An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

I started with the controversy known as the Homeric Question, a centuries-old debate about how Homer’s epics had come into being—whether they had started as written texts or as oral compositions. It was important for the students to grasp the fundamentals of the debate, since significant questions of interpretation hang on which theory you subscribe to. The Greeks themselves tended to think that there had been a poet called Homer who wrote down his poems. Herodotus thought that Homer must have lived around 800 B.C., four hundred years before his own time; several centuries after Herodotus, Aristarchus, the head of the Library of Alexandria (the greatest scholarly institution of the ancient world) and a renowned authority on Homer’s texts, surmised that the poet had lived about 1050 B.C., a century and a half after the Trojan War itself was supposed to have taken place. It was generally believed that Homer wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey; but some ancient scholars, called the Separatists, thought the poems were written by two different people. No fewer than seven cities in ancient times claimed Homer as a son. That was the received wisdom until, in the late 1700s, a French scholar called Villoisin discovered a tenth-century manuscript of the Iliad moldering away in a library in Venice. This manuscript was unlike others that had circulated over the centuries: along with the Greek text of the epic it included transcriptions of the marginal notes of ancient commentators, ...