Literature of ancient Greece. The meaning of the word homer in the directory of characters and cult objects of Greek mythology About the work of Homer

Homer by Antoine-Denis Chaudet, 1806.

Homer (ancient Greek Ὅμηρος, VIII century BC) is a legendary ancient Greek poet-storyteller, the creator of the epic poems of the Iliad (the oldest monument of European literature and the Odyssey).
Approximately half of the ancient Greek literary papyri found are passages from Homer.

Nothing is known for certain about the life and personality of Homer.

Homer - the legendary ancient Greek poet-storyteller

It is clear, however, that the Iliad and the Odyssey were created much later than the events described in them, but before the 6th century BC. e., when their existence is reliably recorded. The chronological period in which Homer's life is localized by modern science is approximately the 8th century BC. e. According to Herodotus, Homer lived 400 years before him, other ancient sources say that he lived during the Trojan War.

Bust of Homer in the Louvre

Homer's birthplace is unknown. Seven cities argued for the right to be called his homeland in the ancient tradition: Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes, Argos, Athens. According to Herodotus and Pausanias, Homer died on the island of Ios in the Cyclades archipelago. Probably, the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed on the Asia Minor coast of Greece, inhabited by Ionian tribes, or on one of the adjacent islands. However, the Homeric dialect does not provide accurate information about the tribal affiliation of Homer, as it is a combination of the Ionian and Aeolian dialects of the ancient Greek language. There is speculation that his dialect is a form of poetic Koine that developed long before Homer's supposed lifetime.

Paul Jourdy, Homère chantant ses vers, 1834, Paris

Traditionally, Homer is portrayed as blind. It is most likely that this representation does not come from the real facts of his life, but is a reconstruction typical of the genre of ancient biography. Since many prominent legendary soothsayers and singers were blind (for example, Tiresias), according to the ancient logic that connected the prophetic and poetic gift, the assumption that Homer was blind looked very plausible. In addition, the singer Demodocus in the Odyssey is blind from birth, which could also be perceived as autobiographical.

Homer. Naples, National Archaeological Museum

There is a legend about the poetic duel between Homer and Hesiod, described in the essay "The Competition of Homer and Hesiod", created no later than the 3rd century BC. BC e., and according to many researchers, and much earlier. The poets allegedly met on the island of Euboea at games in honor of the deceased Amphidemus and each read their best poems. King Paned, who acted as a judge in the competition, awarded the victory to Hesiod, since he calls for agriculture and peace, and not for war and battles. At the same time, the sympathy of the audience was on the side of Homer.

In addition to the Iliad and the Odyssey, a number of works are attributed to Homer, undoubtedly created later: the “Homeric hymns” (7th-5th centuries BC, are considered along with Homer the oldest examples of Greek poetry), the comic poem “Margit”, etc. .

The meaning of the name "Homer" (it first occurs in the 7th century BC, when Kallin of Ephesus called him the author of "Thebaid") was tried to be explained back in antiquity, the options "hostage" (Hesychius), "following" (Aristotle) were proposed or “the blind man” (Efor Kimsky), “but all these options are as unconvincing as modern proposals to ascribe to it the meaning of “compounder” or “accompanist”.<…>This word in its Ionian form Ομηρος is almost certainly a real personal name ”(Boura S.M. Heroic poetry.)

Homer (about 460 BC)

A.F. Losev: The traditional image of Homer among the Greeks. This traditional image of Homer, which has existed for about 3,000 years, if we discard all the pseudo-scientific fictions of the later Greeks, comes down to the image of a blind and wise (and, according to Ovid, also poor), necessarily an old singer, creating wonderful tales under the constant guidance of the muse that inspires him and leading the life of some wandering rhapsodist. We meet similar features of folk singers in many other nations, and therefore there is nothing specific and original in them. This is the most common and most common type of folk singer, the most beloved and most popular among different peoples.

Most researchers believe that the Homeric poems were created in Asia Minor, in Ionia in the 8th century. BC e. based on the mythological tales of the Trojan War. There is late antique evidence of the final edition of their texts under the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus in the middle of the 6th century. BC e., when their performance was included in the festivities of the Great Panathenaic.

In ancient times, Homer was credited with the comic poems "Margit" and "The War of Mice and Frogs", a cycle of works about the Trojan War and the return of heroes to Greece: "Cypri", "Aetiopis", "Small Iliad", "The Capture of Ilion", "Returns" ( so-called "kyklichnye poems", only small fragments have been preserved). Under the title "Homeric Hymns" there was a collection of 33 hymns to the gods. In the Hellenistic era, the philologists of the Library of Alexandria Aristarchus of Samothrace, Zenodotus from Ephesus, Aristophanes from Byzantium did a great job of collecting and clarifying the manuscripts of Homer's poems (they also divided each poem into 24 songs according to the number of letters of the Greek alphabet). The name of the sophist Zoilus (4th century BC), nicknamed "the scourge of Homer" for his critical statements, has become a household name. Xenon and Hellanic, so-called. "separating", expressed the idea that Homer might belong to only one "Iliad"

Jean-Baptiste Auguste Leloir (1809-1892). Homere.

In the 19th century, the Iliad and the Odyssey were compared with the epics of the Slavs, skaldic poetry, Finnish and German epic. In the 1930s The American classical philologist Milman Parry, comparing Homer's poems with the living epic tradition that still existed among the peoples of Yugoslavia at that time, found in Homer's poems a reflection of the poetic technique of the Aed folk singers. The poetic formulas they created from stable combinations and epithets (“swift-footed” Achilles, “shepherd of the peoples” Agamemnon, “wise-minded” Odysseus, “sweet-tongued” Nestor) made it possible for the narrator to “improvise” perform epic songs consisting of many thousands of verses.

The Iliad and the Odyssey belong entirely to the centuries-old epic tradition, but this does not mean that oral tradition is anonymous. “Before Homer, we cannot name a single poem of this kind, although, of course, there were many poets” (Aristotle). Aristotle saw the main difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey and all other epic works in the fact that Homer does not develop his narrative gradually, but builds it around one event - the poems are based on a dramatic unity of action. Another feature that Aristotle also drew attention to is that the character of the hero is revealed not by the descriptions of the author, but by the speeches uttered by the hero himself.

Medieval illustration for the Iliad

The language of Homer's poems - exclusively poetic, "supra-dialectal" - has never been identical to living colloquial speech. It consisted of a combination of Aeolian (Boeotia, Thessaly, the island of Lesbos) and Ionian (Attica, insular Greece, the coast of Asia Minor) dialect features with the preservation of the archaic system of earlier eras. Hexameter, rooted in Indo-European epic creativity, metrically designed the songs of the Iliad and Odyssey - a poetic meter in which each verse consists of six feet with the correct alternation of long and short syllables. The unusual nature of the poetic language of the epic was emphasized by the timeless nature of the events and the greatness of the images of the heroic past.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) - Homer and his Guide (1874)

Sensational discoveries of G. Schliemann in 1870-80s. proved that Troy, Mycenae and the Achaean citadels are not a myth, but a reality. Schliemann's contemporaries were struck by the literal correspondence of a number of his finds in the fourth shaft tomb at Mycenae with Homer's descriptions. The impression was so strong that the era of Homer for a long time became associated with the heyday of Achaean Greece in the 14th-13th centuries. BC e. In the poems, however, there are also numerous archaeologically attested features of the culture of the "heroic age", such as the mention of iron tools and weapons or the custom of cremation of the dead. In terms of content, Homer's epics contain many motifs, storylines, myths gleaned from early poetry. In Homer, one can hear echoes of the Minoan culture, and even trace the connection with the Hittite mythology. However, the main source of epic material for him was the Mycenaean period. It is during this era that the action of his epic takes place. Living in the fourth century after the end of this period, which he strongly idealizes, Homer cannot be a source of historical information about the political, social life, material culture or religion of the Mycenaean world. But in the political center of this society Mycenae, however, objects identical to those described in the epic (mainly weapons and tools) were found, while some Mycenaean monuments present images, things and even scenes typical of the poetic reality of the epic. The events of the Trojan War, around which Homer unfolded the actions of both poems, were attributed to the Mycenaean era. He showed this war as an armed campaign of the Greeks (called Achaeans, Danaans, Argives) led by the Mycenaean king Agamemnon against Troy and its allies. For the Greeks, the Trojan War was a historical fact dating back to the 14th-12th centuries. BC e. (according to Eratosthenes' calculations, Troy fell in 1184)

Karl Becker. Homer songs

A comparison of the evidence of the Homeric epic with the data of archeology confirms the conclusions of many researchers that in its final version it took shape in the 8th century. BC e., and many researchers consider the Catalog of Ships (Iliad, 2nd song) to be the oldest part of the epic. Obviously, the poems were not created at the same time: the Iliad reflects the idea of a person of the “heroic period”, the Odyssey stands, as it were, at the turn of a different era - the time of the Great Greek colonization, when the boundaries of the world mastered by Greek culture were expanding.

For a man of antiquity, Homer's poems were a symbol of Hellenic unity and heroism, a source of wisdom and knowledge of all aspects of life - from military art to practical morality. Homer, along with Hesiod, was considered the creator of a comprehensive and orderly mythological picture of the universe: the poets “composed genealogies of the gods for the Hellenes, provided the names of the gods with epithets, divided dignity and occupations between them, and drew their images” (Herodotus). According to Strabo, Homer was the only poet of antiquity who knew almost everything about the ecumene, about the peoples inhabiting it, their origin, lifestyle and culture. The data of Homer as authentic and trustworthy were used by Thucydides, Pausanias (writer), Plutarch. The father of tragedy, Aeschylus, called his dramas "the crumbs from the great feasts of Homer."

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot. Homer and the Shepherds

Greek children learned to read from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer was quoted, commented on, explained allegorically. By reading selected passages from Homer's poems, the Pythagorean philosophers called for the correction of souls. Plutarch reports that Alexander the Great always had with him a list of the Iliad, which he kept under his pillow along with a dagger.

The myth of Homer himself is probably no less a myth than the myths of his poems. Already in the ancient period, Homer was a semi-legendary figure, akin to demigod heroes. Seven Greek cities argued for the right to be called the birthplace of the great aed, but this dispute was not finally resolved, as the lines of an unknown ancient poet say:

Seven cities, arguing, are called the homeland of Homer:

Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Pylos, Argos, Ithaca, Athens.

The traditional image of Homer is a blind old man, whose singing is echoed by the melodious ringing of strings, but no one knows what the living Homer was like. Probably, if he was physically blind, his spiritual eye saw much more than is possible for a mortal. As the blind soothsayer Tiresias, mentioned in the Odyssey, he could see the fate of people.

Some scholars doubt whether Homer existed? Maybe the authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey were different people? Perhaps these poems are a product of oral folk art? Finally, there is another version that appeared relatively recently: Homer existed, but he was a woman, not a man, as was commonly believed. However, does it really matter what Homer was like during his lifetime? He himself has long become a part of the great myth, therefore his image cannot and should not be ordinary, banal, unambiguous. And what do faint-hearted doubts about the very fact of Homer's existence mean when the Iliad and the Odyssey are real, and, oddly enough, are still modern? Didn't people doubt the existence of Christ, although he lived much later than Homer? But after all, this is probably the peculiarity of a truly great personality - when it passes into eternity, the light that comes into the world through this person does not disappear, but in its dazzling radiance it is sometimes difficult to discern the earthly features of the divine chosen one ...

The myths preserved by Homer for posterity, after many centuries, still continue to excite the minds of people:

I closed the Iliad and sat by the window,

On the lips fluttered the last word,

Something shone brightly - a lantern or the moon,

And the sentinel's shadow moved slowly.

These are lines from N. S. Gumilyov's poem "Modernity", in which the images of the Homeric poem unexpectedly find embodiment in reality at the beginning of the 20th century. Heroes like Homer's - it is they who pave new paths, they strive forward. But it often happens that the essence of these people is hidden in the depths of their souls, and they themselves are forced to be content with a very modest position in life, doing useful but boring work.

Our contemporaries continue to be interested in the mythological plot of the Iliad. The film "Troy" is an attempt to bring the heroes of the Trojan War closer to us, to make them more understandable and real. The sudden love of a formidable warrior's wife for a charming guest, the hostility of two allies, ready to turn into an open clash, the mother's sadness about the unfortunate fate of her son, the grief of a father who lost the noblest and most courageous of his heirs... These are the eternal motives of human existence. And even the theme of fate, which dominates everything and everything - is it not close to many people who proudly call themselves "civilized"?

However, no matter how one regards the personality of Odysseus, the theme of his return to Ithaca, his love for his homeland and his family, of course, significantly elevates this hero above his human weaknesses and sins. But the image of Odysseus captures the imagination and the fact that it is the image of a wanderer, bravely fighting the elements. O. E. Mandelstam in the poem “A stream of golden honey ...” brings the image of King Ithaca closer to the images of the Argonauts who set off on a journey in order to gain a great treasure:

Golden Fleece, where are you, Golden Fleece?

The heavy waves of the sea roared all the way,

And, having left the ship, which worked the canvas in the seas,

Odysseus returned, full of space and time.

Mandelstam did not ignore Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, whose image is no less majestic than her wife. As Odysseus differs from other heroes in his ingenuity, so Penelope surpasses the wives of other heroes in her fidelity and wisdom. So, Odysseus invented the Trojan horse to capture Troy, while Penelope began to weave a wedding veil that will never be finished, so as not to get married and remain faithful to her missing husband: Remember, in a Greek house: beloved by all the wife, -

Not Elena - different - how long did she embroider? The English writer G. Haggard in his novel The Dream of the World made an attempt to show the further fate of the king of Ithaca. Some details of the plot coincide with myths that were not included in Homer's epic. For example, the death of Odysseus at the hands of Telegon, his own son from the goddess Circe. However, in general, the plot of "Dreams of the World" looks too fantastic, it is alien to the strict regularity of the Homeric narrative. But the fact remains - the image of one of the heroes of Homer inspires the imagination of writers many centuries later. And one more thing - although Odysseus seems to die in Haggard's novel, the motive of his future return immediately sounds ...

The glory of Odysseus lies not so much in his exploits and not even in cunning, but in his return. After all, the whole "Odyssey" is a story about the hero's return to Ithaca. In the Iliad, Homer glorifies Achilles, and the glory of this hero is different:

If I stay here, before the city of Trojans to fight, -

There is no return to me, but my glory will not perish. If I return to the house, to my dear native land,

My glory will perish, but my age will be long-

The glory of Achilles is firmly associated with Troy, the glory of Odysseus is with the road from Troy to Ithaca, and the glory of Homer is not associated with any specific place on earth: ...

We say: the great sky is your fatherland, and not mortal

You were born a mother, but Calliope herself.

Odysseus in Homer's poem tells about the island of Crete. Today, the island of Crete, which is part of Greece, is inhabited by about half a million people. The inhabitants are mainly engaged in agriculture. Industry is poorly developed, there are no railways. In a word, that abundance, which Homer reports, is not now on the island of Crete and in
remember. Until the 70s of the 19th century, the inhabitants of Crete had no idea that under their feet in the ground lies the ruins of an ancient civilization that was once the pearl of the Mediterranean.

A certain Cretan merchant named Minos Halokerinos, who lived in the second half of the 19th century, the namesake of the famous king Minos, came across the ruins of an ancient building, found ancient utensils. Messages about this discovery spread around the world, interested the famous G. Schliemann, but the excavations began to be carried out by the Englishman Arthur Evans in 1900, who became the discoverer of the Cretan culture. Evans saw the magnificent palace of Minos (as Evans called it), multi-storey, with a huge number of rooms, corridors, baths, pantries, with running water, sewerage. In the palace halls, the walls were painted with frescoes. Along with huge vessels (pithoi), weapons, and decorations, tablets with inscriptions were found. Homer did not lie, Crete was indeed the center of the riches and arts of antiquity.

The dead, apparently, the richest Crete-Mycenaean culture, undoubtedly, had its own literature. However, nothing remained of it, except for writings on clay tablets, which were deciphered only in 1953 by the British Ventris and Chadwig. However, the Cretan-Mycenaean culture cannot be ignored in the history of literature. This is the link between the culture of ancient Egypt and the Hellenic culture.

Until the 20th century, science, in essence, knew nothing about the antiquities of Crete, except for the evidence of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Diodorus, which were perceived as legendary, fabulous material.

The heyday of Cretan culture apparently falls on the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. Traditions associate it with the name of King Minos. “Minos, as we know from legend, was the first to acquire a fleet for himself, having mastered a large part of the sea, which is now called Hellenic,” wrote the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Herodotus called Minos "lord of the sea". Cretan cities did not have fortifications. Apparently, Crete had an excellent fleet, which fully ensured the safety of its cities. Thucydides and Diodorus considered Minos a Greek. Homer called him "the interlocutor of Kronion."

... The Homeric epic and all mythology - this is the main legacy that the Greeks transferred from barbarism to civilization.
F. Engels

Homer is so great, so significant both for the spiritual history of the ancient world and for subsequent epochs in the history of all mankind, that an entire culture should rightfully be named after him.

Homer was a Greek, apparently from the Ionians from the shores of Asia Minor.

Today, there are relatively few Greeks in the human family of five billion: something like 12 million, and one third of them live outside Greece. Once they were a huge cultural force in the world, spreading their influence far beyond the metropolis.

The ancient Greek tribes, of course, were not a single people, and they did not call themselves Greeks either. So the Romans later called them after one of the small tribes in southern Italy. They themselves called themselves Hellenes. The genealogy of the Hellenes is lost in the XII century BC. e. The indigenous population at that time, apparently, were pelazgi, tribes that came from Asia Minor and from the north of the Balkan Peninsula merged with them.

What were the Greeks like in those remote times? Today they are relatively short (165-170 cm), with dark wavy hair, swarthy skin and dark eyes. In those days, the growth of men, judging by the archaeological excavations, reached 180 cm.

