“If we can remember anything of the past, it is through words and stories: the laments of women, and the tales of poets. Words enable the sharing of grief when there is no other comfort to be found.” (Wilson lviii)
When one is troubled by loss or by failure, turning to familiar favorite stories can be a great comfort, as that quote from Emily Wilson, translator of The Iliad, suggests. I doubt that anyone ever embraced the comforts of a good book as enthusiastically as William Gladstone did in 1855. We’ve met Gladstone before – he’s the British Prime Minister who, over the course of a long and storied political career, found time to promote the interests of both George Smith, the printer’s apprentice who translated the Epic of Gilgamesh, and E.A. Wallis Budge, the ambitious boy from Cornwall who rose to become the British Museum’s premier Egyptologist.
In 1855, however, that was all in the future. Just then, however, Gladstone may have felt his best years were in the past: that summer he was troubled by both loss and failure. He had just resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer – generally the second-most important person in the government in Britain – and he was still struggling to cope with the death of his small daughter, Jessy, five years previously. He had only his faith to fall back on. And his wife and his other children. And his castle in Wales, and its thousands and thousands of books – fine, he had a lot to fall back on in this situation. But he chose to fall back on Homer.
Gladstone kept a consistent, but very terse, diary. On the 7th of July he notes “Looked into my papers on Homer & am strongly tempted to undertake something, avoiding scholarship however on account of inability.” (Yates) The result of Gladstone’s classical self-soothing was Homer and the Homeric Age, three volumes of erudite waffle that took three years to write. In it, Gladstone attempts to prove how Homer can be read as much more than a mere poet.
“If the works of Homer are, to letters and to human learning,” he wrote, “what the early books of Scripture are to the entire Bible and to the spiritual life of man; if in them lie the beginnings of the intellectual life of the world, then we must still recollect that that life, to be rightly understood, should be studied in its beginnings.” (Gladstone 14)
And study it he did. By taking minute scraps of text and analyzing them to death, Gladstone argued that Homer can teach us specific facts about history, the origins of constitutional monarchy, and of monotheistic religion. Gladstone’s very, very, very close reading included making exhaustive lists of how Homer refers to geographical features, animals and, perhaps most famously, words for color. Gladstone seemed to think that the limited number of color words Homer used implied an inability to see or distinguish colors, not just for the poet, but for the ancient Greek world generally. (Funnily enough, he may have stumbled across something legitimate: linguists have recently shown that most languages start with a few basic words for colors, then add more as time goes on.)
When this work was laid before the public, the reception was either baffled or hostile. In his book The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli, historian Richard Aldous sums up some of the very unfriendly reviews. “Fundamentally wrong,” was probably one of the gentlest responses. Others included “hobby-horsical” and “a mere nonsense”. (Aldous 97) Perhaps Gladstone’s most famous predecessor in the office of prime minister would put it best: “Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun,” Winston Churchill once said, “and it served him right.” (Churchill, quoted in Aldous 96)
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.
Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 10: The Iliad, Part Two: The Blind Poets Department. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.
Apologies for going back to the Victorian well to start the episode; I realize that William Gladstone has made almost as many appearances in this show as E.A. Wallis Budge at this point. But given that this show is airing on the day of the UK general election, I figured it was appropriate to include a British Prime Minister’s thoughts on Homer, and of the PMs I’m aware of who’ve laid claim to a deep understanding of Homer, Gladstone is probably the least objectionable.
Anyway, what we’re going to do in this episode is walk through an overview of what, for the last 200 years or so (West 383), scholars have referred to as the Homeric Question. Or more properly the Homeric Questions: there are two main parts to this thing, and each of those have their own additional sub-questions nestled inside like Greeks in a Trojan Horse.
The first part questions the authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey: was there actually a person called Homer who composed these poems, or did they come about in some other way? The second part asks about the historicity of Homer – that is, whether the content of these poems can tell us anything about actual historical events or practices.
Not to spoil it, but the answers to these two parts are respectively “probably not” and “yes, kind of”. But it’s fun to trace some of the history of how people have thought and fretted and argued about this two-part question over the centuries – the millennia, even. All these brilliant people, capable of speaking multiple languages, with fancy academic pedigrees – it’s honestly kind of amusing to see them all get so worked up about a poem. “[I]n Homeric studies,” said the scholar Frederick M. Combellack in 1959, “every man’s hand is raised against his brother, and one never knows from what corner the next dead cat will come.” (Combellack 194)
I don’t know if it’s quite so fraught as Combellack suggests it is, but I do know this: the debates around the Homeric Question are nowhere near as exhausting or as tedious as the debates you can watch Star Wars nerds on the internet having any day of the week. Anyway, brace yourself: we’re about to do a speedrun through some of the longest-running cultural debates in the history of humanity.
