Homer Didn't Write The Odyssey, This is Who Did | Harvard’s Gregory Nagy
The 3000 Year Old Mystery of the Homeric Epics
Homer didn’t write the Odyssey, he didn’t write the Iliad. In fact, there was no person ever called “Homer”.
This is not a conspiracy theory but the considered conclusion of Harvard’s Gregory Nagy after a lifetime of research. Professor Nagy is the most respected Homerist alive and his defining contribution is to uncover the 3000 year old mystery of who (or what) actually produced the epics.
This interview will examine two of Professor Nagy’s radical claims:
The Homeric epics were not written, carefully edited, and memorized for performance. They were created on the fly while being sung! That is to say the Greeks somehow developed a method to create amazingly intricate, 12-15 thousand line poems in the middle of a performance.
The Homeric Epics were not composed by an individual but cumulatively by countless poets over a millenia. There was never a person called “Homer”.
What we cover:
00:00 0. Introduction
02:09 1. Homer Didn't Write, He Sang
35:44 2: The Process of Crystallization
1:05:49 3. The Panathenaic Festival
1:38:34 4. Is there Room for Genius?