Homer calls the Achaeans "curly-headed", Menelaus "fair-haired" or "golden-haired". Agameda, an ancient healer, was also fair-haired, who “knew all the healing herbs, how much the earth gives birth to them.” Odysseus was fair-haired and, presumably, most of the Greeks. Homer picturesquely draws the appearance of his heroes. Agamemnon is tall and thin, Odysseus is shorter and stockier. Standing next to Menelaus, he was somewhat inferior to him, but when sitting he looked "prettier". Menelaus spoke little, fluently, but weightily, "strikingly," expressing himself frankly, "not roundabout." Gorgeous in the "Iliad" portrait of Odysseus. So he got up, lowered his eyes, turned them to the ground, stands quietly, motionless, as if he is looking for and cannot find words and does not know what to say, “like a simple man.” What is it, or is he speechless from anger, or is he completely stupid, unspoken, "poor-witted"? But a voice escaped from his mighty chest, and speech, “like a strong blizzard, rushed out of his mouth” - “No, no one would dare to fight with Odysseus with words.”

Homer captured the details of the lives of his contemporaries. Sometimes they are no different from what we have observed in our day. Here he tells how a playing boy builds something on the seashore from wet sand and then “scatters it with his hand and foot, frolicking”, or how “jugular meski” (hinnies) “pull from a high mountain along the road a cruelly bumpy ship beam or a huge mast …”, or how a working person rests:

... the woodcutter's husband begins to cook his dinner,
Sitting under a shady mountain, when he had already satiated his hands,
The forest plunges high, and finds languor on souls,
Feelings are embraced by the hunger for sweet food.

Homer is very detailed - according to his descriptions, one can vividly imagine the labor process of a person of his day. The poet, apparently, was close to the common people, perhaps in his youth he himself built rafts and ships and sailed on them on the “boundless sea”. This is felt by the way in which he describes in detail and, perhaps, lovingly, the work of Odysseus, who was building his raft:

He began to cut trees and soon finished the work,
He cut down twenty logs, cleaned them with sharp copper
He scraped it out smoothly, then called, trimming along the line.
That time Calypso returned to him with a drill.
He began to bore the beams and, having drilled everything, rallied them,
Stitching with long bolts and sticking spikes in with large ones.

Etc. (V). Using the detailed and loving description of Homer, the carpenter of our day will freely build the structure made by Odysseus.

Homer accurately and in detail described the cities in which his contemporaries and compatriots lived. The city of his days appears to our imagination quite realistically and visibly with streets and squares, temples and houses of citizens, and even outbuildings:

... With loopholes, the walls surround him;
A deep pier envelops it on both sides: the entrance is
The pier is constrained by ships, which to the right and left
The shore is lined, and each of them is under a protective roof;
There is also a trading square around Posidon's temple,
Standing firmly on hewn stones; tackle
All the ships are there, stock of sails and ropes in the spacious
Buildings are stored, smooth oars are also being prepared there.

City walls - "wonderful beauty", does not forget to insert Homer, because the townspeople of his time thought not only about the impregnability and strength of the walls, but also about their beauty.

We learn, though in general terms, about the existence of medicine in the days of Homer. The Achaean army had its own doctor, a certain Machaon, the son of Asclepius, the god of healing. He examined the wound of Menelaus, squeezed out the blood and showered her with "medicine". What these means were, the exact and detailed Homer does not tell. It's a secret. It was opened to Asclepius by the centaur Chiron, the kindest creature with the face of a man and the body of a horse, the educator of many heroes - Hercules, Achilles, Jason.

Not only people specially trained for this, the “sons of Asclepius”, or healers like the fair-haired Agameda, are engaged in healing, but also individual warriors who have learned certain recipes. The hero Achilles knew them from the centaur Chiron, and Patroclus, who recognized them from Achilles.

Homer even described the surgical operation:

Spread the hero, with a knife he stings from the ladwei
Cut out bitter feathered, washed it with warm water
Black blood and rubbed root sprinkled with hands
Bitter, healing pain, which he completely
Pain quenches: and the blood subsided, and the ulcer withered.

The Greeks considered Homer their first and greatest poet. However, his poetry has already crowned a large culture created by more than one generation. It would be naive to think that it, like a miracle, arose on uncultivated soil. We know little about what preceded it, but the very system of poetic thinking of the great old man, the world of his moral and aesthetic ideas indicate that this is the pinnacle of a centuries-old cultural process, a brilliant generalization of the spiritual interests and ideals of a society that has already come a long way historical formation. Historians believe that the Greece of the time of Homer was no longer as rich and highly developed as in the previous Cretan-Mycenaean era. Apparently, intertribal wars and the invasion of new, less developed tribes had an effect, which delayed and even somewhat pushed Greece back. But we will use the poems of Homer, and in them the picture is different. (Perhaps these are only poetic memories of bygone times?) Judging by the descriptions of Homer, the peoples who inhabited the shores of Asia Minor, the Balkan Peninsula, the islands of the Aegean Sea and the entire East
Mediterranean, lived richly, Troy was already a well-built city with wide areas.

The household items described by Homer testify to the height of culture.

The lyre played by Achilles was "magnificent, exquisitely decorated", with a "silver pommel on top".

In his tent are armchairs and luxurious purple carpets. On the table are “beautiful baskets” for bread.

Speaking of Helen sitting at the loom, Homer will not fail to cast a glance at the canvas: it turns out to be “a light, two-fold cover”, something like an ancient tapestry, which depicted scenes from the Trojan War (“battles, exploits of horse Trojans and copper hasty danaev"). It must be assumed that in the time of Homer, episodes of the Trojan War were the subject of not only oral traditions, songs, but also picturesque and plastic creations.

The height of the general material culture of the world of the era of Homer is also evidenced by the cosmetic tricks of the goddess Hera, colorfully described by the poet. The poet describes in detail, with delight, the decoration of the goddess, all the tricks of the women's toilet, her beauty:

In the ears - beautiful earrings with triple pendants,
Playing brightly: the beauty around from the goddess shone.
Sovereign Hera overshadowed the head with a light cover.
Lush, new, which, like the sun, shone with whiteness.
She tied the beauty of a magnificent mold to her bright legs,
So for the eyes a delightful body adorned with decorations,
Hera came out of the box ...

The poet loves to fix his eyes on military armor, clothes, chariots, drawing in detail every detail of them. Using his descriptions, it is possible to accurately recreate household items used by his contemporaries. Hera's chariot had two copper wheels with eight spokes on an iron axle. The wheels had gold rims, with densely placed copper spikes, the hubs were rounded with silver. The body was fastened with straps lavishly trimmed with silver and gold. Two brackets towered above it, the drawbar was trimmed with silver, and the harness with gold. "Wonderful to the eye!"

And here is a description of the warrior’s attire: Paris, going to battle with Menelaus, puts “lush” leggings on his “white legs”, fastening them with silver buckles, put copper armor on his chest, threw a belt and a silver-nailed sword with a copper blade over his shoulder, put it on his head a brilliant helmet with a crest and a horse's mane, took a heavy spear in his hands.

Such weapons, of course, were bulky and heavy, and Homer, reporting the death of one or another warrior, usually concludes the scene with the phrase: “He fell to the ground with a noise, and armor rattled on the fallen.” The armor was the pride of the warrior, his property, and quite expensive, so the winner was in a hurry to remove them from the vanquished, it was a trophy and honorable and rich.

There is no state apparatus in the days of Homer, the peoples live in patriarchal simplicity, producing everything on their own kleros (allotment). But the beginnings of taxation are already being planned. “He rewarded himself for the loss with a rich collection from the people,” Alkina says in the poem. Class stratification was already quite sharply marked in Greek society in the days of Homer. The poet colorfully draws the life of the top of the people, the luxury of their dwellings, clothes, comfortable life. It is unlikely that Odysseus’ house was very luxurious, but even here there are “rich armchairs of skillful work”, they are covered with a “patterned cloth”, a bench, a “silver tub”, for washing hands, a “golden washstand” are placed under the feet. The “smooth table”, apparently, was light, it was moved by a slave. Slaves and youths serve food, the housekeeper manages supplies, gives them out. Here the herald makes sure that the cups are not empty.

The house of Nestor was also rich, where the son of Odysseus Telemachus arrived, received by the elder as an honored guest. He puts Telemachus "in resounding peace" on a "slotted" bed.

Nestor's youngest daughter took Telemachus to a cool bath, washed him and rubbed him with "pure oil". In a chiton and a rich mantle, the young son of Odysseus came out of the bath, "like a god with a radiant face."

Homer also described the rich feasts of the Greeks, to which, presumably, all the free citizens of the city were invited, as, for example, on Pylos during the festival of Poseidon (“the azure-curly god”):

There were nine benches there: on the benches, five hundred on each,
People were sitting, and there were nine bulls in front of each.
Having tasted the sweetness of the womb, they already burned the Thigh before God ...

Homer described in detail how, during the feast, the youths carry the "light drink" around the circle of guests, "according to custom, starting from the right," how the tongues of sacrificial animals are thrown into the fire, etc.

At feasts they ate meat (fish was not included in the circle of delicacies), sprinkled abundantly with barley grains. After the feast, the young men sang a hymn to the god (“loud pean”).

The fate of the poor is sad. One can judge this by the way the suitors of Penelope and even the slave treated the unrecognized Odysseus, who appeared in his house in the rags of a beggar, what fun they arranged for themselves from a dispute and a fight between two beggars, one of whom was a disguised Odysseus (“the suitors, clasping their hands, everyone was dying of laughter"):

Just wait, I'll deal with you, you dirty tramp:
You are bold in the presence of noble gentlemen and you are not timid in soul.

One of the suitors threatens Odysseus. The threat to the old beggar is even more terrible:

I will throw you into a black-sided ship and send you in an instant
To the mainland to Ekhet the king, the slayer of mortals.
He will cut off your ears and nose with merciless copper,
He will vomit the shame and give it raw to be eaten by dogs.

The poetry of Homer, of course, was already the pinnacle of some very large artistic culture that has not come down to us. She raised him, shaped his artistic taste, taught him to understand physical and moral beauty. He embodied the highest achievements of this culture in poetry as a brilliant son of his people. In ancient Greece, there was a cult of beauty, and above all the physical beauty of a person. Homer captured this cult in poetry, the great sculptors of Greece a little later - in marble.

All the gods, except, perhaps, the lame-footed Hephaestus, were beautiful. Homer constantly talks about the beauty of his heroes.
Elena, the daughter of Leda, was so beautiful that all her suitors, and these were the rulers of the city-states, in order to avoid mutual insults and civil strife, agreed among themselves to recognize and protect her chosen one, and when Elena, already the wife of Menelaus, was abducted by Paris and taken from Mycenae to Troy, the treaty came into force. All Greece went to Troy. Thus began the great war described by Homer in the Iliad. Paris, according to Homer's descriptions, "shone with beauty and clothes", he has "luxurious curls and charm." He received the "gracious gift of the golden Aphrodite" - beauty.

Everything in Homer is beautiful: the gods, and the people, and all Hellas, "glorious women with beauty."

With penetrating tenderness, Homer describes the appearance of Helen. So she got up, was overshadowed by silvery fabrics. She went, "tender tears stream down her face." The elders saw her. It would seem that all of them should be inflamed with hatred and indignation, because it stirred up so many peoples, brought so many troubles to the inhabitants of Troy. But the elders cannot restrain their admiration: she is so good, so beautiful - this "lily-ramen" Elena:

The elders, as soon as they saw Elena going to the tower,
The quiet ones spoke winged speeches among themselves;
No, it is impossible to condemn that Troy sons and Achaeans
Scolding for such a wife and troubles endure so long:
Truly, she is like the eternal goddesses in beauty!

For Homer, there are no guilty people in the world, everything is done by the will of the gods, however, they are also subject to the great Moira - fate. Innocent and Elena, her escape from Mycenae is the will of Aphrodite. Elder Priam, the ruler of the besieged Troy, treats the young woman with paternal care. Seeing Elena, he friendly called her: "Walk, my dear child! .. You are innocent before me: only the gods are guilty."

Drawing the scene of the wounding of Menelaus, Homer pays tribute to beauty here: “the thighs are steep, beautiful legs stained with purple blood” - and compares them with “purple-colored” ivory. The “young” Simonisius, a Trojan slain in battle, he likens to a cut down poplar, “a wet meadow to a pet”, which is “smooth and clean”. The god Hermes appeared before Priam, "like a noble youth in appearance, pubescent with the first beard, whose youth is charming."

Priam, complaining about his fate and foreseeing his violent death, is most afraid of what will appear to the eyes of people in an obscene form, with a body distorted by old age:

... Oh, the young man is glorious,
No matter how he lies, fallen in battle and torn to pieces by copper, -
Everything with him, and with the dead, whatever is open, is beautiful!
If a gray-haired beard and a gray-haired head of a man,
If the shame of a murdered old man is defiled by dogs,
There is no more miserable fate for unfortunate people.

Talking about Ajax, Homer will not fail to note the "beauty of the face", he will talk about "beautiful Achaean wives." About Ermia: "he had a captivating image of a young man with virgin fluff on fresh cheeks, in a beautiful youthful color." Megapeid "captivated by youthful beauty." Etc.

Homer also glorifies the beauty of things. They are created by artists. He also glorifies his brothers, "singers who comfort the soul with the divine word," and skilled jewelers. So, in the most pathetic place in the story, Homer fixes his gaze on a skillfully crafted badge, he cannot help but stop and describe it in detail:

Golden, beautiful, with double hooks
The mantle was held on with a plaque: the master on the plaque skillfully
A formidable dog and in his mighty claws he has a young
Doe sculpted: as if alive, she trembled; and scared
The dog looked at her furiously, and rushing from his paws
Break out, she kicked: in amazement, that badge
She brought everyone.

Myths of Homeric Greece

Myths are the first form of poetic consciousness of the people. They contain his philosophy, his history, his morals, customs, his anxiety, worries, dreams, ideals and, in the end, the whole complex of his spiritual life.

The daily life of the ancient Greek took place in constant communication with the gods. This communication was, of course, not in reality, but in the imagination, but this did not lose the force of reality for him. The whole world around him was inhabited by gods. In the sky and the stars, in the seas and rivers, in the forests and mountains - everywhere he saw the gods. Reading Homer today, we cannot perceive his narrative as a realistic depiction of true events. For us, this is a beautiful poetic fiction. For the ancient Greek, contemporary of the poet, it was an undeniable truth.

When we read from Homer: “A young woman with purple fingers Eos arose from darkness,” we understand that morning has come, and not just a morning, but a bright, southern, sunny morning, a beautiful morning, fanned by the fresh breath of the sea, a morning like a young goddess , because Eos named here is “young” and she has “purple fingers”. The ancient Greek perceived this phrase in the same emotional coloring, but if for us Eos is a poetic image, then for the ancient Greek it was a real being - a goddess. The name Eos spoke very much to his heart. He knew both beautiful and tragic stories about her. This is the goddess of the morning, the sister of Helios, the god of the Sun, and Selena, the goddess of the moon. She gave birth to stars and winds - cold, sharp Boreas and soft, gentle Zephyr. The ancient Greek imagined her as the most beautiful young woman. Like real, ordinary women, she lived the life of the heart, she fell in love and suffered, enjoyed and grieved. She could not resist the courageous beauty of the god of war Ares and thus aroused the wrath of Aphrodite, who was in love with him. The goddess of love, as a punishment, inspired her with a constant and insatiable desire. Eos fell in love with the handsome Orion and kidnapped him. The name of Orion entailed a string of new stories. He was the son of the sea god Poseidon. His father gave him the ability to walk on the sea surface. He was a strong and courageous hunter, but also bold and arrogant. He dishonored the young Merope, and the girl's father blinded him. Then, in order to see clearly, he went to Helios himself, and he restored his sight with his life-giving rays. Orion died from the arrow of Artemis and was carried to heaven. There he became one of the constellations.

The Greek also knew another sad story about the morning goddess. She once saw the young Trojan Titon, brother of Priam, and, subdued by his beauty, carried him away and became his beloved, giving birth to his son Memnon. Her love was so strong that she begged Zeus to give him immortality, but forgot to ask him for eternal youth. The handsome Titon became immortal, but every day something was lost in him. Life faded, but did not go away completely. In the end, he became decrepit: he could no longer move. The unfortunate goddess could only bitterly mourn her fatal mistake.

They say that Titon personified for the ancient Greeks the passing day, the fading, but not yet extinguished light. Maybe! But what a wonderful and exciting legend about this natural phenomenon has been created by the poetic fantasy of a people of genius!
So, pink-fingered Eos! Morning! Morning and youth! Morning and beauty! Morning and love! All this merged in the minds of the ancient Greek, woven into amazingly beautiful legends.

We read from Homer the following phrase: "A heavy night has descended from a formidable sky."

Night (in Greek Nikta) is also a goddess, but her name is associated with other images - gloomy. She is the daughter of Chaos and the sister of Erebus (darkness) and, as Homer writes, "the immortal and mortal queen." She lives somewhere in the depths of Tartarus, where she meets with her antipode and brother Day to replace him in the eternal change of day.

Night has children and grandchildren. Her daughter Eris (discord) gave birth to Strife, Sorrow, Battles, Famine, Murder. This evil, insidious goddess threw an apple of discord at the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis and led entire nations - Greeks and Trojans - to war.

The formidable goddess of retribution Nemesis was also born from the Night. Her judgment is just and swift. She punishes for the evil committed by man. The sculptors depicted her as the most beautiful (the Greeks could not help it) woman with a sword, wings and scales (sword - retribution, punishment, punishment; wings - speed of retribution; scales - balancing guilt and punishment).

The night gave birth to the nymphs of the Hesperides. They live in the far west, near the Ocean River, in a beautiful garden, and there they guard apples that give eternal youth. The son of the Night was the mocking god Mom, the great mocker and bully. He is slanderous, he laughs even at the gods themselves, and the angry Zeus expelled him from the kingdom of the gods of Olympus.

The son of the Night was Thanatos, the merciless god of death. Once Sisyphus managed to shackle Thanatos in chains, and people stopped dying, but this did not last long, and Thanatos, liberated, again began to destroy the human race.

The Night had three terrible daughters: moira, the goddess of fate. One of them was called Lachestis (drawing lots). Even before the birth of a person, she determined his fate in life. The second is Clotho (spinning). She spun the thread of his life to a man. And the third is Atropos (inevitable). She broke this thread. Russian translators of Homer Gnedich and Zhukovsky called moira in their translations parks. The Greeks did not know such a word, “parks” is a Latin word, as the ancient Romans called moira, transferring them to their pantheon.

Perhaps the most beautiful son of Night was Hymnos, the god of sleep. He is always beneficent, he heals people's sorrows, gives rest from heavy worries and thoughts. Homer draws a sweet scene: Penelope yearns in her chambers for her missing husband, for her son Telemachus, who is threatened by both the "evil sea" and "treacherous murderers", but now ... "Peaceful sleep flew in and cherished her, and everything in her subsided" .

