When did Homer compose the Odyssey?
Homer
Friedrich August Wolf's "Prolegomena ad Homerum", published in 1795, argued that much of the material later incorporated into the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" was originally composed in the tenth century BC in the form of short, separate oral songs, which passed through oral tradition for roughly four hundred years before being assembled into prototypical versions of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" the sixth century BC by literate authors. After being written down, Wolf maintained that the two poems were extensively edited, modernized, and eventually shaped into their present state as artistic unities. Wolf and the "Analyst" school, which led the field in the nineteenth century, sought to recover the original, authentic poems which were thought to be concealed by later excrescences. Within the Analyst school were two camps: proponents of the "lay theory," which held that the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were put together from a large number of short, independent songs, and proponents of the "nucleus theory", which held that Homer had originally composed shorter versions of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", which later poets expanded and revised. A small group of scholars opposed to the Analysts, dubbed "Unitarians", saw the later additions as superior, the work of a single inspired poet. By around 1830, the central preoccupations of Homeric scholars, dealing with whether or not "Homer" actually existed, when and how the Homeric poems originated, how they were transmitted, when and how they were finally written down, and their overall unity, had been dubbed "the Homeric Question".
Classical compass winds
The archaic Greek poet Homer (c. 800 BC) refers to the four winds by name – Boreas, Eurus, Notos, Zephyrus – in his "Odyssey", and in the "Iliad". However, at some points, Homer seems to imply two more: a northwest wind and a southwest wind. Some have taken this to imply that Homer may have had as many as eight winds. However, others remain unconvinced, and insist Homer only had a four wind-rose.
Sherlock Holmes
After resisting public pressure for eight years, Conan Doyle wrote "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (serialised in 1901–02, with an implicit setting before Holmes's death). In 1903, Conan Doyle wrote "The Adventure of the Empty House", set in 1894; Holmes reappears, explaining to a stunned Watson that he had faked his death to fool his enemies. "The Adventure of the Empty House" marks the beginning of the second set of stories, which Conan Doyle wrote until 1927.Holmes aficionados refer to the period from 1891 to 1894—between his disappearance and presumed death in "The Final Problem" and his reappearance in "The Adventure of the Empty House"—as the Great Hiatus. The earliest known use of this expression is in the article "Sherlock Holmes and the Great Hiatus" by Edgar W. Smith, published in the July 1946 issue of "The Baker Street Journal".
Classics
The earliest surviving works of Greek literature are epic poetry. Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are the earliest to survive to us today, probably composed in the eighth century BC. These early epics were oral compositions, created without the use of writing.
Around the same time that the Homeric epics were composed, the Greek alphabet was introduced; the earliest surviving inscriptions date from around 750 BC.
European drama was invented in ancient Greece. Traditionally this was attributed to Thespis, around the middle of the sixth century BC, though the earliest surviving work of Greek drama is Aeschylus' tragedy "The Persians", which dates to 472 BC. Early Greek tragedy was performed by a chorus and two actors, but by the end of Aeschylus' life, a third actor had been introduced, either by him or by Sophocles. The last surviving Greek tragedies are the "Bacchae" of Euripides and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, both from the end of the fifth century BC.
Cyclops
Euripides' only extant comedy is his play "Cyclops", which was written in 408 B.C. It is the only complete satyr play of ancient Greece that has survived. It is based on a story that occurs in book nine of Homer's "Odyssey". It takes place on the island of Sicily near the volcano Mount Etna, and the cyclops is portrayed as a cave-dwelling, violent, cannibalistic, oafish character. This depiction is similar to Homer’s cyclops, though it differs from the cyclops of Hesiod. Euripides’ version may have been influenced by the comic handling of the cyclops found in Cratinus' play "Odysseuses", which is one of many plays of ancient Greece that are known to have lampooned Homer's cyclops story.
Mission Odyssey
Starting with the victory over Troy, Odysseus' voyage home turns into a true adventure. The sea god Poseidon has made a bet with Athena that Odysseus and his team, consisting of the horned mythical creatures Titan, Zephyr, the son of a god of wind, teenage barefoot clairvoyant Nisa, clumsy Philo, rapacious Navigator Dates as well as Diomedes and a clever owl, will never make it home on their own. To achieve this Poseidon interferes in every episode of the series, with Athena constantly reminding Poseidon that direct intervention violates their betting rules.
The series covers the most important stages of Homer's Odyssey but is simplified and re-worked in a child-friendly manner. Occasionally parts of other Greek legends are used.
Francis Karl Alter
Alter also edited Homer's "Iliad" (1789) and "Odyssey" (1794) and wrote an essay on Georgian literature (1798).
Joseph Spence (author)
Spence wrote an essay on Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's "Odyssey" in 1726 which gave rise to a friendship between Spence and Pope. In 1727 Pope published his comments on the second part of Spence's essay.
English translations of Homer
This is a list of English translations of the main works attributed to Homer, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey".
Translations are ordered chronologically by date of first publication, with first lines often provided to illustrate the style of the translation.
Home Sweet Homer
The show was designed as a vehicle for Yul Brynner, who was anxious to duplicate his success in "The King and I" more than two decades earlier. The original book and lyrics were by author Erich Segal, and a fairly modest production with a small cast began a national tour in December 1974 at the Hanna Theater in Cleveland, Ohio. The musical was titled "Odyssey" at that time.
Klaus Bruengel
Klaus Bruengel (born in October 1949 in Holzwickede) is a German Composer and bass player.
Noteworthy are his 46 musical representations of the characters and places in Homer's epic Odyssey, summarized in the Odyssey Suite 2014 he composed the Ballet Suite "In Monets Garden"
Ignacy Nagurczewski
Ignacy Nagurczewski (22 March 1725 – 1811) was a Polish writer, translator, educator, and Jesuit. He is best known for translating Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" into Polish.
