Homer & the Epic Tradition
Who Was Homer?
The Odyssey is one of the oldest surviving works of Western literature, and tradition attributes it to a poet called Homer. Ancient writers generally believed Homer was a blind bard from Ionia — the western coast of what is now Turkey — who composed both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Modern scholars, however, debate whether a single poet called Homer ever existed, whether the two epics were composed by the same person, and whether the poems we have today were the work of one genius or the result of centuries of collaborative oral tradition. What matters for the exam is understanding the nature of the tradition that produced these poems.
The ancient Greeks themselves held Homer in extraordinary esteem. They called him simply “the Poet,” as though no other poet needed naming. His works were the foundation of Greek education: schoolchildren learnt passages by heart, rhapsodes (professional reciters) performed them at festivals, and philosophers quoted them to settle arguments about ethics and the gods.
The Odyssey was composed and performed in an oral tradition. The performer — a bard or rhapsode — used a stock repertoire of formulae, repeated phrases and set-piece scenes to compose the poem in performance, rather than reading from a written text.
What Makes the Odyssey an Epic?
An epic poem is a long narrative poem that deals with heroes and their deeds on a grand scale. The Odyssey has several defining features that mark it out as epic. It is composed in dactylic hexameter, the traditional metre of Greek epic — a rolling, stately rhythm that feels weightier than ordinary speech. It opens with an invocation of the Muse, asking the goddess of poetry to inspire the telling: the poem begins by asking the Muse to tell of “the man of many ways” — Odysseus. This signals immediately that the story is not merely entertainment but a divinely inspired account of great deeds.
Another epic convention is beginning in medias res — that is, starting the story in the middle of the action rather than at the beginning. When the Odyssey opens, Odysseus has already been wandering for ten years. We learn the earlier stages of his journey through his own narration to the Phaeacians in Books 9 and 10. This technique creates dramatic suspense and allows Homer to concentrate on the most significant episodes.
Three key oral-formulaic techniques appear throughout the Odyssey. First, epithets are fixed labels attached to characters: Odysseus is repeatedly called “resourceful Odysseus,” “godlike Odysseus,” or “the great tactician.” The rosy-fingered Dawn appears at the start of many mornings. These tags are not decorative accidents — they serve a practical function, allowing the performer to fill a particular part of the line while also reinforcing a character’s defining quality.
Second, formulae are repeated phrases used to describe recurring actions — drinking, eating, praying, greeting a guest. When Odysseus arrives at a new palace, Homer uses a set sequence of reception scenes that mirrors the rules of xenia. Third, Homeric similes — also called extended similes — pause the action to compare events to scenes from everyday life. When Odysseus finally kills the leading suitor, Homer compares the fallen man to an acrobat tumbling off a stool. These similes are vivid, surprising and ground the heroic world in the real world of the audience.
The Structure of the Odyssey
The Odyssey is divided into 24 books. The first four books follow Odysseus’s son Telemachus as he searches for news of his father — a section often called the Telemachy. Books 5–8 introduce Odysseus, stranded on the island of Calypso and eventually reaching the Phaeacians. Books 9–12 are Odysseus’s own first-person account of his adventures — a story within the story. Books 13–24 describe his return to Ithaca, his disguise as a beggar, the recognition scenes and the final bloody revenge on the suitors.
This structure is highly crafted. By placing Books 9–12 as a first-person flashback told by Odysseus to the Phaeacians, Homer allows the hero to be his own storyteller — which itself reveals something important about his character. Odysseus is a man of words as much as of deeds, and his ability to tell a compelling story is part of what makes him a great hero.
The Odyssey consists of 24 books. The prescribed books for study are Books 9, 10, 19, 21 and 22. Book 9 contains the Cyclops episode; Book 10 the encounter with Circe; Book 19 the recognition of Odysseus by his nurse Eurycleia; Book 21 the contest of the bow; and Book 22 the slaughter of the suitors.
A common misconception is that oral poetry must be imprecise or low quality. In fact, the scholarship of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the 20th century showed that oral poets in the Balkans could compose thousands of lines of technically accomplished verse in performance. The repetitions, formulae and epithets in Homer are not signs of laziness — they are the tools of a sophisticated oral craft. The question of when the poems were written down is separate from the question of when they were first composed: the standard scholarly view is that the poems reached roughly their current form around the 8th century BC, and were written down during the 6th or 7th century BC.
It is also a misconception to think of Homer’s poems as simple myths invented for entertainment. The Greeks regarded them as a record of a real heroic age, a time when great men interacted directly with the gods. Modern archaeology has confirmed that a wealthy Bronze Age civilisation — the Mycenaean world — did exist, though the poems blend historical memory with legend and imagination in ways we cannot fully separate.
Themes and the Odyssey’s Appeal
The Odyssey is built around a series of powerful, interlocking themes. Nostos — the desire to return home — drives every choice Odysseus makes. The poem asks: what is it that makes a place “home”? Is it a physical location, a wife and son, a kingdom, or an identity? Every obstacle Odysseus faces tests whether his longing for Ithaca is stronger than the temptations placed in his way.
The tension between civilised and barbaric behaviour runs through the poem. Every new land Odysseus visits is measured against Greek standards of civilised life: do they practise xenia? Do they have proper laws and agriculture? The Cyclops Polyphemus fails every test. Circe begins as a monster but comes to embody a kind of civilised hospitality. These contrasts are not just entertaining — they define the civilised world that Odysseus is fighting to return to.