Homer came from an Ionian aristocratic family. The language of the Iliad and the Odyssey is an artificial sub-dialect that has never been spoken in life. Two categories of people are considered native speakers of the Homeric language: Aeds and Rhapsods. Aeds are storytellers, creators of poems, semi-improvisers, they have a high position in society, so they had the right to change something in poems. Homer mentioned Demodocus and Thamyr the Thracian. The art of the Aeds is mysterious, as it is very difficult to memorize so much text.

The plot of the Homeric poems is the Trojan cycle of myths. It is associated with almost all mythology. The plot is local, but the time frame is small. Most of the motivations for the actions of the characters are outside the scope of the work. Homeric poems always tell about the distant past. The Greek was pessimistic about the future. These poems are meant to capture the golden age.

Epic materialism is associated with the task of describing everything in full. Homer fixes his attention on the most ordinary things: a stool, carnations. All things must have color. Some believe that at that time the world was described in two colors - white and gold. In the Homeric poems, everything is colored: the clothes of goddesses, berries. The sea has more than 40 shades of color. The objectivity of the tone of Homer's poems. The creators of the poems had to be extremely fair. Homer is biased only in epithets. For example, the description of Thersites. Thersites is absolutely devoid of epic prowess.

epic comparisons. In an effort to visualize the image, the poet seeks to translate each description into the language of comparison, which develops into an independent picture. All Homer's comparisons are from the everyday sphere: battles for ships, the Greeks are pushing the Trojans, the Greeks fought as neighbors for the boundaries in neighboring areas. The fury of Achilles is compared to threshing, when oxen trample grain.

The poems are written in hexameter, a six-foot dactyl. Moreover, the last foot is truncated. A caesura is made in the middle - a pause that divides the verse into two half-verses and gives it a regularity. All ancient versification is based on a strictly ordered alternation of long and short syllables, and the quantitative ratio of stressed and unstressed syllables is 2: 1, but the stress is not forceful, but musical, based on raising and lowering the tone.

Homeric question- a set of problems related to the authorship of the ancient Greek epic poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey" and the personality of Homer. A sharp statement of these problems was made by the book of Friedrich August Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, published in 1795.

Many scholars, called “pluralists”, argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey in their present form are not the works of Homer (many even believed that Homer did not exist at all), but were created in the 6th century BC. BC e., probably in Athens, when the songs of different authors transmitted from generation to generation were collected and recorded. The so-called "Unitarians" defended the compositional unity of the poem, and thus the uniqueness of its author.

New information about the ancient world, comparative studies of South Slavic folk epics and a detailed analysis of metrics and style provided enough arguments against the original version of the pluralists, but also complicated the view of the Unitarians. Historical-geographical and linguistic analysis of the Iliad and the Odyssey made it possible to date them around the 8th century BC. BC e., although there are attempts to attribute them to the 9th or 7th century. BC e.

Different scholars assess in different ways how great the role of the creative individual was in the final design of these poems, but the prevailing opinion is that Homer is by no means just an empty (or collective) name. The question remains unresolved whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were created by the same poet or are the works of two different authors, although modern computer analysis of the text of both poems has shown that they have one author.

This poet (or poets) was probably one of the Aedi who, from the Mycenaean era (XV-XII centuries BC), passed on from generation to generation the memory of a mythical and heroic past. There was, however, not the primordial Iliad or the primordial Odyssey, but a certain set of established plots and a technique for composing and performing songs. It was these songs that became the material for the author (or authors) of both epics. New in the work of Homer there was a free processing of many epic traditions and the formation of a single whole from them with a carefully thought-out composition. Many modern scholars are of the opinion that this whole could only be created in writing.

5. War and peace, gods and heroes in Homer's Iliad. Images of Achilles and Hector. Features of the epic style of Homer .

The Iliad begins with a conflict in the camp of the Achaeans besieging Troy. King Agamemnon kidnapped the daughter of the priest of Apollo, for which a pestilence begins in the Achaean army. Achilles criticizes Agamemnon. But he agrees to replace one captive with Briseis, who belongs to Achilles. The 9-year siege (I, 259) is on the verge of collapse, but Odysseus corrects the situation.

In the second song, Homer describes the forces of the opposing sides. Under the leadership of Agamemnon, 1186 ships sailed to the walls of Troy, and the army itself numbered over 130 thousand soldiers. Various regions of Hellas sent their troops: Argos (under the command of Diomedes), Arcadia (under the command of Agapenor), Athens and Locris (led by Ajax the Great), Ithaca and Epirus (under the command of Odysseus), Crete (under the command of Idomeneus), Lacedaemon (Spartans Menelaus), Mycenae, Rhodes (under the command of Tlepolemus), Thessaly (Myrmidonians of Achilles), Phocis, Euboea, Elis, Aetolia, etc. , Paphlagonians (under the command of Pilemen), Pelasgians, Thracians and Phrygians.

Since the Trojan War began with the abduction of Helen, in the third song, her legal husband Menelaus enters into single combat with the actual one - Paris. Menelaus wins the duel, but the goddess Aphrodite saves Paris and carries the wounded man away from the battlefield. Due to the fact that the duel did not end with the death of one of the opponents, it is considered invalid. The war continues. However, neither the Achaeans nor the Trojans can prevail. The immortal gods help the mortals. The Achaeans are patronized by Pallas Athena, the Trojans by Apollo, Ares and Aphrodite. However, the fifth song tells how in a cruel slaughter even the immortal Ares and Aphrodite are injured by the hand of the Achaean Diomedes. Seeing the power of Pallas Athena, the leader of the Trojans, Hector, returns to Troy and demands rich sacrifices to be made to the goddess. At the same time, Hector shames Paris, who has hidden in the rear, and reassures his wife Andromache.

Returning to the battlefield, Hector challenges the strongest of the Achaeans to a duel, and Ajax the Great accepts his challenge in the seventh song. The heroes fight until late at night, but none of them can prevail. Then they fraternize, exchange gifts and disperse. Meanwhile, the will of Zeus leans towards the Trojans, and only Poseidon remains faithful to them. The Achaean embassy goes to Achilles, whose army is inactive because of a quarrel between their leader and Agamemnon. However, the story of the disasters of the Achaeans, pressed by the Trojans to the sea, touches only Patroclus, a friend of Achilles. Counterattacking, the Trojans almost burn the Achaean fleet, but the goddess Hera, who is favorable to the Achaeans, seduces and lulls her husband, the god Zeus, to save her favorites. Seeing the Achaean ship set on fire by the Trojans, Achilles sends his soldiers (2500 people) under the control of Patroclus into battle, but he himself evades the battle, holding anger at Agamemnon. However, Patroclus dies in battle. First, Euphorbus strikes him in the back with a spear, and then Hector strikes him with a mortal blow in the groin with a pike. The desire to avenge a friend brings Achilles back into play, who, in turn, kills Hector by hitting him with a spear in the neck. At the end of the Iliad, a lawsuit unfolds over the body of Hector, which Achilles initially refused to give to the father of the deceased for burial.

The Olympic and pre-Olympic gods were a myth for the ancient Greek. Each creature had its own sacred biography, its own expanded magical name, by the power of which it commanded and performed miracles. The myth turned out to be a miracle and a real object of faith. These were Zeus and Hera, Demeter and Poseidon, Athena and Hephaestus, Apollo and Artemis.

There are many religious and mythological contradictions in both poems. Zeus is the supreme god, but he does not know much about what is happening in his kingdom, he is easy to deceive; at decisive moments he does not know what to do; and in the end it is impossible to understand whether he is protecting the Greeks or the Trojans. There is a constant intrigue around him, and often not at all of a fundamental nature, some kind of domestic and family quarrels. Zeus is a very hesitant ruler of the world, sometimes even stupid. In the Iliad, Zeus in a direct speech sends Apollo to bring Hector to consciousness, lying on the battlefield in an unconscious state, and then the poet himself says that Hector awakened the mind of Zeus. According to Hector, Zeus is going to help the Trojans take over the ships; however, this is not visible from the picture drawn here by the poet himself. Zeus invites the gods to fight of their own choice, because otherwise Achilles will immediately defeat all the Trojans, but the Xanthus river directs Achilles to fight the Trojans on the assumption that Zeus has already decided the issue of the defeat of the Trojans by Achilles.

The gods are constantly squabbling among themselves. Some of them stand for the Trojans, others for the Greeks. Zeus is not seen to have any moral authority. The appearance of the gods is also depicted inconsistently. Athena in the fifth song of the Iliad is so huge that the chariot of Diomedes, on which she stepped, cracks from her, and in the Odyssey she is some kind of caring aunt for Odysseus, whom he himself treats without much respect.

In depicting the general course of action, in linking episodes and individual scenes, "divine intervention" plays a huge role. The plot movement is determined by a necessity that lies outside the character of the characters depicted, by the will of the gods, "fate". The mythological moment creates that unity in the picture of the world that the epic is not able to grasp rationally. For the Homeric interpretation of the gods, two circumstances are characteristic: the gods of Homer are much more humanized than was the case in the actual Greek religion, where the cult of fetishes, veneration of animals, etc., was still preserved; they are fully attributed not only a human appearance, but also human passions, and the epic individualizes the divine characters as clearly as human ones. Then, the gods are endowed - especially in the Iliad - with numerous negative features: they are petty, capricious, cruel, unjust. In dealing with each other, the gods are often even rude: there is a constant squabble on Olympus, and Zeus often threatens Hera and other obstinate gods with beatings. The Iliad does not create any illusions of the "goodness" of the divine control of the world. Otherwise, in the Odyssey: there, along with features reminiscent of the gods of the Iliad, there is also the concept of gods as guardians of justice and morality.

HECTOR is the central character in Homer's Iliad (between the 10th and 8th centuries BC). Son of King Priam of Troy, father of fifty sons and fifty daughters. Husband of Andromache, daughter of Getion, king of Thebes, who was killed by Achilles. In the "Iliad" G. is accompanied by the epithets "great", "brilliant", "armor-brilliant", "helmet-brilliant". He is the main defender of Troy, besieged by the Achaeans, led by Menelaus and Agamemnon. In book VI of the Iliad, G.'s meeting with Andromache is described, which predicts his imminent death: “Your courage will destroy you! You do not feel sorry for the baby, nor for the poor mother. And soon I will be a widow, soon the Achaeans will kill you in battle. G. returns to the battlefield.

Book VII shows his single combat with Ajax, the son of Telamon, a friend of Hercules. Nobody won this fight. Opponents, making sure that their forces are equal, exchanged gifts. In another duel, G. kills Patroclus, a friend of Achilles. Patroclus before his death predicts that G. will soon die at the hands of Achilles, who will avenge the death of a friend.

One of the climaxes of the Iliad is Book XXII, titled The Assassination of Hector. The duel between Achilles and G. is watched by the gods. Zeus sympathizes with G. and wants to save him, but the goddess Athena objects to him. The case is decided by "two lots of death" thrown on the scales. Athena helps Achilles kill G. Having won the duel, Achilles abused the body of the defeated enemy, tying him to a chariot and dragging him near the walls of Troy in front of G.'s parents. Andromache bitterly mourns the death of her husband. Book XXIV tells of the ransom of the body of G. Achaeans by the Trojans and the Trojans concluded a truce for eleven days so that the parents and people of Troy could mourn and bury G. After the fall of Troy, the widow of G. Andromache became the slave of Neoptolem, the son of Achilles. Her fate is told in the tragedy of Euripides "Andromache" (V century BC).