Greek mythology
The Greek myths were initially propagated in an oral-poetic tradition most likely by Minoan and Mycenaean singers starting in the 18th century BC; eventually the myths of the heroes of the Trojan War and its aftermath became part of the oral tradition of Homer's epic poems, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey". Two poems by Homer's near contemporary Hesiod, the "Theogony" and the "Works and Days", contain accounts of the genesis of the world, the succession of divine rulers, the succession of human ages, the origin of human woes, and the origin of sacrificial practices. Myths are also preserved in the Homeric Hymns, in fragments of epic poems of the Epic Cycle, in lyric poems, in the works of the tragedians and comedians of the fifth century BC, in writings of scholars and poets of the Hellenistic Age, and in texts from the time of the Roman Empire by writers such as Plutarch and Pausanias.
Greek epic in film
The Odyssey is a British-American fantasy-adventure television series based on Homer’s ancient Greek epic poem, The Odyssey. The miniseries won a 1997 Emmy Award and was nominated for a Golden Globe. The two-part NBC miniseries was filmed in Malta, Turkey, parts of England, as well as places around the Mediterranean where the story took place.
Samuel Butler (novelist)
Butler developed a theory that the "Odyssey" came from the pen of a young Sicilian woman, and that the scenes of the poem reflected the coast of Sicily (especially the territory of Trapani) and its nearby islands. He described the "evidence" for this theory in his "The Authoress of the Odyssey" (1897) and in the introduction and footnotes to his prose translation of the "Odyssey" (1900). Robert Graves elaborated on this hypothesis in his novel "Homer's Daughter". In a lecture entitled "The Humour of Homer", delivered at The Working Men's College in London, 1892, Butler argued that Homer's gods in the "Iliad" are like men but "without the virtue" and that the poet "must have desired his listeners not to take them seriously." Butler translated the "Iliad" (1898). His other works include "Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered" (1899), a theory that Shakespeare's sonnets, if rearranged, tell a story about a homosexual affair.
Edward McCrorie
But first, after a ten-year effort assisted by many Greek scholars, notably the late William Wyatt of Brown University, he published a verse translation of Homer's "Odyssey" with The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2004. In all his translations he persisted with the idea of close approximation: not only the sense but the sound of Homer's Greek he attempted to capture in English verse. Responses to this work were highly favorable; he would soon go on to Homer's "Iliad".
Odysseus Unbound
One of the great mysteries of Homeric scholarship, too, has been how Homer — whoever he was, or whoever "they" were — living in the Aegean in what now is western Turkey, where he/they are said to have lived, might have acquired such detailed knowledge of "Ithaca" / Paliki as appears in his "Odyssey". The suggestion made in the study is that folk-tales of the "Ithacans" containing detailed references to the landscape were carried by them, during their Greek Dark Ages migrations during the time-of-troubles which followed the Mycenean / Trojan war period, to the Greek mainland and from there to western Anatolia. At that final resting place for the migration of the Ionians, then, roving bards of the type described by Milman Parry picked up the "Ithacan" tales, perhaps, and wove them together into the "Odyssey": for the entertainment and edification of audiences who knew Paliki well, and initially were very homesick, and longed for it.
William Cullen Bryant
In his last decade, Bryant shifted from writing his own poetry to a blank verse translation of Homer's works. He assiduously worked on the "Iliad" and "The Odyssey" from 1871 to 1874. He is also remembered as one of the principal authorities on homeopathy and as a hymnist for the Unitarian Church, both legacies of his father's enormous influence on him.
Homer
In the "Iliad" 10.260–265, Odysseus is described as wearing a helmet made of boar's tusks. Such helmets were not worn in Homer's time, but were commonly worn by aristocratic warriors between 1600 and 1150 BC. The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and continued archaeological investigation has increased modern scholars' understanding of Aegean civilisation, which in many ways resembles the ancient Near East more than the society described by Homer. Some aspects of the Homeric world are simply made up; for instance, the "Iliad" 22.145–56 describes there being two springs that run near the city of Troy, one that runs steaming hot and the other that runs icy cold. It is here that Hector takes his final stand against Achilles. Archaeologists, however, have uncovered no evidence that springs of this description ever actually existed.
Homeric Hymns
The Homeric Hymns (, "Homērikoi Hymnoi") are a collection of thirty-three anonymous ancient Greek hymns celebrating individual gods. The hymns are "Homeric" in the sense that they employ the same epic meter—dactylic hexameter—as the "Iliad" and "Odyssey", use many similar formulas and are couched in the same dialect. They were uncritically attributed to Homer himself in antiquity—from the earliest written reference to them, Thucydides (iii.104)—and the label has stuck. "The whole collection, as a collection, is "Homeric" in the only useful sense that can be put upon the word," A. W. Verrall noted in 1894, "that is to say, it has come down labeled as 'Homer' from the earliest times of Greek book-literature."
Sersi
A few thousand years later, Sersi was based in ancient Greece, where she met the poet, Homer. Homer would later write one of the earliest works in Western literature, The Odyssey. The character Circe, who lived on an island in the Aegean called Aeaea, and turned the hero Odysseus' men into pigs, was based on Sersi.
Rediscovering Homer
Even before the appearance of "Rediscovering Homer" the idea was dismissed as "far-fetched" by Anthony Snodgrass on the grounds that a woman would have been "bored out of her mind" when composing the "Iliad". Reviewers, even when praising the book, have continued to be sceptical of this proposal:
Catalogue of Ships
In the debate since antiquity over the Catalogue of Ships, the core questions have concerned the extent of historical credibility of the account, whether it was composed by Homer himself, to what extent it reflects a pre-Homeric document or memorized tradition, surviving perhaps in part from Mycenaean times, or whether it is a result of post-Homeric development. Dörpfeld notes that while in "Odyssey" Odysseus's kingdom includes Ithaca, Same, Dulichium, and Zacynthus, the Catalogue of Ships contains a different list of islands, again Ithaca, Same, and Zacynthus but now also Neritum, Krocylea, and Aegilips. The separate debate over the identity of Homer and the authorship of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" is conventionally termed "the Homeric Question".
