: the alphabet has just been adapted from the Phoenicians, the first colonies are going out to Sicily and the Bay of Naples, and the Panhellenic sanctuaries at Olympia and Delphi are filling with dedications. The poem looks back four hundred years to a Bronze Age that had already become legend — Mycenae, boar's-tusk helmets, a war at Troy — and out of it makes something no one had made before: not a chronicle of the whole war but fifty-one days of it, organised entirely around one man's wrath and its cost. Antiquity credited the Iliad and the Odyssey to a blind poet of Ionia, of Chios or Smyrna, whom seven cities claimed; what is certain is a long oral tradition of singers, working in a formulaic language built for the hexameter, and a moment in the eighth century when the poem was fixed.

poem The Iliad 750 BC

The Odyssey follows, a generation or so later, by a poet working in the same tradition and possibly the same hand — the language is slightly younger, the world slightly wider. It is the age of Greek ships pushing west and east, of trade with Egypt and Phoenicia, of stories brought home from the edges of the map; the poem answers the Iliad's battlefield with a sea, a household under siege, and a hero who survives by cunning rather than by dying young and famous. Where the Iliad ends at a funeral, the Odyssey ends at a marriage bed.

poem The Odyssey 725 BC

The Homeric Hymns belong to the following two centuries, sung by rhapsodes as preludes at the festivals of the gods they address, and gathered later into one collection under Homer's name. The great four — to Demeter, to Apollo, to Hermes, to Aphrodite — are archaic work of the seventh and sixth centuries, contemporary with the rise of the Panhellenic festivals, the spread of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and Delphi's growth into the oracle of the Greek world. The Hymn to Demeter is our earliest account of the rape of Persephone and the founding of the Mysteries; the Hymn to Hermes is the funniest poem to survive from archaic Greece.

poem The Homeric Hymns 650 BC

The Epigrams — a curse on cheating potters, a blessing begged at a rich man's door, an epitaph for a bronze girl on Midas's tomb, a riddle that fishermen put to the poet — are occasional verses of various dates, already circulating as Homer's by the time the sophist Alcidamas wrote about his life around this year. They reached us embedded in the pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer, a Roman-era biography built around them: the poet wandering Ionia, poor and unhoused, paying for his supper in hexameters. The verses are older than the story they now illustrate.

poem The Epigrams of Homer 400 BC

The Battle of Frogs and Mice is Hellenistic — the age of Callimachus and the Library at Alexandria, when Homer had become a school text and scholarship on him an industry, and when the epic manner was ripe for parody. An anonymous poet, probably Ionian, arms frogs and mice in full Homeric dress, gives them speaking names and genealogies and death-scenes, and lets Zeus settle the war with an army of crabs. Antiquity ascribed it to Homer himself, or to Pigres of Halicarnassus; it was one of the most read of all Greek poems in Byzantium and the Renaissance, and the first Homeric text many Europeans ever met.

poem The Battle of Frogs and Mice 180 BC