Achilles (Achilles) is the protagonist of the poem, a stern and implacable warrior. In response to the insult inflicted on him by Agamemnon, the supreme leader and leader of the Achaean army, who had been besieging Troy for 10 years, A. refuses to participate in the war. Because of this, the Achaeans suffer one defeat after another. But when the leader of the Trojans, Hector, kills a friend of A. Patroclus, A. forgets about his offense and reconciles with Agamemnon. The mighty A., patronized by the goddess Athena, shows miracles of courage on the battlefield and kills Hector in a duel, whose death marks the final defeat of the Trojans. The image of A. bears the typical features of a mythological epic hero, a courageous warrior, in whose system of values ​​the most important thing is military honor. Proud, quick-tempered and proud, he participates in the war not so much in order to return to the king of Sparta Menelaus his wife Helen, kidnapped by Paris (this was the reason for the war with Troy), but to glorify his name. A. craves more and more new exploits. He sees the meaning of his life in constantly risking his life.

6. The theme of fate and homeland in Homer's Odyssey. The peculiarity of the composition. Image of Odysseus. Features of the epic style of Homer .

In terms of plot (mythological sequence of events), the Odyssey corresponds to the Iliad. But it does not tell about military events, but about wanderings. Scientists call it: "the epic poem of wanderings." The fate of Odysseus comes to the fore - the glorification of the mind and willpower. The Odyssey corresponds to the mythology of late heroism. Dedicated to the last 40 days of the return of Odysseus to his homeland. The very beginning testifies that the center is the return.

Composition: harder than the Iliad. The Odyssey has three storylines: 1) the Olympian gods. But Odysseus has a goal and no one can stop him. Odysseus extricates himself from everything. 2) the return itself is a difficult adventure. 3) Ithaca: two motifs: the actual events of the matchmaking and the theme of Telemachus' search for his father. Telemachia is considered by some to be a late insertion.

For the first time, a female image appears, equal to a male one - Penelope, the wise woman - the wife of Odysseus. Example: she is spinning a funeral cover.

The poem is more complicated not only in composition, but also in terms of the psychological motivation of actions.

The main plot of the "Odyssey" refers to the type of legends widespread in world folklore about the "return of the husband" to the moment when his wife is ready to marry another, and upsets a new wedding.

The poem opens, after the usual invocation of the Muse, brief description situations: all participants in the Trojan campaign, who escaped death, returned safely home, one Odysseus languishes in separation from his family, forcibly held by the nymph Calypso. Further details are put into the mouths of the gods, discussing the question of Odysseus in their council. Athena, who patronizes Odysseus, offers to send the messenger of the gods Hermes to Calypso with the order to release Odysseus, and she herself goes to Ithaca, to Odysseus' son Telemachus. In Ithaca at this time, suitors wooing Penelope. Athena encourages Telemachus to go to Nestor and Menelaus, who have returned from Troy, to find out about their father and prepare for revenge on the suitors (Book 1).

2nd book gives a picture of the popular assembly of Ithaca. Telemachus complains about suitors, but the people are powerless against noble youth. The suitors demand that Penelope choose someone. Along the way, the image of the “reasonable” Penelope arises, with the help of tricks delaying consent to marriage. With the help of Athena, Telemachus equips the ship and secretly leaves Ithaca for Pylos to Nestor.

Nestor informs Telemachus about the return of the Achaeans from under Troy and about the death of Agamemnon, but for further news he sends him to Sparta to Menelaus, who returned home later than other Achaean leaders.

Warmly received by Menelaus and Helen, Telemachus learns that Odysseus is a prisoner of Calypso. The grooms, frightened by the departure of Telemachus, set up an ambush to kill him on his way back (Book 4). This whole part of the poem is rich in everyday sketches: feasts, holidays, chants, table conversations are depicted. "Heroes" appear before us in a peaceful home environment.

A new line of storytelling begins. The next part of the poem takes us to the realm of the fabulous and the miraculous.

In the 5th book, the gods send Hermes to Calypso, whose island is depicted with features reminiscent of Greek ideas about the kingdom of death (the very name Kalypso - "cover" - is associated with the image of death). Calypso releases Odysseus.

Having escaped, thanks to the goddess Levkofeya, from the storm, Fr. Scheria, where happy people live - feaks, sailors with fabulous ships. Meeting of Odysseus on the shore with Nausicaa. (6 books)

Alkina, with his wife Areta, receives the wanderer in a luxurious palace (book 7) and arranges games and a feast in his honor, where the blind singer Demodocus sings about the exploits of Odysseus. O. is crying. (Book 8). There is reason to think that, according to the original meaning of the myth, the feacs are death shippers, carriers to the kingdom of the dead, but this mythological meaning has already been forgotten in the Odyssey, and death shippers have been replaced by fabulous people leading a peaceful and magnificent lifestyle.

The story of Odysseus about adventures occupies the 9-12th book of the poem and contains a number of folk stories. The first adventure is still quite realistic: Odysseus and his companions rob the city of the Kikons (in Thrace), but then a storm carries his ships over the waves for many days, and he ends up in distant, wonderful countries. At first, this is a country of peaceful lotus-eaters, “lotus eaters”, having tasted it, a person forgets about his homeland and forever remains a lotus collector. Then Odysseus falls into the land of the Cyclopes (Cyclops), one-eyed monsters, where the cannibal giant Polyphemus - O. blinds him.

The god of the winds, Eol, handed Odysseus a fur with unfavorable winds tied in it, but not far from their native shores, Odysseus's companions unleashed the fur, again they were in the sea. Then they again find themselves in the country of cannibal giants, the lestrigons, who destroyed all the O ships, except for 1, the cat then landed on the island of the sorceress Kirka (Circe). Kirka, like a typical folklore witch, lives in a dark forest, turns O's companions into pigs, but O, with the help of a wonderful plant (Hermes helped), overcomes the spell and enjoys Kirka's love for a year (book 10).

At the direction of Kirk, he goes to the realm of the dead in order to question the soul of the famous Theban soothsayer Tiresias. Odysseus talks with his mother, with comrades-in-arms, Agamemnon, Achilles, sees various heroes and heroines of the past (book 11)

Returning from the realm of the dead. Odysseus visits Kirk again, sails with his ship past the deadly Sirens, past Skilla and Charybdis.

The final episode of the Odyssey narrative depicts the cruelty of the gods and their contempt for human grief. On about. Trinacaria, where the herds of the god Helios (the sun) grazed, Odysseus and his companions were forced to linger due to the winds, food ran out. O. fell asleep, the satellites killed the sacred animals, Zeus destroyed the ships. Odysseus escaped, thrown by the waves on about. Ogygia, where he then stayed with Calypso (book 12).

The Theacians, richly endowing Odysseus, take him to Ithaca. The realm of fairy tales is coming to an end. Odysseus, turned by Athena into a beggar old man, goes to the faithful swineherd Eumeus (book 13). The unrecognizability of the hero is a constant motif in the plot about the "return of the husband." Unrecognizability is used to introduce numerous episodic figures and everyday paintings. Before the listener passes a string of images, friends and enemies of Odysseus, and both of them lost faith in the possibility of his return.

Stay at Eumeus (book 14) - an idyllic picture; a devoted slave, honest and hospitable, but tempted by hard life experience and somewhat distrustful, is depicted with great love, although not without slight irony. Here Odysseus meets his son Telemachus. (Book 15 - 16). In the form of a beggar tramp, Odysseus comes to his house. The "recognition" of Odysseus is repeatedly prepared and pushed back again. Only the old nanny Eurycleia recognizes Odysseus by the scar on his leg.

With the 21st book, the denouement begins. Penelope promises her hand to the one who, having bent the bow of Odysseus, will pass the arrow through the twelve rings.

O. opens up to the suitors and, with the help of Telemachus and Athena, kills them (book 22). Only after this does the “recognition” of Odysseus by Penelope take place (book 23). The poem ends with the scene of the arrival of the souls of the suitors in the underworld, the meeting of Odysseus with his father Laertes and the conclusion of peace between Odysseus and the relatives of the dead (book 24).

Odysseus is the most prominent figure in the Ionian epic. This is not just a diplomat and a practitioner, and certainly not just a cunning, hypocrite. The practical and business inclination of his nature acquires its real significance only in connection with his selfless love for his native hearth and his wife waiting for him, as well as his constantly difficult fate, forcing him to constantly suffer and shed tears away from his homeland. Odysseus is par excellence a sufferer. His constant epithet in the Odyssey is "long-suffering". Athena tells Zeus with great feeling about his constant suffering. Poseidon is constantly angry with him, and he knows this very well. If not Poseidon, then Zeus and Helios break his ship and leave him alone in the sea. His nanny wonders why the gods are constantly indignant at him with his constant piety and obedience to the will of the gods. His grandfather gave him the name precisely as "the man of divine wrath." The motive of love for the motherland. In the Iliad, Odysseus at war is glorified in 10 cantos. In the Iliad, he fights bravely and even gets wounded, but Diomedes tries to keep him from fleeing and reproaches him for cowardice. Cunning, fantasy cunning. Then he gets out of the cave under the belly of the ram, grabbing his wool, and thus deceives the vigilance of the blind Polyphemus. Then he makes the Cyclops and the ogre drunk and gouges out his only eye. Now he slips past the sirens, where no one has ever passed alive and healthy, then he makes his way into his own palace and takes possession of it. He himself speaks of his subtle cunning, and Polyphemus guessed that it was not strength that killed him, but the cunning of Odysseus. Odysseus is a complete adventure, resourcefulness. He lies even when there is no need for it, but for this patron Athena praises him:

It would be very thieving and crafty, who will compete with you

Could in all sorts of tricks; it would be difficult even for God.

Forever the same: cunning, insatiable in deceit! Really,

Even in your native land, you can't stop

False speeches and deceptions, loved by you since childhood?

Introducing himself to Achilles, he reports about himself: I am Odysseus Laertides. I am glorious with cunning inventions among all people. My glory reaches heaven.

Everyone praises Odysseus' love for Penelope. He was both the husband of Calypso, and, moreover, for at least seven years, and the spouse of Kirk, and according to other sources, he even had children from them. However, he prefers immortality to return to his native hearth. He spent his nights with Calypso, and during the day he wept on the seashore. Odysseus still likes to pretend to be a merchant and entrepreneur: he is a very prudent owner. Arriving at Ithaca, he first of all rushes to count the gifts that were left for him by the Phaeacians. Finally, let's add to everything that has been said the brutal cruelty that this humane and sensitive person shows. Tracking down the suitors, he chooses a convenient moment to deal with them and fills the whole palace with their corpses. Sacrificer Leod tries to ask him for mercy, but he blows his head off. Melantius was cut into pieces and given to be eaten by dogs, unfaithful servants Telemachus, on the orders of his father, hung on a rope. After this wild reprisal, Odysseus, as if nothing had happened, hugs the maids and even sheds tears, and then a happy meeting with his wife.

So, Homer's Odysseus is the deepest patriot, the bravest warrior, suffer, diplomat, merchant, businessman, dodgy adventurer, womanizer, wonderful family man and cruel executioner.