Homeric Question
The modern debate began with the "Prolegomena" of Friedrich August Wolf (1795). According to Wolf, the date of writing is among the first questions in the textual criticism of Homer. Having satisfied himself that writing was unknown to Homer, Wolf considers the real mode of transmission, which he purports to find in the Rhapsodists, of whom the Homeridae were an hereditary school. Wolf reached the conclusion that the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" could not have been composed in the form in which we know them without the aid of writing. They must therefore have been, as Bentley has said, a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, loose songs not collected together in the form of an epic poem until about 500 years after their original composition. This conclusion Wolf supports by the character attributed to the Cyclic poems (whose want of unity showed that the structure of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" must be the work of a later time), by one or two indications of imperfect connection, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the authenticity of certain parts.
L'Odissea
L'Odissea was a European TV miniseries broadcast on RAI (Italian state TV) in 1968 and based on Homer's "Odyssey". An Italian, Yugoslavian, German and French (Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française) coproduction, it was directed by Franco Rossi, assisted by Piero Schivazappa and Mario Bava; the cast included Bekim Fehmiu as Ulysses and Irene Papas as Penelope, Samson Burke as the Cyclops, as well as Barbara Bach as Nausicaa, and Gerard Herter (of "Caltiki" fame). The movie is considered by several critics a masterpiece representation of the ancient world.
Odyssey
The "Odyssey" has a lost sequel, the "Telegony", which was not written by Homer. It was usually attributed in antiquity to Cinaethon of Sparta. In one source, the "Telegony" was said to have been stolen from Musaeus of Athens by either Eugamon or Eugammon of Cyrene (see Cyclic poets).
Homer's Odyssey (The Simpsons)
"Homer's Odyssey" is the third episode of the first season of "The Simpsons". It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on January 21, 1990. In this episode, Homer becomes a crusader for citizen safety in Springfield, and is promoted to his current position as Nuclear Safety Inspector for the entire power plant. It was written by Jay Kogen and Wallace Wolodarsky and was the first "Simpsons" script to be completed, although it was the third episode produced.
Ancient accounts of Homer
Establishing an accurate date for Homer's life presents significant difficulties. No documentary record of his life is known to have existed other than his writings of the "Odyssey," as well as the "Iliad." All accounts are based on tradition. Only one explicit date exists. Herodotus maintains that Hesiod and Homer lived not more than 400 years before his own time, consequently not much before 850 BC. Herodotus admits that this is his own opinion. He was not sure of the dates of some of the poets believed in his time to have been earlier, but he relies on the priestess of Dodona in asserting that they were actually later. Modern opinion is that the priestess was right; the poets were later.
Penthelia
The eighteenth-century English writer Bryant claimed the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey poems were written by Penthelia, and stolen from the archives of the temple by Homer in travels through Egypt. Matilda Joslyn Gage finds support for this in Diodorus Siculus, Vol I, Chap. 7, based on the potion Helen gave Telemachus and that potion's use in historic Thebes, Egypt.
Treasure Coast High School
The School's Yearbook is called "The Odyssey", named after the epic by Homer.
Adventure
Some of the oldest and most widespread stories in the world are stories of adventure such as Homer's "The Odyssey".
Rediscovering Homer
He then spotlights the unknown poet who, long after the time of the traditional Homer, at last saw the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" recorded in writing. Dalby notes that "no early author describes or names the singer who saw these two poems written down. We are given no sex and no name -- certainly not Homer, who is seen as a singer of the distant past." Based on what we can judge of this poet's interests and on the circumstances in which oral poetry has been recorded elsewhere, "it is possible, and even probable, that this poet was a woman. As a working hypothesis, this helps to explain certain features in which these epics are better -- more subtle, more complex, more universal -- than most others."
Brian Kemball-Cook
Brian H. Kemball-Cook (December 12, 1912 – September 19, 2002) was a classicist and headmaster at a direct grant grammar school in Blackburn and Bedford Modern School. Among other works, Kemball-Cook published his translation of Homer's "Odyssey" into English in the original meter (1993).
Hamlet
In the 1920s, James Joyce managed "a more upbeat version" of "Hamlet"—stripped of obsession and revenge—in "Ulysses", though its main parallels are with Homer's "Odyssey". In the 1990s, two novelists were explicitly influenced by "Hamlet". In Angela Carter's "Wise Children", "To be or not to be" is reworked as a song and dance routine, and Iris Murdoch's "The Black Prince" has Oedipal themes and murder intertwined with a love affair between a "Hamlet"-obsessed writer, Bradley Pearson, and the daughter of his rival. In the late 20th century, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest draws heavily from "Hamlet" and takes its title from the play's text; Wallace incorporates references to the gravedigger scene, the marriage of the main character's mother to his uncle, and the re-appearance of the main character's father as a ghost.
Wilhelm Dörpfeld
Dörpfeld died in 1940 on the island of Lefkada, Greece, where he had a house, believing that the bay of Nidri on the eastern coast of Lefkada was the historical Ithaca, home of Odysseus in Homer's "Odyssey".
Telemachy
The Telemachy (from Greek Τηλεμάχεια) is a term traditionally applied to the first four books of Homer's epic poem the "Odyssey". They are named so because – just as the "Odyssey" tells the story of Odysseus – they tell the story of Odysseus' son Telemachus as he journeys from home for the first time in search of news about his missing father.
Thriller (genre)
Homer's "Odyssey" is one of the oldest stories in the Western world and is regarded as an early prototype of the genre.
Home Sweet Homer
Originally called "Odyssey", it is one of the most notorious flops in Broadway theatre history. Loosely based on Homeric legend, it focuses on Odysseus and Penelope, awaiting his return to Ithaca.
Johann Heinrich Voss
Johann Heinrich Voss (, ; 20 February 1751 – 29 March 1826) was a German classicist and poet, known mostly for his translation of Homer's "Odyssey" (1781) and "Iliad" (1793) into German.
Greek literature
At the beginning of Greek literature stand the works of Homer; the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey". Though dates of composition vary, these works were fixed around 800 BC or after. Another significant figure was the poet Hesiod. His two surviving works are "Works and Days" and "Theogony".
John Tzetzes
In the "Antehomerica", Tzetzes recalled the events taking place before Homer's "Iliad". This work was followed by the "Homerica", covering the events of the "Iliad", and the "Posthomerica", reporting the events taking place between the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey". All three are currently available in English translations.