Homer calls him "the sweetener". He is also a living being, a beautiful young man who lives on the island of Lemnos, near the spring of oblivion. He also has very human feelings. He is in love with one of the Charites, Pasiphae, in love for a long time and hopelessly. But Hera needed his service, it was necessary to put Zeus to sleep. Hymnos hesitates, afraid of the wrath of the strongest of the gods. But Hera promises him the love of Pasiphae:

You will finally embrace, you will call your wife
That Pasiphae, for which you have been sighing for a long time all the days.

And Hymnos is delighted, only asks Hera to swear by the "Styx by water" that she will fulfill the promise.

The Greek saw the gods everywhere, and they were beautiful in their not divine, but human feelings, he elevated people to the ideal of a deity, reduced the gods to people, and this was the attractive power of his mythology.

However, Greek mythology has undergone a certain evolution.

The first, most ancient gods were terrible. They could only inspire fear by their appearance and their actions. Man was still very weak and timid before the incomprehensible and formidable forces of nature. The raging sea, storms, huge waves, all the infinity of the sea space frightened. A sudden, inexplicable movement of the earth's surface, which seemed unshakable before, is an earthquake; explosions of a fire-breathing mountain, red-hot stones flying to the sky, a column of smoke and fire and a fiery river flowing down the slopes of the mountain; terrible storms, hurricanes, whirlwinds, turning everything into chaos - all this shocked souls and demanded explanations. Nature seemed hostile, ready at any moment to bring death or suffering to man. The forces of nature seemed to be living beings, and they were terrible. The gods of the first generation are fierce. Uranus (sky) threw his children into Tartarus. One of the Titans (sons of Uranus and Gaia) (of the earth) castrated his father. From the blood spilled from the wound grew monstrous giants with thick hair and beards and snake legs. They were destroyed by the Olympian gods. A fragment of the frieze of the altar in Pergamum (II century BC) has been preserved, where the sculpture depicts gigantomachy - the battle of the Olympian gods with the giants. But the sculptor, obeying the reigning cult of beauty, depicted a giant with huge snake rings instead of legs, but also with a beautiful torso and a face similar to that of Apollo.

Cronus, who overthrew his father, devoured his children. To save Zeus, his mother Rhea threw a huge boulder into the mouth of the god-father instead of a child, which he calmly swallowed. The world was inhabited by terrible monsters, and man bravely entered the fight against these monsters.

The third generation of gods - Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades - Homeric gods. They carried bright humanistic ideals.

The Olympian gods invite people to participate in their battles with terrible giants, with all the monsters that Gaia gave birth to. This is how heroes appeared. The Russian word for "hero" is of Greek origin (heros). The first generation of Greeks fought monsters. Hercules killed, while still a young man, the Cithaeron lion, then the Nemean lion, taking possession of his skin, invulnerable to arrows, killed the Lernean hydra with nine heads, cleared the stables of Augeus, killed the bull monster in Crete. So he performed twelve feats, cleansing the world from filth and monsters. The hero Cadmus, the son of the Phoenician king, killed the dragon monster and founded the city of Thebes. The hero Theseus killed a minotaur monster in Crete. The daughter of Minos, in love with Theseus, helped him get out of the labyrinth, holding on to the thread (the thread of Ariadne). Heroes make long trips. The Argonauts, led by Jason, go to distant Colchis and extract the Golden Fleece.

The next generation of heroes fights at the Scamander River - these are the characters of Homer's poems.

The history of the Greek gods went from chaos to order, from ugliness to beauty, from gods to man. The world of the gods is patriarchal. They live on Olympus. Each of them has his own house, built "according to the ideas of the creative" blacksmith, artist and architect lame Hephaestus. They argue and quarrel, feast and enjoy the singing of the Muses and "the sounds of the beautiful lyre, rattling in the hands of Apollo", and taste, like people, "a sweet dream." "Blessed inhabitants of the sky!"

Olympus, where they say they founded their abode
Gods, where the winds do not blow, where the cold-bearing rain does not rustle,
Where winter does not raise snowstorms, where cloudless air
It is poured with light azure and penetrated with the sweetest radiance;
There for the gods in unspeakable joys all the days run by.

The gods, although they live on the high Olympus, but in constant communication with people, almost in a friendly way, almost like a neighbor. Achilles' mother Thetis informs her son that yesterday Zeus with all the gods, "with a host of immortals", went to the distant waters of the Ocean to visit, to a feast to the "immaculate Ethiopians." Apparently, the feast should be many days, because Zeus returned to Olympus only on the twelfth day. The idea of the country of the Ethiopians is still rather vague, they live somewhere on the edge of the inhabited earth, near the distant waters of the Ocean.

The gods flew, they put on golden sandals with wings, as Hermes did, or they ascended in the form of a cloud. Thetis rose "out of the foamy sea" with "an early mist". She appeared before her crying son "like a light cloud."
The gods for the ancient Greek were always next to him, they helped or hindered him, they appeared to him in the form of his relatives or people known to him. Most often they came to him in a dream. So, Athena entered Penelope’s bedroom through the keyhole, “breathing her lungs with air”, appeared before her in the guise of her sister Iftima, “the beautiful daughter of the elder Icarius”, the wife of the “mighty Ephmel”, and began to exhort her, who was in a “sweet slumber in the silent gates of dreams,” do not grieve. “The gods, who live an easy life, forbid you to cry and complain: your Telemachus will return unharmed.”

The gods send their signs to people. It was usually the flight of birds, most often an eagle (right - good luck, left - bad luck).
Whatever serious action the Greek conceived, his first concern was to propitiate the gods so that they would help him. For this he made a sacrifice to them.

Homer described in great detail the act of sacrifice in honor of the goddess Athena. They brought the best heifer from the herd, bound her horns with gold, the sons of Nestor washed their hands in a tub lined with flowers, brought a box of barley. Nestor, having washed his hands, took a handful of barley and sprinkled the head of the heifer with it, the sons did the same, then they threw the wool from the head of the heifer into the fire, praying to Athena, and then Thrasimedes plunged an ax into her body. The calf fell down. Women cried out - Nestor's daughters, daughters-in-law and "meek in heart" of his wife. This detail is beautiful: how humane the women of Homer's time were!

The Greeks asked the gods, begged, but in their hearts they scolded. So, in the duel between Menelaus and Paris, the first, when his sword broke into pieces from a blow to the helmet of Paris, “cryed out, looking at the spacious sky: “Zeus, not one of the immortals, like you, is evil!”

Elena also speaks harshly and abusively with Aphrodite when she calls her to the bedchamber, where Paris is waiting for her “on a chiseled bed, bright with beauty and clothes”. "Oh, cruel! Seduce me again are you on fire? Do you appear to me with malicious deceit in your heart? Walk to your beloved yourself ... always languishing with him as a wife or a worker.
Even the chief of the gods is sometimes not spared. One of Homer's characters so in his hearts addresses the sky: "Zeus is an Olympian, and you have already become an obvious false lover." The gods, of course, respect their supreme leader. When he enters the palace (on Olympus), everyone stands up, no one dares to sit in his presence, but his wife Hera meets him completely unkindly (she does not forgive him for his sympathy for the Trojans): “Which of the immortals with you, insidious, built advice ?

Zeus has black eyebrows. When he “washes them” as a sign of consent, his “fragrant” hair rises and the multi-hilled Olympus shakes.

No matter how formidable Zeus is, he is clearly afraid of his wife. She argues with him, and "shouts", and can "embitter him with an insulting speech." When the nymph Thetis, the mother of Achilles, turned to him for help, he “sighed deeply”, answers: “It’s a sad thing, you excite hatred for me by the arrogant Hera”, promises to help, but so that his wife does not know about it: “Go away now May Hera not see you on Olympus.

The gods, of course, are on guard of justice. (It should be so.) And Zeus, "who sees our deeds and punishes our atrocities," and all the other inhabitants of Olympus.

The blessed gods do not like dishonest deeds,
They value good actions in people, justice.

But this, as they say, is ideal. In fact, they suffer from all the vices of people. They are deceitful, and insidious, and vicious. Hera and Athena hate and persecute all the Trojans only because one of them, the shepherd boy Paris, called Aphrodite, not them, the most beautiful. This latter patronizes both Paris and all the Trojans, not at all caring about justice.

The Greeks were afraid of the wrath of the gods and tried their best to propitiate them. However, sometimes they dared to raise a hand against them. So, in the Iliad, Homer tells how on the battlefield the frantic Diomedes, in the heat of anger, throws his spear towards Aphrodite, who was here, trying to save her son Aeneas, and wounded her “tender hand”. “Immortal blood flowed” of the goddess. It was not blood (after all, the gods are “bloodless, and they are called immortal”), but a special moisture, “which flows from the inhabitants of the happy sky.” But the goddess was in pain (“In the darkness of feelings, a beautiful body faded from suffering”) - “she retires, vague, with deep sorrow.” Zeus, learning about her misfortune, said to her with a paternal smile:

Dear daughter! Noisy scoldings are commanded to you.
You engage in pleasant affairs of sweet marriages.

It seems that the heroes of Homer do not do a single more or less serious act without the advice or direct order of the gods: Agamemnon severely insulted Achilles, an ardent warrior flared up with anger, a hand reached for the sword, but immediately Athena, sent by Hera, appeared to his eyes, appeared, visible only to him and to no one else, and stopped him, saying: "Scourge with evil words, but do not touch the sword with your hand." And he obeyed, "clenching his mighty hand", remembering the truth that the Greeks were taught from childhood: from the gods everything comes to man: both love and death crowning life. It is predetermined by moira. Some die from a “slow illness”, which, having “torn apart the body”, spits out an “exhausted soul” from it, others suddenly from the “silent arrow” of Artemis (woman) or Apollo (man).

The Greeks believed in an afterlife, but it was the existence of shadows that retained all the feelings of a person: as soon as "the hot life leaves the cooled bones, - having flown away like a dream, their soul disappears."

Homer also described Hades, the region of the dead. It must be assumed that someone still visited the northern latitudes in those distant times, because the description of Hades is very similar to the description of the north during the polar night: Helios (the sun) there “never shows the eye of people a radiant face”, “Night joyless there from time immemorial surrounds the living ":

... Here everything terrifies the living; running noisily here
Terrible rivers, great streams; here the ocean
The waters are deep, no one can swim across them.
And Odysseus, who got there, is embraced by "pale horror."

All the dead, both the righteous and the wicked, go to Hades. This is the fate of all mortals. Odysseus saw there the mother of the “dreary sufferer” Oedipus, Jocasta, who “opened the doors of Hades herself” (committed suicide), and her own mother Anticlea, who “destroyed the sweet-sweet life”, longing for him, Odysseus. He saw his friend and colleague Achilles there. The conversation that took place between them has a deep meaning, in it is the glorification of life, the one and only ("joyful light", "sweet life"!). In Hades, Achilles reigns over the dead, and Odysseus reproaches his friend for his murmuring:

And so he answered, sighing heavily:
- Oh, Odysseus, do not hope to give me consolation in death;
I wish I were alive, like a day labourer, working in the field,
By serving the poor plowman to get his daily bread,
Rather than reign over the soulless dead here, dead.

Such is Hades, the abode of the dead. But there is an even more terrible place - "Deep Tartarus", the very "last limit of land and sea." It is darker than Hades, where Odysseus visited, there is eternal darkness:

A distant abyss, where the deepest abyss is underground:
Where is the copper platform and iron gates, Tartarus.
As far from hell as the bright sky is from home.

The defeated gods languish there - the father of Zeus Kron, once the supreme god, there is the father of Prometheus, the titan Iapetus, they "can not enjoy the wind or the light of the high sun forever."

The ancient Greek believed in the existence somewhere on Earth of the beautiful Champs-Elysees, where "the light carefree days of man run through." The happy people live there. Who specifically, Homer does not say, he only draws this eternal, alluring dream of mankind. There:

“There are no blizzards, no downpours, no cold winters,” and “the Zephyr blows sweetly noisily flying, the Ocean sends blissful people there with a slight coolness.”

Personality of Homer

You do not try to find out where Homer was born and who he was.
Proudly consider themselves his homeland all the cities;
The important thing is the spirit, not the place. Fatherland of the poet -
The brilliance of the Iliad itself, the Odyssey story itself.
Unknown Greek poet. 2nd century BC e.

Thus, in the end, the ancient Greeks settled disputes about where the great poet was born, although seven cities claimed to be the birthplace of the author of famous poems. Modern times have already ceased to be interested in this issue, but disputes in science have already flared up on another issue, whether there was Homer at all, whether this is a collective image of the poet, and whether there were poems in the form in which we know them now. It has been suggested that each of their songs was composed separately by different aeds, and then only they united and made up a single narrative. However, the inner unity of the poem, which we feel now reading it, the unity and harmony of the narrative, the whole unified logic of its general concept, figurative system, convince us that we have one creator, a brilliant author who, perhaps, using some of the already existing small songs about various episodes of the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus, composed the poem as a whole, permeating its entire fabric with a single poetic breath.

Homer brought up the ancient world. The ancient Greek studied it from childhood and throughout his life carried in himself the ideas, images, feelings generated in his imagination by the poems of the great old man. Homer shaped the views, tastes, morality of the ancient Greeks. The most educated, most refined minds of the ancient world bowed before the authority of the patriarch of Hellenic culture.

He is, of course, the son of his age, his people. He absorbed from childhood the morality and ideals of his compatriots, therefore his moral world is the moral world of the Greeks of his time. But this does not detract from his personal individual qualities. His inner spiritual world, which he revealed in his poems with such exciting poetic power, has become the world of all his readers for thousands of years, and even we, who are distant from him for centuries and space, experience the beneficial influence of his personality, perceive his ideas, concepts of good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Who among us will not be moved by the picture of Agamemnon returning to his homeland and then his heinous treacherous murder?

He began to kiss the dear fatherland; seeing again

What troubles could Agamemnon expect at that moment?
What suspicions do you have for anyone?

Meanwhile, it was at this hour that his death awaited, and from the people closest to him - the wife of Clytemnestra and a relative
Aegistha. The latter, with an "affectionate call," introduced him, "alien to suspicion," into the house and killed him "at a merry feast." Together with Agamemnon's brother Menelaus, we are shocked by the betrayal and such a tragic ending to the joyful return of the hero to his homeland:

... a sweet heart was torn to pieces in me:
Weeping bitterly, I fell to the ground, I became disgusted
Life, and I did not want to look at the sunlight, and for a long time
He cried and lay on the ground for a long time, sobbing inconsolably.

Homer made me feel the vileness of betrayal, because he himself felt hatred and disgust for all cruel and perfidious acts, that he was humane and noble, and this personal quality of his is felt in every verse, in every epithet.

The ancient poet, unknown to us, is right when he said that what matters is not where the poet was born, but what he put into his poems - his thought, his soul.

Reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, we constantly feel the presence of the poet, his moral, political and aesthetic ideals, we look at the world through his eyes, and this world is beautiful, because it seemed to the poet that way.

Homer's story is far from being biased, but he is not dispassionate, he is excited. His heroes are raging, passions play with their souls, often pushing them to madness, the poet does not judge them. His narrative is imbued with humane tolerance. His position in relation to the events taking place in his poems and to the characters is similar to the position of the choir in the ancient theater. The choir rejoices, mourns, but never gets angry, does not condemn and does not interfere in events.

Homer cannot hide his constant admiration for both the world and man. The world is grandiose, great, it is beautiful, it can be formidable, it can bring death to a person, but it does not suppress a person. Man submits to inevitability, because the gods also obey it, but never shows slavish self-abasement towards the gods. He argues, protests and even swings at the gods. The world is beautiful in all its manifestations: both in good and in evil, and in joy, and in tragedy.

And this is the position of the poet himself, these are signs of his personality.

In his poems, Homer expresses his own political opinions. He is for a single ruler (“there is no good in many powers”). The ruler holds power from God (he is given Zeus and the "Scepter and Laws"). He "must both speak the word and listen." The great quality of a ruler is the ability to listen. The ability to listen to opinions, advice, take into account the situation, events, circumstances, be flexible, as we would say in our time, is the most valuable thing a ruler can have, and the wisest Homer understood this well. Through the mouth of Elder Nestor, he instructs the ruler: “Fulfill the thought of another, if someone, inspired by the heart, says good things.” And at the same time, Homer reminds us that "totally everything cannot be known to one person." The gods endow one with "the ability to fight," the other with a "light mind," the fruits of which both "city stand" and "tribes prosper for mortals."

Homer praises a good ruler. His Odysseus was a kind, wise king and loved his people, "like a benevolent father." The poet repeats this over and over. Homer admires nature:

Night…
In the sky about a month clear host
The stars seem beautiful if the air is windless;
Everything around opens - hills, high mountains,
Dales; the heavenly ether opens up all boundless;
All the stars are visible; and the shepherd, marveling, rejoices in his soul.

And here is the winter picture:

Snow, rushing, often falls in flakes
In the winter season ... the snow is continuous;
Mountains of the highest head and cliffs covering the tops,
And flowering steppes, and fat plowmen fields;
Snow falls on the shores and on the wharfs of the gray sea;
Its waves, running in, absorb it; but everything else
He covers.

Telling, for example, about the journey of Telemachus, looking for his father, he talks about the coming morning.

It would seem a simple, unpretentious and local picture. The sun rose, its rays began to play ... but Homer gave it a cosmic and universal character:

Helios rose from the beautiful sea and appeared on a copper
The vault of heaven to shine for the immortal gods and for mortals,
Rock subject to people living on a fruitful land.

Homer's attitude to events, to the world, to a person is expressed by epithets, comparisons, and they are visual, picturesque and emotionally colored. He is kind, infinitely and wisely kind. So, he says that Athena removes the arrow shot into the chest of Menelaus, "like a tender mother chases a fly from a son who has fallen asleep sweetly."

Together with Odysseus and his comrades, we find ourselves on the shores of the warm southern sea. We are captivated by the charm of the world and life, drawn with such wonderful power by a brilliant poet: “The divinely languid night has come. We all fell asleep under the sound of the waves hitting the shore”; we admire with Homer the beautiful Penelope, the personification of eternal femininity, when she is "in the silent gates of dreams", "full of sweet slumber".