B7 Works and Days by Hesiod as an example of a didactic epic. The image of the Iron Age. The peculiarity of style.

Didactic literature- a symbol for various literary genres that introduce non-literary (philosophical, theological, scientific, practical-moral, etc.) material into the usual forms of artistic and verbal creativity.

The decline of the heroic epic. Hymns and parodies. Didactic and genealogical epic (Hesiod) The tribal community was in decline. Private initiative grew. Individual proprietors were put forward, for whom tribal authorities no longer mattered. And if Homer was the eve of class society, then Hesiod already reflects the orientation of man within class society. Mythology, already sufficiently shaken by Homer, directly turned either into morality (didactic epic) or into an object of collecting and cataloging (genealogical epic). If Homer's poems are addressed to representatives of the tribal nobility and sing of the exploits of heroes, Hesiod's listeners are his compatriots, the Boeotian peasants. In contrast to Homer, who rarely teaches, Hesiod's works are didactic, i.e. instructive, instructive character. At the very beginning of the poem “Works and Days” (v. 9-380), the poet’s reasoning is given about the two Eris, the goddesses of envy and discord. Further Hesiod gives the tale of Pandora and the description of the five ages, as well as the fable of the nightingale and the hawk. The second part of the poem presents pictures of the farmer's work, a description of winter in Boeotia, talks about the poet's attitude to work, a woman, provides examples of all kinds of superstitions and practical advice. those. hybrid, meaning the impudent arrogance of people when they, blinded by the gods, violate the traditional norms and limits of behavior. Hesiod's style is the opposite of the luxury, verbosity and breadth of the Homeric style. It is striking in its dryness and brevity. "Theogony". After a prologue devoted to the Muses, a dry and prosaic list is given, first of the main deities, and then of the marriages of the gods with mortal women. The war with the titans composed the composition of the poem. "Works and Days". This poem is an example of a didactic epic; it develops several themes. The first theme is built on the preaching of the truth, with the insertion of episodes about Prometheus and about the five ages (golden, silver, copper, the age of heroes and the iron one, in which he lives). Belief in divine justice and in the single-saving power of labor is the central idea of ​​the poem. The second, main theme is devoted to field work, agricultural implements, livestock, clothing, food, etc. These verses speak of happy and unhappy days for work (for example, on On the 13th day you can not start sowing, but this day is good for planting plants). The whole poem is interspersed with various instructions that portray before us the image of a peasant who knows how and when to arrange his economic affairs profitably. "Homeric hymns" make up a collection of 33 works, conventionally called hymns. They were created at different times. From the 7th century BC and ending with the period of late antiquity. Most of them are proemii - kr.introduction before the recitation of a story about the deeds of a particular god. "Hymn to Aphrodite" dates back to 7-6 BC. It tells about the meeting of Aphrodite with the Trojan hero Anchises. Homer's poem "The War of Mice and Frogs" is a parody of the Iliad. It serves as convincing evidence of the decline of the heroic epic. The gods are reduced to the level of everyday characters.

An image of the Iron Age. It seems to Hesiod that the fate of people is a slow extinction, and from here he is born historical pessimism. He speaks with delight of the pre-Seusian time, when people prospered under the rule of Cronus. It was a golden age, when mortals "knew no sorrow, no sorrow, no hard work." There was no cruel rivalry between them, there were no painful contradictions of faith and life, "their soul was calm and clear." They labored with joy, died, "as if embraced by sleep." But those times are gone forever. The next, silver generation is already much worse, it gave rise to madmen who refused to serve the gods. Probably, in the legend about them, the appearance of the Achaean aliens who rejected the old cults was vaguely reflected, while the golden age could be a memory of the glorious times of Crete. The silver generation was followed by the copper generation of mighty heroes. But "the terrible power of their own hands brought them destruction." The fourth period is the time of the heroes of the Trojan campaign. "A terrible war and a terrible battle ruined them." (Meaning the Trojan battle) And finally came iron age - decline of humanity. Obsessed with greed and malice, people are waging an endless struggle among themselves. The poet laments that he is destined to be a witness to this gloomy era.

If I could not live with the generation of the fifth century!
I would like to die before him, or be born later.
The earth is now inhabited by iron people. Will not
They respite neither at night nor during the day from work, and from grief,
And from misfortune. The gods will give them heavy worries

But ahead Hesiod sees something even worse - the complete decrepitude of people; it seems to him that history is an inclined plane along which they slide into the abyss. The myth about the ages of mankind, resurrected in our day by Spengler and Toynbee, was already known in Babylon, where a pessimistic view of the world first developed. But Hesiod handled the subject on his own in order to express his sad credo. The Boeotian singer was often compared to the prophet Amos. Indeed, this great contemporary of Hesiod also came from a peasant milieu and also denounced social untruth. But the eyes of the prophet were directed forward. He saw in history not only periods of regression, but also the highest purposefulness. The Greek poet, on the other hand, is all turned towards the past: for him, the most beautiful thing that was on earth rests in the graves. So, wandering somewhere between the magic of great-grandfather cults, the imperious Olympus and the irresistible thirst for justice, Hesiod forever remained in vicious circle contradictions, complaining about the fate that threw him into the darkness of the Iron Age.

AT 8. The main varieties of ancient Greek poetry: melika and declamatory lyrics. An elegy in the work of Theognis.

The term "lyric" does not belong to the era we are considering; it was created later, during the time of the Alexandrian philologists, replacing the earlier term “melika” (from melos - “song”), and was applied to those types of songs that were performed to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument, primarily a seven-stringed lyre, the invention which the myth ascribes to the god Hermes. At the present time, when speaking of Greek lyric poetry, the term is used in a broader sense, embracing such genres that the ancients did not recognize as "lyrical", for example, elegies accompanied by the sounds of a flute.

It is necessary to distinguish: 1) elegy, 2) iambic and 3) melika, or lyric in the narrow sense of the word; this latter, in turn, has numerous divisions depending on the content or cult task of the song, but the main one is its division into two categories - monodic lyrics performed by an individual singer, and choral lyrics. The difference between all these species was due to the fact that they arose from various types folk song, received their literary development in different regions of Greece and in different class conditions, and each genre had its own themes, its own stylistic and verse features, and even retained the dialect of the area in which it first took shape literary. The genres developed independently and very rarely crossed with each other.

Elegy civil.

First of all, we meet in Greece from the very beginning of the 7th century. BC. with a militant-patriotic elegy. Its most ancient representative is Kallinus from Ephesus, who in his elegies exhorted the inhabitants of Magnesia to resist the Cimmerians who attacked them. There is reason to believe that Callinus was even older than Archilochus. Further known is Tyrtaeus (second half of the 7th century BC), about whom it was said that once the Spartans asked the Athenians for a commander in the second Messenian War (645-628) and that they sent them a lame school teacher Tyrtaeus, which allegedly inspired the Spartan troops, so that Sparta won. Tirtaeus wrote an elegy called "Benevolence", where he praised the good peaceful order and called for the protection of antiquity. In another elegy, "Councils," he expressed his soul as a patriotic warrior in a simple and artless form. Tirtaeus is also credited with a military song during the attack, written in living anapaests, called "Embaterium".

love elegy

Love elegy is a very subjective, personal lyric, its representative in the 7th century. BC. is Mimnerm. The main theme of his elegies is love. He sings of the joys of youth and is horrified by the impending old age. He prefers death to old age and the absence of pleasure. In his discussions of human life, he is distinguished by a melancholic way of thinking. In 1937, Mimnerm's poem "Smyrneida" became known, which spoke about the attack of King Gyges on the inhabitants of Smyrna. This is a military history poem. Therefore, Mimnermus should be considered a representative of the epic rather than the lyric. In any case, in his work one can see a transitional stage from the epic to the lyric.

ELEGY IN THE WORKS OF FEO NIT MEGARSKY.

He was born around 546 BC. When a struggle between the aristocracy and democracy took place in Megara, in view of the victory of the democratic party, Theognis retires for a long time into exile, from where, after the victory of the aristocracy, he returns, however, without receiving his property back. Therefore, Theognis is characterized by passionate polemicism, extraordinary irritation and contempt for people. About 1400 verses have come down to us, divided into two unequal parts: 1280 verses - instructions to Theognid's favorite, Kirnu, and about 150 verses - a love elegy.

Since Theognis has even more instructions than Solon, they were subsequently used in compiling moral and instructive collections. Such a collection is Feognidovsky, in which there are poems by Tyrtaeus, Mimnermus, Solon, Archilochus and others. In particular, the verses of love content hardly belong to Theognid because of their too specific nature. in his poems we find a call for modesty and prudence (prudence is a gift of the gods, so happy is the one who possesses this gift), a call to worship the gods, advice to avoid the company of bad people, choose friends wisely, not trust people, even relatives, keep friendship , help in trouble and preserve the old order.

The peculiarity of Theognid is his unusually passionate and at the same time gloomy aristocratic way of thinking. This is a preacher of violence and cruelty, even hatred for all these "loaders" and "ship mob". He wants to "press down the unreasonable mob with a strong fifth, bend it under the yoke." However, he treats the "noble" no better. The "noble" are mired in greed and money fetishism. Thus, in Theognid's lyrics, social ideology is combined with deep personal excitement. Theognid's clear anti-democratic

epic means nothing more than a word about exploits (in Greek, “epos” - “word”), songs that were performed by wandering singers. To the accompaniment of the lyre he sang them or aed- a songwriter, or rhapsode performer and collector of heroic tales.

Homer. "Iliad" and "Odyssey" - the great ancient Greek poems

Tradition considers the creator of the ancient Greek epic Homer, a blind wandering aed, a beggar singer. Already in ancient Greece, his name was surrounded by legends. Many subsequently considered this name a household name. "Homer" in one of the Greek dialects means "blind". Many scholars, not understanding how one person could orally create and retain in memory thousands of verses of the Iliad and the Odyssey, have questioned the existence of Homer himself (see the Homeric question).

For us, the main thing is not the personality of Homer, but those greatest poems that are associated with his name. These poems were formed in the 9th - 7th centuries. BC e. They were recorded, as is commonly believed, in the VI century. BC e. The myths on the basis of which these poems are created go back to hoary antiquity and, undoubtedly, are the creation of the people. However, the completion of the poems and their artistic decoration indicate that they took their final form on the eve of the emergence of the slave-owning formation, at a time when the communal-tribal system was dying.

Homer

The heroic epic originated on the coast of Asia Minor and nearby islands. It was created mainly in a special, Ionian dialect (the common Greek language in Greece appears only in the 4th - 3rd centuries BC). "Iliad" (see its summary and full text) and "Odyssey" (see summary and full text) are included in the so-called Trojan mythological cycle, which combines a number of myths reflecting the struggle of the Greeks for mastering the Asia Minor city of Ilion, or Troy .

The Iliad depicts several episodes from the tenth year of the siege of Troy; "Odyssey" - the return to the homeland of one of the Greek heroes, Odysseus.

For a long time, these events were considered purely mythical, legendary, although the Greeks themselves stubbornly repeated that the Trojan War was approximately (according to our calculation) in the XII century. BC e. In the 70s of the XIX century. German G. Schliemann, a lover of antiquity and a very wealthy man, with the help of leading scientists, excavated in the territory of the alleged Troy, on the hill of Gissarlik in Asia Minor. The excavations yielded rich results. Scientists could say with certainty that a large and rich city really stood on this site, burned by enemies (traces of several fires are well preserved). The things found during the excavations were striking in their luxury, the finest work on gold and silver, and very much resembled the utensils and expensive items described in Homer's poems.

