Homer's Ancestry In The Odyssey

During Ancient Greek times, there was a famous writer named Homer. Homer’s ancestry can be traced from the Odyssey. It is said how Homer’s ancestry can be traced is through the Homeric question, which is said “that when the Emperor Hadrian asked the Oracle at Delphi about Homer, the Pythia predicated that he was Ithacan …referring to Odyssey” (Homer Biography). “Homer was the son of Epikaste and Telemachus. Born around 8th-9th century B.C. he was said to be a court singer and a story teller [sic]” (Homer - Ancient). Many say Homer was “born on the island of Chios while argue that he existed in Ionia” but with Homer's dialect and the description the poems had, it points towards his influential background from Ionia (Homer - Ancient). Homer is
These poets were “descendants of prisoners of war” as the poets were not sent to war “because their loyalty on the battlefield was suspect, they would not get killed in battles”(Religion). Thus the poets were trusted and required to remember the majority of stock poetry in times before literacy in their area (Religion). Although the origins of the Homer religion are lost in time, “it is believed that the modern Greek religion goes back to the period of Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC…” at which the invaders encounter two different religious background which included the “Neolithic of Greece: the Aegean (Pelasgians ) and the Minoans of Crete” (Greece). During the period of time that the Aryan invasion was occurring, there was a “confused conglomeration, but gradually a certain systematization of the gods…” (Greece). Afterwards this is when the Greek gods became known such as: “Zeus the sky father, Demeter the earth mother…” (Greece). Soon before the Doric invasions, “the Achaeans had fought hard the Trojans of Asia Minor.” (Greece). Within the Iliad, the war provides a picture of ‘“how the Greek religion evolved from a mixture of Achaeans, Dorians, Minoans, Egyptians, and other Asian influences. This was the phase “Homeric” Greek religion… ”’ (Greece). Within the Homeric religion, the Homeric pantheon “was a very small family group with natural forces, but not
The Iliad was written in the mid-8th century B.C. and the epic “recounts some of the significant events of the final weeks of the Trojan War and the Greek siege of the city of Troy (which was also known as Ilion, Ilios or Ilium in ancient times)” (The Iliad). With Homer’s work portraying the Trojan War, it includes, “the wrath of Achilles and the constant interventions of the gods…” (The Iliad). Also, Homer includes themes that later provided subjects for Greek, Roman and Renaissance writers to come with themes such as, “themes of glory, wrath, homecoming and fate…” (The Iliad). Homer’s work, the Iliad, is “clearly dependent on an older oral tradition…” (The Iliad). During Homer’s time period of writing the Iliad, Homer is “probably one of the first generation of authors who were also literate, as the Greek alphabet was introduced in the early 8th Century BCE, and the language used in his epic poems is an archaic version of Ionic Greek… [with] dialect such as Aeolic Greek.” (The Iliad). Homer’s complete epic poem, the Iliad, “consist of twenty-four scrolls, containing 15,693 lines of dactylic hexameter verse.” (The Iliad). The poem has a formal rhythm that is consistent throughout that makes the epic from being monotonous and whole passages are repeated verbatim over and over again throughout the poem. The main theme and importantly the whole poem is