Every word of Homer contains his soul, his thoughts, his joy or sorrow, it is colored by his feeling, and this feeling is always moral, sublime.
ill
Here he shows us Odysseus, who is in deep grief, far from his native Ithaca:

He sat alone on a rocky shore, and his eyes
Were in tears; flowed slowly, drop by drop,
Life for him is in constant longing for a distant homeland.

And we believe that for the sake of the fatherland, he could, like his singer Homer, refuse both immortality and the “eternal blooming youth” that the nymph Calypso offered him.

Homer loves broad picture comparisons. They become, as it were, inserted short stories, full of drama and dynamics. Talking about how Odysseus wept while listening to the aeda of Demodocus, Homer suddenly stops and distracts us to another human misfortune: after a stubborn battle, a warrior fell in front of the besieged city. He fought to the last, "struggling from the fateful day to save his fellow citizens and family." Seeing how he shuddered "in mortal struggle", his wife leans towards him. She is near, she is with him. Now, clinging to his chest, she stands, weeping contritely, already a widow, and the enemies beat her with spear shafts, tear her from her dear body and “the poor (Homer is beautiful in his all-pervading compassion) are dragged away to slavery and long grief.” Slavery and long grief! Homer will not forget to add that there, in captivity, slavery, her cheeks will wither from sadness and crying.

Homer's poems glorify the life, youth and beauty of man. He applies the tenderest epithets to the words "life" and "youth". We see in this the features of wise old age. Homer was undoubtedly old, he knew a lot, he saw a lot, he thought about a lot. He can already talk about "beautiful youth" and that youth is careless, presumptuous, that "youth is rarely reasonable." On the basis of his great life experience and deep reflections, he can make sad conclusions about a person, about his general fate:

The almighty gods judged us, unfortunate people,
To live on earth in grief: the gods alone are carefree.

And this is where his wise tolerance comes from. He looked into human souls and described the seething of passions, either lifting a person up to the heavens of the most exalted ideals, or overthrowing him into the abyss of monstrous brutality. Homer did not idealize either his gods, who were like people in everything, or his heroes, who were like their gods both in vices and in virtues. The wise old man did not allow himself to judge either one or the other. They were taller than him. For him, in essence, there was no one to blame in the world. Everything - both evil and good - everything is from the gods, and the gods (they are also not omnipotent) - from the great and omnipotent Destiny.

We know nothing about Homer the man. Who is this genius creator? Where was he born, in what family, where did he die and is buried? Only a sculptural portrait of a blind old man has come down to us. Is it Homer? - Hardly. But he is alive, he is with us, we feel his closeness. He is in his poems. Here is his world, his soul. In those distant times, he could have said about himself, like a Russian poet: “No, all of me will not die, the soul in the cherished lyre will survive my ashes and run away from decay ...”

Iliad

Anger, O goddess, sing...
Homer

This is how the Iliad begins. The word “sing” is understood by us as a call to glorification. But the poet turns to the muse not at all in order to glorify anger. He asks her to help him truthfully (certainly truthfully, for only in truth did he see the dignity of the story) to tell about the affairs of distant antiquity, about battles and massacres, and about what misfortunes a person’s unbridled angry outburst can do if this person holds power in his hands. and strength.

Anger, anger and anger! The theme of anger runs throughout the poem. One can only marvel at the unity of design and execution.
Let us trace the history of anger, how it began, how it manifested itself and how it ended.

The protagonist of the Iliad and the main carrier of anger is Achilles, the son of the Myrmidon king Peleus, the grandson of Aeacus and the daughter of the river god Asopa. So, Achilles is descended from the gods, he is the great-grandson of Zeus. His mother is also not a mere mortal. She is the nymph Thetis. According to the mythology of the Greeks, forests, mountains and rivers are inhabited by beautiful and young creatures - nymphs, "living in beautiful groves and in bright springs, and in green-flowering valleys." In the mountains they are oreads, in the seas they are nereids, in the forests they are dryads, in the rivers they are naiads. One of these Nereids was the mother of Achilles Thetis. She, of course, cannot claim equality with the Olympic goddesses, but she is always well received by Zeus, and he receives her friendly and affectionately.

The possessions of Achilles are somewhere in the east of the northern part of Greece, in Thessaly. Subject to his father Peleus, and therefore also to him, the Myrmidons descend from ants, as their very name indicates. Ant in Greek - myrmex. The myth tells that in the days of the reign of Achilles' grandfather Aeacus, the goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus, sent a disease to his people, and he all died out. Then Eak offered his prayers to the main god, his father, and he gave him new subjects - ants, turning them into people.

A chain of events links Achilles to Troy. The tragedy that eventually brought Troy and all its inhabitants to ruin began at the wedding of his parents, Thetis and Peleus. All the gods and goddesses were invited to the wedding, except for one - the goddess of Discord. The offended goddess treacherously threw up the so-called "apple of discord", on which it was written - "for the most beautiful." Three goddesses immediately declared their claims to him - Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Each of them considered herself the most beautiful. Zeus, although he was the most formidable of the gods, knowing the nature of the goddesses,
prudently evaded the decision and sent them to the Trojan shepherdess Paris, let him judge, as an outsider and impartial person. Paris was, of course, not a simple shepherd, but a young prince, the son of Priam and Hecuba. At his birth, Hecuba had a terrible dream, as if she gave birth not to a boy, but to a burning brand that burned Troy. The frightened queen removed the born son from the palace, and he grew up and matured on the wooded slopes of Ida, grazing
cattle. It was to him that the beautiful inhabitants of Olympus turned. Each promised her gifts: Hera - power, Athena - wisdom, Aphrodite - the love of the most beautiful of the women of Hellas. The last gift seemed to young Paris the most attractive, and he gave the apple to Aphrodite, winning her constant favor and the equally constant hatred of the other two. This was followed by his journey, staying with the hospitable and ingenuous Menelaus, from whom he stole a beautiful wife and countless treasures with the connivance of Aphrodite. Because of them, the warlike Achaeans and their allies ended up at the walls of Troy, the number, judging by the description of Homer, was about a hundred thousand, on multi-oared ships from 50 to 120 soldiers each. Fifty ships of them were commanded by the leader
Myrmidon is the mighty Achilles, whom we see in the Iliad young, full of strength, courage and anger.

From the prehistory, two more circumstances should be pointed out. At his birth, Thetis was predicted that her son would not live long if he wanted to fight and achieve military glory. If he agrees to obscurity, he will live to a ripe old age in peace and prosperity. Thetis, like any mother, preferred the latter for her son. When they began to gather an army for a campaign against Troy, she hid him in women's clothes on the island of Skyros, believing that he would remain unrecognized among the daughters of Tsar Lykomed. But she did not know the tricks of Odysseus. This latter, wishing to captivate the hero on a campaign, came to Skyros with gifts. Of course, it was difficult to distinguish the young Achilles, who had not even had fluff above his upper lip, from the girls around him. And Odysseus offered a choice of women's jewelry, and among them swords and spears. The girls chose jewelry, but Achilles grabbed the sword and was recognized.

So, Thetis failed to provide her son with a long and calm life, he preferred a short life, but full of storms, worries, glory. Achilles knew about his early death, others knew about it, and above all his mother, whom we see constantly sad, trembling for his fate.

A halo of tragedy surrounds the young head of Achilles. “Your age is short, and its limit is near!..” - Thetis tells him. “In an evil time, O my son, I gave birth to you in the house.” Homer reminds us of this more than once in the poem, and this shadow of near death, which constantly follows Achilles, softens our attitude towards the young hero. It also softens the good heart of Homer, who, not considering himself entitled to judge the deeds of the gods and heroes of antiquity, cannot describe the acts of cruel ferocity of Achilles without an inner shudder. And they are truly fierce.

Achilles is quick-tempered (“fast-tempered”) and in anger is indomitable, wild, angry, long-term.

His friend Patroclus in his hearts reprimands him:

Unmerciful! Your parent was not Peleus the good-natured,
The mother is not Thetis; but the blue sea, gloomy rocks
you were born, a stern heart, like yourself!

The whole poem, as a single core, is permeated with the theme of this anger. And Homer does not sympathize with this, essentially selfish, reproachless, ambitious feeling of his hero. What caused this anger? Agamemnon, the supreme commander of the troops of all the Achaeans, took away the captive Briseis from Achilles after the division of military booty. He did this because he himself had to part with his prey Chryseis, returned to his father at the behest of Apollo. Agamemnon, as the poet described him, is both brave and powerful, like, indeed, all warriors, and fierce in battle, but not stable in decisions, susceptible to panic and, perhaps, not smart. He took the spoils of war from Achilles without thinking about the consequences. Then he will deeply regret this and will offer the warrior both rich gifts and a taken away maiden. But Achilles will proudly reject them. His fighters, and there are more than two thousand of them, and he himself stay away from the battles, and the Achaeans suffer one defeat after another. Already the Trojans, led by Hector, came close to the camp of the besiegers, stealing up to the ships in order to burn them and doom all the newcomers to death. Many of them died, recent associates of Achilles, but he only gloats over their failures and thanks Zeus for this.

And only at the last minute, when the danger of general death hung over everyone, did he allow his soldiers, led by Patroclus, to come to the aid of the Achaeans. Patroclus died in this battle. Hector killed him. Homer described in detail and colorfully the dispute and battle around the body of Patroclus, because it was armed with Achilles; "immortal armor of a strong husband." Patroclus! Homer calls him meek ("meek"). As a child, he had to experience a terrible tragedy that left an indelible mark on his soul. In a childish game and dispute, he accidentally killed his peer, the son of Amphidamas. And he couldn't stay at home. Menetius, his father, brought the boy to Pelias. He, "accepting him favorably", gently raised him along with his son Achilles. Since then, an inextricable friendship has linked the two heroes.

In the social hierarchy, and it already existed in Greece at the time of Homer, Patroclus, both by birth and status, was placed below Achilles, and Menetius instructed his son to submit to a friend, although he was younger than him for years.

Patroclus, by nature mild and accommodating, it was not difficult, and Achilles loved him dearly. What Patroclus meant to him, he fully understood after his death. Sorrow, like all feelings of the passionate, temperamental leader of the Myrmidons, was violent. He tore his hair, rolled on the ground, screamed, yelled. And now a new wave of anger swept over him - anger against the Trojans and especially Hector, who killed his friend.
There was a reconciliation with Agamemnon.

Achilles was convinced that his offense, his proud removal from his brothers brought a lot of trouble not only to them, his comrades, but also to himself. Now he rushed into battle against the Trojans with bitterness, with a frantic passion for revenge, to torment, to kill (“a black bloody field flowed ... under the divine Pelid, hard-hoofed horses crushed corpses, shields and helmets, the whole copper axis and the high semicircle of the chariot were splashed with blood from below ... Brave Pelid ... stained his undefeated hands in blood").

Homer talks about all this with spiritual trepidation. He cannot afford to blame the hero, because he is a demigod, the grandson of Zeus, and it is not for him, the poor singer, to judge who is right and wrong in this terrible battle of peoples. But, while reading the poem, we feel how the old man trembles inwardly, drawing the cruel fury of Achilles.

The Trojans flee in panic, seeking salvation. Here before them is the terrible stream of Scamander. They try to take cover near its rocky shores. In vain, Achilles overtakes them. “Having tired his hands with murder,” he selects twelve young men from them, mad with fear “like young deer,” binds their hands and sends them to the camp of the Myrmidons, in order to later throw Patroclus into the fire as a sacrifice. Here he sees the young Lycaon, the youngest of the sons of Priam, and does not believe his eyes, because quite recently he captured him, having attacked at night, and sold him into slavery on the island of Lemnos, having received a “hundred-dollar price”. By what miracle was this youth saved? Lykaon fled from Lemnos and, happy, rejoiced in his newfound freedom and native places, but not for long. “At home for eleven days he had fun with his friends” and on the twelfth ... he is again at the feet of Achilles, unarmed, without a shield, without a helmet and even without a dart:

Lycaon approached half dead,
Ready to hug Pelid's legs, he wished inexpressibly
Avoid terrible death and close black fate.
Meanwhile, the long-bodied dart brought swift-footed Achilles,
Ready to strike, and he ran up and hugged his legs,
Crouched to the bottom; and a spear, whistling over his back,
Trembling, greedy human blood stuck in the ground.
The young man hugged his knees with his left hand, begging,
He grabbed the right spear and, not letting it out of his hand,
So Achilles prayed, sending winged speeches:
- I will encircle your legs, have mercy, Achilles, and have mercy!
I stand before you as a suppliant worthy of mercy!

But Achilles did not spare. He told him that in the old days, before the death of Patroclus, it was sometimes pleasant for him to pardon the Trojans and let them go free, taking a ransom, but now - to all "Trojans, death, and especially to the children of Priam!" He also told him that there was no need to weep, that death befell those who were better than him, Lycaon, that Patroclus also died, and he himself, Achilles, would die, but meanwhile:

You see what I myself am, and beautiful and majestic in appearance,
The son of a famous father, my mother is a goddess!
But even on earth I cannot escape a mighty fate.

"Consolation" did not calm Lycaon, he only realized that there would be no mercy, and submitted. Homer paints a brutal murder scene with stunning truth:

“... the young man's legs and heart trembled.
He dropped the terrible dart and, trembling, arms outstretched,
Sat down, Achilles, swiftly tearing out the mutual sword,
I stuck it in the neck at the shoulder, and up to his hilt
The sword plunged into the insides, prostrate on black dust
He lay down, prostrated, the blood swept over and flooded the ground.
Taking the dead man by the leg, Achilles threw him into the river,
And, mocking him, he uttered feathered speeches:
“There you lie, between the fish! Greedy fish around the ulcer
Your blood will be carelessly licked! Not a mother on the bed
Your body will lay down to mourn, but Xanthus is fleeting
A stormy wave will carry the sea into the boundless bosom ...
So perish, Trojans, until we destroy Troy.”

The kind and wise Homer, of course, pities the young Lycaon, but he does not dare to judge the actions of Achilles himself and submits him to the judgment of the river god Xanthus. And “Xanthus was cruelly annoyed at him”, “in the form of a mortal, God proclaimed from a deep abyss: “... The corpses of the dead are full of my light-streaming waters ... Oh, refrain.” And after that:

Terrible around Achilles, stormy excitement arose,
The hero's ramparts sway, falling on the shield; on his feet
Bole could not resist; grabbed the elm
Thick, sprawling, and elm, overturned at the root,
The shore brought down with him, blocked the fleeting waters
Its branches are dense and, like a bridge, stretched along the river,
All over her. Hero, jumping out of the abyss,
He rushed in fear through the valley to fly on his fast feet,
The furious god did not lag behind; but, rising behind him, struck
With a black-headed shaft, burning to curb Achilles
In the exploits of the quarrelsome and Troy's sons, protect them from murder.

And if it were not for Poseidon and Athena, who came to the call for help and, "taking the form of people", did not give him a hand and did not save him, the mighty Achilles would have died "an inglorious death ... like a young swineherd."

The story of Achilles' wrath culminated in his duel with Hector. A great human tragedy is unfolding before us. Homer prepared us for it, often prophesying the death of the protagonist of the Trojans. We already know in advance that Achilles will win, that Hector will fall under his hand, but we are still waiting for a miracle until the last minute - the heart cannot accept the fact that this glorious man, the only true defender of Troy, will fall, struck down by a stranger’s spear.

Homer treats Achilles with spiritual trepidation and, perhaps, fear, he endows him with the highest military virtues, but he loves Hector. The Trojan hero is human. He never cast a sidelong glance at Elena, and yet she was the culprit of all the misfortunes of the Trojans, he did not reproach her with a bitter word. And to his brother Paris, and from him all the troubles went, he did not have unkind feelings. It happened to him, in annoyance at the effeminacy, carelessness and laziness of his brother, to throw angry reproaches, because he should have understood that the city was under siege, that the enemy was about to destroy the walls and destroy everyone. But as soon as Paris recognizes him, Hector, that he is right and obeys, Hector's anger cools down, and he is ready to forgive him everything:

"Friend! You are a brave warrior, often only slow, unwilling to work, ”he tells him, and is tormented by his soul for him, and would like to protect his careless brother from blasphemy and reproach. The most sublime poetry of marital and paternal feelings are the poems of Homer, depicting the scene of Hector's meeting with Andromache and his son, still a child, Astyanax. This scene is famous. For two millennia, it has moved the hearts of readers, and none of those who write about Homer and his poems has passed her over in silence. She entered into all anthologies of the world.

Andromache worries about her husband. For her, he is everything (“You are everything to me now - both a father and a kind mother, you and my only brother, you and my beloved husband”), for Achilles killed all her relatives by attacking her hometown, and her father, an old man Etiope, and her seven brothers. The mother was released for a large ransom, but she died soon after. And now all the hopes, all the joys and cares of Andromache are directed to two beings dear to her - to her husband and son. The son is still "an inarticulate baby" - "charming, like a radiant star."

Homer expresses his feelings with vivid epithets, metaphors, comparisons. Hector named his son Scamandry in honor of the river Scamandra (Xanthus), while the Trojans named Astyanax, which meant "lord of the city". Hector wanted to take the boy in his arms, hug him, but he, frightened by his sparkling helmet and “shaggy-haired crest”, clung to his chest with a cry of a “pompous wet nurse”, and the happy father smiled, took off his helmet “magnificently shiny” (Homer cannot do without a picture epithet imagine describing neither a person nor an object), puts him on the ground, taking his son, “kisses, shakes”. Andromache smiles at them through her tears, and Hector is “touched sincerely”: “Good! Do not break your heart with immoderate grief.

The scene is full of tragedy, because Hector knows about the imminent death of Troy (“I know for sure myself, being convinced both by thought and heart”), Andromache knows this too.

Hector is not just a strong and brave warrior, he is a citizen, and Homer emphasizes this all the time. When Elena asks him to enter the house, sit with them, calm "his sore soul", he replies that he cannot accept the welcoming invitation, that they are waiting for him there, on the battlefields, that he is "carried away by the soul to protect fellow citizens." When one of the fighters pointed out an eagle flying to the left as a bad omen (flying to the left was considered a bad sign), Hector ominously told him that he despises signs and does not care about where the birds fly from, left or right. “The best sign of all is to fight bravely for the fatherland!”