Excavations continued on the mainland of Greece, in Mycenae and Tiryns, where the tombs of the most ancient leaders - basileus, or kings, many gold items and other treasures were found. This confirmed the Homeric opinion about the "gold-rich" Mycenae. So, gradually the Trojan War and the campaign of the Greeks acquired real features. It is now considered established that around the XII century. BC e. the tribes of the Achaeans (even from Asia Minor we received information about the powerful state of Ahiyava) went under Troy in search of new lands and riches. However, when the Achaeans conquered Troy and returned to their homeland, they began to be pressed by the tribes of the Dorians who came from the north, who were more backward culturally and with a lower social order. The Dorians conquered the Achaeans. However, the memory of the great last feat of the Achaean tribe lived among the people, and songs about the heroes of the Trojan War gradually began to take shape. The Dorians, who considered themselves descendants of Hercules, who also once besieged Troy, saw in the epic of the Trojan War the glorious past of their ancestors.

When Attica and Athens gained primacy in Greece, the Athenians also associated the exploits of the sons of their hero, Theseus, with this war. Thus, it turned out that all the Greek tribes had in the Homeric epic a work that glorified their common great past, equally dear and eternal for everyone.

The Greeks more than once aspired to Asia Minor. Already in the VII - VI centuries. BC e. its coast and the nearby islands were colonized by the Ionian Greeks, and it was the cradle of Homer's epic.

It is also interesting to note that the Homeric epic reflected an even more ancient culture, namely the culture of the island of Crete, which flourished on the eve of the spread of the Achaean tribes in the 13th-12th centuries. BC e. In Homer, one can find many elements of everyday life, the life of society, reminiscent of this ancient culture. When deciphering the so-called linear letter "B", it turned out that the Cretan inscriptions mention the names of heroes known from the epic of Homer, as well as the names of gods, who have always been considered purely Greek. When these letters are fully read, perhaps they will open before us a new world of the pre-Homeric epic, which served for Homer as a poetic model and a collection of ancient legends.

Each people of ancient and original education has an ancient, from the depths of time going, but not hardened and not stable for a long time, modified and multiplied poetic tradition, which little by little he learns to protect from further changes, as an inviolable heritage of the original revelations. sent down to people gods. Thus, the people acquires sacred texts, the study of which educates generations and gives the first reasons for the development of the science of the word and the art of verbal, history, religious doctrine and philosophical speculation.

Such was the meaning of the Homeric poems in Greece. They signified, for everything fragmented into many political bodies of the Hellenic world, a nationwide connection, the consciousness and materialization of which was the urgent need of a nation not united by a state union; why, since ancient times, certain cities, by legislative means, have introduced the public proclamation of passages from Homer by rhapsodic reciters into the obligatory circle of the festive rite and since the 6th century they have been stocking up, for storage in state archives, certified lists of the Iliad and the Odyssey. On Homer, from generation to generation, the Hellenes learned from childhood - both at home, and at school, and on the square - what Hellenism is, how the high system of ancient speech and its "sacred" mode, primordial disposition and cherished custom, knowledge of fatherly gods and the memory of native heroes. From Homer, whose verses for long centuries were recited by heart, closely studied,

were interpreted in many ways - the Hellenes developed their own poetry (later epic, choral lyrics, and finally tragedy), and grammar mother tongue, and the first principles of ethics, poetics, dialectics, rhetoric, and their sacred history, and the plastic ideals of fine art (thus, in the 5th century, the famous lines of the first song of the Iliad, st. 528-530, determined the artistic design of Phidias when creating the Olympian statue of Zeus and forever established the iconographic type of the omnipotent father of gods and men), until the time finally came for critical thought, and in the same old Homer, learned wit and aesthetic exactingness first tested their strength and refined themselves to complete independence from the tradition sanctified by the ages. Then the blind old man, inspired by the divine Muses, turned into one of the exemplary, "canonical", or "classical" poets, into the simple-hearted, "good" Homer, into an artist to match other authors of literary literature, unusually skillful, although in many ways not yet perfect, endowed with incomparable power of genius, but not at all infallible and sometimes offending exquisite taste.

Homer and humanism.

Ancient philology had already outlined this path of comparing Homer with the creators of the artificial epic, the path along which the new European thought also went from the 14th century, from the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio, when Homer, known in the Middle Ages only by hearsay, as the eldest, great brother of the prophetic prophet and magician Virgil on the poetic Parnassus, appeared in more tangible outlines, as a result of the first acquaintance with his poems, partly already in the original, according to old lists, disassembled with the help of foreign learned Greeks, and then - also from first-printed books; for in 1488, in Florence, the enlightenment activity of the Byzantine emigrant humanists, already of the second generation, culminated, by the way, in the first edition of the Homeric poems, edited by the Greek Demetrius Chalkondyla.

Only the notion of the organic nature of the cultural-historical process, which first dawned on Giovanni Battista Vico at the end of the 17th century, and, in particular, of the organic growth of folk poetry, developed in the 18th century by Herder, made it necessary to draw a sharp line between the artificial epic (what, for example, ., poems by Virgil, Dante, Ariosta, Tasso, Camões) and folk epics, among the Greeks - Homer's epics.

II.
Homeric question.

Friedrich August Wolff (Prolegomena ad Homerum, 1795), following in the footsteps of several predecessors (of which special merit belongs, together with Vico, a 17th-century writer, Abbé d'Aubigny), with energy proclaimed the opinion that it was impossible to assume a planned epic creativity in such an early era , as the era of the creation of Homer's poems, which did not yet know writing, and the need to consider them as a collection of heterogeneous epic tales, collected and presented in more or

less harmonious order only in the VI century. BC, by a scientific commission of rightists, by order of the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus.

This doctrine created an extraordinary stir in the whole educated world and found both enthusiastic adherents and ardent opponents. Schiller wondered with annoyance how such a great poet as Goethe could treat this doctrine favorably, which overlooked the living face of Homer the poet; however, Goethe, little by little, returned to the belief in the historical reality of Homer. The famous "Homer question" began; and the next (1837) stage in the development of Wolff's vision of Homer as a legendary figure, under whose guise lies many diverse singers, was Lachmann's theory of the Iliad's disintegration, upon careful study, into a number of epics, which were not extensive in terms of volume, or ballads, which this scholar, more or less arbitrarily, tried to isolate and delineate from the connection.

Since the end of the 18th century, the idea of ​​Homer as a simple symbol of the folk singer-storyteller, and of the ancient epic in general as a nameless, impersonal, artless, organically popular art has prevailed. This view rested on two premises, which were two exaggerations: the antiquity of the Homeric world was recognized as primitive antiquity, and its culture was more integral and one-elemental, less divided and heterogeneous than it turned out to be in later historical study. It was an abstract ideology that nurtured the ideal of an "era of organic", golden, infantile epoch of a naive and almost unconscious epic, which, as the philosopher Schelling wrote, corresponds to "such a general state, where there is no contradiction between personal freedom and the natural course of things, where everything is human skіya relations enter the same track of the historical process. The impression from the first acquaintance with the folk epic of other countries, especially with the Serbian epic songs, the performers of which are blind singers with a harp or a bandura, so vividly reminiscent of the traditional blind Homer with his "kithara" or "forminga" (small, primitive lyre), seduced to see in Homeric creativity an unadulterated expression of the patriarchal-Hellenic, simple-heartedly clear outlook on the world, a direct manifestation of tribal poetic genius, the creation of a folk element that has not yet singled out either a uniquely creative personality or even a culturally isolated group.

But still, philologists-scribes, free from such general premises, occupied primarily not with the establishment of broad perspectives, but with an accurate investigation of the verbal monument to be studied, it was clear that before them was not a formless heap of tales and byles, but a strictly thought-out epic unity, revealing undoubted traces of conscious and skillful processing. The conviction that the Homeric poems are an artistic whole, that they are a finished work, forms the basis of the conservative trend in the debate about Homer. Its defenders, like the ancient scholars of the Alexandrian period, would like to confine themselves to the discovery and elimination of individual late insertions that distorted the Homeric original in places. So, Nitch (G. W. Nitzsch, who spoke for the first time with his defense of tradition

in the thirties of the last century) considers Homer the true author of both great poems attributed to him, from which they are subject to exclusion only for special reasons in each separate case, suspected particulars; Homer's work consisted in an artistic fusion and completion of all the epic material that had come down to him from an earlier time; widely and freely using the epic tradition, he partly compiled it, partly modified and enriched it on his own.

Already G. German, the founder of modern philology, outlined (in 1831) the third point of view: a complex and comprehensive epic could grow out of the initial simple epic grain. Therefore, the task of the study became the disclosure in the Iliad of the first Iliad, in the Odyssey - the primordial Odyssey. At the same time, it was necessary to find out how this core developed, what successive deposits were left on it, as if in layers, by new eras, how other narratives, previously alien to it, were brought into connection with the basic composition.

On this fundamental basis rests the interpretation of the growth of the Iliad from the comparatively small poem "On the Wrath of Achilles", or "Achilleides", given by the Englishman Groth in his classic "History of Greece" (1846). Grotto's attempt proved extremely fruitful; the compromise he proposed—to agree on the assumption that Homer, the author of the Achilleid, himself expanded it to the size of the Iliad—could not, of course, satisfy anyone; but it was not so much about the creator, but about the creation of the Homeric epic, about its emergence and its transformations, about the pure lines of the original architectural plan in a colossal building cluttered with extensions and reconstructions. Researchers began to search for the "proto-Iliad"; all sorts of criteria were applied to distinguish more ancient from later elements in the present composition of the epic. B. Nize (in the book “On the Development of Homeric Poetry”, 1882) reduced the Homeric question to the problem of successive guild creativity of singers, which he showed to be significantly different from folk creativity. A. Fikk (1881 and later) ventured to remove from Homer his Ionian attire and poems written in the Ionian dialect, to declare common retellings of the original Iliad and Odyssey, composed by the Aeolians in Aeolian. K. Robert (“Studien zur Ilias”, 1901) uniquely used the latest archeological data to determine the relative antiquity of the Iliad’s constituent parts by the type of weapons they mention, based on the contrast between the ancient Mycenaean monuments of military life and the remains of a later culture; not without some self-delusion by the harmony of the results obtained by this method, Robert tried to prove that the archaeological signs of antiquity are confirmed by the predominance of Aeolian elements in the language - which makes it possible for him to restore the main "song of Achilles"; and it cannot be denied that this hypothetical restoration of his, being a condensed excerpt from the Iliad, transcribed into the Aeolian dialect, makes an unexpected, whole and vivid impression with its naked simplicity, the lyrical tone of the bylina and concentrated tragic energy. Many scholars, however, not convinced by any of a number of attempts at critical wit to resolve the "Homeric question", remained at

the opinion that the latter is generally undecidable and that, apart from particular results, all work on it has not led to any general conclusion worthy of taking the place of the ancient tradition of Homer, the creator of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

As for the Odyssey, which presented fewer reasons for suspecting its whole composition and artistic unity than the Iliad, it became the subject of deep critical study only half a century ago, when A. Kirchhoff ("Homer's Odyssey", 1859, reprinted in 1 879), taking up exposing the “great-Odyssey” in it, came to the conclusion about its emergence from the most ancient adhesion of two essentially different primordial tales, which underwent further successive expansion, with the introduction of new, initially alien to her circle, epic elements. On the basis of Kirchhoff's investigations, Wilamowitz-Mellendorff's "Homeric Studies" dedicated to Odyssey (1884) arose. An overview of the Homeric question as it appears today, and a versatile criticism of all the opinions expressed on this issue, the reader will find in the 2nd edition of P. Cauer's book "Basic Questions of Homeric Criticism" *.

