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The Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic poems attributed to a blind poet named Homer, record the adventures of the great heroes of ancient Greece who fought in the Trojan War. They are, to date, the two oldest known pieces

of literature from Europe. They are not the oldest poems in the world— the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh is certainly older—but these works date to the time when the Greek writing system appeared more than 2,500 years ago.

The profound age of these epics led to a number of questions concerning their origins and creation. Do they recount history or fantasy? How old are they? Who wrote them, and how? Who was Homer, and was he really blind?

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Discussion

⚡️ 9mo ago

The poems are based on reality…. How about people who grow up with this stories and culture. Wouldn’t be recreating what readers imagined from the poems?

Kanuni 9mo ago

…learning process was, simply enough, learning a lot of stories.

These peasants spent their entire lives listening to recitations of the great epic tales, stories of heroes and heroines, and, over time, they came to memorize the basic elements of the tales. This is nothing more than learning the story of Peter Pan or the Hunchback of Notre Dame, with greater or lesser amounts of detail based on the memory skills of the peasant. This will lay the groundwork for the stories themselves,

although not in poetic form.

Kanuni 9mo ago

The Iliad is the search for the meaning of life in a world plagued by war.