CultureEurope
The Iliad and the Odyssey
Oral poetry written down, and European literature begins
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In the 1930s Milman Parry travelled to Yugoslavia and found illiterate singers who could perform epics of tens of thousands of lines using fixed formulas. That resolved the "Homeric question": the poems were not written by one man at a desk but built up by an oral tradition and fixed in writing once the alphabet arrived. Homer is a tradition that acquired a name.
For children
The tales of the war at Troy and of Odysseus's journey home were sung by wandering poets for centuries before anyone wrote them down. They became the shared book of the Greeks — and are still read three thousand years on.
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Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org