In general, we can say that the theory of extensions, coming from Hermann, has taken a firm place in the history of the Homeric question, and still open, although it cannot be argued that the efforts of scientists managed to establish with complete certainty and exact certainty the relative prescription of all the constituent parts of the Homeric epic separately. and present an undoubted picture of the formation of the available poems from their ancient and simple prototypes.

III.
Aeolian beginning in
Ionian epic.

Thus the newest study inevitably limits the now obsolete doctrine of the wholly folk character of Homeric poetry. Between two extremes - equating Homer with the creators of artificial epics and the idea of ​​the authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey as simple retellers of what, little by little, due to some natural process, spontaneously arose in impersonal, popular creativity - between these two extremes establish a third possibility, which has all the signs of historical and philological probability for itself, the possibility of seeing in Homer's poems creativity in many respects still close to folk, but already different from it,

* R. Gauer, "die Grundfragen der Homerkritik", 2. Aufl., Leipz. 1909.—In Russian, the Homeric question is devoted to a study by F. Sokolov, 1868, "The Homer Question" (Proceedings of Ѳ. Ѳ. Sokolov, St. Petersburg, 1910, pp. 1-148) and Shestakov's two-volume essay "On the Origin of Homer's Poems" (Kazan, 1892-1899). From the literature about Homer in Russian, we will also mention the translated work of Jebb (“Homer. Introduction to the Iliad and Odyssey”, 1892) and the original historian D. M. Petrushevsky “Society and the State in Homer.”— Among the presentations of the Homeric question in general guides to In the history of Greek literature, the chapter on the epic of Homer in the book by W. Christ, “Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur”, 5. Auflage, bearb. von W. Schmid, München 1908, Ss. 24— 85, - in the 7th volume of "Handbuch der class. Alterthums-Wissenschaft" by Ivan Müller).

not similar either in its methods, or in its reasons and tasks to the fruits of artificial writing and poetic individualism, but nevertheless already calculated on the aesthetic assessment of listeners and consciously pursuing certain goals of cultural and moral impact on society. It is no longer possible to say: the poet Homer is not conceivable; he just has not been proven as a historical person, because there is not a single reliable evidence of his personality in a number of later stories and fables about a wandering blind rhapsode. But since creation itself bears witness to the creator, the name of Homer rightly opens for us the lists of Hellenic poets; only his face, as it were, doubles and multiplies for us, and we do not know - and, apparently, we will never know - whether the name of Homer was the composer of the original Achilles, or also the genius and already showing more traits of individual talent, the creator of some parts of the Iliad belonging to undoubtedly a later era, or, finally, the last collector and organizer of the code that has come down to us? There were several fathers of the Homeric epic in several generations, and the very name "Homer" remains mysterious and almost only symbolic.

That the Homeric poems are not pure folk creativity, although, on the other hand, not individual creativity, but, on the contrary, cumulative and gradual, will become clear from the conditions for the emergence and successive transmission of the ancient Hellenic epic. There is no doubt that the Ionian colonies in Asia Minor were the birthplace of the great poems; these poems are the creations of the Ionian genius, artistically receptive, universally versatile, mentally flexible and mobile, full of harmony, grace and a sense of proportion; and the dialect ih - the dialect of ancient Ionian. But the language of the poems surprises the researcher with the abundance of aeolisms interspersed in it, i.e. features of the Aeolian dialect. Let us add to this that the hero to whose glorification the Iliad, Achilles, is an Aeolian hero, originally alien to the Ionian tribe. Hence the opinion that the primordial Iliad - the song of the wrath of Achilles - was a tribal epic of ardent and warlike, courageously straightforward, lyrically sincere Aeolians and that it was composed in the Aeolian dialect; hence the attempts to approach the impression that this primordial epic was supposed to produce by transposing the Ionian hexameters that have come down to us into Aeolian ones. In this way, this attempt will anticipate, by the way, the fact that the hems are sprinkled with more or more equal, while they would have to be absent in the parts of the later origin, and that the poems of the text of the text of the Eol. translation into the Aeolian dialect is associated with some modifications in the text, with its deliberate adaptation to the Aeolian warehouse.

So, probably another view, according to which the Iliad arose in the area where the Aeolians formerly sat, and then the Ionians sat, so that the language of the local singers was more or less mixed. In its further development, the epic retained the original features of the dialect of the ancient Aeds: for many centuries the language of epic poetry remained a kind of dialectical variety, conventional poetic speech, different from the live speech of the Ionian tribe. This

the historical conclusion from observation of the language is in perfect agreement with the most reliable of the legends about the homeland of Homer, who, competing and arguing among themselves, considered their fellow countryman and citizen of the seven Greek urban communities. Precisely, in Smyrna we find, precisely, those historical conditions about which we spoke: before the Ionians finally ousted the Aeolians from it, both tribes interrupted one another beautiful seaside city in that distant era when the colonization of the Asia Minor coast, ascending with its beginning, took place to the XI century BC. X.

IV.
Thessalian epics.

But it clearly follows from what has been said above that those songs about the glories of heroes, which formed the first basis in the building of the slowly created Iliad, were Aeolian songs. They were brought with them to Asia Minor by the tribes who originally lived in Thessaly, south of Mount Olympus, which remained for the settlers the mountain of the gods. On it all the gods have their houses; on it and at its feet, in Pieria, the Muses live, delighting with the singing of the gods and reminding the old singers. The Thessalian Aeolians also knew the silver-footed sea goddess, Thetis, the wife of Peleus (originally the god of Mount Pelion), and have long been accustomed to mourn the sorrowful fate of Thetis's son, the beautiful Achilles (he, by patronymic - Pelid), who is destined short life, full of feats of incomparable glory, but poisoned by bitter losses and doomed to stop after Achilles defeats another hero - Hector.

The latest research has revealed the presence, in local Thessalian cults and heroic traditions, of a whole series of heroes gathered at Homer under the walls or within the walls of besieged Troy. The material presence, in the historical era, of the anciently glorified tombs serves as a reliable sign by which we can judge the place of original veneration of the hero and the homeland of the myth associated with him. The tomb of Hector, the main hero of Troy and the most dangerous enemy of the Greeks according to Homer, back in the time of Pausanias, who left us a description of his journey through Greece (II century A.D.), was one of the revered city shrines of the seven gates of Thebes in Boeotia. It seems that Hector in the most ancient epic tales, depicting the Aeolians, in their homeland, the memory of their militant movements from the north, from Thessaly, to central Greece, to the valley of the river Sperheya, played the role of defender of Tebe against the Thessalian newcomers and in these wars he was killed. According to one message preserved by Plutarch from the Attic genealogies of Istra, generally an unreliable historian, but in this case, obviously, writing down an old local legend - Alexander, whose name in Thessaly was Paris, was overpowered in battle, at the Sperchea river, Achilles and Patroclus b . And in this example, we see that the stories of the Homeric epic about the battles under the walls of Troy turn out to be a mirage reflection of the intertribal battles that took place in European Greece even before the colonists were evicted to Asia Minor. And if at Homer Alexander-Paris fights only

with the Thessalians, and if, according to legend, he fell at the hands of the Thessalian, Philoctetes, then the fidelity of the late epic to its original sources, the Aeolian heroic songs, is clearly shown here, long after the faces and events were torn off from their native soil and transferred to alien to them, semi-ideal world. Likewise, the coastal area of ​​Thebes in Asia Minor, the city of Andromache destroyed by Achilles (Ill. VI, 397), is nothing more than a projection of the city of Thebes in the region of Phthiotis; Andromache also belongs to the ancient Aeolian circle of epic legends, and Helen, as a goddess, was the subject of religious worship in Thessaly.

With such a stock of local legends about gods and native heroes, at the head of which he stood, next to his friend Patroclus, Achilles doomed to an early death, the Aeolian settlers came to Asia Minor, where new living conditions and new cultural influences awaited the newcomers.

v.
Do-Homeric polytheism.

The main change in the sphere of religious ideas, which determined the general shift in worldview and created new foundations for epic creativity, naturally followed from the very fact of resettlement: it was the loss of local cults, beliefs and rituals, directly due to the meaning of the ancient commandment these places and their material shrines.

The religion of the era preceding the resettlement consisted of the veneration of gods differing in glory and power, whose host was lost on the lower levels in a chaotic multitude of elemental, but almost always precisely localized demons that overwhelmed the world, and of the veneration of heroes. This polytheism was predominantly heterotheism; there were more centrifugal forces in him than centripetal forces. Even such religious ideas, which were originally common to all Hellenism and grew out of pre-Hellenic roots, as the idea of ​​the supreme Zeus, or Dіѣ, were so heterogeneous among different tribes and clans that they were united only by the name of the deity, coming from the very cradle of the Aryan race. But since the difference in rites also led to the creation of new names, established by the rite, to which the gods responded differently and which were needed in significant quantities in order to persistently attract divine help, avert the threat and in every possible way influence the supernatural powers by the conspiratorial power that lies in the word and in the name, then the polynomiality of deities and the variety of designations applied to the same religious concept served as a new impetus to the dismemberment and fragmentation of the fundamental unity of religious foundations. From this came the obscuring of the original meaning of many objects of private tribal belief; little by little it was forgotten, for example, that the name "Amphitrion" was once only the local name of Zeus, his cult nickname, and the admirers of Amphitryon, becoming subsequently

admirers of the all-Hellenic Zeus, retained the memory of Amphitryon only as a demigod, a hero, finally - just as about the anciently revered earthly father of the hero Hercules (among the Romans - Hercules), whose heavenly parent Zeus was declared, and the dispute of mutual claims to a real patronymic is so and remained unresolved.

But, in addition, numerous deities, which later became common Hellenic, are at first the exclusive property of individual tribes. Thus, the cult of Zeus's prophetic oak and Mother Earth in Dodon (Il. XVI, 234; Od. XIV, 327 and XIX, 296), which existed from time immemorial antiquity, "from the Pelasgians", has retained its local, Epirotian character even after after having won, already in the era of Homer, the general recognition of the Hellenic world, as the cradle of the most ancient and most sacred of oracles; the local character has the veneration of Mother Earth in the Boeotian Thespia; the mistress Hera is from the beginning and primarily the goddess of the Argive Achaeans, etc. This motley material of local worship of God had to undergo a slow process of gathering, gradual unification into a grandiose system of national religion, which, however, never reached full dogma in Greece ical and ceremonial uniformity and even in the period of completion of the unifying work, it retained in its harmonious and arranged whole sufficient independence and, as it were, self-government of individual local religions.

