Aeneas is the son-in-law of Priam (the hero of the epic Aeneid by Virgil). The children of the couple include the mighty hero, Hector, who is also the eldest, Cassandra, the sorceress, Deiphobus, and Paris (also known as Alexander). Ilios, more popularly known as Troy, was then ruled by Priam, the grand old man and his queen Hecabe. Helen, the wife of Menelaus, the king of Sparta, is abducted by the Trojan prince Paris, who, in the guise of a diplomatic mission visited Sparta to seduce her. Horsemen, probably Achilles and Hector chasing each other (Picture courtesy - Google Image Search) Schliemann establish the existence of the grand city of Troy and a great war before or during the time of Homer. The two epics are poetic interpolations of real historical events, as is the case with the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. In size, both the epics span 24 books each, the Iliad being the bigger of the two with 15,693 lines and the Odyssey with 12,110 lines. Homer’s Greek (and those of the later poets too) carries pitch accent, which is reminiscent of the traisvarya of the Vedic Sanskrit. Homeric language is a mixture of Ionic and Aeolic dialects, but also has large traces of folk variations and non-Greek languages. It is hard to if Homer wrote down his epics and even if he did, the script he might have used is hard to determine. His works are the products of an oral art, composed for and directed to listeners who mainly heard and read less. He had an arduous life and seems to have withstood hardships by finding solace in his works of art. Legend has it that Homer was blind, but was not born one. It is the pinnacle because, it is hard to name Western literary works which match Homer’s, barring a handful. As foundations, they have provided raw material for several future poets and playwrights, starting from Aeschylus to Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and for many contemporary writers. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Homer’s works are both the foundations and the pinnacles of Western literature in general and classical Greek literature in particular. Further, his works are drawn from the community consciousness of the civilization. Homer is thus to be placed in the ranks of Vālmīki and Vyāsa, rather than in that of Kālidāsa, for the influence that Homer had on an entire culture and the period of his lifetime matches the former poets more closely. If the Greeks had got another thousand years, they would have possibly continued to produce great works of art. the classical Greek civilization, had been eradicated by the early years of the Common Era, even before India saw its golden age and the peak in Sanskrit literature during Kālidāsa’s time. It is hard to ascertain if any literary work existed before the Indian epics in Greece or the rest of the world. Nearly two thousand years earlier, its sister civilization in India had produced the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, which are the oldest literary works having epic dimension. The culture, the language, and the creative genius of the Greeks were advanced enough by then to artistically contribute to architecture, sculpture, painting, theater, and literature, the influence of which is even to this day felt in the respective fields. This was the time when a large part of the human civilization in the rest of Europe was yet to develop a meaningful language and the Greek civilization had seen its peak in classical literature. Historians estimate that he lived sometime between the years 1100 and 800 BCE. Homer, the first known epic poet of the West, composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer ( Picture courtesy - Google Image Search)
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