Trojan War
The events of the Trojan War are found in many works of Greek literature and depicted in numerous works of Greek art. There is no single, authoritative text which tells the entire events of the war. Instead, the story is assembled from a variety of sources, some of which report contradictory versions of the events. The most important literary sources are the two epic poems traditionally credited to Homer, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", composed sometime between the 9th and 6th centuries BC. Each poem narrates only a part of the war. The "Iliad" covers a short period in the last year of the siege of Troy, while the "Odyssey" concerns Odysseus's return to his home island of Ithaca following the sack of Troy and contains several flashbacks to particular episodes in the war.
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for "Ulysses" (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's "Odyssey" are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection "Dubliners" (1914), and the novels "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916) and "Finnegans Wake" (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, his published letters and occasional journalism.
Ithaca
Modern Ithaki is historically linked with Homer's Ithaca, the home of Odysseus, whose twenty-year absence is part of the plot of the classical Greek poem and allegory: "Odyssey" of Homer.
Anne Dacier
The "Iliad", which made Homer known for the first time to many French men of letters (including Antoine Houdar de la Motte) gave rise to a famous literary controversy. In 1714, La Motte published a poetical version of the "Iliad", abridged and altered to suit his own taste, together with a "Discours sur Homère", stating the reasons why Homer failed to satisfy his critical taste. Mme. Dacier replied in the same year in her work, "Des causes de la corruption du goût (“Of the Causes of the Corruption of Taste”)." In defending Homer, Dacier "developed her own philosophical aesthetics. She insists on the centrality of taste as an indicator of the level of civilization, both moral and artistic, within a particular culture."
Returns from Troy
Odysseus (or Ulysses), attempting to travel home, underwent a series of trials, tribulations and setbacks that stretched his journey to ten years' time. These are detailed in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey.
The Apotheosis of Homer (Ingres)
Ingres revisited the subject in several later works, including an undated watercolour (Lille, Musée des Beaux-Arts) and paintings such as "Homer and His Guide" (1861; Brussels, Royal Collection) and "The Odyssey" (Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts). In 1854 be began work on a drawing of the composition to be used as a model for the engraver Calamatta. This drawing, in which Ingres announced his intention to "amplify and complete" his conception, was not completed until 1865, as the artist deliberated at length in choosing the appropriate historical personages to be included. He ultimately added dozens of new figures, including Ictinus, Giulio Romano, John Flaxman, Jacques-Louis David, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, Cosimo de Medici, Louis XIV, and Pope Leo X. Ingres also refined his selection by excluding Shakespeare, Tasso, and Camões from the 1865 drawing, as he had come to believe that they were too closely related to the Romantic tendency epitomized by his rival Delacroix.
Disability in the arts
Oral literature, the oldest form of literature, can be enjoyed by anyone, including the deaf or hearing-impaired (depending upon their ability to lip-read), and impaired verbal ability is the only impediment to storytelling. Homer, the ancient Greek author of the verse epics the "Odyssey" and the "Iliad", is believed to have been blind. This disability was no barrier to the challenge of composing, and reciting for others, his classic creations, which contain over 15,000 lines ("Iliad") and 12,000 lines ("Odyssey"). The "Iliad" itself is divided into 24 "books" that each take around one hour to recite. The tradition of oral storytelling, and the greater ease with which verse stories are memorized and retold, helped John Milton compose the 17th-century epic English poem "Paradise Lost". Milton gradually lost most of his eyesight and dictated "Paradise Lost" to willing assistants who wrote it down for publication (a process called Amanuensis).
Homeric scholarship
By the Classical Period the Homeric Question had advanced to the point of trying to determine what works were attributable to Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey were beyond question. They were considered to have been written by Homer. The D-scholia suggest that they were taught in the schools; however, the language was no longer self-evident. The extensive glossaries of the D-scholia were intended to bridge the gap between the spoken language and Homeric Greek.
Critheïs
Critheïs ( or , ; , occasionally ) was, according to several traditions, the mother of Homer, the poet to whom the Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed. The best-known versions of her story appear in the "Life of Homer" by the pseudo-Herodotus, and the "Life of Homer" related by the Pseudo-Plutarch. Her name may be connected with "κριϑή (krithé)", barley.
Ulysses (novel)
While the action of Joyce's novel takes place during one ordinary day in early twentieth-century Dublin, Ireland, in Homer's epic, Odysseus, "a Greek hero of the Trojan War ... took ten years to find his way from Troy to his home on the island of Ithaca". Furthermore, Homer's poem includes violent storms and a shipwreck, giants and monsters, gods and goddesses, a totally different world from Joyce's. Joyce's character Leopold Bloom, "a Jewish advertisement canvasser", corresponds to Odysseus in Homer's epic; Stephen Dedalus, the hero also of Joyce's earlier, largely autobiographical, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", corresponds to Odysseus's son Telemachus; and Bloom's wife Molly corresponds to Penelope, Odysseus's wife, who waited twenty years for him to return.
Cyclic Poets
Cyclic Poets is a shorthand term for the early Greek epic poets, approximate contemporaries of Homer. We know no more about these poets than we know about Homer, but modern scholars regard them as having composed orally, as did Homer. In the classical period, surviving early epic poems were ascribed to these authors, just as the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were ascribed to Homer. Together with Homer, whose "Iliad" covers a mere 50 days of the war, they cover the complete war "cycle", thus the name. Most modern scholars place Homer in the 8th century BC. The other poets listed below seemed to have lived in the 7th–5th centuries BC. Excluding Homer's, none of the works of the cyclic poets survive.
Odysseus
Odysseus (; , " Ὀdysseús" ), also known by the Latin variant Ulysses (, ; ), is a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the "Odyssey". Odysseus also plays a key role in Homer's "Iliad" and other works in that same epic cycle.
Homerus (disambiguation)
Homerus is the Greek poet Homer, the author of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey".
The Odyssey (painting)
The Odyssey is an 1850 painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, showing a female personification of the eponymous poem by Homer. It is now in the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon.