That's Hector. And here is his final hour. The Trojans fled into the city in a panic, hastily closed the gates, forgetting about Hector. He alone remained outside the walls of the city, alone in front of a host of enemies. Hector's heart trembled, and he was afraid of Achilles. Three times they ran around Troy. All the gods looked at them, and the Trojans from the city walls, and the weeping Priam, his father. The good-natured Zeus took pity on the hero and was ready to help him out of trouble, but Athena intervened, reminding her "black-clouded" father that from ancient times fate had inscribed a "sad death" to people. And Zeus allowed her to speed up the bloody denouement. The actions of the goddess were cruel and insidious. She appeared before Hector, taking the form of Deiphobe. Hector was delighted, he was touched by his brother's self-sacrifice, because Deyphobe dared to come to his aid, while others remain in the city and look indifferently at his suffering. "Oh Deifob! And always you, from infancy, were kind to me. Athena, in the form of Deiphobus, goes to great deceit, says that both his mother and father begged him (Deifobe) to stay, and his friends begged him not to leave the city, but that de he, “worrying with longing” for him, came to him for help. Now there is no need to delay, there is nothing to spare spears and forward, into battle, together.
“Thus prophesying, Pallas treacherously stepped forward,” writes Homer. And Hector went into battle. Achilles threw a spear at him and missed. Athena, invisible to Hector, raised the spear and gave it to her favorite. Then Hector threw his spear towards Achilles, the spear hit the shield and bounced off, because the shield was forged by Hephaestus himself. Hector calls Deyphobe, asks to give him a second spear, looks around - no one! He understood the evil betrayal of the goddess. He, unarmed, remained before his mortal enemy:

Woe! .. I thought that my brother was with me ...
He is in the walls of Ilion: Pallas seduced me,
Near me - only death!

So the fate of the glorious defender of the city was accomplished. Already dying, he asks Achilles not to mock his body, to return it to the house for a decent burial. But Achilles, burning with anger and hatred, throws him:

“In vain you, dog, hug my legs and pray to my relatives!
I myself, if I listened to anger, would tear you apart,
I would devour your raw body."

With that, Hector dies - "quietly the soul, having flown out of the mouth, descends to Hades." Achilles, "drenched in blood," began to tear off his armor. The Achaeans who ran up again and again pierced the already lifeless body of the hero with their peaks, but defeated and dead, he was beautiful, "everyone was amazed, looked at the growth and at the miraculous image."

Achilles, however, had not yet quenched his anger and “conceived an unworthy deed”, he pierced the tendons of his legs, threaded the belts and tied Hector’s body to the chariot, drove the horses, dragging the body along the dusty road. The beautiful head of the hero beat along the road, his black curls were widely scattered and covered with dust. The inhabitants of Troy looked at everything from the city walls, old Priam wept, tore his gray hair, Hecuba sobbed, Andromache's grief was immeasurable. But even this did not quench Achilles' thirst for revenge, having brought Hector's body to his camp, he continued the "unworthy deed" there, dragging his body around the grave of Patroclus, "so he cursed the divine Hector in his anger." Looking at it from Olympus, Apollo “the silver-armed” could not stand it. He threw the gods a heavy accusation of malice, ingratitude towards Hector and unfair favor to his murderer:

You decided to be favorable to Achilles the robber,
To the husband who banished justice from his thoughts, from his heart
He rejected all pity and, like a lion, only thinks about ferocity ...
So this Pelid destroyed all pity, and he lost shame ...
The earth, the mute earth, the furious man offends.

Homer nowhere mentions the famous heel of Achilles, the only weak point of the hero's body. And, apparently, not by chance, then his duel with Hector would have looked like a monstrous murder, because before him the Trojan would have appeared unarmed (vulnerable).

What is the fault of Achilles? And he bears, undoubtedly, a tragic guilt. Why does Homer tacitly condemn him? And the condemnation is almost obvious. In the loss of a sense of proportion. Here before us is one of the greatest commandments of the ancient Greeks, both in life and in art - a sense of proportion. Any exaggeration, any going beyond the norm is fraught with disaster.

Achilles, on the other hand, constantly violates boundaries. He loves excessively, hates excessively, is excessively angry, vengeful, touchy. And this is his tragic fault. He is intolerant, quick-tempered, intemperate in irritation. Even Patroclus, whom he loves, is afraid of him: “He is quick-tempered” (quick-tempered) and in anger can accuse the innocent, he says about a friend. How much more humane is Patroclus himself. When Briseis, from which the fatal wrath of Achilles arose, returned to him, she saw the dead Patroclus. He was not her lover, and she did not love him. But he was kind to her, attentive, he consoled her in grief, was sympathetic to her, a captive woman whom Achilles hardly noticed. And, perhaps, she felt the greatest pity for the deceased. Her grief was genuine and so unexpected in the poem. Homer did nothing to prepare us for this:

Oh my Patroclus! Oh friend, for me ill-fated, priceless ...
You fell! I mourn you forever, dear young man.

The poem ends with the ransom of Hector's body. This is also the famous scene where Homer showed his greatest psychological insight. Old Priam, accompanied by one driver, entered the guarded camp of Achilles, bringing him a rich ransom for the body of his son. Zeus decided to help him in this and sent Hermes to him, who appeared before the old man, “like a young man, whose first pubescent beard is charming youth,” and led him unharmed to Achilles.

The meeting and conversation of Achilles and Priam, in essence, is the denouement of the whole knot of events and feelings that began at the very beginning of the poem in the word "anger". This is the moral defeat of Achilles! Priam defeated him with the power of human love:

The elder, unnoticed by anyone, enters the rest and, Pelida,
Falling down at his feet, he hugs his knees and kisses his hands, -
Terrible hands, his children killed many!
Scary hands!

Homer truly outdid himself. How much mind, heart, talent is needed to understand this! What abyss of the human soul had to be explored in order to find this amazing psychological argument!

Brave! You are almost gods! Have pity on my misfortune
Remember Peleus father: I am incomparably more pitiful than Peleus!
I will experience what no mortal has experienced on earth:
Husband, murderer of my children, I press my hands to my lips.

And Achilles is defeated. For the first time, pity for a person penetrated into his heart, he received his sight, he understood the pain of another person and wept with Priam. Miracle! These tears turned out to be sweet, "and the noble Pelid enjoyed tears." How wonderful, it turns out, the feeling of mercy, how joyful it is to forgive, forget about evil and cruel revenge and love a person! Priam and Achilles, as if renewed; cannot find in themselves a recent feeling of bitterness, enmity towards each other:

For a long time Priam Dardanides marveled at King Achilles,
To his sight and majesty: he seemed to see God.
King Achilles was as surprised as Dardanides Priam,
Looking at the venerable image and listening to the speeches of the elders.
Both of them enjoyed, looking at each other.

This is the finale of the great pan-human drama of all times and peoples.

There was a legend that a competition took place between Homer and Hesiod and preference was allegedly given to Hesiod as a singer of peaceful labor (the poem "Works and Days"). But Homer did not glorify war. He, of course, admired the courage, strength, courage and beauty of his heroes, but he was also bitterly sad for them. The gods were to blame for everything, and among them the god of war, the “husband”, “the exterminator of peoples, the destroyer of walls, covered with blood” Ares and his sister, “the insatiable rage of strife”. This person, judging by the descriptions of Homer, at the very beginning is quite small in stature and crawls and crawls, but then grows, expands and becomes so huge that her head rests on the sky and her feet on the ground. She sows rage among people, "for mutual destruction, roaring around along the paths, multiplying the dying groan."

The god of war Ares is wounded by Diomedes, a mortal warrior from the camp of the Achaeans. Ares complains to his father, "showing immortal blood flowing through the wound." And what about Zeus?

Looking menacingly at him, the Thunderer Kronion prophesied:
"Shut up, oh you bastard! Do not howl, sitting next to me!
You are the most hated of the gods that inhabit the sky!
Only you are pleasant and enmity, yes discord, yes battles!
You have a mother spirit, unbridled, eternally obstinate,
Hera, whom I myself can hardly tame with words!

Homer describes the fight, perhaps with a certain amount of surprise and horror. What does bitterness do to people! “Like wolves, warriors rushed one at another; man tangled with man." And the death of warriors, "young, blooming with life," mourns with paternal sadness. Simois, slain by a spear, he compares with a young poplar. Here it is, the poplar is “smooth and clean”, “pet of a wet meadow”, it was cut down to bend a wheel for a chariot from it, now it dries, lying “on the banks of the native stream”. So lay Simois, young and naked (without armor), who died at the hands of "powerful Ajax."

Homer filled his poem with many names and historical information, brought together hundreds of destinies, provided it with the most vivid realistic pictures of the life and life of his fellow tribesmen, blossomed with colors of poetic comparisons, epithets - but put Achilles in the center. He did not add to the portrait of his hero a single implausible, elevating feature. His hero is monumental, but he is alive, we hear how his heart beats, how his beautiful face is distorted with anger, we hear his hot breath. He laughs and cries, he screams and scolds, at times he is monstrously cruel, at times soft and kind - and he is always alive. His portrait is true, we do not see a single false, invented, painted feature in him. Homer's realism is here at the highest level, meeting the highest demands of modern realistic poetics.

Homer's heart is filled with horror and pity, but he does not judge his hero. Gods are guilty. Zeus allowed it.
Before us is life in its tragic apotheosis. Amazing dramatic picture! But there is no depressing humiliation of man in front of the forces of the world beyond his control. Man, both in death and in tragedy, is great and beautiful.

This is what determined the aesthetic charm of the tragedy itself, when "sadness" becomes "delight".

There will be no day, and sacred Troy will perish,
Priam and the spear-bearing people of Priam will perish with her.
Homer

This prophecy is repeated several times in the Iliad. It came true. Holy Troy is dead. Priam the spear-bearing and all those who lived, loved, suffered and rejoiced with him also died. The gleaming helmeted Hector, and the swift-footed Achilles, and the curly-headed Danaans also perished. Only the “rattling, deep abyssal Scamander” still poured its stormy waters into the sea waves, and the wooded Ida, from which the cloudmaker Kronion once looked at the magnificent city, towered over the surroundings as of old. But neither human voices, nor the melodic sounds of the ringing lira were no longer heard here.

Only birds and dust storms and snow blizzards swept over the hill, on which palaces and temples once proudly stood. Time covered the remains of the fortress walls and burnt dwellings with a dense, many-meter layer of earth. It became difficult to find out the place where the heroes of Homer acted.

But the poem of Homer remained. They read and re-read it, admired the charm of the verse, the mind and talent of their creator, although they hardly believed in the truth of the story, in the reality of the events described in it, and even in the fact that “sacred Troy” ever existed. Only one enthusiastic person in the 19th century believed Homer (it cannot be that everything told with such convincing truth was not true!) and began the search for the legendary Troy. It was Heinrich Schliemann. His biographer describes the minute of Schliemann's first meeting with the places where he was supposed to dig up Troy and reveal it to the world of civilized mankind: “... his attention was again and again attracted by a hill rising fifty meters above the Scamander valley.

This is Gissarlyk, effendi, - says the guide. This word in Turkish means “palace” ... (more precisely, a fortress, fortification - “hysar” - S.A.). Behind the Hissarlik hill rises Mount Ida, overgrown with forests, the throne of the father of the gods. And between Ida and the sea, bathed in the evening sun, stretches the Trojan plain, where for ten years two heroic peoples opposed each other. It seems to Schliemann that through a light haze of fog that has descended to the earth, he sees the prows of ships, the camp of the Greeks, fluttering sultans of helmets and the gleam of weapons, detachments scurrying back and forth, hears battle cries and the cry of the gods. And behind rise the walls and towers of the glorious city.”

It was in the summer of 1868. Schliemann began excavations with a volume of the poet Homer in his hands. This is how Homeric Greece was discovered.

Exact and rigorous science made its own adjustments to Schliemann's romantic conclusions, established the boundaries and level of occurrence of urban layers, determined the time of the emergence and death of cities that were built one above the other for centuries and millennia. The dream of Troy faded somewhat in the light of the dry facts of historical realities, but Homer's world was open.

Homer "helped" Schliemann to continue excavations and find new sensational finds. Homer's epithet "gold-abundant" ("gold-abundant Mycenae") prompted him to search for and eventually acquire the richest golden objects of Ancient Greece, which he called "Agamemnon's gold".

You talked to Homer alone for a long time,
We have been waiting for you for a long time
And bright you descended from the mysterious heights,
And he brought us his tablets.
A. S. Pushkin

This is how Pushkin met Gnedich's translation of Homer's Iliad. It was an event in Russian culture. The greatest poet of Greece spoke Russian.

The language of translation is somewhat archaic. We no longer say “dondeje” (“until when”), “paki” (“again”) or “vyya” (“neck”). Neither Gnedich himself nor his contemporaries in Rus' spoke like that. These words, leaving the colloquial everyday language, were left for solemn occasions, woven into the hymn of prayer, creating a feeling of the unusualness of what was happening, something important, non-everyday, sublime. This was precisely the language of the Homeric poems for his listeners in ancient Greece. The ancient Greek listened to the measured speech of the Aed and trembled and was filled with reverence: it was as if the gods themselves spoke to him. Gnedich with great tact resorted to old Russian words in order to convey similar feelings to the Russian reader. The archaism of the language complicates, of course, the understanding of the text, but at the same time gives it a high artistic coloring. In addition, there are not so many obsolete words - within a hundred.

Russian people transferred a lot to their language from the Greek language. Gnedich, translating the Iliad, created verbose epithets following the Greek model, which are unusual for our eyes and ears, but they also create the effect of elation of speech. The poet (and scholar at the same time) worked on the translation for over 20 years, publishing it in 1829. Pushkin spoke enthusiastically about him (“I hear the silenced voice of the divine Hellenic speech, I smell the shadow of the great old man with a confused soul”).

The work of the whole life of Gnedich. Now in St. Petersburg at the memorial cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, you can find a grave mound with a marble tombstone. On it is inscribed:

"Gnedich, who enriched Russian literature with Omir's translation - from friends and admirers." And then a quote from the Iliad:

"Speech from the mouth of his prophetic sweetest honey poured."

By the way, Pushkin also resorted to "high style", to pathetic archaisms, when the content of the work required it:

But what do I see? Hero with a smile of reconciliation
Coming with a golden olive.

Or from the same poem ("Memories in Tsarskoye Selo"):

Take comfort, mother of the cities of Russia,
Look at the death of the alien.
Buried today on their haughty necks
The right hand of the avenging creator.

Odyssey

For six hours the boat tacked against the wind until it reached
Ithaca. It was already night, velvety black, July night, filled with
scented with the scents of the Ionian Islands… Schliemann thanks
gods that they finally allowed him to land in the kingdom of Odysseus.
G. Stol

The island sung by Homer is still called Ithaca. It is one of the seven islands of the Ionian Sea off the southwestern coast of Greece. Heinrich Schliemann undertook archaeological excavations on the island, hoping to find material evidence of the advanced culture that Homer described. But nothing was found. Science has so far only established that around the 5th century. BC e. there was a small settlement there. In a word, neither Odysseus, nor Penelope, nor their son Telemachus, nor their rich house, nor the city on the seashore - none of what Homer so colorfully and vividly described, never existed in Ithaca. Is it possible?

Is all this the product of the artistic imagination of the ancient Greeks? It is hard to believe this: in great detail, truly documented in the poem, the appearance of the island and everything that was on it:

This is Eumeus, nothing less than the beautiful home of Odysseus!
Even among many others, it is not at all difficult to recognize him.
Everything here is one to one. Artfully crenellated
The yard is surrounded, the double-leaf gates are wonderfully strong ...

Everything is alive, everything is visible, we are brought into everyday life, we are there together with the heroes of Homer. Here “the black night ... has come”, “everyone went home” and “Telemachus himself retired to his high chamber”. In front of him, Eurycleia, the "faithful housekeeper", carried a torch. Homer, of course, also reported that the chamber of Telemachus was turned by windows into the courtyard, "that a vast view opened up in front of the windows." Here Telemachus enters the "rich bedroom", sits down on the bed, takes off his thin shirt. The caring old woman "carefully" takes the master's attire, folds it into folds, and smoothes it with her hands. Homer also tells about the bed - it is "skillfully chiseled", and about the door handles - they are "silver", there are also latches - they are tightened with a belt.

Homer misses nothing. He also describes the pantry in the house of Odysseus:
The building is spacious; heaps of gold and copper lay there;
There was a lot of dress in chests and fragrant oil stored there;
Clay kufas with perennial and sweet wine stood
Next to the walls, enclosing a divinely pure drink.

Of course, the doors to the pantry are special, "double-winged, doubly closed." The order in the pantry was kept with the "experienced vigilant zeal" of Eurycleia, the "reasonable" housekeeper.

In modern science there is no consensus on the origin of the Homeric poems. Many suggestions have been made; in particular, that the Odyssey was created after the Iliad by a hundred years. Very possible. However, the author of the Iliad more than once calls Odysseus "cunning", "many-witted" "the famous sufferer." The verses in the Iliad, dedicated to Odysseus, seem to anticipate everything that will be told about him in the Odyssey. “Brave, his heart always dared to face danger”, “enterprising”, “firm in labor and in troubles”, “loved by Pallas Athena”, capable of getting out of the “burning fire” unharmed, “so the mind is abundant in him for inventions” . All these qualities of Odysseus will be revealed vividly and picturesquely by the second poem of the great Homer.

Marx called ancient Greek society the childhood of mankind. Perhaps more than any other poetic work, Homer's Odyssey illustrates this famous saying. The poem is dedicated, if you think about its main philosophical plan, to the discovery of the world by man. Indeed, what do the wanderings of Odysseus, Menelaus and other warriors who returned home after the destruction of Troy mean? Knowledge of the Oikumene - the inhabited part of the Earth, then known to Greece. The boundaries of this area were quite small. The Greek imagined that the whole Earth is surrounded by the Ocean, a river that feeds all the lakes, seas, streams and streams that were inside. No one dared to go beyond the Ocean. Homer knew the countries close to the Mediterranean coast in the west, no further than Gibraltar. The island of Euboea seemed to him a border, "beyond which there is nothing," and yet this island was in the Aegean Sea. Sailing to the island of Euboea seemed to be the work of especially brave sailors.

In the days of Homer, the Greeks were developing new lands in the western and eastern limits of the then Oikoumene. Homer calls those living from the eastern and western sides of the Oikumene - "extreme people", "settled in two ways": "one, where the light-bearing God descends", others - where he ascends.

