homer

n.

1. Baseball. A home run.
2. A homing pigeon.

intr.v. Baseball, ho·mer·ed, ho·mer·ing, ho·mers.
To hit a home run: homered in the fifth inning.


ho·mer² (hō'mər)
n.
A unit of capacity used by the ancient Hebrews, equal to 10 ephahs (about 10 bushels) or 10 baths (about 100 gallons). Also called kor.

[Hebrew ḥōmer, heap, homer.]

Homer (Hŏmēros) (probably eighth century BC), Greek epic poet.

1. Homer was regarded in antiquity as the author of two sovereign works, the Iliad and the Odyssey; other epic poems were sometimes attributed to him, most popularly Margites and Batrachomyomachia, but the best authorities rejected these. The Greeks themselves knew no certain facts about his life; various dates were suggested, ranging from the Trojan War (beginning of the twelfth century BC) to five hundred years later. Herodotus dated him to about 850 BC. Modern scholars generally date the poems to the end of the eighth century, long after the events of the Trojan War and its aftermath that they describe. Many cities claimed to be Homer's birthplace, most plausibly Smyrna and Chios, the home of the Homeridae. The ancient Greeks thought of Homer as a blind minstrel, suffering poverty and hardship in the course of a wandering life before his eventual death and burial on the Aegean island of Ios.

2. The view of some Hellenistic scholars, the ‘separatists’ (chōrizontğs), that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by the same person, has been adopted by some modern scholars, who argue on the basis of the language, the social customs, and the attitude to the gods, that the Odyssey was composed perhaps a generation later than the Iliad. Other modern scholars (the ‘unitarians’), thinking that the differences between the two poems can be accounted for by their very different subjects, believe, as the ancient Greeks themselves believed, that both poems are the work of one man. Whether two poets or one, it is clear that both poems were composed in an Ionian-speaking part of the Greek world, that the Odyssey was intended as a sequel to the Iliad, the events of which it presupposes, and that the characters appearing in both have recognizably the same individuality.

3. Not only has it been suggested that there were two poets, it has been doubted whether there was even one. Since the publication of the German scholar F. A. Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum (‘Introduction to Homer’) in 1795 Homeric scholarship has been dominated by the problem of defining the authorship, the so-called ‘Homeric question’. Wolf and his followers believed that each poem was created out of a compilation of shorter ballad-type poems, ‘lays’, and brought to its present length by natural accretions and collective effort, or, it might be, by the editorial activity of one man, whose individual contribution it would be impossible to assess. In fact, extensive study of comparable epic material such as that surviving in Yugoslavia into the twentieth century seems to have established that the poems are the culmination of a centuries-old tradition of oral poetry, and this may account for the disparate elements and for discrepancies which may become apparent to readers able to turn back the pages of a book but which would not be noticed during a recitation. It also accounts for one of the most distinctive features of Homer, the fact that his language is highly ‘formulaic’, i.e. repetitive; the poet constantly repeats not only epithets and phrases but lines and passages; even scenes are repeated, for example those describing such ‘typical’ activities as preparing a meal or arming for battle.

4. Some of the traditional elements in the poems may go back, as is often alleged, to the Mycenaean period of Greek prehistory (say 1400–1200 BC), but these are not very numerous. Perhaps the poems recall a war that was the last concerted effort of Mycenaean Greece against a foreign enemy; archaeology confirms that Troy was in fact destroyed between c.1250 and 1200 BC. Shortly afterwards the Mycenaean civilization itself collapsed, perhaps in the wake of the Dorian Invasion. The poems vaguely hark back to the glories and the practices of that palace society, but the formative period of Homeric epic and the society it by and large reflects is that of the late Dark Age, the ninth and eighth centuries BC (see HOMERIC AGE).

