Homer the odyssey robert fagles pdf file

That's the essential drama of Homer: this beautiful city trying to defend itself against these increasingly lawless, violent warriors outside. Before that, they were essentially tribes from the steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian-nomadic, male-dominated, violent. After that, the Greeks had arrived in the Mediterranean and started to create a civil society. The only thing that makes sense is revenge and self-assertion.ДЄnd that picture of the Greeks doesn't make sense any later than about 1800 to 1700 B.C. All ideas of rule and law and love count for nothing. The atmosphere in the Greek camp is like gang life in the more difficult parts of modern industrialized cities. Outside Troy is this camp of wild barbarians-the Greeks.

It's a well-set-up, organized city, where women lead very dignified lives. The civilized nation in The Iliad is Troy.

The second thing is that the situation in The Iliad is very clearly not one in which two deeply civilized nations are opposed to each other. There are deep elements in Homer that have nothing to do with Greece or the Aegean. One is that there are large elements of the Homeric stories, particularly The Iliad, that are shared among the Indo-European world as a whole, all the way from north India through Greece to Germanic and Icelandic stories. The reason I say that has two strands to it. My claim is that the poems, especially The Iliad, have their beginnings around 2000 B.C.-about 1,000 or 1,200 years earlier than most people say Homer existed. You believe the tradition began much earlier than that. There are even doubts about when they were composed. They're simply the evolved beauty of long and careful tradition. Nobody knows who made them, no name is attached to them, there's no written design or drawings. The Iliad and The Odyssey are like Viking longships. Today we have an author obsession-we want to know biography all the time. An entire culture coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of telling stories that are important to it. I think it's a mistake to think of Homer as a person. Samuel Butler, the 19th-century satirist, wrote an entire book trying to prove he was actually a she. Seven locations have been given as Homer's birthplace.

I suddenly thought, This is talking to me in a way I would never have guessed before. Odysseus is the great metaphor for all of our lives: struggling with storms, coming across incredibly seductive nymphs, finding himself trapped between impossible choices. Lying in my bunk tied up next to a quay in southwest Ireland, I opened this book and found myself confronted with what felt like the truth-like somebody was telling me what it was like to be alive on Earth, in the figure of Odysseus. Our instruments broke, and it had been a big hike from Cornwall. I had thrown into my luggage a copy of The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, having never really looked at Homer for about 25 years.

We wanted a big adventure, so we decided to sail up the west coast of the British Isles, the exposed Atlantic coast, visiting various remote islands along the way. Speaking from his home in England, Nicolson describes how being caught in a storm at sea inspired his passion for Homer, how the oral bards of the Scottish Hebrides may hold the key to understanding Homer's works, and why smartphones are connecting us to ancient oral traditions in new and surprising ways.ДЄbout ten years ago, I set off sailing with a friend of mine. In Why Homer Matters, historian and award-winning author Adam Nicolson suggests that Homer be thought of not as a person but as a tradition and that the works attributed to him go back a thousand years earlier than generally believed. But almost nothing is known about their author and the date and manner of their creation. The Iliad and The Odyssey are two of the key works of Western civilization.

Homer the odyssey robert fagles pdf file