Menelaus saw a lot in his wanderings, who, like Odysseus, did not immediately reach his native shores. For seven years he wandered after the capture of Troy in the then world, before returning to his native Argos:

I saw Cyprus, visited the Phoenicians, reached Egypt,
The Ethiopians penetrated the blacks, stayed with the Sidonians, the Erembians,
In Libya was, finally, where horned lambs would be born.
In that side and the fields, the lord and the shepherd of lack
In cheese and meat, and fatty milk they do not have,
Cows are milked in abundance all year round.

Even longer (10 years) was the path of Odysseus. His wanderings have already been described in detail. His enemy and friend, the sea, is described in the same detail.

It became one of the main characters of the poem. It is beautiful, like its ruler Poseidon, the “azure-haired” god, it is also terrible, fatal. Before this formidable element, a person is insignificant and pathetic, like Odysseus in raging waves during a storm. In everything, of course, Poseidon is guilty, he "raised a wave from the abyss ... terrible, heavy, mountainous." “The waves boiled and howled, fiercely rushing to the high shore from the sea ... Cliffs and reefs stuck out. Odysseus was horrified." But then the “azure-curly-haired Eos” appeared, and everything changed, the storm calmed down, “the sea all brightened in a quiet calm.”

Most of all epithets, the most diverse and sometimes opposite, are accompanied by the word "sea" in the poem. When it threatens with an unknown danger, it is “foggy” or even “dark foggy”, sometimes it is “evil”, “poor”, “terrible” and always “full of water”, “great”, “sacred” - then “rich in abundance” and “ many fish”, and then “barrenly salty”, then “noisy” or even “broadly noisy”, and then “desert” or “endlessly deserted”.

For the inhabitants of Greece, with its indented coastline, with its numerous islands, the sea was an important element of economic and cultural activity. By virtue of things, the Greeks became brave and skillful sailors, therefore, in Homer, the word "sea" acquires the epithet "much experienced."

A typical representative of the Greeks, or rather, of all mankind, with his thirst for knowledge, with his indomitable strength to fight, with great courage in troubles and misfortunes, is truly Odysseus. In the Iliad, he is only a warrior - brave, strong and, moreover, cunning, intelligent, eloquent, "wise in advice." Here, in the poem "Odyssey", he appeared in all his human greatness.

His patroness is Athena, the wisest and most active goddess. Here she is harsh, but not cruel. When one of her favorites, Tydeus, whom she wanted to make immortal, showed ferocity, she turned away from him in disgust. (According to the myth, having killed one of his opponents, he split his skull and sucked out his brain in a wild frenzy.) She kills the Gorgon Medusa, helps Hercules, Perseus, Prometheus, personifies the art of craft, so valued in Greece, and patronizes Odysseus, admires him: “You affectionately accept every advice, you are understanding, you are brave in execution,” but sometimes he reproaches him for slyness - “a trickster, daring for insidious inventions.”

In the execution of his plans, Odysseus is stubborn and persistent, his companions do not always like this. But their censure sounds like great praise to him:

“You, Odysseus, are inexorably cruel, you are gifted with great Power; there is no fatigue for you, you are shackled from iron.

Odysseus is a faithful husband, a loving father, a wise ruler, for which the people of Ithaca appreciate and exalt him, but he was not created for home peace and quiet family joys. His element is struggle, overcoming obstacles, knowledge of the unknown. He, as Homer reports about him, did not like either "field work" or "quiet home life." He was attracted by “battle and winged arrows”, “copper-shiny spears” (“terrible, great awe and fearful of many”).

When the sorceress Circe warns him against the terrible Scylla, he is not going to retreat, but wants to "fight back by force":

"ABOUT! Unbridled, again conceived of the exploits of the quarrelsome,
Again you dream of a fight; you are glad to fight with the gods.

Odysseus is brave, courageous, quick-witted ("cunning"). But perhaps his most characteristic feature is curiosity. He wants to see everything, hear everything, learn everything, experience everything. Often this involves him in the most serious troubles, from which he always finds a way out.

He is assured that the maiden birds - sirens are dangerous, that they have already ruined many with "singing sweet", "bewitching". He strives to hear them and orders each of the team to cover their ears tightly with wax, but he himself left them open at home and, tied with strong ropes to the mast pole, experienced the power of singing wonderful and terrible bird-maidens.

Why is he doing this? To know.

Homer reports that, and after Odysseus returns to his native Ithaca, he will not calm down and will again go in search of adventure. Nothing stops him. “The thought of death has never troubled my heart,” he says of himself. He visited a place from which no mortal has ever returned - in the kingdom of shadows, in Hades, and in a fabulous country of happiness and peacefulness, where the benevolent Alkina rules ...

Such is Odysseus and his main features. But besides them, he also has a great, cherished feeling - this is an inextinguishable love for the motherland. He rushes to her, sheds tears about her, refuses eternal youth and immortality, which the nymph Calypso offers him, if only to be back where he was born and raised. And the eternal feelings, close to everyone and everyone at all times, are expressed by the ancient poet with amazing, sometimes tragic truth.

"Our dear fatherland, where we were born and flourished."

“There is nothing sweeter for us than our homeland and our relatives,”

Homer sings, and his "Odyssey" becomes an anthem in honor of the motherland.

Not only Odysseus, but also other heroes love their homeland to self-forgetfulness:

Joyfully, the leader Agamemnon stepped onto the parental shore.
He began to kiss the dear fatherland, seeing again
The desired land, he shed abundantly warm tears.

Homer showed both insidious human cruelty, with indignation, contempt (the murder of Agamemnon), and tenderly and reverently - family feelings: marital, filial and parental love (Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus). He, as it were, contrasted two fates, two moral categories - Penelope's loyalty and betrayal, the crime of Clytemnestra and "Contemptible Aegist".

Tremulously and gently draws the image of Homer Penelope. She is a faithful wife, constantly thinking about her absent husband, she is a mother, and her anxieties for her son are described with penetrating warmth. For her, he is “a lad who has not seen the need, who is not used to talking with people.” Telemachus is twenty years old, he is quite independent and sometimes declares himself to be the eldest in the house and can even order his mother to retire to her chambers:

But good luck: do, as you should, the order of the economy,
Yarn, weaving; see that the slaves are diligent in their work
Were ours; to speak is not a woman's business, but a business
Husband, and now mine: I am my only master.

The subordinate position of women in Ancient Greece, as we see, is presented very clearly. Penelope heard her son say this for the first time and was amazed and, perhaps, filled with pride for him, but, like for any mother, he will forever remain a child for her. Having learned that he had gone furtively from her in search of her father - and furtively because he did not want to disturb her, so that “the freshness of her face would not fade from sadness,” as Homer, who always glorifies beauty, explains, she is worried. “My heart trembles for him, so that no misfortune with him happens at sea with evil, or in a foreign country with a foreign people.”

Homer everywhere emphasizes the youthful modesty and shyness of Telemachus. When Mentor sends him to ask Nestor the "bridle horses" about his father, Telemachus hesitates: is it proper for the younger ones to ask the elders?

The Greeks believed that every person has his own demon, a special patron, a kind of spirit that will tell him in time the right thought, the right word, and the right deed (hence the expression “his genius” in our speech):

Much by yourself, Telemachus, you will guess with your mind,
The demon will reveal much to you...

To some extent, Homer's Odyssey is also a utopia, a great human dream of happiness. Odysseus visited the country of the feacs. Theakians are a fabulous, happy people. Their country is truly an ancient El Dorado. Their king Alcinus admits:

The ships of the feaks know neither helmsmen nor helmsmen, "clothed in darkness and mist", they fly over the waves, obeying only the thoughts of their shipmen. They are not afraid of either storms or fogs. They are invulnerable. The amazing dream of the ancient Greek: to control the mechanisms directly with just one thought! They call it autokinesis these days.

But the wonderful, fabulous city of the Phaeacians will become inaccessible. An angry Poseidon will close it with a mountain, and access to it will be blocked forever and for everyone, and the Phaeacians, protected from the world of troubles, worries and sorrows, will be alone in eternal blissful being. This is how fairy tales about dazzlingly alluring and unrealizable happiness always end.

Homer sang a song about heroic natures, he glorified their strength and courage. The heroes left, died, but their life became a song, and therefore their fate is beautiful:

In the Iliad, Homer does not speak of the Aeds. He reports on the songs and dances of young men at feasts and during the grape harvest, but so far there is no talk of specialist singers. True, in the second song he mentions a certain Famir from Thrace, who took it into his head to compete in singing with the muses themselves and, as a punishment for such audacity, was blinded and deprived of "the divine gift sweet to songs and the art of rattling the cithara."

Songs, epic tales about heroes to the accompaniment of the lyre were performed in the Iliad not by professional specialists, but by ordinary amateurs.

We, I will say, are not excellent either in fisticuffs or in wrestling;
Quick feet but unspeakably and the first in the sea;
We love sumptuous dinners, singing, music, dancing,
Fresh clothes, voluptuous baths and a soft bed.
For this they were sent down both death and a pernicious lot
Gods, may they be a glorious song for posterity.

Art of Homer

Singers are highly honored by all, she herself taught them
Singing Muse; her lovely singers noble tribe.
Homer

Achilles, in his luxurious tent, during the hours of calm from the battle, played the lyre and sang (“with the lyre he delighted the spirit, singing the glory of the heroes”).

The Iliad was written, apparently, much earlier than the Odyssey. During this time there have been some changes in the life of society. Special performers of epic tales appeared. The Odyssey talks a lot about them.

Moreover, there has already been talk of charlatan storytellers, "boastful deceivers", "many vagabonds who go around the earth, spreading lies everywhere in ridiculous stories about what they saw." The personality of Homer himself, his affiliation with professional singers in the Odyssey is quite tangible, and his professional interests, and professional pride, and his aesthetic program.

The ancient Greeks, contemporaries of Homer, saw inspiration from God in poetry (the poet - "he is like inspired high gods"). From this came the deepest respect for poetry and recognition of the freedom of creativity.

If all the thoughts and actions of people, according to the ancient Greek, depended on the will and instigation of the gods, then this was even more true for the Aeds. Therefore, young Telemachus objected when his mother Penelope wanted to interrupt the singer Phemius, who was singing about the "sad return from Troy":

Dear mother, objected the judicious son of Odysseus,
How do you want the singer to ban our pleasure
Then to sing that his heart awakens in him? Guilty
This is not a singer, but Zeus is guilty, sending from above
People of high spirit will be inspired by their will.
No, do not prevent the singer about the sad return of the Danae
Sing - with great praise people listen to that song,
Every time with her, as if new, admiring her soul;
You yourself will find in it not sadness, but sadness delight.

Freedom of creativity was already becoming an aesthetic principle of the ancient poet. Let us recall Pushkin's sorcerer from "The Song of the Prophetic Oleg": "Their prophetic language is truthful and free and friendly with the will of heaven."

Ancient man, whose spiritual life took place in the sphere of myth and legend, did not accept fiction. He was childishly trusting, ready to believe everything, but any fiction must be presented to him as the truth, as an undeniable reality. Therefore, the truthfulness of the story also became an aesthetic principle.

Odysseus praised the singer Demodocus at the feast of King Alcinous, primarily for the authenticity of his story. “You might think that you yourself were a participant in everything, or you learned all from the faithful eyewitnesses,” he told him, and yet Odysseus was an eyewitness and participant in precisely those events about which Demodocus sang.

And finally, the third principle - the art of singing should bring joy to people, or, as we would say now, aesthetic pleasure. He speaks about this more than once in the poem (“capturing our hearing”, “for our pleasure”, “admiring our soul”, etc.). Surprisingly, Homer's observation that a work of art does not lose its charm when re-reading - each time we perceive it as new. And then (this already refers to the most complex mystery of art), drawing the most tragic collisions, it brings an incomprehensible peace to the soul and, if it causes tears, then the tears are “sweet”, “pacifying”. Therefore, Telemachus tells his mother that Demodocus will bring her "delight of sorrow" with his song.

The ancient Greek, and Homer was his most glorious representative, treated the masters of art with the greatest respect, no matter who this master was - a potter, foundry worker, engraver, sculptor, builder, gunsmith. In Homer's poem, we constantly find a word of praise for such a master artist. The singer has a special place. After all, he calls Femius "a famous singer", "a divine husband", a man of "high spirit", who, "capturing our hearing, is like inspired high gods." The singer Demodok is also glorified by Homer. “Above all mortal people, I put you, Demodocus,” says Odysseus.

Who were they, these singers, or Aeds, as the Greeks called them? As you can see, both Phemius and Demodocus are deeply revered, but, in essence, they are beggars. They are treated like Odysseus Demodocus, who sent him from his plate “a full of fat spinal part of a sharp-toothed boar”, and “the singer gratefully accepted the donation”, they are invited to a feast in order to listen to their inspired singing after a meal and libations. But, in fact, their fate was sad, how sad was the fate of Demodocus: “The muse rewarded him with evil and good at birth”, gave him “sweet singing”, but also “eclipsed his eyes”, that is, he was blind. Tradition has conveyed to us the image of the blindest Homer. So he remained in the representation of the peoples for three millennia.

Homer is striking in the versatility of his talent. He embodied in his poems truly the entire spiritual arsenal of antiquity. His poems caressed the delicate musical ear of the ancient Greek and the charm of the rhythmic disposition of speech, he filled them with vivid picturesque, poetic expressiveness pictures of the ancient life of the population of Greece. His story is accurate. The information reported by him is invaluable for historians documentary. Suffice it to say that Heinrich Schliemann, undertaking the excavations of Troy and Mycenae, used Homer's poems as a geographical and topographic map. This accuracy, sometimes downright documentary, is amazing. The enumeration of the military units that besieged Troy, which we find in the Iliad, seems even tedious, but when the poet concludes this enumeration with the verse: “like leaves on trees, like sands on the seas, armies are innumerable,” we involuntarily believe this hyperbolic comparison.

Engels, referring to military history, uses the poem of Homer. In his essay "Camp", describing the system of building military fortifications and defense among the ancients, he uses the information of Homer.

Homer does not forget to name all the characters in his poem, even the most distant ones in relation to the main plot: the sleeping bag of King Menelaus “the nimble Asphaleon”, his second sleeping bag “Etheon the most honored”, not forgetting to mention his father “Eteon, son of Voets”.

The impression of complete authenticity of the story is achieved by extreme, sometimes even pedantic accuracy of details. In the second song of the Iliad, Homer lists the names of the leaders of the ships and squads that arrived at the walls of Troy. He does not forget to remember the most insignificant details. Naming Protesilaus, he informs not only that this warrior died, the first to jump off the ship, but also that he was replaced by a “one-blooded” brother, “youngest in years”, that the hero’s wife remained in his homeland “with a torn soul”, the house is “half-finished ". And this last detail (the unfinished house), which could not have been mentioned at all, turns out to be very important for the overall persuasiveness of the whole story.

It gives the individual characteristics of the enumerated warriors and the places they came from. In one case, there are “harsh fields of Olizona”, there is a “bright lake” Bebendskoe, “the magnificent city of Izolk” or “rocky Pithos”, “high-cliff Ifoma”, “Larissa bumpy”, etc. Warriors are almost always “famous”, “armored ”, but in one case they are excellent spearmen, in the other they are excellent shooters.

Homer's contemporaries perceived his tales of the adventures of Odysseus with all the seriousness of their naive worldview. We know that there was and is not Scylla or Charybdis, there was not and could not be the cruel Circe, who turns people into animals, there was not and could not be the beautiful nymph Calypso, who offered Odysseus "both immortality and eternal youth." And yet, reading Homer, we constantly catch ourselves on the fact that, despite the skeptical consciousness of a man of the 20th century, we are irresistibly drawn into the world of the naive faith of the Greek poet. By what force, by what means, does he achieve such an influence on us? What is the effect of the credibility of his narrative? Perhaps mainly in the scrupulous details of the story. They, by their randomness, eliminate the feeling of fantasy bias. It would seem that some of these random details might not have happened, and the story would not have suffered in the plot, but it turns out that the general mood of reliability would have suffered.

For example, why did Homer need the figure of Elpenor, which appeared quite unexpectedly in the story of the misadventures of Odysseus? This companion of Odysseus, “not distinguished by courage in battles, not generously gifted with the mind from the gods,” in other words, cowardly and stupid, went to sleep “for coolness” on the roof of Circe’s house and fell from there, “broke the vertebral bone, and the soul flew off into region of Hades. This sad event had no effect on the fate of Odysseus and his comrades, and if one followed the strict logic of the narrative, then one could not report on it, but Homer spoke about it in detail, and about how Odysseus later met the shadow of Elpenor in Hades and how they buried him, erecting a mound over his grave, and hoisted his oar on it. And the whole narrative of the poet acquired the authenticity of a diary entry. And we involuntarily believe everything (so it was! Everything is accurately described to the smallest detail!).

The detailed and detailed story of Homer is bright and dramatic. It is as if we, together with Odysseus, are fighting against the raging sea elements, we see the rising waves, we hear a frantic roar and we are desperately fighting together with him to save our lives:

At that moment a great wave rose and broke
All over his head; the raft swirled swiftly,
Grabbed from the deck into the sea, he fell headlong, missing
Steering wheel out of hand; knocked down the silt asya mast, breaking under heavy
Opposite winds, flying against each other with a blow.
... A fast wave rushed him to a rocky shore;
If he, in time, was instructed by the bright goddess Athena
He wasn’t, the cliff grabbed his neighbor with his hands; and clinging to him
He waited with a groan, hanging on a stone, so that the wave would run
past; she ran, but suddenly, reflected on the return
She knocked him off the cliff and threw him into the dark sea.

The ancient poet also draws picturesquely, dramatically, and the state of Odysseus, his constant conversation with his “great heart” and his prayer addressed to the gods, until the “azure-curly” Poseidon, having quenched his anger, finally took pity on him, taming the sea and calming the waves . Miserable, exhausted, Odysseus was carried ashore:

... knees buckled under him, mighty hands hung; in the sea his heart was weary;
His whole body swelled up; spewing with both mouth and nostrils
an ode to the sea, he fell at last, lifeless, mute.

Pictures of portraits of heroes. In the poem they are given in action. Their feelings, passions are reflected in their appearance. Here is a warrior on the battlefield:

Hector raged terribly, under his gloomy eyebrows
Terrifyingly shone with fire; above the head, rising like a crest,
He swayed terribly with a helmet flying by a storm through the battle of Hector!