In this unifying work, the first stage was passed hand in hand with the development of epic poetry in the colonies of Asia Minor and under its direct influence: the Ionian singers were the first collectors of the Hellenic faith. After them, powerful centers of priesthood acquired great importance, especially the Delphic oracle and some other local temple communities, for example, the community in Thespiah; this latter had an immediate impact on the second great epic school of Greece - the Boeotian school of Hesiod, which significantly supplemented the doctrine of the Ionian, Homeric school by introducing into it a multitude of primordial beliefs and ideas of a religious-metaphysical order, left without the attention of the Homeric school oh or alien and unknown to her. The “Father of History”, Herodotus (5th century), is without a doubt right, expressing the general opinion of the nation about the role of the epic in the creation of a national religion with the following words: “Homer and Hesiod taught the Hellenic gods; they distributed the sacred names belonging to each of the gods, and the share of dominion proper to each, and the kind of veneration appropriate to each; they vividly described the image of each deity.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the first search for a new religious consciousness, the first search for religious truths more spiritual and morally lofty, begins with a polemic with the doctrine of Homer and, to a lesser extent, Hesiod. So, the rhapsophy-philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon (5th century) throws a reproach to Homer and Hesiod that "they attributed a lot of falsehood to the gods, they charged a lot of such things that people rightly consider shameful and worthy of censure." On the other hand, one cannot deny the solidity of the view of Aristotle, who calls the first Hellenic "theologian" Hesiod:

In Homer, we do not find a systematic doctrine of the gods. Nor does he know anything about divine cosmogony (cf., however, Il. XIV, 201, where the Ocean is called theôn génesis, "the parent of the gods," a thought in which the ancients saw confirmation of Thales' doctrine of the moist fundamental principle of the universe); the world exists for him once given, statically determined; how it arose, how it was created, is indifferent to the singer. And it is not the essence of the gods that occupies him, but their interference in human affairs, their historical interaction with people: everything that he reports about them is suggested by the pragmatism of the story about the fate of the heroes; in passing, he reveals about them what is necessary for the listener of heroic "glories". But what he discovers is important and decisive for the fate of all religion, it is imprinted on its unfrozen surface with indelible lines—and the singer knows what he is imprinting, because his consciously set goal and consistently resolved task is to approve and introduce many things separately. into the popular consciousness for all ages.

Honoring heroes.

Along with the above-described polytheism and unusually developed demonology, which determined the whole life and demanded from a person, with each of his actions, special forethought in relation to the invisible forces affected by this action, and the special, magical significance of each act - the content the original religion of the tribes crowding in European Greece before colonization, were heroic cults. We have already seen how the concept of the hero was developed through the obscuring of the face of the original deity. According to some scholars, all heroic cults grew out of this root: all heroes are forgotten, debunked gods. According to others, on the contrary, heroes are deified ancestors. In any case, the very reduction of gods to the rank of heroes is conceivable only on the basis of the already existing cult of ancestors, to which many phenomena of primitive religious life and culture are generally reduced. Most likely, both sides of the disputing morals - that some heroes are the former gods, reduced in the struggle with their own doubles, established in the popular belief under a different name, to the level of underground strong, while other heroes are the ancient relatives of tribal and tribal legend, glorifying fief ancestors of immemorial past, underground strong, capable of harming the living from underground and sending them from the underground fertility and an abundance of earthly fruits. Victims are demanded, both by gods and heroes; but the rite significantly distinguishes these two types of sacrifices, giving the sacrifices in honor of the heroes the character of offerings at feasts, sent down to the underworld, performed not on altars, but on “hearths” and on tombs. Distinctive for heroic cults is their direct and indispensable connection with the burial place of the legendary heroes-relatives; that is why it can be said, as we have already said above, that the hero is at home where the legends are preserved in the memory, like a material attachment of the cult, his coffin, mound or cave.

VI.
Loss of local cults.

I can see that the settlers, leaving their homeland, broke away religiously from its soil, for they left their native graves associated with the veneration of relatives. The old cult of heroes had to die for these natives, as a specific part of religious life, and the host of heroes, cut off from their native ashes, should become only the ideal property of tribal memory, unstable and vague. This memory saved only their names, a few main features of their generic characteristics, and even everything that managed to take the form of songs (ôimai) about the glories (kléa) of ancient valiant men.

If the Iliad is replete with aeolisms, this testifies first of all to the fact that it was based on Aeolian songs-glories. Assimilated in a short time by the neighboring Ionians, who fought with the Aeolians because of new places, forced them out and were forced out by them, mixed with them to a partial confusion of dialects - these songs introduced their legendary and historical content into the new epic creativity that had begun. extremely distorted, changed beyond recognition. The images of Achilles, Patroclus, Hectors, Alexandrov were given in song legend as if hanging in the air, characteristically outlined, but ghostly, homeless shadows; they could be attached to other places of action, introduced into a different connection of events closer to the life experienced. And this life was full of events: the so-called Teutran war had just ended, in which the newcomers had to win back places for their settlements from the native inhabitants of the country, span by span; her vicissitudes immediately merged with the legendary heritage of ancient tales, memories of her were adorned with the name of Achilles and multiplied the number of exploits of the hero of the old fathers. All this composition of tales, with the addition of other Thessalian ones, what are the epics about Pirithos, Driant and Teses, who entered into battle with the fierce children of the mountains, Lapiths and Centaurs (Il. I, 263; compare XII, 127-194), as well as vanskikh, as a legend about the campaign of seven heroes against the Thebes (Il. IV, 376 ff., 405 ff.), Aetolian, as a myth about Meleager and the Calydonian hunt (Il. IX, 529 ff.) and many others, was accepted by the Ionian genius, to whom it was given, as it were, to melt it in his furnace and pour it into a new, harmonious unity - and, of course, the legends of a foreign tribe, already unsteady and changing their original outlines, with even greater freedom and less memory of the prototypes, were used in order to establish a pan-Hellenic code of heroic glory and a pan-Hellenic picture of the divine world order.

New beliefs.

But not only, with the departure from ancient shrines, the tangibility of heroic tradition was lost, ritual life in the field of heroic cults was interrupted, certain sketches of heroes were erased, but also a whole series of foreign influences radically changed the old patristic faith. So - and this was the main event of the new era of religious consciousness that had come, - a new powerful alien, the god of Asia Minor, entered the former cathedral of the gods from the "country of light" - Lycia - Apollo - a formidable, angry god with a youthful appearance, golden curls yami up shoulder and silver bow

behind his shoulders, sounding scary, is the god of the archer, aptly hitting people and animals from a distance with his deadly arrows, cruelly avenging those who do not respect his lands and shrines, sending pestilence, propitiating victims and special ritual songs nyami conjuring the sea and invoking health - "Paeans" - such a formidable god that, according to a very ancient hymn created by the singers of the Homeric school, all the gods get up and tremble at the appearance of an alien, except for one father of the gods, Zeus, and even Anollon's mother, Letho (Lato, Rome. lat

· The historical basis and time of creation of the Homeric poems. G. Schliemann and Troy.

· Mythological basis and plot of Homer's poems.

· The concept of the epic hero and the images of warriors in the poem.

· Moral problems of Homer's poems.

· The originality of the epic worldview and style.

· The Homeric question and the main theories of the origin of the poems.

Homer is traditionally considered the author of the two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Pushkin: "One can only feel Homer." The authorship of Homer has not been proven, just as his existence has not been proven. He becomes a legend already in antiquity. Almost all the polis argue about the right to consider themselves his homeland. Epic poetry arose in the 10th century BC, the poetry of Homer - the turn of the 9th and 8th centuries. These are the first written creations from which European literature began. Most likely, this is not the beginning of a tradition - the author refers to predecessors and even includes excerpts from predecessor poems in the text. "Odyssey" - Demodocus, Famir Thracian. Then parodies appear on Homer's poems - "Batrachomyomachia" - the struggle of frogs and mice.

Antiquity is not characterized by the usual definition of "epos". "Epos" - "speech, story." It appears as a form of everyday story about an event important for the history of a tribe or clan. Always poetic reproduction. The subject of the image is the history of the people on the basis of mythological perception. Majestic heroism lies at the heart of ancient artistic epics. Heroes of epics personify entire nations (Achilles, Odysseus). A hero is always strong by the strength of his people, personifies both the best and the worst in his people. The hero of Homer's poems lives in a special world where the concepts "all" and "everyone" mean the same thing.

Studying the language of Homeric poems, scientists came to the conclusion that Homer came from an Ionian aristocratic family. The language of the Iliad and the Odyssey is an artificial sub-dialect that has never been spoken in life. Until the 19th century, the point of view prevailed that the content of both poems was a poetic fiction. In the 19th century, they started talking about the reality of events after Troy was discovered by the amateur Heinrich Schliemann (in the last quarter of the 19th century).

Heinrich Schliemann was born in 1822 in Germany in the family of a poor pastor. On his seventh birthday, he received a colorful encyclopedia of myths and after that he declared that he would find Troy. He doesn't get an education. The history of his youth is very turbulent: he is hired on a schooner as a cabin boy, the schooner is shipwrecked, Schliemann ends up on a desert island. At the age of 19, he gets to Amsterdam and gets a job there as a petty clerk. Turns out. That he is very receptive to languages, so he soon goes to St. Petersburg, opens his own business - the supply of bread to Europe. In 1864, he closes his business, and uses all the money to open Troy. He travels to places where she could be. The entire scientific world carried out excavations in Bunarbashi in Turkey. But Schliemann was guided by the Homeric texts, where it was said that the Trojans could go to the sea several times a day. Bunarbashi was too far from the sea. Schliemann found Cape Hisarlik and found out that the real reason for the Trojan War was the economy - the Trojans charged too much to pass through the strait. Schliemann conducted excavations in his own way - he did not excavate layer by layer, but excavated all the layers at once. At the very bottom (layer 3A) he found gold. But he was afraid that his unprofessional workers would plunder him, so he ordered them to go to celebrate, and he and his wife dragged the gold into the tent. Most of all, Schliemann wanted to return Greece to its former greatness, respectively, and this gold, which he considered the treasure of King Priam. But according to the laws, the treasure belonged to Turkey. Therefore, his wife, the Greek Sophia, hid the gold in cabbage and transported it across the border.

Having proved to the whole world that Troy really existed, Schliemann actually destroyed it. Later, scientists proved that the required time layer was 7A, Schliemann destroyed this layer, taking out gold. Then Schliemann led excavations in Tiryns and dug up the birthplace of Hercules. Then excavations in Mycenae, where he found the golden gate, three tombs, which he considered the burial places of Agamemnon (the golden mask of Agamemnon), Cassandra and Clytemnestra. He was wrong again - these burials belonged to an earlier time. But he proved the existence of an ancient civilization, as he discovered clay tablets with writings. He also wanted to excavate in Crete, but he did not have enough money to buy the hill. Schliemann's death is absolutely absurd. He was driving home for Christmas, caught a cold, fell in the street, was taken to a poorhouse where he froze to death. They buried him magnificently, the Greek king himself walked behind the coffin.