The best current estimate we have for when The Iliad and The Odyssey were written down is around 750 BCE. According to the scholar Martin West, we first see references to The Iliad and The Odyssey being recited at festivals in Athens in the fifth century BCE – close to two hundred years after the poems were believed to be written down. (West 2011, p. 389) That’s also when the first written references we have to these poems being written by someone called “Homer” emerge, according to the excellent Homer: A Very Short Introduction by Barbara Graziosi. Graziosi says that “the Greeks considered him an outstanding and ancient poet – but . . . they knew nothing certain about him.” (Graziosi 4)
For example, the Greek historian Herodotus said he thought that Homer lived about four hundred years before his own time, which was around 450 BCE. (Cline 42) The playwright Aeschylus, who is known to have died in 456 BCE, cited Homer as an inspiration for several of his own plays. (Graziosi 5) In fact, in antiquity, many, many more epic poems were attributed to Homer until Aristotle – you know, Aristotle – stuck his oar into the debate. He argued that The Iliad and The Odyssey were most likely Homer’s only works, because they have this unified, tightly plotted structure the other poems didn’t. (Graziosi 5) This doesn’t mean Aristotle was right – he was just speculatin’ on a hypothesis – but people across many cultures considered him an authority on almost anything, so his ideas stuck.
Other ancient sources related legends about Homer’s origins or his characteristics – the idea of Homer as a “blind” poet, or as someone who had been taken hostage at during a conflict at some point in his life – this latter idea may come from the fact that the Greek word for “hostage”, homeros, is so similar to the name of the poet. There were long-running arguments about where Homer hailed from – Ionia! No, Chios! No, Smyrna! According to Graziosi, in antiquity at least seven different regions would claim to be Homer’s birthplace, and over the centuries more and more outlandish ideas about his origin were put forward – He was Egyptian! He was Roman! By 200 CE, an actual Roman, the satirist Lucian, poked fun at all this nonsense by claiming he’d spoken to Homer’s ghost personally and could reveal that the great poet was a Babylonian. (Graziosi 4)
In the Translator’s Note in her edition of The Iliad, Emily Wilson says that “Every statement about the historical person or people who composed The Iliad must be hedged with maybes. Ancient ‘lives’ of Homer are set in the cloudy lands of biographical myth.” From what I can tell, it took quite a long time for that hedge of maybes to grow to any kind of height. The notion of a single blind poet from Ionia (or maybe Chios) was surprisingly persistent over the centuries – heck, it’s persistent now, given that I can’t stop referring to a singular Homer even though I know there probably wasn’t one.
There was, and continues to be, a brisk trade in what you might call Homeric fan art. Sculptors and painters created portraits of Homer; other writers began to riff on his writings, or even include him in their works as a character. For example, in Canto IV of Inferno, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri writes that he bumps into Homer in the first circle of Hell – the cushy circle, the one for the virtuous pagans and unbaptized babies – and is delighted when the great poet pays compliments to his own writing and invites him to join his super poet pals club along with Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. That was in 1315, and thanks to a lapse in western access to texts of Homer’s works during the Middle Ages, Dante had never even read The Iliad or The Odyssey. (Graziosi 3) But he knew of Homer’s reputation, and that was enough.
However, as the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance and then to the early modern period, people were able to read Homer again, and the record begins to fill up with more voices asking Homeric Questions. A 2015 article by Tania Demetriou traces the history of the Homeric Question from the 1500s onwards – my personal favorite source she cites is the Dutch historian Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655), who called Homer “a mere phantom born in the library” (Heinsius quoted in Demetriou 500) – a phantom everyone seems to shape to their own needs.
Another Italian, the philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), had what today we might call a spicy take: in addition to thinking that the works ascribed to Homer were actually written by several people, Vico thought the works ascribed to Homer were overhyped B.S. He claimed that The Iliad and The Odyssey were “too vile, rude, cruel . . . frivolous and light” (Vico quoted in Graziosi 7) to have been composed by one person, let alone one talented person. Contrarian philosophers: they have been with us forever, it seems.