With the same expression, a portrait of another person was written out - one of Penelope's suitors:

Antinous - seething with anger - his chest heaved,
Pressed by black malice, and his eyes, like a flaming fire, glowed.

The feelings of the woman manifested themselves in a different way, here the restraint of movements, the deep concealment of suffering. Penelope, having learned that the suitors were going to kill her son, “was wordless for a long time”, “her eyes were darkened with tears, and her voice did not subdue her.”

It has become commonplace to talk about constant epithets in Homer's poems. But is it only in Homer's poems?

Constant epithets and special, strongly soldered turns of speech we will find among the poets of all peoples of antiquity. “Red girl”, “good fellow”, “white light”, “cheese earth”. These and similar epithets are found in every Russian fairy tale, epic, song. And what is remarkable, they do not age, do not lose their original freshness. Amazing aesthetic mystery! It is as if the people have honed them forever, and they, like diamonds, sparkle and shimmer with eternal, bewitching brilliance.

Apparently, the point is not in the novelty of the epithet, but in its truth. “I remember a wonderful moment ...” “Wonderful!” - a common, ordinary epithet. We often repeat it in our everyday speech.

Why, then, in Pushkin's line is he so fresh and, as it were, primordial? Because it is infinitely true, because it conveys the truth of feelings, because the moment was really wonderful.

Homer's epithets are constant, but at the same time they are diverse and surprisingly picturesque, that is, in a word, they recreate the situation. They are always appropriate, extremely expressive and emotional.

When the sad Telemachus, full of thoughts about his missing father, goes to the sea in order to “wet his hands with salt water”, then the sea is “sandy”. The epithet paints us a picture of the sea coast. When it came to Telemachus going on a journey in search of his father, the epithet was already different - the “foggy” sea. This is no longer a visual image, but a psychological one, speaking of the difficulties ahead, of a path full of surprises ... In the third case, the sea is already “terrible”, when Eurycleia, worrying about the fate of Telemachus, dissuades him from going to Pylos. When at dawn Telemachus sets sail from Ithaca, the sea again acquired the picturesque epithet "dark" ("freshly breathed marshmallows, stunning the dark sea"). But then the dawn broke, Homer designated the picture of the morning with one epithet - “purple waves”.

Sometimes the sea is "dark foggy", that is, full of threats and troubles, "abundant", "great".

Waves in a storm are "powerful, heavy, mountainous." The sea is “rich in fish”, “broadly noisy”, “sacred”. When Penelope imagines what troubles her son can meet at sea, it already becomes an "evil" sea, full of anxieties and dangers, "anxiety of the misty sea."

To give his listener a visual idea of winter, Homer reports that the shields of the warriors "were thin with crystal from the frost." The poet picturesquely and even, perhaps, somewhat naturalistically draws episodes of battles. So, the spear of Diomedes hit
Pandarus in the nose near the eyes: flew through white teeth,
Flexible tongue crushing copper at the root cut off
And, flashing through the tip, it froze in the chin.

Another warrior was pierced by a spear in his right side, “right into the bladder, under the pubic bone”, “with a cry he fell to his knees, and death dawned on the fallen.” Etc.

Homer is not always impassive. Sometimes his attitude to people and events is expressed quite clearly. Listing the allies of the Trojan king Priam, he names a certain Amphimachus, apparently a fair fanfaron and a lover of showing off, so that “he even went to battle, dressing up in gold, like a maiden. Pathetic!" Homer exclaims contemptuously.

Homer is a poet, and, as a poet, he appreciates that main element of poetic creativity, that brick that makes up a separate verse, song, poem - the word. And he feels the immense expanse of words, he literally bathes in speech expanse, where everything is subject to him:

The language of man is flexible; speeches for him abound
Everyone, the field for words both here and there is boundless.

Summing up, it is necessary to identify the main, in my opinion, features of Homer's poems. They are different in their themes. The Iliad is a historical work. She tells about events not only of national, but also for that time of international significance. The tribes and peoples of a vast region clashed in a great confrontation, and this confrontation, which was remembered for a long time by subsequent generations (it is believed that it took place in the 12th century BC), is described with accuracy that is obligatory for historical science.

This work reflected with encyclopedic breadth the whole spiritual world of Ancient Greece - its beliefs (myths), its social, political and moral norms. It imprinted with plastic clarity and its material culture. Conceived as a historical narrative, it recreated with great artistic expressiveness the physical and spiritual appearance of the participants in the event - it showed specific people, their individual traits, their psychology.

The poet singled out the main moral problem of his narrative, subordinating to it, in fact, the entire course of the story - the influence of human passions on the life of society (the wrath of Achilles). This was his own moral position. He opposed anger and bitterness with the idea of humanity and kindness, ambition and the pursuit of glory (Achilles) - high civil prowess (Hector).

"Odyssey" absorbed the civil and family ideals of ancient Greek society - love for the motherland, family hearth, feelings of marital fidelity, filial and paternal affection. However, this is basically the story of the "discovery of the world". A person, in this case Odysseus, looks with curiosity at the mysterious, unknown, concealing many secrets, the surrounding world. His inquisitive gaze seeks to penetrate into its secrets, to know, to experience everything. The irresistible craving for understanding the unknown is the main ideological core of Odysseus' wanderings and adventures. To some extent, this is an ancient utopian novel. Odysseus visited the "afterlife", in Hades, and in the country of social justice, general welfare - on the island of feaks. He looked into the future of human technological progress - he sailed on a ship controlled by thought.

Nothing stopped his curiosity. He wanted to endure everything, to experience everything, no matter what troubles threatened him, in order to find out, to comprehend the still untested, unknown.

The Iliad shows the cunning and cunning of Odysseus as his main and, perhaps, not always attractive features, while the Odyssey shows curiosity and inquisitiveness of mind. True, even here the spirit of guile does not leave him, helping him in the most difficult situations.

So, two poems that covered the life of the ancient Greek people. The first illuminated the whole society in all the diversity of its historical existence, the second - the individual in its relationship with people and mainly with nature. Odysseus acts as a representative of all mankind, discovering, knowing the world.

Greek lyrics

Homer is the shining pinnacle of Greek culture. Below, if we stick to the metaphorical form of speech, stretched the vast fragrant plains of classical Greece with its lyrics, drama, historical, rhetorical and philosophical prose. Athens was its geographical center, the 5th century was its most flourishing time.

Homer completes an era in ancient world culture - its initial nationwide stage, when it was created by all the people. Some of its brilliant representatives only generalized and synthesized the achievements of their fellow tribesmen. The memory of the people did not always retain their names. Sometimes she, saving us the name of one of them, especially distinguished and especially honored, attributed to him the best works of other authors. This is what happened to Homer. And since the ancient peoples saw inspiration in creativity, the individual author's originality was not appreciated. The authors continued the established traditions, their own personality seemed to be obscured. This was an epic stage in the history of culture. Everything I have told about the ancient literatures of China, India, the countries of the Middle and Near East and Homeric Greece refers to this epic period of world culture, when
the personality of the author has not yet laid claim to an individual creative style. (“... In my songs, nothing belongs to me, but everything belongs to my muses,” the Greek poet Hesiod wrote in the 7th century BC.)

Usually literature is divided into three main types: epic, lyric and drama. This division, of course, is conditional, because in the epic one can find elements of lyrics and in lyrics - elements of the epic, but it is convenient, since it indicates the main distinguishing features of each of these types of literature.

In the most distant times, the epic poem could not yet have arisen, it was still too complicated for a person of the prehistoric era, while an unpretentious song with a clear rhythm was quite accessible to him. Initially, these were labor songs and prayers. Prayer expressed human emotions - fear, admiration, delight. The lyrics were still nameless and expressed the emotions not of an individual, but of a collective (clan, tribe), it retained the established, as it were, frozen forms and was passed down from generation to generation. Songs of this type have already been described by Homer:

In the circle of their lad is beautiful in a ringing lyre
Sweetly rattling, singing beautifully to the linen strings
Thin voice...

Then legends appeared, epic stories about events in the world of deities, about heroes. They were composed and performed by the Aeds, orally passing from generation to generation, “polishing”, improving them. From these songs (in Greece they were called Homeric hymns) they began to compose poems. Such composers in Greece were called rhapsodes (collectors, "stitchers" of songs). One such rhapsodist was obviously Homer. The lyrics remain at the level of traditional ritual forms (festivities, sacrifices, funeral rites, lamentations). But later, she pushed aside the epic and came out on top, and has already acquired a new quality. In the field of art, this was a real revolution, due, of course, to social factors. The personality began to separate, stand out from society, sometimes even came into conflict with society. Now the lyrics began to express the individual world of an individual.

The lyric poet differed significantly from the epic poet, who recreated the outside world - people, nature, while the lyricist turned his gaze to himself. The epic poet strove for the truth of the picture, the lyric poet - for the truth of feeling. He looked "into himself", he was busy with himself, he analyzed his inner world, his feelings, his thoughts:

I love and I don't love
And without a mind, and in the mind ... -

wrote the lyric poet Anacreon. Passions boil in the soul - a kind of madness, but somewhere in the corners of consciousness a cold, skeptical thought nests: is it really so? Am I deceiving myself? The poet tries to sort out his own feelings. The epic poet did not allow himself such a thing, without attaching importance to his personality.

Homer turned to the muses to help him tell the world about the anger of Achilles and all the tragic consequences of this anger, the lyric poet would ask the muses for something else: may they help him (the poet) tell about his (the poet's) feelings - suffering and joys, doubts and hopes. In the epic, the pronouns are "he", "she", "they", in the lyrics - "I", "we".

“My lot is to be in love with sunlight and beauty,” the poetess Sappho sang. Here in the foreground is not beauty and the sun, but the attitude of the poetess towards them.

So, the majestic and luxurious epic poetry of Homer was replaced by an agitated, passionate and languid, caustic and harsh poetry, lyrical in its personal quality. Alas, it has come down to us truly in fragments. We can only guess what kind of wealth it was. We know the names of Tyrtaeus, Archilochus, Solon, Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon and others, but little of their poetry has survived.

The lyrical poet showed his bleeding heart, sometimes, driving away despair, urged himself to patience, to courage. Archilochus:

Heart, heart! Troubles arose before you in a formidable formation:
Cheer up and meet them with your chest ...

The personality became her own biographer, she spoke about the dramas of her life, she was her own portrait painter and mourner. The poet Hipponact, with a bitter smile, speaking to the gods, spoke of the miserable state of his wardrobe:

Hermes of Killensky, Maya's son, dear Hermes!
Hear the poet. My cloak is full of holes - I will tremble.
Give clothes to Hipponactus, give shoes...

Lyric poets also glorify civic feelings, sing of military glory, patriotism:

It's sweet to lose life, among the valiant fallen warriors,
To a brave husband in battle for the sake of his fatherland, -

sings Tirtaeus. “And it is praiseworthy and glorious for a husband to fight for his homeland,” Kallin echoes him. However, the moral foundations were noticeably shaken: the poet Archilochus does not hesitate to admit that he threw his shield on the battlefield (a serious crime in the eyes of the ancient Greek).

Now the Saiyan wears my impeccable shield,
Willy-nilly, I had to throw it to me in the bushes.
I myself escaped death. And let it disappear
My shield! As good as a new one I can get.

The only excuse he could have was that he was in a mercenary army. But the Spartans did not forgive him for his poetic confession, and when he once found himself on the territory of their country, he was offered to leave.

Poets cared about the beauty of their verse, but the main thing they asked the muses was excitement, emotion, passion, the ability to kindle hearts:

Oh Kaliope! Conceive us a lovely
Song and passion ignite the conquering
Our anthem and make the choir pleasant.
Alkman

Perhaps the main theme of lyric poetry was, and is, and, apparently, always will be - love. Even in ancient times, a legend arose about Sappho's unrequited love for the beautiful young man Phaon. Rejected by him, she allegedly threw herself off a cliff and died. The poetic legend was dispelled by the latest scientists, but it was sweet to the Greeks, giving a tragic charm to the whole appearance of the beloved poetess.

Sappho kept a school of girls on the island of Lesvos, taught them singing, dancing, music, science. The theme of her songs is love, beauty, beautiful nature. She sang of female beauty, the charm of female modesty, tenderness, the youthful charm of a girlish appearance. Of the celestials, the closest thing to her was the goddess of love, Aphrodite. Her hymn to Aphrodite, which has survived, has come down to us, reveals all the charm of her poetry. We give it in full in the translation of Vyacheslav Ivanov:

Rainbow Throne Aphrodite! Zeus' immortal daughter, the goat-woman!
Don't break my heart with sadness!
Have pity, goddess!
Rush from the heights of the mountains - as before it was:
You heard my voice from afar
I called - you came down to me, leaving the Father's heaven!
I got on the red chariot;
Like a whirlwind, carried her with a fast flight
Strong-winged above the dark earth
A flock of doves.
You rushed, you were in front of the eyes,
She smiled at me with an unspeakable face ...
"Sappho!" - I hear: - Here I am! What are you praying for?
What are you sick of?
What makes you sad and what maddens you?
All say! Does the heart yearn for love?
Who is he, your offender? Who will I bow
Sweet under the yoke?
The recent fugitive will be inseparable;
Who did not accept the gift will come with gifts,
Who does not love will love soon
And unrequited…”
Oh, appear again - through a secret prayer,
Rescue the heart from a new misfortune!
Stand, armed, in gentle combat
Help me.
Eros never lets me breathe.
He flies from Cyprida,
Everything around you plunging into darkness,
Like lightning sparkling northern
Thracian wind and soul
Powerfully sways to the very bottom
Burning madness.

The name of a contemporary and compatriot Sappho Alkey is associated with political events on the island of Lesvos. He was an aristocrat. Usually in those days in the Greek policies, in these small city-states, there were several eminent families who considered themselves "the best" from the word "aristos" ("the best"), so the word "aristocracy" ("power of the best") appeared.

Usually they traced their lineage from some god or hero, were proud of this relationship and were brought up in the spirit of tribal pride. This gave a certain charm to the myths and allowed them to be kept in memory, and sometimes enriched with new poetic details, flattering for the representatives of the genus. Myths morally nourished the aristocratic youth. To imitate the heroic ancestors, not to drop their honor by any unworthy act was a moral principle for every young man. This inspired respect for the aristocratic family.

But times have changed. Aristocratic families became poorer, wealthy townspeople advanced to the political arena, class conflicts arose, and in a number of cases significant social movements took place. People who had previously stood at the top of society were left behind. Such was the fate of the poet Alcaeus, an aristocrat thrown out of his usual rut of life, who became an exile after the accession of the tyrant Pittacus in Mytilene.

Alcaeus created in poetry the image of a ship-state thrown from side to side by a raging sea and stormy wind.

Understand who can, the furious riot of the winds.
Shafts roll - this one from here, that one
From there ... In their rebellious dump
We rush with a tarred ship,
Barely resisting the onslaught of evil waves.
Already the deck was completely flooded with water;
The sail is already shining through
All perforated. The fasteners loosened.

This poetic image of a state shaken by political storms later arose more than once in world poetry.

In political and philosophical lyrics, the poet and politician Solon is interesting. History included his reforms carried out in the VI century. BC e. Aristotle called him the first protector of the people. His reforms took into account the interests of the poorest sections of Athens. Solon did not share his feelings with the reader, he was rather a moral and political mentor ("Instructions to the Athenians", "Instructions to himself"), inspiring feelings of patriotism and citizenship. His poem “The Weeks of Human Life” is known, characterizing the general view of the ancient Greek on human life, on its time limits, age characteristics of a person. We present it in full:

The little boy, still foolish and weak, is losing
The first row of teeth, as soon as he was seven years old;
If God brings the second seven years to an end, -
The lad is already showing signs of maturity to us.
In the third, the young man hides quickly with the growth of all members
Gentle fluffy beard, skin color changes.
Everyone in the fourth week is already in full bloom
The strength of the body, and in her valor, everyone sees a sign.
In the fifth - the time to think about marriage to the desired man.
To continue their kind in a number of blooming children.
The human mind in the sixth week fully matures
And no longer strives for unfulfilled deeds.
Reason and speech in seven weeks is already in full bloom,
Also at eight, fourteen years in total.
The man is still powerful in the ninth, but they are weakening
For all-valiant deeds, the word and his mind.
If God brings the tenth to the end of seven years, -
Then the death end for people will not be early.

In modern times, the name of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, a cheerful old man who glorified life, youth and the joys of love, enjoyed special love. In 1815, the sixteen-year-old lyceum student Pushkin, in playful verses, called him his teacher:

Let the fun come running
Waving a frisky toy,
And make us laugh from the heart
For a full frothy mug ...
When will the east be rich
In the darkness, young
And the white poplar will light up,
Covered in morning dew
Give the bunch of Anacreon:
He was my teacher...
"My testament"

Youth is beautiful with its bright perception of the world. Such was Pushkin's youth, and it is not surprising that a distant, long-standing poet who lived twenty-five centuries before him so delighted him with his cheerful, cheerful, mischievous poetry. Pushkin made several translations from Anacreon, amazing in beauty and fidelity to the spirit of the original.

Unfortunately, little of Anacreon's poetry has come down to us, and his fame, perhaps, is more based in modern times on numerous imitations of him and the charm of the legend that has developed about him in antiquity. In the 16th century, the famous French publisher Etienne published a collection of Anacreon's poems based on a manuscript of the 10th - 11th centuries, but most of them did not belong to the poet, but were talented pastishes (imitations). There is a rich Anacreontic poetry. In Russia, Anacreon was especially fond of in the 18th century. M. V. Lomonosov’s ode “The sky covered with darkness at night” even became a popular romance.

The name of the poet Pindar is associated with an amazing in scale, beauty, moral nobility phenomenon in the public life of Ancient Greece - the Olympic Games. Pindar was truly their singer. The poet lived an ordinary human age, something within seventy years (518-442), the Olympic Games lasted for more than a millennium, but his poetry painted this millennium with rainbow colors of youth, health, beauty.

For the first time, sports competitions took place in Olympia in 776 BC. e. in a quiet valley near Mount Kronos and two rivers - Alfea and its tributary Kladei - and repeated every four years until 426 AD, when the fanatics of Christianity, destroying the old pagan culture of antiquity, destroyed the Olympic Altis (temples, altars, porticos, statues of the gods and athletes).

