Professor Edith Hall
speaker
337 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Professor Edith Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It tells us a huge amount about the mindset of Greeks in the 8th, 7th century BCE.
I don't think it's historically specific.
I think trying to find the actual locations and so on is misguided.
But if you want to think yourself into how an ancient Greek peasant farmer felt about the new horizons that colonization had opened up for him as a sailor and a farmer and somebody who needed to make his living from the soil, I think it's an immensely rich document of the cultural imagination.
Well, that's the really complicated thing about both Homeric epics, because the more we know about the Mycenaeans, so these are the late Bronze Age civilizations portrayed in the Iliad and the Odyssey when the Trojan War happened.
The more we know about them, the more we know that these poems actually originated at those times.
There are absolutely technical, metrical, linguistic references
and archaeological details in them that show that these poems were being recited without any writing orally for at least 500 years before they were written down.
So that means that they've got accrued layers of historical knowledge and technical vocabulary and so on in them.
It would be like
having some medieval tales that had circulated orally about Robin Hood or something or King Arthur.
Finally, after five or six hundred years of being retold and retold, getting into the script for a new film.
I'm not sure that there was a person named Homer.
It's a very strange name.
It means hostage in Greek.
It's a very peculiar name.
What I do believe, with the Odyssey even more than the Iliad, is that there was a master literary aesthetic brain involved.
I don't think that the beautiful ring composition and structure of something that takes you two whole days and nights to recite could be achievable without writing.
You would have to be able to whip back and see how you'd framed that motif in the early passages and how it comes back.
So I do think there was a master literary figure involved in finessing it.
Showing 1–20 of 337 · page 1 of 17
Next →