This idea of Homer as an idea continued to percolate over the next few centuries. Scholars gradually separated into two rough camps called the analysts and the unitarians. The analysts looked closely at the texts to see where the seams were, so to speak – picking apart the different styles evident in the stories to identify different potential authors, dialects of Greek, or time periods. An influential early analyst was a German philologist named Friedrich August Wolf. In his 1795 book, “Prolegomena to Homer,” he wrote that: “I find it impossible to accept the belief to which we have become accustomed: that these two works of a single genius burst forth suddenly from the darkness in all their brilliance, just as they are.” (Kirsch)
The unitarians, as Martin West rather uncharitably puts it, “were emotionally committed to the idea of Homer as a singular genius, a master craftsman whose works showed throughout the marks of design.” (West 2011, p. 386) They came up with more and more outlandish ways in which a singular “Homer” – who they thought really must have been blind, as per ancient tradition – could have written these works, such as dictating them to a scribe as he composed them.
William Gladstone, obviously, was a unitarian. But the analysts were slowly winning out: in 1869, a promising young academic named Friedrich Nietzsche delivered his inaugural lecture as a professor on the topic of the Homeric Question. “The poet of The Iliad and The Odyssey,” Nietzsche told his audience, “is not a transmitted historical fact – but rather an aesthetic judgement.” (Nietzsche quoted in Graziosi 9)
According to Martin West, some “oddball scholars” (including himself) actually think that Homer could have been the term for something like an ancient poetic competition (West 2011, p. 389) or even a specific society or guild of poets who invented a mythical forebear called Homer (West 1999). West’s 1999 journal article “The Invention of Homer” goes deep into evidence for this latter explanation. I don’t know. The idea that “Homer” grew out of a kind of occupational title for wandering poets is a little too cute for me – a little too much like the solution to a riddle in J.R.R. Tolkien. But I’m not an expert. I’m just some lady standing in her spare room in England, late at night, talking to her computer. So I have to lean on the experts.
The interpretation that feels right to me is that “Homer” was an idea that made the origins of The Iliad and The Odyssey more tangible, both for the ancient Greeks and for several centuries of readers who had become used to works of literature having named authors. The idea of a long-lost Homer is also just more satisfying, somehow: humans seem to enjoy yearning for lost pasts. The classicist James I. Porter, in a 1999 article entitled “Homer: The Very Idea”, says that “Homer is, and probably always was from his baptismal naming, an idea of something that remains permanently lost to culture—whether this be a Heroic Age, an ideal of unattainable poetic excellence, or a vague sense of some irretrievably lost past.” (Porter 60)
So if there wasn’t a Homer, how did these poems come down to us across the ages in such a standard, unified form? Emily Wilson notes that one thing that is so striking about The Iliad and The Odyssey is their unity and their relative unchangingness over time. She states that among the different texts, “variations were relatively small, compared to the vast variations possible within an entirely oral tradition.” There’s no version of The Iliad where Patroclus isn’t killed, for example. (Wilson xix)
From what I’ve read, it seems like the consensus about how The Iliad and The Odyssey were written is that the plots and characters in them are drawn from a long tradition of recited epic poetry in Greek. A singular or small number of writers set these poems down in writing around 750–600 BCE, and then rhapsodes – professional reciters of poetry – used the texts to memorize the poems and go around performing them at festivals. There may also have been some changes to the text by Egyptian scholars at the Library of Alexandria, who we know were working to create authoritative editions of Homer circa 300 BCE. (Wilson xix) For example, most scholars agree that book 10 of The Iliad – the one in which Odysseus and Diomedes conduct their little late-night raid on the Thracians – was probably dropped into the text long after the rest of it had been composed (or compiled and unified) in writing. (West 385)
It seems like there was something of a mental block around the idea that The Iliad and The Odyssey came out of oral tradition. This block originated in the fact that a lot of scholars simply did not believe that oral poets could commit gigantic poetic epics like The Iliad to memory, let alone compose something of such length and complexity on the fly in a smoky banquet hall where people were busy carousing. But then, in the 1920s, an American scholar named Milman Parry came along. Parry, just starting out as a professor at Harvard, was a bit of a wunderkind – Barbara Graziosi calls him “dashing.” (Graziosi 11) He came up with a novel way to try to answer a question which had been floating around for a few centuries. In the process, he completely set the field of Homeric studies on its ear.
