The Odyssey

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The Odyssey

• Background Information

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Mycenaean Greece

• 1600 BC, Greeks get to know people living around
  the Mediterranean Sea, especially the Phoenicians
  (foy-NEE-shans), the Cretans, and the Egyptians.
• They seem to have started to take jobs as
  soldiers for the Egyptians, who paid them in
  gold.

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• Greeks started to buy things from the Phoenicians
  (or Canaanites) with their gold.
• Greek graves from this time, excavated at Mycenae
  (my-SEEN-ay), have a lot of gold cups, jewelry,
  and beautiful swords in them.

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• Greeks began to copy their ways of doing things.
  They started to have kings instead of village
  headmen.
• These kings had palaces to live in and collected
  taxes which they stored in big storerooms. The
  palaces had big stone walls around them. The
  stones were so big that later Greeks thought the
  walls must have been built by giants, whom they
  called Cyclops.

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Late Bronze Age1275-1250 B.C.
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Homer

• Homer was a legendary early Greek poet
  traditionally credited with writing the major
  Greek epics The Iliad and The Odyssey .
• For the Greeks of the 7th century BC. however,
  these books were their history. Their past had
  been obliterated by the destruction of Mycenaean
  Civilization.

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• Tradition depicts Homer as a blind minstrel
  wandering from place to place reciting poems that
  had come down to him from a very old oral
  tradition.
• It is probable that Homer used earlier writings
  to help him write the Iliad and the Odyssey, or
  he could have dictated his poems to someone else
  because of his blindness, or because he was
  illiterate.

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• Scholars maintain their belief in the reality of
  an actual Homer. So little is known or even
  guessed of his actual life .
• Samuel Butler theorized a young Sicilian woman as
  author of the Odyssey (but not the Iliad).