Talk:Homer
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Quoth the article:
The poems appear to go back to at least the eighth century B.C.E., and were first written down at the command of the Athenian ruler Pisistratos, who feared that they were being forgotten. He made a law that any bard or singer who came to Athens must recite as much as he knew of Homer for the Athenian scribes, who recorded each version and collated them into what we now know as the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer is also rumored to have written a third, comic, epic, but if it ever existed, no fragments of it have been found.
I'm suspicious of these statements. Do you have any sources to cite? There is nothing wrong with putting speculative theories and even rumors in here, but we should cite sources in that case to maintain good scholarship. -- hajhouse
- No, I don't have sources to cite: this is what I learned when I studied classical Greek, 20-odd years ago. Only the last sentence counts as rumor, I think. I'll see if I can find something, but it may take a while before I get to this. --Vicki Rosenzweig
- Apparently the tradition that Pisistratus commissioned the writing down of the Homeric epics has been deleted from the article, but has crept back in with attribution to Pisistratus's son Hipparchus instead, which seems to me even more questionable. Since it's back in, anyway, I was thinking of changing the attribution back to Pisistratus, since as far as I know, the entire story is only supported by an ancient tradition, and the tradition specifies Pisistratus, not Hipparchus. --Arkuat 06:26, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)
- IMO mentioning tradition is fine, so long as it is clearly identified as a tradition. These are the sorts of things you learn when you study Homer. — B.Bryant 09:10, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- A short comic epic attributed to Homer in antiquity, Batrachomyomachia, still survives, but modern scholars think it is a later work in the Homeric style. — B.Bryant 09:10, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)