The question Parry wanted to investigate goes a bit like this: What’s the purpose of those repetitive and formulaic phrases you so often come across in Homer – phrases like “rosy-fingered dawn”, “the wine-dark sea”, “swift-footed Achilles”? Are they just descriptive crutches, or are they actually serving some other purpose in the context of an oral performance?
Parry decided to seek out contemporary oral poets to see how they worked their craft. Fortunately, in the late 1920s there was still a very active, very rich culture of epic poetry recitation in what was then Yugoslavia. He and his research assistant Albert Lord spent months traveling around the country (Parry took to packing a gun to ward off bandits – things were very unsettled during the interwar period). They visited homes and coffeehouses to record illiterate poets as they spontaneously composed their epics (Graziosi 11-12).
In his analysis of the recordings, Parry was able to prove that the epic poets had memorized a complex set of repetitive and formulaic (but still very beautiful) phrases that could help fill out different-sized gaps in the poetic meter, and that these formulaic phrases had been drawn from many different time periods and from many different dialects. He also demonstrated how these poets used a predictable structure for certain types of scenes, such as scenes of single combat, and then wove all these formulas and structures together to help them improvise new compositions on the fly. He was then able to show these same compositional strategies at work in The Iliad and The Odyssey.
“This failure to see the difference between written and oral verse,” he wrote in his landmark 1930 paper on the subject, “was the greatest single obstacle to our understanding of Homer.” (Parry 1930, p. 77) This wasn’t just Parry blowing his own horn: subsequent scholars have likened his impact on the field of Homeric studies to Charles Darwin’s impact on biology or Albert Einstein’s on physics. Debates between analysts and unitarians about all kinds of arcane questions – debates that were in some cases centuries old – were suddenly no longer live issues.
Scholars had been doubtful that any illiterate oral poet could memorize so much material: Parry had iron-clad proof that they could and did. His work also offered the best answer yet to why there were so many different dialects of Greek present in Homer: because the repertoire of oral epic poets was drawn from a wide range of previous poets, and you used whatever formula best fit your line, even if it wasn’t in your dialect. (Parry 1930 pp. 20–23)
Now, Parry was himself a unitarian. He felt there was a singular artist at work in The Iliad and The Odyssey, albeit one who was working from within an established tradition. His findings actually angered a lot of the people in his own camp. In the 1959 paper “Milman Parry and Homeric Artistry” – the one I quoted earlier, with the line about the dead cat – Frederick Combellack states that according to many unitarians, Parry’s compelling proof for the idea that Homer was drawing on a deep stockpile of traditional phrases and scenes cast “a dastardly aspersion on Homer’s inventive power, that feature of Homer’s genius to which they attach supreme importance.” (Combellack 194)
That is, to put it flatly, very silly. The Iliad is still a monumental work of human creativity even if Homer didn’t invent every single phrase in it from his own mind – or even if there wasn’t a Homer – in the same way that the sunset is still beautiful even if Apollo is not literally driving a chariot over the horizon to make it happen.
Parry died in 1935, just a few years after his initial breakthrough. The circumstances surrounding his death are weird and tragic. He’d taken a leave of absence from Harvard to help his wife deal with a family issue. They were in a hotel room in Los Angeles when Parry accidentally shot himself with that gun he’d taken to carrying around in Yugoslavia. Naturally, rumors began to swirl that it wasn’t an accident: some people said he’d taken his own life out of frustration, because Harvard had refused to give him a tenured job. Others said his wife was unstable and had shot him because she thought he was having an affair. These rumors have persisted to this day: in a 2020 article about Parry, writer Nicholas Liney says that “Milman’s own life and death would become material for another oral tradition, a series of rumours, stories and happenstances that would place him at the centre of his own Parriad.”
Parry’s work was picked up by his former assistant Albert Lord and, later, his son Adam Parry. The Parry-Lord Oral Formulaic Hypothesis has helped new generations of scholars analyze not just Homer, but other old works that come out of oral tradition, such as Beowulf, the first epic told in English. A 2021 New Yorker article about Parry is called “The Classicist Who Killed Homer”, but really, what Parry seems to have done is to reveal him by demonstrating that the tradition of poetry within which he worked still lasts to this day.
So there’s what I’ve got on the first part of the Homeric Question. What about the second: what about the history behind the events in The Iliad? Does that poem actually shed light on anything that really happened during Bronze Age? Was there even a Troy?