5. It has been thought likely that the apparent reintroduction of writing into Greece towards the end of the eighth century (see ALPHABET) was the crucial factor in determining the form of the poems, giving an exceptional poet—Homer—the opportunity to meditate and perhaps dictate to a scribe a longer and vastly more complex poem (or poems) than he could otherwise have composed or delivered. The resulting poems were intended for oral delivery (epic was in fact sung or chanted, the poet accompanying himself on the lyre); on the other hand the continuous narrative shows that they were designed to be heard in their entirety, the Iliad in particular being difficult to break up into episodes. Their length, however, precludes their being performed at a sitting: uninterrupted recitation of the Iliad would take roughly twenty hours, and perhaps would only have been possible at one of the great festivals. It is therefore probable that in general the poems were sung in excerpts by rhapsodes.

6. The indications, then, are that the poems were each conceived as a unity and composed by an individual poet (or two poets) working in the Ionian tradition of oral composition; it is generally felt that the cohesion and subtle artistry that each poem shows could not have been achieved by mere editorial activity; Aristotle in the Poetics singles out Homer's grasp of artistic unity for special praise. Moreover, ancient Greek unanimity about the existence of ‘Homer’ should not be discounted. A story of doubtful authenticity tells how the sixth-century Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, finding the Homeric texts in confusion, was responsible for having them put in order and recited at the Panathenaic festival (see also ONOMACRITUS). The Athenian element in a few episodes, and perhaps even traces of the Attic dialect, indicate that at some stage Athens played a part in the transmission of the text. Indeed, an Athenian version of the text would appear to be the source of all our manuscripts of Homer; it may even be the origin of the division of the poems into 24 books each. At the end of the sixth century BC quotations from and references to Homer begin to appear in fair quantity; from these and subsequent quotations, as well as from papyrus fragments, it is clear that texts at that time contained considerable if superficial variations; for some centuries there was probably an oral transmission maintained by the rhapsodes as well as a written transmission. However, it is upon the editorial labours of the scholars at Alexandria from the third century BC onwards, Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and above all Aristarchus, that the modern text is based.

7. The Homeric poems have been read continuously, first in Greece and then in Europe generally, ever since their creation. Homer was regarded with reverence by most Greeks, the source (with Hesiod) of their knowledge of the gods, the formulator of the heroic code of conduct, a touchstone of wise behaviour. Aristotle in his Poetics regarded him as ‘in the serious style the poet of poets’, ‘unequalled in diction and thought’, and he was constantly quoted. Passages were frequently imitated or translated by Latin poets (e.g. Lucretius and Virgil); the Odyssey was translated into Latin saturnians by Livius Andronicus. A much-imitated stylistic feature is the Homeric simile which, once the point of comparison is made, develops into an independent vignette; it may be descriptive or it may have an emotional effect or relieve tension, particularly in the Iliad where it often introduces into an epic of war a glimpse of ordinary, peaceful life.

8. The first printed edition of Homer appeared at Florence in 1488. Famous English verse-translations of the Iliad and Odyssey were written by George Chapman (1559–1634) (inspiring Keats's sonnet, ‘On first looking into Chapman's Homer’), and Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Pope's Odyssey contains a line that soon became famous, ‘Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest’ (15. 74). The late-Victorian prose translations, of the Iliad by Lang, Leaf, and Myers (1883), of the Odyssey by Butcher and Lang (1879), written in a deliberately archaic and dignified English, keep closely to the original. The translations by E. V. Rieu, racy and colloquial and often rather free, gained an enormous readership—his Odyssey (1946) was the first volume published in the Penguin Classics series. A new edition of Rieu's translation appeared in 1991.

For medieval legend connected with the Iliad see TROJAN WAR. See also HEROES.

Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has 3 meanings:

Meaning #1: a base hit on which the batter scores a run
  Synonym: home run

Meaning #2: an ancient Hebrew unit of capacity equal to 10 baths or 10 ephahs
  Synonym: kor

Meaning #3: pigeon trained to return home
  Synonym: homing pigeon

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The verb homer has one meaning:

Meaning #1: hit a home run

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