Homer's Daughter
It starts from the idea that Homer's "Odyssey" was written by a princess in the Greek settlements in Sicily. The novel makes an entirely speculative reconstruction of who she was and why she wrote such a work. It has her modifying the legends that existed in her own time to partly match a crisis in her own life. The idea that a woman wrote the works of Homer was initially proposed by Samuel Butler who developed the theory in his The Authoress of the Odyssey. Graves elaborated from Butler's theory in his novel.
Nausicaa
In his 1892 lecture, "The Humor of Homer" (collected in his "Selected Essays"), Samuel Butler concludes that Nausicaa was the real authoress of the "Odyssey", since the laundry scene is more realistic and plausible than many other scenes in the epic. His theory that the "Odyssey" was written by a woman was further developed in his 1897 book "The Authoress of the Odyssey".
Life of Homer (Pseudo-Herodotus)
Having failed in a bid for municipal sponsorship at Cyme, he moved to Phocaea, where another schoolteacher, Thestorides, offered him food and lodging in exchange for the right to record his poetry in writing. Homer had little choice but to accept, and recited to Thestorides the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey".
Johann Heinrich Voss
In 1778 Voss was appointed rector of the school at Otterndorf. In 1781, after the publication of several treatises, he produced a German-language text for Homer's "Odyssey". This work made the poem national with the Germans (new ed. by Bernays, 1881).
Homer
Most contemporary scholars, although they disagree on other questions about the genesis of the poems, agree that the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the apparently imitative character of certain passages of the "Odyssey" in relation to the "Iliad"." Nearly all scholars agree that the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are unified poems, in that each poem shows a clear overall design, and that they are not merely strung together from unrelated songs. It is also generally agreed that each poem was composed mostly by a single author, who probably relied heavily on older oral traditions. Nearly all scholars agree that the "Doloneia" in Book X of the "Iliad" is not part of the original poem, but rather a later insertion by a different poet.
Geography of the Odyssey
Finally, the "Ephemeris" attributed to Dictys of Crete, who claims to have been present at the Trojan War, was probably written in the 1st century CE or perhaps a little earlier. It falls into a tradition of anti-Homeric literature, based on the supposition that Homer got most things about the Trojan War wrong by making virtuous people look like villains, and vice versa. It is important because later historians took Dictys as a historical record, including Sisyphus of Cos, John Malalas, George Cedrenus, John of Antioch, and others. Many Western mediaeval writers also accepted Dictys (in the Latin summary by Lucius Septimius) as the definitive account of the Trojan War.
Homeric scholarship
Critical editions of Homer discuss three special steps in this process. First is the hypothetical "Peisistratean recension". There is a long-standing, but somewhat old-fashioned, tradition in modern scholarship which holds that in the mid-6th century BCE the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus had the Homeric epics compiled in a definitive edition. It is known that under Peisistratus, and later, rhapsodes competed in performing Homer at the Panathenaic festival; and a scholion on "Iliad" 10.1 accuses Peisistratus of inserting book 10 into the "Iliad". But there is little evidence for a Peisistratean recension, and most present-day scholars doubt its existence; at the very least it is disputed what is to be understood by the term "recension". The second and third key moments are the critical editions made by the 3rd and 2nd century BCE Alexandrian scholars Zenodotus of Ephesus and Aristarchus respectively; both of these scholars also published numerous other works on Homer and other poets, none of which survive. Zenodotus' edition may well have been the first to divide the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" into 24 books.
Thestorides of Phocaea
Thestorides figures as a major character in the fictional "Life of Homer" fraudulently ascribed to Herodotus. According to this, when Homer came to Phocaea Thestorides offered him food and lodging in exchange for the right to record his poetry in writing. Homer had little choice but to accept, and recited to Thestorides the "Iliad", the "Odyssey" and also an epic on local history and legend, "Phocais". This story is unique among the ancient legends concerning Homer as it embodies the claim that writing was known in Homer's circle; all other sources state or imply that Homer's poems were transmitted orally to his followers or descendants. The "Life" adds that Thestorides afterwards moved to Chios, where he performed Homer's poems as if they were his own and became famous. Homer heard rumours of this and eventually travelled to Chios also; Thestorides, threatened with disgrace, left the island hastily.
Man's best friend (phrase)
In Homer's "Odyssey" (c. 8th century BC), upon Odysseus' return, his beloved dog Argos is the only individual to recognize him. Odysseus anonymously asks his old friend, "Eumaeus, what a noble hound that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?" "This dog," answered Eumaeus, "belonged to him who has died in a far country. If he were what he was when Odysseus left for Troy, he would soon show you what he could do. There was not a wild beast in the forest that could get away from him when he was once on its tracks. But now he has fallen on evil times, for his master is dead and gone, and the women take no care of him." Unable to greet his beloved dog, as this would betray who he really was, Odysseus passed by (but not without shedding a tear) and entered the well-built mansion, and made straight for the riotous pretenders in the hall. But Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years. This story shows both companionship and neglect towards dogs amongst humans.
Pénélope (Piccinni)
Pénélope is a French-language opera by the composer Niccolò Piccinni, first performed at Fontainebleau on 2 November 1785 in the presence of King Louis XVI and his queen Marie-Antoinette. It takes the form of a tragédie lyrique in three acts. The libretto, by Jean-François Marmontel, is based on the story of Odysseus (Ulysses) and Penelope in Homer's "Odyssey". The opera transferred to the Académie Royale de Musique, Paris (the Paris Opera) on 6 December 1785, but it was not a success.
Rediscovering Homer
Rediscovering Homer is a 2006 book by Andrew Dalby. It sets out the problems of origin, dating and authorship of the two ancient Greek epics, "Iliad" and "Odyssey", usually attributed to Homer.
Demeter
Homer's "Odyssey" (c. 8th century BC) contains the earliest direct references to the myth of Demeter and her consort Iasion, a Samothracian hero whose name may refer to bindweed, a small white flower that frequently grows in wheat fields. In the "Odyssey", Calypso describes how Demeter, "without disguise", made love to Iasion. "So it was when Demeter of the braided tresses followed her heart and lay in love with Iasion in the triple-furrowed field; Zeus was aware of it soon enough and hurled the bright thunderbolt and killed him." In ancient Greek culture, part of the opening of each agricultural year involved the cutting of three furrows in the field to ensure its fertility.