The answer to that last question is yes, definitely. And the person who first proved it belongs to our favorite class of meta-character on this show: an archaeology-obsessed chancer. In this case, our hero was one Heinrich Schleimann (1822-1890). Born in 1822 in northeastern Germany, not too far from the North Sea, Schleimann received some early education in the classics until his father, according to Barbara Graziosi, got caught embezzling funds from the church where he was a minister. (Graziosi 21) The family fell on hard times, and Schleimann was obliged to enter work at age 14, just like our old friend Budge.
According to Schleimann, he became obsessed with The Iliad and the possibility of discovering the site of Troy either as a young boy, when looking at illustrations in a book his father gave him, or else after he started his apprenticeship with a grocer’s shop, where he heard someone recite from The Iliad in Ancient Greek. Not to cast aspersions on the education of German grocery employees in the 1830s, but the story about the book honestly seems more likely.
Schleimann soon tired of the grocer’s shop, and he embarked on a globe-trotting, job-hopping life that could have filled an entire episode by itself. His entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica states that he was a cabin boy on a ship bound for Venezuela until it wrecked off the Dutch coast. Then he found work in an import-export office, first as the errand boy, then as a bookkeeper, eventually rising high enough in the company to open a satellite office in St. Petersburg. In the 1850s he heard about gold in California and headed out west, becoming an American citizen in the process (Graziosi 21) – how we love an entrepreneurial jack-of-all-trades – and then, spotting the chance to make some real cash, he set up shop as a military supply contractor for the British during the Crimean War.
By this point – in 1858, when he was 36, according to a 2022 Smithsonian Magazine article – he was fantastically rich, and he decided to retire from business in order to devote himself to his self-proclaimed childhood ambition: the search for Troy.
For centuries, scholars had debated about where Troy had stood – Giambattista Vico, the Italian philosopher, actually held that it didn’t exist at all – and consensus settled on a region of what’s now Türkiye that was known in antiquity as the Troad. This is in the northwest corner of the country, close to the Aegean Sea and just a short, swift black boat ride from many parts of Greece. Schleimann rocked up to the Troad and began looking for leads.
Schleimann soon fell in with an expatriate Englishman who lived in the area, one Frank Calvert. Calvert was also interested in locating Troy, and he had discovered some interesting artifacts – coins and other small items – in a mound called Hisarlik. In 1870, “with Homer in one hand and a spade in the other,” as the curators Lesley Fitton and Alexandra Villing put it in a 2019 blog post for the British Museum, Schleimann began to dig in the mound Calvert had indicated. He hit paydirt: the mound contained the ruins of a fortified city. In fact, a 2016 Guardian article reports that the mound contained at least 10 settlements, ranging from a small village established around 3500 BCE to a small Greek town settled in 500 BCE. In between, like layers in a cake, were numerous other Troys.
Schleimann, with all the zeal of an amateur, dug straight through this mound, destroying masses of important evidence in the process. He found golden jewelry in one of the bottom layers, and with a businessman’s eye for publicity, he circulated photographs of his handsome young Greek wife wearing the ornaments, gazing pensively out of the frame. (Graziosi 22) He soon published his findings, declaring that he had found the treasures of King Priam (he hadn’t, subsequent research determined the jewelry he found was much too old, dating back to 2300 BCE). (Wilson xvi) He also wrote Frank Calvert out of the story in the process. That’s how the archaeology cookie crumbles, as both Hormuzd Rassam and Giovanni Belzoni could have told Calvert.
The professional world of 19th-century archaeology did not want to accept Schleimann’s discovery at first. Gradually, they came to recognize that yes, he had found Troy – but was it Homer’s Troy? There really is no way to know for certain. Scholars estimate, based on the descriptions of the weapons and the warfare tactics described in The Iliad, that the conflict Homer wrote about probably took place sometime between 1100 and 1200 BCE – a tumultuous period known as the Bronze Age collapse, when most of the civilizations around the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas suffered some degree of upheaval.
