LOLI STONE TALKS ABOUT GREECE, HOMER & 'THE ILIAD'

Homer

The Stones have just arrived to Ithaca this evening. They have gone to their hotel directly where Homer, an old Grandma's friend, was waiting for them. After unpacking their baggage and having a hot shower, all the members of the family have joined in the great hall to listen to Loli Stone. It is an emotive travel for her because she has returned at home -she is Greek- and she has met one of her most admired Greek poets, Homer.

Loli and Homer have offered an interesting conference about the Iliad to The Stones, who have discovered unknown stories and have enjoyed a lot with this experience.

Homer, in Ancient Greek Ὅμηρος, is the legendary author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are the central works of ancient Greek literature.

The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek kingdoms. It focuses on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles lasting a few weeks during the last year of the war.

The Odyssey focuses on the ten-year journey home of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, after the fall of Troy. Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity, the most widespread being that he was a blind bard from Ionia, a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary.

The Homeric Question -concerning by whom, when, where and under what circumstances the Iliad and Odyssey were composed- continues to be debated. Broadly speaking, modern scholarly opinion falls into two groups. One holds that most of the Iliad and, according to some, the Odyssey are the works of a single poet of genius.

More information: Cliffs Notes

The other considers the Homeric poems to be the result of a process of working and reworking by many contributors, and that Homer is best seen as a label for an entire tradition. It is generally accepted that the poems were composed at some point around the late eighth or early seventh century BC.

The poems are in Homeric Greek, also known as Epic Greek, a literary language which shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence is Eastern Ionic. Most researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally.

From antiquity until the present day, the influence of Homeric epic on Western civilization has been great, inspiring many of its most famous works of literature, music, art and film. The Homeric epics were the greatest influence on ancient Greek culture and education; to Plato, Homer was simply the one who has taught Greece -ten Hellada pepaideuken.

Loli Stone & Homer read The Iliad

The Homeric epics are written in an artificial literary language or Kunstsprache only used in epic hexameter poetry.

Homeric Greek shows features of multiple regional Greek dialects and periods, but is fundamentally based on Ionic Greek, in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia.

Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was composed slightly before the Odyssey, and that Homeric formulae preserve older features than other parts of the poems.

The Iliad, in Ancient Greek Ἰλιάς, sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium, is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter, traditionally attributed to Homer.

Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles.

Although the story covers only a few weeks in the final year of the war, the Iliad mentions or alludes to many of the Greek legends about the siege; the earlier events, such as the gathering of warriors for the siege, the cause of the war, and related concerns tend to appear near the beginning. Then the epic narrative takes up events prophesied for the future, such as Achilles' imminent death and the fall of Troy, although the narrative ends before these events take place. However, as these events are prefigured and alluded to more and more vividly, when it reaches an end the poem has told a more or less complete tale of the Trojan War.

More information: Facts and Details

The Iliad is paired with something of a sequel, the Odyssey, also attributed to Homer. Along with the Odyssey, the Iliad is among the oldest extant works of Western literature, and its written version is usually dated to around the 8th century BC. In the modern vulgate, the standard accepted version, the Iliad contains 15,693 lines; it is written in Homeric Greek, a literary amalgam of Ionic Greek and other dialects.

The poem dates to the archaic period of Classical Antiquity. Scholarly consensus mostly places it in the 8th century BC, although some favour a 7th-century date. Herodotus, having consulted the Oracle at Dodona, placed Homer and Hesiod at approximately 400 years before his own time, which would place them at c.850 BC.

The historical backdrop of the poem is the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse, in the early 12th century BC. Homer is thus separated from his subject matter by about 400 years, the period known as the Greek Dark Ages. Intense scholarly debate has surrounded the question of which portions of the poem preserve genuine traditions from the Mycenaean period. The Catalogue of Ships in particular has the striking feature that its geography does not portray Greece in the Iron Age, the time of Homer, but as it was before the Dorian invasion.

Venetus A, copied in the 10th century AD, is the oldest fully extant manuscript of the Iliad. The first edition of the Iliad, editio princeps, edited by Demetrius Chalcondyles and published by Bernardus Nerlius, and Demetrius Damilas in Florence in 1488/89.

Download The Iliad by Homer

No man or woman born, coward or brave,

can shun his destiny.

Homer, The Iliad