Besides that, "wasn't written by Homer, but by another Greek by the same name" is a little crazy. All we know about Homer was that he was named Homer, wrote the Iliad and Odyssey (allegedly) and was blind. If this other Homer was blind, what kind of discovery is that? It's like saying: there was an historical Sinbad, but not the Sinbad you think, a different guy named Sinbad who did all the same stuff.
now I see that it was a joke. Pwned by my own hand.
I think I'm taking a joke comment seriously, but the issue would be that one person wrote one play, and another person wrote another. Can two people be Shakespeare?
Similarly, the interesting thing about "Homer" which seems to be being asserted is that one person wrote the Odyssey, and another wrote the Illiad.
Oh, if text says this is all a joke I should delete this rather than hit post.
text -- unless one Homer wrote the Odyssey, and one wrote the Iliad. That would be a Krazy Koincidence. But maybe "Homer" was like Smith to those guys.
It seems we should all delete everything we wrote on this thread.
I dragged two down with me, which isn't so bad.
7: but if the other two were also named "text", would we care?
But BUT. In your defense, the joke was pinpointing the ridiculousness of the authorship debates, which was your point also.
It wasn't your best post ever, but that's nothing to be embarrassed about.
Pointy-headed pointallism on-point.
"Point taken, Joe," he remarked pointedly.
Well, the Balbulus Notker who wrote the life of Charlemagne may or may not be the same Balblus Notker who pioneered music notation. And there were two Jack Dempseys and two Howlin Wolfs / Wolves. So you see.
We care about IP because of our faith in divine Provenance.
Whoever wrote the plays, that was Shakespeare; what more do you need to know?
Godel/Schmidt alert!
And it's the "No Homers Club." That's important.
Also, John, I'm pretty sure you mean "two Sonny Boy Williamsons."
Il n'y a pas de hors-écrivain.
I hate it when the Frenching starts.
you've just got to relax, Joe. You're nervous is all.
That impostor, Matt Weinere, never explains his references, but let's see if I can come up with something that explains Godel and Schmidt instead of just referencing it...
Here.
reference shift/reference failure/counterparts who instead of writing the iliad knitted woolen caps for goats/cala's brain melted.
I don't think I got the joke.
NB, "denial of Shakespeare follows exactly the same flawed reasoning as Holocaust denial", in Aug. 17, 2005, TLS, here. It'll probably go away after a while so read / dl it now if you're interested.
Bernard Knox's introduction to Fagles's recent translation of the Iliad has some nice, sober points on the identity and literacy of Homer. You can find it in print.google.com beginning on page 7.
you've just got to relax, Joe. You're nervous is all.
I've tried it myself on a few occasions, but I can't work my mouth properly; think I keep putting it too far back in the throat.
Someone's bound to mention Kripke at some point. So it might as well be me...
I take it that this is a good (the original?) description of the Gödel/Schmidt scenario? I'm asking for personal edification, since I hadn't a clue what you meant when you first wrote it.
Wow, I've fallen way behind the thread, thank god for preview.
I thought the Shakespeare debate was about Shakespeare being real, but only a front for a noble who couldn't admit he was the author of the plays? And more, maybe that noble was famed philosopher Françis Bacon? I don't no about the plausibility of this at all, but at least there's something interesting about it.
I don't no much about it either, but wasn't Shakespeare a real person, and an actor in all of his plays? If someone like Bacon was using him as a front, wouldn't the beans eventually get spilled after, say, twenty or so plays?
I haven't even read the article yet, and I can tell you that it's messed up. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not initially written works, unlike, say, Shakespeare's plays. They were the product of an oral culture and can not, therefore, be attributed to any one author.
I thought the debate was about whether Shakespeare wrote "Romeo and Juliet" while he was himself in love with a Lady betrothed to another, with a broad, sharp nose, happy eyes, and pleasing figure, and whether he was experiencing a bit of writer's block beforehand, and whether, on opening night, he actually played Romeo, and the Lady Juliet, and Queen Elizabeth saw it, and everyone like it very much.
Not true, bg. Homer composed them, extemporaneous-like, inbued with the vapors of the muses, riding on a bed of hummingbirds.
After that, everyone remembered them like Homer had told them, and nobody changed a word.
I thought Homer composed them, but didn't write them, and it was only generations later that they were written down.
Text I think you are superfluousing me.
only when I sleep on my right side, Standpipe.
"All that the people of the Mineshaft know about 'Matt McGrattan' was that he was the first person to allude to* Kripke on the Homer thread. But in fact the first person to allude to Kripke was the someone whose birth name was Matt Weiner, who died shortly thereafter from a case of acute pot-kettlism, as reported by Medical Examiner Gary Farber. Furthermore, his allusion was posted under the mysterious name 'Matt Weinere'. When the people of the Mineshaft use 'Matt McGrattan,' are they talking about the pot-kettlist, or some other guy?"
w/d, Naming and Necessity is indeed where the Godel/Schmidt example comes from.