Similar clay tablets have been found in Crete. This proves that a very long time ago (12th century BC) there was writing in Crete and Mycenae. Scientists call it "linear pre-Greek pre-alphabetic syllabary", and there are two varieties: a and b. A cannot be deciphered, B has been deciphered. The tablets were found in 1900, and deciphered after the Second World War. Franz Sittini deciphered 12 syllables. The breakthrough was made by Michael Ventris, an Englishman, who suggested that the basis should be taken not from the Cretan, but from the Greek dialect. So he deciphered almost all the signs. A problem arose before the scientific world: why was Greek written in Crete at the time of its heyday? Schliemann first tried to accurately determine the date of the destruction of Troy - 1200 BC. He was only ten years wrong. Modern scholars have established that it was destroyed between 1195 and 1185 BC.

Two categories of people are considered native speakers of the Homeric language: Aeds and Rhapsods. Aeds are storytellers, creators of poems, semi-improvisers, they have a high position in society, so they had the right to change something in poems. Homer mentioned Demodocus and Thamyr the Thracian. The art of the Aeds is mysterious, as it is very difficult to memorize so much text. The art of the Aeds is clan, each clan had its own secrets of memorization. Some families: Homerids and Creofilides. Most often they were blind, "Homer" means blind. This is another reason why many believe that Homer did not exist. Rhapsody - only performers, could not change anything.

In relation to the epic, the concepts of plot and plot are very different. The plot is a natural direct temporal connection of events that makes up the content of the action of a literary work. The plot of the Homeric poems is the Trojan cycle of myths. It is associated with almost all mythology. The plot is local, but the time frame is small. Most of the motivations for the actions of the characters are outside the scope of the work. The poem "Cypria" was written about the causes of the Trojan War.

Causes of the war: Gaia turns to Zeus with a request to clear the earth of part of the people, as there are too many of them. Zeus is threatened by the fate of his grandfather and father - to be overthrown by his own son from the goddess. Prometheus names the goddess Thetis, so Zeus urgently marries her to the mortal hero Peleus. At the wedding, a bone of contention appears, and Zeus is advised to use Paris Mom, an evil-speaking adviser.

Troy is otherwise called the kingdom of Dardanus or Ilion. Dardanus is the founder, then Il appears and founds Ilion. Hence the title of Homer's poem. Troy is from Tros. Sometimes Pergamon, by the name of the palace. One of the kings of Troy is Laomedon. Under him, the walls of Troy were built, which cannot be destroyed. This wall was built by Poseidon and Apollo, people laughed at them, Laomedon promised a reward for their work. Aeacus had a good relationship with the gods, so he built the Sketic Gate, the only one that can be destroyed. But Laomedon did not pay, the gods got angry and cursed the city, so it is doomed to death, despite the fact that this is the favorite city of Zeus. In the war, only Anchises and Aeneas, who are not related to the genus Laomedont, will survive.

Elena is the granddaughter of Nemesis, the goddess of retribution. Theseus kidnapped her at the age of 12. Then everyone wanted to marry her, Odysseus advised Elena's father to let her choose herself and take an oath from the suitors to help Elena's family in case of trouble.

The Iliad covers as events an insignificant period of time. Total 50 days last year war. This is the wrath of Achilles and its consequences. And so the poem begins. The Iliad is a military-heroic epic, where the central place is occupied by the story of events. The main thing is the wrath of Achilles. Aristotle wrote that Homer's choice of subject was brilliant. Achilles is a special hero, he replaces an entire army. Homer's task is to describe all the heroes and life, but Achilles overshadows them. Therefore, Achilles must be removed. Everything is determined by one event: on the earthly plane, everything is determined by the consequences of the wrath of Achilles, in the heavenly plane, by the will of Zeus. But his will is not all-encompassing. Zeus cannot control the fate of the Greeks and Trojans. He uses the golden scales of fate - the shares of the Akhets and Trojans.

Composition: the alternation of the earthly and heavenly plot lines, which are mixed by the end. Homer did not break his poem into songs. It was first broken by Alexandrian scientists in the third century BC - for convenience. Each chapter is named after a letter of the Greek alphabet.

What is the cause of Achilles' anger? For 10 years they ruined many surrounding policies. In one city, they captured two captives - Chryseis (got Agamemnon) and Briseis (got Achilles). The Greeks begin to form a consciousness of the value of their personality. Homer shows that tribal collectivity is becoming a thing of the past, a new morality is beginning to form, where the idea of ​​the value of one's own life comes to the fore.

The poem ends with the funeral of Hector, although in essence the fate of Troy has already been decided. In terms of plot (mythological sequence of events), the Odyssey corresponds to the Iliad. But it does not tell about military events, but about wanderings. The scientist call it: "an epic poem of wanderings." In it, the story of a person replaces the story of events. The fate of Odysseus comes to the fore - the glorification of the mind and willpower. The Odyssey corresponds to the mythology of late heroism. Dedicated to the last forty days of the return of Odysseus to his homeland. The very beginning testifies that the center is the return.

Composition: harder than the Iliad. Events in the Iliad develop progressively and consistently. The Odyssey has three storylines: 1) the Olympian gods. But Odysseus has a goal and no one can stop him. Odysseus extricates himself from everything. 2) the return itself is a difficult adventure. 3) Ithaca: two motifs: the actual events of the matchmaking and the theme of Telemachus' search for his father. Some believe that Telemachia is a late insertion.

Basically, this is a description of the wanderings of Odysseus, and in retrospective terms. Events are determined by retrospection: the influence of events of the distant past. For the first time, a female image appears, equal to the male one - Penelope, the wise woman - the worthy wife of Odysseus. Example: she is spinning a funeral cover.

The poem is more complicated not only in composition, but also in terms of the psychological motivation of actions.

The Iliad is Leo Tolstoy's favorite work. The meaning of Homer's poems lies in moral values, they represent them to us. It was at this time that ideas about morality were formed. Relationship with materials. Heroism and patriotism are not the main values ​​that interest Homer. The main thing is the problem of the meaning of human life, the problem of the values ​​of human life. The theme of human duty: to the homeland, to the tribe, to the ancestors, to the dead. Life on a universal scale is presented as an evergreen grove. But death is not a cause for grief - it cannot be avoided, but it must be met with dignity. Ideas about human friendship are formed. Odysseus and Diomedes, Achilles and Patroclus. All of them are balanced. Problems - what is cowardice? Bravery? Loyalty to the house, people, spouse? Faithful wives: Penelope, Andromache.

As mentioned earlier, the generalized features of the entire people they represented were collected in the Homeric heroes. The images of warriors were diverse. Homer did not yet have an idea about the character, but, nevertheless, he does not have two identical warriors. It was believed that a person is already born with certain qualities, and nothing can change during life. This view undergoes a change only in the writings of Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle. The amazing moral integrity of Homeric man. They have no reflection or duality - this is in the spirit of Homer's time. Fate is a share. Therefore, there is no doom. The actions of the heroes are not related to divine influence. But there is a law of double motivation of events. How are feelings born? The easiest way to explain this is by divine intervention Homer's talent: the scene with Achilles and Priam.

The set of qualities for each warrior is the same, but the images are unique. Each of the characters expresses one side of the national Greek spirit. There are types in the poem: elders, wives, and so on. The central place is occupied by the image of Achilles. He is great, but mortal. Homer wanted to portray the poetic apotheosis of heroic Greece. Heroism - conscious choice Achilles. Achilles epic prowess: brave, strong, fearless, war cry, fast run. In order for the characters to be different, the number of different qualities is different - an individual characteristic. Achilles has impulsiveness and immensity. Characteristics of Homer: he knows how to compose songs and sings them. The second most powerful warrior is Ajax the Great. He has too much ambition. Achilles is swift, Ajax is clumsy, slow. The third is Diomedes. The main thing is complete disinterestedness, so Diomedes is granted victory over the gods. Epithets: Achilles and Odysseus have more than 40. In the battle, Diomedes does not forget about the household. The leaders of the campaign are depicted in conflict with the epic laws. The authors of the epic write objectively. But Homer has many epithets for his favorite heroes. Atrids have few epithets. Diomedes reproaches Agamemnon "Zeus did not give you valor." Another attitude to Nestor, Hector and Odysseus. Hector is one of Homer's favorite heroes, he is reasonable and peaceful. Hector and Odysseus do not rely on the gods, so Hector has fear, but this fear does not affect his actions, since Hector has epic prowess, which includes epic shame. He feels responsible to the protected people.

Praise for Wisdom. Elders: Priam and Nestor. Nestor survived three generations of people for thirty years. New Wisdom: The Intelligence of Odysseus. This is not experience, but the flexibility of the mind. Odysseus is also distinguished: all heroes strive for immortality - it is offered to him twice, but he changes him to his homeland.

Homer gives us experience for the first time comparative characteristics. 3rd song of the Iliad: Elena talks about the heroes. Menelaus and Odysseus are compared.

The image of Helen in the Iliad is demonic. In The Odyssey, she is a housewife. It is not her appearance that is being described. And the reaction of the elders to her. We know very little about her feelings. In the "Odyssey" it is different - there is nothing mysterious.

Features of the epic worldview and style.

First, the volume of epic poems is always considerable. The volume does not depend on the desire of the author, but on the tasks set by the author, which in this case require a large volume. The second feature is versatility. The epic in ancient society performed many functions. Entertainment is the last. The epic is a repository of wisdom, an educational function, examples of how to behave. The epic is a repository of information on history, it preserves the people's idea of ​​history. Scientific functions, since it was in the epic poems that scientific information was transmitted: astronomy, geography, craft, medicine, life. Last but not least, entertainment. All this is called epic syncretism.

Homeric poems always tell about the distant past. The Greek was pessimistic about the future. These poems are meant to capture the golden age.

Monumentality of images of epic poems.

The images are elevated above ordinary people, they are almost monuments. All of them are loftier, more beautiful, smarter than ordinary people - this is an idealization. This is epic monumentality.

Epic materialism is associated with the task of describing everything in full. Homer fixes his attention on the most ordinary things: a stool, carnations. All things must have color. Some believe that at that time the world was described in two colors - white and gold. But this was denied by Wilkelman, he was engaged in architecture. In fact, there are many colors, and the statues are whitened by time. The statues were dressed, painted, decorated - everything was very bright. Even the Titanomachia on the Parthenon was painted. In the Homeric poems, everything is colored: the clothes of goddesses, berries. The sea has more than 40 shades of color.

The objectivity of the tone of Homer's poems. The creators of the poems had to be extremely fair. Homer is biased only in epithets. For example, the description of Thersites. Thersites is absolutely devoid of epic prowess.

Epic style: three laws.

1) The law of retardation is a deliberate stoppage of action. Retardation, firstly, helps to expand the scope of your image. Retardation is a digression, an insert poem. Tells about the past or expounds the views of the Greeks. The poems were performed orally, and during the retardation, the author and performer tries to arouse additional attention to the situation: for example, the description of the rod of Agamemnon, the description of the shield of Achilles (this description shows how the Greeks imagined the universe). Marriage of grandfather Odysseus. In the family, Odysseus always had one heir. Odysseus - angry, experiencing the wrath of the gods.

2) The law of double motivation of events.

3) The law of chronological incompatibility of simultaneous events in time. The author of epic poems is naive, it seems to him that if he portrays two simultaneous events at the same time, then this will be unnatural. A vivid example: Priam and Helen are talking.

