Or so announces The Australian. Historian Andrew Dalby said:
“There is no direct evidence of the poet’s identity and therefore no justification for the customary assumption that the two epics were composed by a man.”
Full article here.
Posted by By: kathryn | 
2006/07/02 | News - Writing - Writers | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]
Dunno about Homer but Ronaldinho could deffo be a gal!
Arf, arf!
Oh come on: Only a man could have invented the electric hammer, a gun that shoots make-up onto a woman’s face and the Flaming Moe.
As I began to explain in /Rediscovering Homer/ (with full references for classical scholars), only a woman could make Agamemnon and Achilles look so stupid. I began to explain this … then I thought I wouldn’t.
Thanks for the mention, Kathryn!
Hiya, Andrew! Nice to *see* you!!!!
Of course, women have known all along that Homer was a woman! ho ho ho! Well, I don’t know that at all, but it sounds like a silly enough thing to say!
Looking forward to reading your book!
I have, occasionally, in the darkest of dark nights, wondered whether I did the right thing in suggesting the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey might have been a woman. And then I read dear old Anthony Snodgrass’s response to my suggestion:
‘Anthony Snodgrass, emeritus professor of classical archaeology at Cambridge University, said The Odyssey could have been written by a woman because it is about “a world at peace in general terms, with domesticity, fidelity … endurance and determination rather than aggression”.
But he added: “The idea of a woman writing The Iliad and not being bored out of her mind by the endless fighting and killings is a bit more far-fetched.”‘
‘Bored out of her mind’? Half the world’s population ‘bored out of her mind’? I did the right thing.
Andrew Dalby seems to be reading this site. If so, could he let me know if he has written anywhere in detail about the editing of Homer by Zenodotus. If not, could he tell me where to find the latest scholarship on this.
I am enjoying his latest book as much as I did his earlier one on the empire of the senses. He seems to have read all underline that possible original materials.
Hi b priestley - Thanks for stopping by! I just sent out an official call for Mr Dalby. I’m sure he’s got much better things to do than keep stopping by this blog - he’s probably off unravelling another historical mystery - but who knows…
I’m very sorry to have been elsewhere! Here’s a quick though dilatory answer to B Priestley (feel free to email me for more): no, I haven’t written about Zenodotus. My favourite Homeric commentator (we should all have one, like a favourite colour and a favourite shape of pasta) is Eustathius of Thessalonica.
So who has written about Zenodotus? I know nothing more than I have just re-confirmed with a glance at Wikipedia on Zenodotus; the wikiarticle has, incidentally, been edited (among others) by “Petrouchka”, a New Zealand classicist who really knows about Homeric scholarship. This article reminds me that there is lots about Zenodotus in the 1968 Pfeiffer book History of Classical Scholarship, which you probably already know, and a fair bit in the 1991 book by Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars. There ought to be some in the introduction to the current edition of the Homeric Scholia by Hartmut Erbse (1969-83), but this could well be out of your reach (it’s certainly out of mine) and, even if reached, somewhat hard going since it will be in Latin throughout (except for the Greek).
Hope that helps. Zenodotus has been waiting for our attention for 2200 years so he won’t mind an extra month.
[…] b priestley would like to know if you have “written anywhere in detail about the editing of Homer by Zenodotus.” If you haven’t he’d like to know if you would tell him “where to find the latest scholarship on this.” […]
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