*alluse/mention, yes yes
[slol, I took your name of the Fontana Labs post because I was afraid that if you showed it to your students it would create a security breach.]
What do you expect of the poor man? He was blind.
This was before blind people were expected to play piano and live inspirational lives, remember.
Re 25, do people read translations other than the Fagles? I can't recall the last time I saw another edition on a friend's bookshelf.
Oh, I see. Like BG says. So why does anyone ever even bother referring to "Homer" anymore?
Tia,
I don't remember this very well; it's been a long time since I studied it, but no. It's thought that a lot of people composed those poems.
It was orally improvised. That's why there are so many repetitive lines, for example. This is mostly based on Millman Parry's research in the 30's of Eastern European oral poets.
Armsmasher, that's because your friends are ignorant trend-followers who probably only bought any Homer when Fagles' translations came out.
Millman Parry's research in the 30's of Eastern European oral poets
I undertook similar research when I was in Europe, actually.
Wow, two days in grad school and w-lfs-n has already had the life and humor beat out of him.
Tia--The late Emily Vermeule, a great archaeologist, used to say that Homer ought to be a verb and not a noun, because it really referred to the process of composition and not the person.
I was just under the (mistaken) impression that though they were orally composed, they had been originally compiled by one person, and there was a record (an oral one, of course), of his existence and his origination of the composition.
Better than sitting at home researching beat poetry.
I'm not allowed to be pointlessly caustic anymore?
It could very well be that a person named Homer compiled the oral poems into a single written edition, for the first time, like the Brothers Grimm.
But it wasn't actually Homer, but another Greek who was also named Homer.
Well, what if his friends are ignorant trend-followers? You have to give people an out.
Armsmasher, that's because your friends are ignorant trend-followers who probably only bought any Homer when Fagles' translations came out.
Hey... that's a half-truth.
I'll have you know I don't own a copy of the Odyssey.
I'll just forego making a bitchy art comment.
When you read Plato, you see that Homer is often called simply "The Poet." So, I think that that in a weird way Homer loomed too large over the Greek imagination to have been simply one actual person. (That's a totally non-scholarly impression.)
If I compiled Ben's pointlessly caustic comments for publication, I would call the resulting volume Causticles.
BG and Tia: due respect, but Bernard Knox disagrees, carefully, that there was no Homer and he didn't write; he concludes that "There seems to be only one possible explanation ... that the text was regarded as authentic, the exact words of Homer himself. And that can only mean that there was a written copy" -- that possibly dictated by Homer to a scribe. The quote's on p. 22 of Fagles's Iliad, which I own though don't have to hand. This is not incompatible with Parry's conclusions about Homer being heir to certain oral traditions.
slol, I took your name of the Fontana Labs post
Que?
Well, I'm no scholar. But I'd love to see Fagles go up against Greg Nagy. Fisticuffs would ensue, I'm sure.
Thanks, SB. You are a fine upstanding citizen, MW.
Now lets hope your students don't follow Matt's link to the original thread and see your complaint paired with Matt's offer to help.
Yeah, I'm figuring out that I can in fact never mention anything I'm going to do / have done IRL.
In the "couldn't make it up" department, I note that the TLS records the name of one Shakespeare denier as Thomas J. Looney.
I've never liked the Fagles, collectively or individually, especially not Don Henley.
58, 59: Thanks all--I was rereading 37, mourning my pointless LBery to so many parties (come back, Gary, all is forgiven), and I noticed that there was a sense-destroying typo as well. But then I was too depressed to continue.
One of slol's complaints is in the thread I pointed to, but my offer to help isn't (that's in the "Soy" thread). So my guess is that your students can't come to know that you are slol just by following my link. They might come to have a true belief, though, but only if they spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Homer? What kind of a name is that? It doesn't even sound Greeek.
Anyway, all right-thinking folk know that Miguel Cervantes wrote the Iliad.
""All that the people of the Mineshaft know about 'Matt McGrattan' was that he was the first person to allude to* Kripke on the Homer thread. But in fact the first person to allude to Kripke was the someone whose birth name was Matt Weiner, who died shortly thereafter from a case of acute pot-kettlism...Furthermore, his allusion was posted under the mysterious name 'Matt Weinere'.""
Ah yes, I hadn't followed the link :) nor paid attention to the Godel/Schmidt allusion. Force of habit, I always end up using Nixon when explaining Kripke to people.
Anyway, Kripke's full of crap... :-)
Never explain it if you can turn it into an in-joke, that's my motto.
OK, nobody's asking the important question here. If they've found Odysseus' tomb, doesn't COBRA only need to find Attila the Hun's body before they can create their super-general from the combined DNA of all the world's great warriors?
the interesting thing about "Homer" which seems to be being asserted is that one person wrote the Odyssey, and another wrote the Illiad.
Yeah but which one of them lives on Evergreen Terrace?
Very original content. I really like your site. right Game will Roll Round without any questions: http://newslink.org/ , right Pair will Expect Table without any questions right Cards will Loose Boy without any questions , right Girl will Kill Chips without any questions International is feature of Universal Table