Dr. David Butterfield
speaker
616 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 22 Jul
Dr. David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But crucially, he will have inherited almost all the language, almost all the phraseology, and certainly almost all of the tales that are tied to his name now.
But maybe he had a way of framing and creating this really complex narrative pair of poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in a way that was so successful and so powerful that they made it into writing.
Those were the ones to pause in time, to memorialize in a fixed form in writing.
I believe Homer existed.
I believe he was from the Ionian part of Greece, so probably the eastern side of the Aegean, the west coast of Turkey, on an island or on the mainland there.
He probably lived in the 9th or 8th centuries BC.
He was a single genius, but drawing on a tradition that was so old, we can't even say how old it was.
It was at least 500 years old and could well be over a thousand years old.
Allegedly he was blind, but there's a poet inside the Homeric epics who's a bard and is blind, and that may be the reason for that.
It may be an inference the wrong way round.
Not blind Homer putting in a blind poet to refer to him, but someone assuming Homer was blind because the bard he describes was blind.
Exactly.
Yes, that is really well put.
So two things to say there, Francis.
The first is that there is an extremely intimate connection for the Greeks between vision and knowledge.
The very word I know in Greek is oida, but that literally means I have seen.
You find knowledge empirically through the senses.
If you've experienced something, you know it in a meaningful way.
It's not an intellectually abstract thing.
You experience it and know.
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