For a thousand and two hundred years, Altis was the center of all the beauty that the ancient world contained. The “father of history” Herodotus read his books here, the philosopher Socrates came here on foot, Plato visited here, the great orator Demosthenes delivered his speeches, here was the workshop of the famous sculptor Phidias, who sculpted the statue of Olympian Zeus.

The Olympic Games became the moral center of Ancient Greece, they united all Greeks as an ethnic whole, they reconciled the warring tribes. During the games, the roads became safe for travelers, a truce was established with the warring parties. Throughout the then world known to the Greeks, special messengers (theors - “sacred messengers”) went with the news of the upcoming games, they were hosted by “proxens” - local representatives of the Olympic Games, persons who enjoyed special honor. Crowds of pilgrims then rushed to Olympia. They came from Syria and Egypt, from the Italian lands, from the south of Gaul, from Taurida and Colchis. Only persons who were morally impeccable, never convicted, not convicted of any unworthy deeds, were allowed to the games. The spirit of the times, of course, manifested itself here too: women were not allowed (under pain of death), as well as slaves and non-Greeks.

Pindar composed solemn choral chants in honor of the winners in competitions (epiniki). The hero himself, his ancestors and the city in which the hero lived were glorified in the mighty sound of the choir. Unfortunately, the musical part of the chants has not been preserved. The poet, of course, was not limited only to the pathos of the dithyramb, he wove into his song philosophical reflections on the role of fate in a person’s life, on the will, sometimes unfair, of the gods, on the need to remember the limits of human capabilities, on the sacred sense of proportion for the ancient Greek.

In ancient times, poetry was recited in a singsong voice to the accompaniment of a lyre or flute. There were poems and songs. The poet not only composed the text of the verse, but also came up with a melody and even composed a dance. It was melodic poetry, consisting of three elements: "word, harmony and rhythm" (Plato).

Music occupied a significant place in the daily life of the ancient Greek, it is a pity that crumbs have come down to us from it.
The term "lyric" - from the word lira, a musical instrument used as an accompaniment, appeared relatively late, around the 3rd century. BC e., when the center of Greek culture moved to Alexandria. Alexandrian philologists, who were engaged in classifying and commenting on the literary heritage of classical Greece, united under this name all poetic genres that differ from the epic with its hexameter (six-foot) and other rhythmic forms.

1. The myth of Homer.
2. The sinister grandeur of the Iliad.
3. Images of the Odyssey.
4. Glory to Achilles, Odysseus and Homer.

Seven cities, arguing, are called the homeland of Homer:
Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Pylos, Argos, Ithaca, Athens.

Some scholars doubt whether Homer existed? Maybe the authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey were different people? Perhaps these poems are a product of oral folk art? Finally, there is another version that appeared relatively recently: Homer existed, but he was a woman, not a man, as was commonly believed. However, does it really matter what Homer was like during his lifetime? He himself has long become a part of the great myth, therefore his image cannot and should not be ordinary, banal, unambiguous. And what do faint-hearted doubts about the very fact of Homer's existence mean when the Iliad and the Odyssey are real, and, oddly enough, are still modern? Didn't people doubt the existence of Christ, although he lived much later than Homer? But this is probably the peculiarity of a truly great personality - when it passes into eternity, the light that comes into the world through this person does not disappear, but in its dazzling radiance it is sometimes difficult to discern the earthly features of the divine chosen one ...

The myths preserved by Homer for posterity, after many centuries, still continue to excite the minds of people:

I closed the Iliad and sat by the window,
On the lips fluttered the last word,
Something shone brightly - a lantern or the moon,
And the sentinel's shadow moved slowly.

These are lines from N. S. Gumilyov's poem "Modernity", in which the images of the Homeric poem unexpectedly find embodiment in reality at the beginning of the 20th century. Heroes like Homer's are the ones who pave new paths, they strive forward. But it often happens that the essence of these people is hidden in the depths of their souls, and they themselves are forced to be content with a very modest position in life, doing useful but boring work.

Our contemporaries continue to be interested in the mythological plot of the Iliad. The film "Troy" is an attempt to bring the heroes of the Trojan War closer to us, to make them more understandable and real. The sudden love of the wife of a formidable warrior for a charming guest, the hostility of two allies, ready to turn into an open clash, the sadness of a mother about the unfortunate fate of her son, the grief of a father who lost the noblest and most courageous of his heirs... These are the eternal motives of human existence. And even the theme of fate, which dominates everything and everything - is it not close to many people who proudly call themselves "civilized"?

No less tenacious is the myth of the Odyssey. The title of this poem has long been a household name for a long journey full of trials. The image of Odysseus, Ulysses, along with the images of Achilles, Hector, Ajax and other Homeric heroes attracted the attention of both ancient authors and authors of subsequent eras. Odysseus is, of course, more versatile than his Trojan War comrades-in-arms. He fights not only with conventional weapons, but also with cunning. “You are only useful with bodily strength, but I am useful with the mind,” Ulysses says to Ajax in the poem “Metamorphoses” by the Roman poet Ovid, defending his right to the armor of the deceased Achilles. But the same ambiguity in the image of Odysseus becomes the reason that Dante in the Divine Comedy places this hero and his friend Diomedes in hell, because they captured Troy by deceit, having invented the Trojan horse. However, no matter how one regards the personality of Odysseus, the theme of his return to Ithaca, his love for his homeland and his family, of course, significantly elevates this hero above his human weaknesses and sins. But the image of Odysseus captures the imagination and the fact that it is the image of a wanderer, bravely fighting the elements. O. E. Mandelstam in the poem “A stream of golden honey ...” brings the image of the king of Ithaca closer to the images of the Argonauts, who set off on a journey in order to gain a great treasure:

Golden Fleece, where are you, Golden Fleece?
The heavy waves of the sea roared all the way,
And, having left the ship, which worked the canvas in the seas,
Odysseus returned, full of space and time.

Mandelstam did not ignore Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, whose image is no less majestic than her wife. As Odysseus differs from other heroes in his ingenuity, so Penelope surpasses the wives of other heroes in her fidelity and wisdom. So, Odysseus invented the Trojan horse to capture Troy, while Penelope began to weave a wedding veil that will never be finished, if only not to get married and remain faithful to her missing husband:

Do you remember, in a Greek house: beloved by all the wife, -
Not Elena - different - how long did she embroider?

The English writer G. Haggard in his novel The Dream of the World made an attempt to show the further fate of the king of Ithaca. Some details of the plot coincide with myths that were not included in Homer's epic. For example, the death of Odysseus at the hands of Telegon, his own son from the goddess Circe. However, in general, the plot of "Dreams of the World" looks too fantastic, it is alien to the strict regularity of the Homeric narrative. But the fact remains that the image of one of the heroes of Homer inspires the imagination of writers many centuries later. And one more thing - although in Haggard's novel Odysseus seems to die, the motive of his future return immediately sounds ...

The glory of Odysseus lies not so much in his exploits and not even in cunning, but in his return. After all, the whole Odyssey is a story about the return of the hero to Ithaca. In the Iliad, Homer glorifies Achilles, and the glory of this hero is different:

If I stay here, in front of the Trojan city to fight, -
There is no return to me, but my glory will not perish.
If I return to the house, to my dear native land,
My glory will perish, but my life will be long-lived...

The glory of Achilles is strongly associated with Troy, the glory of Odysseus with the road from Troy to Ithaca, and the glory of Homer is not associated with any particular place on earth:

... Let's say: the great sky is your fatherland, and not mortal
You were born a mother, but Calliope herself.
(A. Sidonsky "The Motherland of Homer")

Homer is the first Greek poet whose works have survived to this day.

Homer is still considered one of the best European poets today. He was the author of two heroic poems of antiquity, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are among the first monuments of world literature. Homer is considered a legendary poet, because we do not know anything about him for certain.

From Homer's biography:

There is no reliable information about Homer himself. The name "Homer" first occurs in the 7th century. BC e. It was then that Callinus of Ephesus called the creator of Thebaid so. The meaning of this name was tried to be explained in antiquity. The following options were proposed: "blind man" (Efor Kimsky), "following" (Aristotle), "hostage" (Hesychius). However, modern researchers believe that all of them are as unconvincing as the proposals of some scientists to attribute to it the meaning "accompanist" or "component". Surely in its Ionic form this word is a real personal name.

The biography of this poet can only be recreated tentatively. This even applies to the birthplace of Homer, which is still unknown. Seven cities fought for the right to be considered his homeland: Chios, Smyrna, Salamis, Colophon, Argos, Rhodes, Athens. It is likely that the Odyssey and the Iliad were created on the Asia Minor coast of Greece, which was inhabited at that time by Ionian tribes. Or perhaps these poems were composed on some of the adjacent islands.

The Homeric dialect, however, does not give any exact information about which tribe Homer belonged to, this remains a mystery. It is a combination of the Aeolian and Ionian dialects of ancient Greek. Some researchers suggest that it is one of the forms of poetic koine, which was formed long before Homer.

Was Homer blind? Homer is an ancient Greek poet whose biography has been reconstructed by many, from ancient times to the present day. It is known that he is traditionally depicted as blind. However, it is most likely that this representation of him is a reconstruction typical of the genre of ancient biography, and does not come from real facts about Homer. Since many legendary singers and soothsayers were blind (in particular, Tiresias), according to the logic of antiquity, which linked poetic and prophetic gifts, the assumption that Homer was blind looked plausible.

Ancient chronographs also differ in determining the time when Homer lived. He could create his works in different years. Some believe that he was a contemporary of the Trojan War, that is, he lived at the beginning of the 12th century. BC e. However, Herodotus claimed that Homer lived around the middle of the ninth century. BC e. Modern scholars tend to date his activity to the 8th or even 7th century BC. e. At the same time, Chios or another region of Ionia, located on the coast of Asia Minor, is indicated as the main place of life.

Nothing is known for certain about the life and personality of Homer. There are nine biographies of Homer in ancient literature, but they all contain fabulous and fantastic elements.

There is evidence that in the first half of the VI century. BC. the Athenian legislator Solon ordered the performance of Homer's poems at the Panathenaic festival, and that in the second half of the same century the tyrant Peisistratus convened a commission of four people to record Homer's poems. From this we can conclude that already in the VI century. BC. Homer's text was quite well known, although it has not been precisely established what kind of works these were.

Serious study of Homer's poems began in the Hellenistic era in the 4th - 2nd centuries. BC. A number of scholars from the Library of Alexandria studied his poems, among whom are especially famous: Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Aristarchus of Samothrace, Didyma. But they do not give any accurate biographical information about Homer. The general and popular opinion of all antiquity about Homer was that he was an old and blind singer who, inspired by the muse, led a wandering life and himself composed both the two poems known to us, and many other poems.

If we talk about the exact date of Homer's birth, then it is not known for certain until today. But there are several versions of his birth. So, version one. According to her, Homer was born very little time after the end of the war with Troy. According to the second version, Homer was born during the Trojan War and saw all the sad events. If you follow the third version, then the lifetime of Homer varies from 100 to 250 years after the end of the Trojan War. But all versions are similar in that the period of Homer's work, or rather, his heyday, falls at the end of the 10th - beginning of the 9th century BC.

The legendary storyteller died on the island of Chios.

Due to the insufficiency of many biographical data, a large number of legends began to appear in connection with the personality of Homer.

One of them says that shortly before his death, Homer turned to the seer to reveal the secret of his origin into the world. Then the seer named Chios as the place where Homer would die. Homer went there. He remembered the sage's admonition to beware of riddles from youth. But remembering is one thing, but in reality it always turns out differently. The boys who were fishing saw a stranger, talked to him and asked him a riddle. He could not find an answer to her, went in his thoughts, stumbled and fell. Homer died three days later. There he was buried.

About Homer's work:

Homer is known to the world as an ancient Greek poet. Modern science recognizes Homer as the author of such poems as the Iliad and the Odyssey, but in antiquity he was recognized as the author of other works. Fragments of several of them have survived to this day. However, today it is believed that they were written by an author who lived later than Homer. This is a comic poem "Margit", "Homeric hymns" and others.

Peru Homer owns two brilliant poems: "Odyssey" and "Iliad". The Greeks at all times thought so and still believe. Some critics began to question this fact and began to express the point of view that these works appeared only in the 18th century and that they do not belong to Homer at all.

Just as the existence of Homer's personality is in principle questioned, there is also an opinion that the authorship of both the Iliad and the Odyssey belongs to different people who lived at different times.

It is clear that the Odyssey and the Iliad were written much later than the events described in these works. However, their creation can be dated no earlier than the 6th century BC. e., when their existence was reliably recorded. Thus, the life of Homer can be attributed to the period from the 12th to the 7th century BC. e. However, the latest date is the most likely.

There is a legend about a poetic duel that took place between Hesiod and Homer. It was described in a work written no later than the 3rd century BC. BC e. (and some researchers believe that much earlier). It is called "The Contest of Homer and Hesiod." It tells that the poets allegedly met at the games in honor of Amphidemus, held on about. Euboea. Here they read their best poems. The judge of the competition was King Paned. The victory was awarded to Hesiod, because he called for peace and agriculture, and not for slaughter and war. However, it was on the side of Homer that the sympathy of the audience was.

In the 18th century, German linguists published a work that states that there was no written language during the life of Homer, texts were stored in memory and passed from mouth to mouth. Therefore, such significant texts could not be preserved in this way. But such famous masters of the pen as Goethe and Schiller still gave the authorship of the poems to Homer.

Since the 17th century, scientists have faced the so-called Homeric question - a dispute about the authorship of legendary poems. But, no matter what scientists argue about, Homer entered the history of world literature, and in his homeland he had special respect for a long time after his death. His epics were considered sacred, and Plato himself said that the spiritual development of Greece was the merit of Homer.

Be that as it may, Homer is the first ancient poet whose works have survived to this day.

25 interesting facts about the life and work of Homer:

1. The name Homer in ancient Greek means "blind". Perhaps it was for this reason that the assumption arose that the ancient Greek poet was blind.

2. In antiquity, Homer was considered a sage: "Wiser than all the Hellenes taken together." He was considered the founder of philosophy, geography, physics, mathematics, medicine and aesthetics.

3. About half of the found ancient Greek literary papyri were written by Homer.

4. Selective translation of Homer's texts was performed by Mikhail Lomonosov.

5. In 1829, Gnedich Nikolai for the first time translated the Iliad completely into Russian.

6. To date, there are nine versions of Homer's biography, but none can be considered completely documentary. In every description, fiction occupies a large place.

7. Traditionally, it is customary to portray Homer as blind, but scientists explain this not so much by the real state of his vision, but by the influence of the culture of the ancient Greeks, where poets were identified with prophets.

8. Homer distributed his works with the help of Aeds (singers). He learned his works by heart and sang them to his Aeds. Those, in turn, also memorized the works and hummed them to other people. In another way, such people were called homerids.

9. A crater on Mercury is named after Homer.

10. In the 1960s, American researchers passed all the songs of the Iliad through a computer, which showed that there was only one author of this poem.

11. The system of ancient Greek education, formed by the end of the classical era, was based on the study of Homer's work.

12. His poems were memorized in whole or in part, recitations were organized on their topics, etc. Later, Rome borrowed this system. Here since the 1st century AD. e. Homer was replaced by Virgil.

13. Large hexametric poems were created in the postclassic era in the dialect of the ancient Greek author, as well as as a competition or in imitation of the Odyssey and the Iliad.

14. In ancient Roman literature, the first surviving work (albeit fragmentary) was a translation of the Odyssey. It was made by the Greek Livy Andronicus. Note that the main work of literature of Ancient Rome - Virgil's Aeneid - in the first six books is an imitation of the Odyssey, and in the last six - the Iliad.

15. Greek manuscripts in the last years of the existence of the Byzantine Empire, and then after its collapse, came to the West. This is how Homer was rediscovered by the Renaissance.

16. The epic poems of this ancient Greek author are brilliant, priceless works of art. Over the centuries, they do not lose their deep meaning and relevance. The plots of both poems are taken from a multifaceted and extensive cycle of legends dedicated to the Trojan War. "Odyssey" and "Iliad" display only small episodes from this cycle.

17. The habits, traditions, moral aspects of life, morality and life of the ancient Greeks are very clearly depicted in the Iliad.

18. The Odyssey is a more complex work than the Iliad. In it we find many features that are still being studied from the point of view of literature. This epic poem mainly deals with the return of Odysseus to Ithaca after the conclusion of the Trojan War.

19. The Odyssey and the Iliad have characteristic features, one of which is the epic style. The sustained tone of the narrative, unhurried thoroughness, complete objectivity of the image, the unhurried development of the plot - these are the characteristic features of the works that Homer created.

20. Homer was an oral storyteller, that is, he did not speak a letter. However, despite this, his poems are distinguished by high skill and poetic technique, they reveal unity.

21. Almost all the works of antiquity can be seen as the influence of the poems that Homer created. The Byzantines were also interested in his biography and work. In this country, Homer was carefully studied. To date, dozens of Byzantine manuscripts of his poems have been discovered. For the works of antiquity, this is unprecedented. Moreover, Byzantine scholars created commentaries and scholia on Homer, compiled and rewrote his poems. Seven volumes are occupied by the commentary of Archbishop Eustathius to them.

22. In science in the middle of the 19th century, the opinion prevailed that the Odyssey and the Iliad were unhistorical works. However, he was refuted by the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann, which he carried out in Mycenae and on the Hissarlik hill in the 1870-80s. The sensational discoveries of this archaeologist proved that Mycenae, Troy and the Achaean citadels existed in reality. The contemporaries of the German scientist were struck by the correspondence of his findings in the 4th tented tomb, located in Mycenae, to the descriptions made by Homer.

23. One of the main arguments in favor of the fact that the historical Homer did not exist was that not a single person is able to remember and perform poetic works of such volume. However, in the middle of the 20th century, folklorists in the Balkans discovered a storyteller who performed an epic work the size of the Odyssey: this is the story of the American Albert Lord's book The Storyteller.

24. A brief summary of the works of Homer formed the basis of many works of authors who lived in ancient Rome. Among them, one can note the “Argonautics” written by Apollonius of Rhodes, the work of Nonn Panopolitansky “The Adventures of Dionysus” and Quintus Smyrna “Post-Homerian events”.

25. Recognizing the merits of Homer, other poets of ancient Greece refrained from creating a major epic form. They believed that the works of Homer are a treasury of the wisdom of the people of Ancient Greece.