Hail Homer!

I'm currently re-reading Homer's Iliad – I sometimes feel that life is too short to read any book twice, but there are exceptions, and Homer is one of them. It's been delightful to delve into his madness and somewhat tongue-in-cheek narrative style, but it's also the translator's sense of humour that comes through too. I can't remember whose version I read thirty years ago, but this one is a revised and updated version of E V Rieu's efforts from 1950 and there is very definitely an ironic influence on the prose peeping through here.

However, I cannot help wondering about the accuracy of the texts. The poem is said to have been written circa 700 BC, but academics have speculated that Homer himself could not write and therefore that he composed the epic 15,000 line poem sometime earlier (circa 950 BC) and passed it down through oral tradition. It is already assumed that Homer owes a great deal to a much older oral tradition of story-telling (the depicted events are supposed to have taken place circa 1200 BC, although it is unlikely they ever really happened), and if this is so, then how much corruption, embellishment and editing of Homer's original words could have taken place before we see the poem that has survived for us today? We all know how Chinese whispers work, when a message saying: 'Send reinforcements, we're going to advance' is given to the beginning of a line of soldiers, only to emerge as: 'Send three-and-fourpence, we're going to a dance' at the very end. Could this have happened to the Iliad as it was passed down through oral tradition over hundreds of years? Most likely.

One wonders then, whether we will ever be victim to such a warping of our own words? On the face of it, you would think perhaps not – everything we say or do these days is recorded electronically for all time, and this would suggest that there is no danger of any oral distortion of that. Or is there? Because it has become so easy to review every action that we take, or every opinion that we expound, do we run the risk of manipulating our own stories before they get irrevocably recorded for posterity? Quite possibly.

But for the meantime, I'm plunging back into the beautiful descriptions and similes of Homer: 'God-like Achilles'; 'the goddess white-armed Hera'; the goddess grey-eyed Athene' etc. etc. All jolly good stuff.