Per the Guardian article, the layers of settlement known as Troy VI and Troy VIIa seem to fit the right time periods. Troy VI has the impressive size and amenities of the city described in The Iliad, but evidence suggests it was probably destroyed by an earthquake – and by Schleimann, who punched a 45-foot trench straight through a large building that was probably a palace. The smaller settlement of Troy VIIa, however, contains arrowheads and other evidence suggesting it was destroyed by a battle. We’ll likely never be able to make direct connections between the material evidence in Troy and the events described in The Iliad, but we can certainly say that the poem draws on something that could very well have happened in a real place. “There were many Troys,” Emily Wilson says in her introduction to The Iliad. “There were many Trojan wars.” (Wilson xvi)
And it’s a real place you can go and visit. The mound at Hisarlik is a UNESCO World Heritage site. More than 24 major excavations have taken place there, and ongoing research is led by Turkish archaeology teams, who are constantly making new discoveries about a city that was inhabited for nearly 4000 years – a city that, even after it was lost, inspired thousands of years of thought and debate. It’s a city people have returned to again and again.
And so will we! There’s a lot more to say about Troy and the Trojan War, but we also have several other works coming up that deal with it – in December we’ll cover the Oresteia, a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus about Agamemnon, who led the Greeks at Troy. Sometime next year we’ll cover Virgil’s Aeneid, which gives us the famous story of the Trojan Horse.
That’s it for this episode. Our next episode continues our Homeric journey with what is by far my favourite work on the list so far: The Odyssey. It’s one adventure after the other, except for the bit where Odysseus winds up as a sex slave for eight years. Lash yourself to the mast with me on Thursday, July 18th for Episode 11, “The Odyssey, Part One – Nobody Was His Name.”
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and Spaceman Lonnie’s Electric Hate Machine, formerly known as Twitter. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
References and Works Cited:
Aldous, Richard. The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli. Vintage Digital, 2012.
Cline, Eric. “The Homeric Question – The Cambridge Guide to Homer.” Cambridge Core, Cambridge University Press, www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-guide-to-homer/homeric-question/1193E2FE5741D670B7E1BB34050A069D. Accessed 16 June 2024.
Combellack, Frederick M. “Milman Parry and Homeric Artistry.” Comparative Literature, vol. 11, no. 3, 1959, pp. 193–208, https://doi.org/10.2307/1768354.
Demetriou, Tania. “The Homeric Question in the Sixteenth Century: Early Modern Scholarship and the Text of Homer.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 2, 2015, pp. 496–557. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/682436. Accessed 1 July 2024.
Elledge, Jonn. “Gladstone, Homer and the ‘Wine Dark Sea’: Some Notes on the History of Colour.” Gladstone, Homer and the “Wine Dark Sea”: Some Notes on the History of Colour, The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, 9 Sept. 2023, https://www.jonn.substack.com/p/gladstone-homer-and-the-wine-dark.
Gladstone, William Ewart. “Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age”, Vol. I, Internet Archive, Oxford : University Press, 1 Jan. 1970, http://archive.org/details/studiesonhomerho03glad/page/n477/mode/2up. Accessed 21 June 2024.
Graziosi, Barbara. Homer: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Kirsch, Adam. “The Classicist Who Killed Homer.” The New Yorker, 7 June 2021, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-classicist-who-killed-homer.
Kuiper, Katherine, and Glyn Edmund Daniel. “Heinrich Schliemann.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., www.britannica.com/biography/Heinrich-Schliemann. Accessed 1 July 2024.
Liney, Nicholas. “The Last Words of Milman Parry.” The Oxonian Review, 6 June 2020, https://www.oxonianreview.com/articles/the-last-words-of-milman-parry.
Parry, Milman. “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I. Homer and Homeric Style.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 41, 1930, pp. 73–147, https://doi.org/10.2307/310626. Accessed 16 June 2024.
Solly, Melian. “The Many Myths of the Man Who ’Discovered’-and Nearly Destroyed-Troy.” Smithsonian.Com, Smithsonian Institution, 17 May 2022, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-many-myths-of-the-man-who-discoveredand-nearly-destroyedtroy-180980102/.
Villing, Alexandra, and Lesley Fitton. “The Search for the Lost City of Troy.” The British Museum, 18 June 2019, www.britishmuseum.org/blog/search-lost-city-troy.
West, Martin. “The Invention of Homer.” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 2, 1999, pp. 364–382, http://www.jstor.org/stable/639863. Accessed 21 June 2024.
West, Martin. “The Homeric Question Today.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 155, no. 4, 2011, pp. 383–393, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23208780. Accessed 21 June 2024.
Yates, Louisa. “It’s a Mere Nonsense: Gladstone’s Homeric Age.” Gladstone’s Library, 23 June 2017, www.gladstoneslibrary.org/news/volume/its-a-mere-nonsense-gladstones-homeric-age.
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