Epic poems abound in repetition. Up to a third of the text falls on repetitions. Several reasons: due to the oral nature of the poems, repetitions are the properties of oral folk art, the folklore description includes constant formulas, most often these are natural phenomena, equipment of chariots, weapons of the Greeks, Trojans - stencil formulas. Decorating epithets firmly attached to heroes, objects, gods (eyed Hera, Zeus the cloud-breaker). The gods as perfect creatures deserve the epithet "golden". Most of all, Aphrodite is associated with gold - the aesthetic sphere, for Hera it is sovereignty, dominance. The darkest is Zeus. All gods must be intelligent, omniscient. The Providence is only Zeus, although others too. Athena: intercessor, protector, irresistible, indestructible. Ares: insatiable in war, destroyer of people, stained with blood, crusher of walls. Often epithets grow together so much that they contradict the position: noble suitors in the house of Odysseus. Aegisthus, who kills Agamemnon, is blameless. These are all folklore formulas.

epic comparisons. In an effort to visualize the image, the poet seeks to translate each description into the language of comparison, which develops into an independent picture. All Homer's comparisons are from the everyday sphere: battles for ships, the Greeks are pushing the Trojans, the Greeks fought as neighbors for the boundaries in neighboring areas. The fury of Achilles is compared to threshing, when oxen trample grain.

Homer often uses description and narration through enumeration. It does not describe the picture in its entirety, but strings episodes - the murders of Diomedes.

The combination of fiction with the details of realistic reality. The line between reality and fantasy is blurring: a description of the cave of the Cyclops. At first everything is very realistic, but then a terrible monster appears. An illusion of objectivity is created.

The poems are written in hexameter, a six-foot dactyl. Moreover, the last foot is truncated. A caesura is made in the middle - a pause that divides the verse into two half-verses and gives it a regularity. All ancient versification is based on a strictly ordered alternation of long and short syllables, and the quantitative ratio of stressed and unstressed syllables is 2: 1, but the stress is not forceful, but musical, based on raising and lowering the tone.

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Homer's poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were created in the first third of the 1st millennium BC. e. in that region of ancient Greece, which bore the name of Ionia. There were probably a lot of compilers of these poems, but the artistic unity of the poems suggests some kind of sole author unknown to us, who remained in the memory of all antiquity and all subsequent culture under the name of the blind and wise singer Homer.

Plot

The Iliad and the Odyssey convey only certain moments of Trojan mythology. Therefore, it is necessary, as far as possible, to get acquainted with the Trojan mythology as a whole, in order to more clearly and distinctly single out in it the plot of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Events before the Iliad. In Trojan mythology, the "Iliad" is preceded by a huge number of myths that were set forth in a special poem "Cypria" by Stasin of Cyprus, which has not come down to us. From these myths we learn that the causes of the Trojan War are related to cosmic events. Troy was located in the northwestern corner of Asia Minor and was inhabited by the Phrygian tribe. The war between the Greeks and the Trojans, which is the content of the Trojan mythology, was allegedly predetermined from above.

It was said that the Earth, burdened with a huge human population, turned to Zeus with a request to reduce the human race, and Zeus decided to start a war between the Greeks and the Trojans for this. The earthly reason for this war was the abduction of the Spartan queen Helen by the Trojan prince Paris. However, this abduction was justified purely mythologically. One of the Greek kings (in Thessaly), Peleus, married the sea princess Thetis, daughter of the sea god Nereus. (This leads us back into the depths of time, when such marriages seemed to be a complete reality for the primitive consciousness.) At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, all the gods were present, except for Eris, the goddess of discord, who therefore plotted to take revenge on the gods and threw the golden apple with the inscription “The Most Beautiful” to the goddesses. The myth told that Hera (wife of Zeus), Athena Pallas (daughter of Zeus, goddess of war and crafts) and Aphrodite (also daughter of Zeus, goddess of love and beauty) were contenders for the possession of this apple. And when the dispute of these three goddesses reached Zeus, he ordered Paris, the son of the Trojan king Priam, to resolve this dispute.

These mythological motifs are of a very late origin. All three goddesses had a long mythological history and were represented in antiquity as severe creatures. It is obvious that the above mythological motifs could only take place towards the end of the community-clan formation, when the clan nobility arose and strengthened. The image of Paris speaks of an even later origin of this myth. It turns out that a person already considers himself so strong and wise, he has gone so far from primitive helplessness and fear of demonic creatures that he can even create judgment on the gods.

Further development of the myth only deepens this motif of man's relative fearlessness before the gods and demons: Paris awards the apple to Aphrodite, and she helps him kidnap the Spartan queen Helen. The myth emphasizes that Paris was the most handsome man in Asia and Helena the most beautiful woman in Europe.

These myths undoubtedly reflect the long-standing clashes of the European Greeks, who sought enrichment for themselves through war with the population of Asia Minor, who by that time had a high material culture. Myth paints the bleak history of ancient wars and idealizes the past; an understanding of this will be very useful to us in the future when analyzing the work of Homer as a whole.

The abduction of Helen plunges her husband Menelaus into great anguish. But here the brother of Menelaus, Agamemnon, one of the main characters in the Iliad, the king of Argos, next to Sparta, appears on the stage. On his advice, the most famous kings and heroes are convened from all over Greece with their squads. They decide to sail to that coast of Asia Minor, not far from which Troy was located, attack the Trojans and return the kidnapped Helen. Among the called kings and heroes, the cunning Odysseus, king of the island of Ithaca, and the young Achilles, son of Peleus and Thetis, enjoyed special influence. A huge Greek fleet lands an army a few kilometers from Troy. The Greeks set up their camp here and attack Troy and its allies living nearby. For nine years the war has been waged without a noticeable preponderance of one side or the other.

Events of the Iliad. The Iliad covers the events of the tenth year of the war, shortly before the fall of Troy. But the very fall of Troy is not depicted in the Iliad. Events in it take only 51 days. However, the poem gives the most intense image of military life. Based on the events of these days (and there are a lot of them, the poem is overloaded with them), one can get a vivid idea of ​​​​the then war in general.

The main line of the story occupies songs I, XI, XVI--XXII. This is the story of Achilles' anger and the consequences of that anger. Achilles, one of the most prominent leaders of the Greek army near Troy, is angry at the chosen commander of Agamemnon for taking away the captive Briseis from him. And Agamemnon took away this captive because, at the behest of Apollo, he had to return his captive Chryseis to her father, Chris, the priest of Apollo near Troy. Song I depicts Achilles' quarrel with Agamemnon, Achilles' departure from the battlefield, his appeal with complaints of insult to his mother Thetis, who receives a promise from Zeus to punish the Greeks for this. Zeus does not fulfill his promise until the 11th ode, and the main story line in the Iliad is only restored in it, where it is told that the Greeks are suffering serious defeats from the Trojans. But in the following songs (XII - XV) there is also no development of the action. The main line of the narrative is resumed only in canto XVI, where Achilles' favorite friend, Patroclus, comes to the aid of the oppressed Greeks. He speaks with the permission of Achilles and dies at the hands of the most prominent Trojan hero Hector, son of Priam. This forces Achilles to return to fighting again. In the XVIII song, Hephaestus, the god of blacksmithing, prepares a new weapon for Achilles, and in the XIX song, about the reconciliation of Achilles with Agamemnon. In Canto XX we read about the resumption of battles, in which the gods themselves are now participating, and in Canto XXII we read about the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles. This is the main story line in the Iliad.

A huge number of scenes unfold around her, which do not develop the action at all, but extremely enrich it with numerous pictures of the war. So, songs II-VII depict a series of fights, and songs XII-XV - just a war with varying success for the Greeks and Trojans. Canto VIII speaks of some military failures of the Greeks, as a result of which Agamemnon (IX) sends ambassadors to Achilles with a proposal to put up, to which he replies with a sharp refusal. Songs XXIII - XXIV tell about the funeral of the dead heroes - Patroclus and Hector. Finally, Song X was already considered in antiquity as a later insertion into the Iliad. It depicts a night raid by Greek and Trojan heroes on the Trojan Plain for reconnaissance.

Events after the Iliad; These events were told in the most detailed way in other poems devoted to Trojan mythology. There were entire poems that have not come down to us, which were a continuation of the Iliad. Such are the poems "Ethiopides", "Small Iliad", "The Fall of Troy", "Returns".

These poems depicted the duel of Achilles with the Amazon Penthesilea, an ally of the Trojans who came to their aid after the death of Hector. The duel ended with the death of Penthesilea. Achilles himself died from the arrow of Paris, which was directed by Apollo. It was said that at the suggestion of Odysseus, the Greeks built a huge wooden horse, inside which the Greek military detachment was located. The rest of the Greeks boarded the ships and, pretending to sail home, hid behind the nearest island. The Greek, left on the shore near the wooden horse, explained to the Trojans the imaginary reason for the construction of the horse - this was supposedly a gift to Pallas Athena. The Trojans put a wooden horse in Troy, and at night the Greeks who settled there came out of it, opened the gates and burned the city. There were many different kinds of epic stories about the return of the Greek leaders from under Troy. The return of Odysseus from Troy was narrated by a poem named after him and preserved to us.

The events of the Odyssey. The events in this poem are not depicted as scattered as in the Iliad, but still it is not without difficulties in familiarizing itself with the course of the action described in it.

The return of Odysseus home takes 10 years and, full of all sorts of adventures, creates a great heap of events. In fact, the first three years of the voyage of Odysseus are not depicted in the first songs of the poem, but in songs IX-XII. And they are given in the form of a story by Odysseus at a feast at a certain king, to whom a storm accidentally threw him. Then it turns out that Odysseus many times fell into the hands of good people, then to robbers, then to the underworld.

In the center of the ninth ode is the famous episode with the one-eyed ogre (Cyclops) Polyphemus. This Polyphemus locked Odysseus and his companions in a cave, from which they got out with great difficulty. Odysseus, having drunk Polyphemus with wine, managed to gouge out his only eye.

In Song X, Odysseus finds himself with the sorceress Kirk, and Kirk sends him to the underworld for a prophecy about his future. Canto XI is a depiction of this underworld. In the XII song, after a series of terrible adventures, Odysseus ends up on the island of the nymph Calypso, who keeps him for seven years.

The beginning of the "Odyssey" just refers to the end of Odysseus' stay with Calypso. Here it is reported about the decision of the gods to return Odysseus to his homeland and about the search for Odysseus by his son Telemachus. These searches are described in I-IV songs of the poem. Songs V-VIII depict the stay of Odysseus, after sailing from the nymph Calypso and a terrible storm at sea, among the good-natured people of the feacs, with their good king Alcinous. There Odysseus tells about his wanderings (songs IX-XII).

Starting from the 13th ode to the end of the poem, a consistent and clear depiction of events is given. First, the feacs deliver Odysseus to his native island of Ithaca, where he settles with his swineherd Eumeus, as his own house is besieged by local kings, who have been laying claim to the hand of Penelope, his wife, who selflessly guards the treasures of Odysseus and, through various tricks, delaying her marriage with these suitors. In songs XVII-XX, Odysseus, under the guise of a beggar, penetrates from the hut of Eumeus into his house to reconnoiter everything that happens in it, and in songs XXI--XXIV, with the help of faithful servants, he kills all suitors in the palace, hangs unfaithful maids, meets with Penelope, who has been waiting for him for 20 years, and still pacifies the uprising against him in Ithaca. In the house of Odysseus, happiness is restored, interrupted by a ten-year war and his ten-year adventures.