The Cantos
Pound had been considering writing a long poem since around 1905, but work did not begin until May 1915 when Pound wrote to his mother that he was working on a long poem. He published the first three cantos in June, July and August 1917, in the journal "Poetry". In this version, the poem began as an address by the poet to Robert Browning. Pound came to believe that this narrative voice compromised the intent of his poetic vision, and these first three ur-cantos were soon abandoned and a new starting point sought. The answer was a Latin version of Homer's "Odyssey" by the Renaissance scholar Andreas Divus that Pound had bought in Paris sometime between 1906 and 1910.
L'Odissea (1911 film)
L'Odissea is a 1911 Italian silent film, adapted from Homer's "Odyssey". 
The film was made in the context of the world's fair of Turin International in 1911, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Unification of Italy, where he launched a film competition for films artistic, scientific and with educational purposes.
William Cowper
Cowper and Mary Unwin moved to Weston Underwood, Buckinghamshire in 1786, having become close with his cousin Lady Harriett Hesketh (Theodora's sister). During this period he started his translations of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" into blank verse. His versions (published in 1791) were the most significant English renderings of these epic poems since those of Alexander Pope earlier in the century. Later critics have faulted Cowper's Homer for being too much in the mould of John Milton.
Glam Slam Ulysses
Glam Slam Ulysses was a 1993 musical production by Prince, loosely based on Homer's "Odyssey", featuring a combination of live performances and video, with thirteen previously unreleased songs.
Homer's Ithaca
Ithaca (; Greek: Ιθάκη, "Ithakē" ]) was, in Greek history, the island home of the hero Odysseus (Odyssey). The specific location of the island, as it was described in Homer's "Odyssey", is a matter for debate. There have been various theories about its location, although modern Ithaca (Ithaki) is generally accepted to be Homer's island by most scholars.
Arthur Way
Arthur Way, son of the Rev. William Way and his wife Matilda, "née" Francis, was born at Dorking, England. He was educated at Kingswood School, Bath, and graduated M.A. at University of London. From 1870 to 1876 he was classical lecturer at Queen's College, Taunton, vice-master of Kingswood School, 1876 to 1881, and in 1882 became headmaster of Wesley College, Melbourne. He had already published his translation of the Odyssey of Homer, and while at Wesley brought out his translation of the Iliad. (See English translations of Homer#Way.)
Andrew Dalby
Dalby's "Rediscovering Homer" developed out of two academic papers from the 1990s in which he argued that the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" must be seen as belonging to the same world as that of the early Greek lyric poets but to a less aristocratic genre. Returning to these themes, he spotlit the unknown poet who, long after the time of the traditional Homer, at last saw the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" recorded in writing. As he teasingly suggested, based on what we can judge of this poet's interests and on the circumstances in which oral poetry has been recorded elsewhere, "it is possible, and even probable, that this poet was a woman."
Circé (Desmarets)
Circé ("Circe") is an opera by the French librettist Louise-Geneviève Gillot de Saintonge, and composed by Henri Desmarets, first performed at the Académie Royale de Musique (the Paris Opera) on 1 October 1694. It takes the form of a "tragédie en musique" in a prologue and five acts. The piece concerns the sorceress Circe who appears in Greek mythology and famously in Homer's "Odyssey".
Homeric scholarship
Among Analysts, Hermann's 1832 "De interpolationibus Homeri" ("On interpolations in Homer") and 1840 "De iteratis apud Homerum" ("On repetitions in Homer") argued that the epics, as they now stood, were encrustations of second-rate later material around a pristine kernel: a hypothetical "Ur-"Iliad"". Conversely, Lachmann's 1847 "Betrachtungen über Homers Ilias" ("Studies on Homer's Iliad") argued that the "Iliad" was a compilation of 18 independent folk-lays, rather as the Finnish "Kalevala" actually was, compiled in the 1820s and 1830s by Lönnrot: so, he argued, "Iliad" book 1 consists of a lay on Achilleus' anger (lines 1-347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis (430–492) and the scenes in Olympus (348-429, 493-611); book 2 is a separate lay, but containing several interpolations such as Odysseus' speech (278–332); and so on. (Lachmann also tried to apply Analyst principles to the mediaeval German "Nibelungenlied".) Kirchhoff's 1859 edition of the "Odyssey" argued that the Ur-"Odyssey" had comprised just books 1, 5-9, and parts of 10-12, that a later phase had added most of books 13-23, and a third phase had added the bits about Telemachos, and book 24.
Phantasia (poet)
The story is one of the least known of the biographical fictions about Homer; it is mentioned neither by Samuel Butler nor by Andrew Dalby, both of whom have developed the argument that a woman poet was responsible for the "Odyssey".
Historicity of the Homeric epics
Moses I. Finley, in "The World of Odysseus" presents a picture of the society represented by the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", avoids the question as "beside the point that the narrative is a collection of fictions from beginning to end" Finley was in a minority when his "World of Odysseus" first appeared in 1954. With the understanding that war was the normal state of affairs, Finley observed that a ten-year war was out of the question, indicating Nestor's recall of a cattle-raid in Elis as a norm, and identifying the scene in which Helen points out to Priam the Achaean leaders in the battlefield, as "an illustration of the way in which one traditional piece of the story was retained after the war had ballooned into ten years and the piece had become rationally incongruous."
Sir Eglamour of Artois
Odysseus, in Homer's 8th century BC epic the Odyssey, having suffered so much in an ocean within which he has been unable to find his way home, is at last taken to the shore of his native Ithaca in a boat that travels more quickly than a swallow in flight and completes the journey in a single night. On his return, Odysseus pretends at first to be a Cretan fugitive, then disguises himself as a beggar, then, to his own father, declares himself to be Eperitus, the son of Prince Apheidas of Alybas, who has been blown off course.
ODY-C
ODY-C is an ongoing comic book series created by Eisner award winning writer Matt Fraction and artist Christian Ward. The series is a science fictional and gender-bent re-imagination of Homer's Odyssey. The first issue was published in November 2014 by the American company Image Comics. It depicts the journeys of three warrior queens, Odyssia, Gamen, and Ene, as they return from their century-long siege on the city Troiia-VII. ODY-C has been described as a "masterfully psychedelic, gender-bending, space-operatic retelling of Homer’s Odyssey."
Oedipus Rex
Homer's "Odyssey" (XI.271ff.) contains the earliest account of the Oedipus myth when Odysseus encounters Jocasta (named Epicaste) in the underworld. Homer briefly summarises the story of Oedipus, including the incest, patricide, and Jocasta's subsequent suicide. However, in the Homeric version, Oedipus remains King of Thebes after the revelation and neither blinds himself, nor is sent into exile. In particular, it is said that the gods made the matter of his paternity known, whilst in "Oedipus the King", Oedipus very much discovers the truth himself.
Cyclops (play)
"Cyclops" is a comical burlesque-like play on a story that occurs in book nine of Homer's "Odyssey". In several elements it is faithful to Homer's tale: The shipwreck, the goatskin of Maron's wine, the blinding of the monocular giant, and the pun on the word "Nobody", all occur in Euripides' play and also in Homer's "Odyssey".
Narcissus in culture
Another Greek writer, Homer (, ca. 7th century BC), in his "Odyssey" ("Ὀδύσσεια"), in several places ("e.g." "Od". 11:539; 24.14) described the underworld as having Elysian meadows ("Ἠλύσιον πεδίον") carpeted with flowers, though using the term asphodel ("ἀσφοδελὸν"), hence Asphodel Meadows. This may have actually been narcissus, with its associations with the underworld, as described by Theophrastus (), and frequently used in later literature to refer to daffodils. A similar account is provided by Lucian (, c. 125 – 180 AD) in his "Necyomantia" or "Menippus" ("Μένιππος ἢ Νεκυομαντεία"), describing asphodel in the underworld ("Nec". 11:2; 21:10).
Homer
Other scholars such as Gregory Nagy hold that, after the poems were formed in the eight century, they were orally transmitted with little deviation until they were written down in the sixth century. After textualisation, the poems were each divided into 24 rhapsodes, today referred to as books, and labelled by the letters of the Greek alphabet. These divisions probably date from before 200 BC, and may have been made by Homer.
Star Trek: Odyssey
According to the creator of "Hidden Frontier" and "Odyssey", Rob Caves, "Odyssey" will be primarily centered on Lt. Cmdr. Ro Nevin (Brandon McConnell) in a loose retelling of Homer's classic story, "Odyssey", set in the 24th century universe of "Star Trek".
Vasily Zhukovsky
On retiring from court, Zhukovsky devoted his remaining years to hexameter translations of Eastern poetry, including long excerpts from the Persian epic Shahnameh. His greatest achievement in this period, however, was his translation of Homer's "Odyssey", which he finally published in 1849. Although the translation has been strongly criticized for its distortions of the original, it became a classic in its own right and occupies a notable place in the history of Russian poetry. Some scholars argue that both his "Undina" and his "Odyssey"—as long narrative works in verse—made a significant, albeit oblique contribution to the development of the 19th-century Russian novel.
Necromancy
The oldest literary account of necromancy is found in Homer’s "Odyssey". Under the direction of Circe, a powerful sorceress, Odysseus travels to the underworld ("katabasis") in order to gain insight about his impending voyage home by raising the spirits of the dead through the use of spells which Circe has taught him. He wishes to invoke and question the shade of Tiresias in particular; however, he is unable to summon the seer's spirit without the assistance of others. The "Odyssey"'s passages contain many descriptive references to necromantic rituals: rites must be performed around a pit with fire during nocturnal hours, and Odysseus has to follow a specific recipe, which includes the blood of sacrificial animals, to concoct a libation for the ghosts to drink while he recites prayers to both the ghosts and gods of the underworld.
Ulysses and the Sirens
Ulysses and the Sirens is a 1909 oil painting by Herbert James Draper measuring 69.25 x 84 in. It is held at the Ferens Art Gallery in Kingston upon Hull, England. The gallery purchased the painting from Draper in 1910 for £600. Draper also painted a reduced replica that is housed at the Leeds Art Gallery. The subject of the painting is an episode in the epic poem "Odyssey" by Homer in which Ulysses is tormented by the voices of Sirens, although there are only two Sirens in Homer's poem and they stay in a meadow. The painting depicts Ulysses tied to the mast and forcibly attendant to the Sirens' seductions. Although the Sirens were depicted in ancient Greek art as scary, ugly creatures, Draper maintains the spirit but not the content of the story by transferring the Sirens' seductiveness from their song to a visible form, depicting the Sirens as beautiful mermaids who invade Ulysses' ship. The Sirens are nude and their tails disappear as they board the ship. Draper's conflation of Sirens with mermaids and his sexualization of these figures are consistent with other artwork of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Norwegian social theorist Jon Elster used the name of Draper's painting as the title for his 1979 book about rationality and precommitment.
Johann Heinrich Voss
It is, however, as a translator that Voss chiefly owes his place in German literature. His translations indicate not only sound scholarship but a thorough mastery of the laws of German diction and rhythm. The most famous of his translations are those of Homer. The translation of the "Odyssey", as originally issued in 1781, is singled out as the most successful. He also translated Hesiod (1806), Theocritus, Bion and Moschus (1808), the whole of Virgil (1799, rev. ed. 1821), Horace (1806), Tibullus (1810), Propertius (1830) and selections from Ovid (1798). He prepared a critical edition of Tibullus. From 1818 to 1829, a translation of William Shakespeare's plays in 9 volumes was published. This work Voss completed with the help of his sons Heinrich and Abraham, both of whom were scholars and writers of considerable ability, though the result has been characterized as less successful than Schlegel's work.
Odyssey Award
The Odyssey Award for Excellence in Audiobook Production is an annual award conferred by the American Library Association upon the publisher of "the best audiobook produced for children and/or young adults, available in English in the United States". It is jointly administered by two ALA divisions (Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) and Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA)) and sponsored by "Booklist" magazine. It recognizes production quality in all respects, considering such things as narration, sound quality, background music and sound effects. It is named for Homer's eighth century BCE epic poem "Odyssey", which was transmitted orally, to remind us modern people of the ancient roots of storytelling.
In medias res
Works that employ "in medias res" often, though not always, will subsequently use flashback and nonlinear narrative for exposition of earlier events in order to fill in the backstory. For example, in Homer's "Odyssey", we first learn about Odysseus's journey when he is held captive on Calypso's island. We then find out, in Books IX through XII, that the greater part of Odysseus's journey precedes that moment in the narrative. On the other hand, Homer's "Iliad" has relatively few flashbacks, although it opens in the thick of the Trojan War.
Homer's Odyssey (The Simpsons)
The episode's title comes from the Greek epic poem "Odyssey", traditionally attributed to the legendary poet Homer. On the bus, Bart sings "John Henry was a Steel Driving Man", an American folk-song about a 19th-century hero of the working-class, building railroads across the West Virginia mountains.
Argonautica
Some of the episodic quality of "Argonautica" can be put down to its genre, as a voyage narrative. Homer's "Odyssey" also features some disunity, as a set of adventures, with surprising discoveries waiting around every headland. Thus Longinus contrasted the "Odyssey" unfavourably with the "Iliad": in the former, he thought the mythical element predominates over the action, whereas he thought the "Iliad" gains dramatic tension through the development of a single, great contest. Voyage narratives don't fit in well with Aristotelian notions of dramatic unity, or, as one modern scholar recently put it: "It is precisely this inherent inconsequentiality, the episodic partition imposed by the very nature of travel, which can be seen at the heart of the Western tradition of "romance", as opposed to the harsh teleologies of "epic"." 
"Argonautica" however goes beyond Homer's "Odyssey" in its fragmentation of the action. Apollonius seems to have rejected the Aristotelian concept of unity, since numerous aitia interrupt the story with 'flashbacks' to myths predating the Argonaut story, and with 'fast-forwards' to customs in the poet's own time. The narrator's choice of material is thus of immediate interest to the reader, since it interrupts the action, unlike the traditional method of Homer, where the poet keeps a low profile. One of Homer's virtues as a narrator, from Aristotle's point of view, was in letting characters do much of the talking. The dominant presence in "Argonautica" is the poet himself71% of the verses are spoken by him, rather than by his characters, whereas only 55% of the "Iliad" and 33% of the "Odyssey" are in Homer's own voice.
Characteristics of epic heroes
Although Homeric epics were not likely written or told by one person, they are often attributed to Homer. Homer is one of the most famous poets of antiquity, known for his Homeric Hymns, as well as "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." Homer had a large amount of influence on future writers, both in antiquity and in modern society.
Wolfgang Schadewaldt
Schadewaldt is known to a broader audience as translator of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey", which along with the renderings of Johann Heinrich Voss are regarded as the best German versions of the two epics. Unlike Voss, Schadewaldt opted not to employ the hexameter in his versions. He translated the "Odyssey" (1957) in prose; his posthumously published version of the "Iliad" (1975) employs free verse. In addition to Homer, Schadewaldt's translations include tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles, as well as the "Carmina Burana".
The Adventures of Odysseus
The Adventures of Odysseus is a book series by Glyn Iliffe. It consists of six books – "King of Ithaca", "The Gates of Troy", "The Armour of Achilles", "The Oracles of Troy", "The Voyage of Odysseus", and "Return to Ithaca" – the last of which was published in 2017. The first three books are published by Pan Macmillan, the fourth by Mereo Books, and the last two by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. The series is another version and point of view on Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey".
Pentti Saarikoski
According to Saarikoski, he was the only person in the world who had ever translated both Homer's and Joyce's Ulysses – a statement that probably holds true even today. Moreover, it only took two years for him to translate Homer's "Odyssey" from Victor Bérard's edition, which is thought to be a rather fast accomplishment. Other notable translations include "Poetics" by Aristotle and "Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger.
Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie
In 1851, when Mackenzie was just 18, his short introductory biography of Homer, a translation of a text by Herodotus, appeared in Theodore Alois Buckley’s "The Odyssey of Homer, with the Hymns, Epigrams, and Battles of the Frogs and Mice. Literally Translated, with Explanatory Notes" (London: Henry Bohn). At the beginning of the book, Buckley thanked Mackenzie for his "Life of Homer: Attributed to Herodotus", writing, "For the translation of the Pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer, the reader is indebted to the industry of Kenneth Mackenzie, Esq. It is the earliest memoir of the supposed author of the Iliad we possess." ("Care and an excellent education seconding the happy talents with which nature had endowed him, [he] soon surpassed his school fellows in every attainment," Mackenzie wrote of the young Homer. "[W]hen older, he... taught in the school of Phemius, where every one applauded him.")
Aurea Catena Homeri
Aurea Catena Homeri oder, Eine Beschreibung von dem Ursprung der Natur und natürlichen Dingen ("The Golden Chain of Homer, or A Description of u and Natural Things") is an hermetical book edited by Anton Josef Kirchweger in Leipzig in 1723.
Pénélope
Pénélope is an opera in three acts by the French composer Gabriel Fauré. The libretto, by René Fauchois is based on Homer's "Odyssey". It was first performed at the Salle Garnier, Monte Carlo on 4 March 1913. The piece is dedicated to Camille Saint-Saëns.
History of Western civilization before AD 500
In classical tradition, Homer is the ancient Greek epic poet, author of the "Iliad", the "Odyssey" and other works. Homer's epics stand at the beginning of the western canon of literature, exerting enormous influence on the history of fiction and literature in general.
Alexander the Great (356BC-323BC) was a Greek king of Macedon and the creator of one of the largest empires in ancient history. He was tutored by the philosopher Aristotle and, as ruler, broke the power of Persia, overthrew the Persian king Darius III and conquered the Persian Empire. His Macedonian Empire stretched from the Adriatic sea to the Indus river. He died in Babylon in 323 BC and his empire did not long survive his death. Nevertheless, the settlement of Greek colonists around the region had long lasting consequence and Alexander features prominently in Western history and mythology.