Homer's epic uses blank six-step lines, but it has a strong sense of rhythm. This poetic style is obviously created for reading or singing, and when singing, it is likely to play the piano to enhance its rhythm effect. Because this kind of narrative poem is sung by artists, it often repeats many common words, even the whole paragraph, without changing a word. Sometimes the repeated use of some adjectives is only for the needs of syllables, which may not necessarily strengthen the meaning of this article. The repetition of many repetitive words, like the melody in a symphony, can give people a deeper sense of beauty. This is probably because some ancient artistic techniques are relatively simple, but experienced storytellers are very skilled in using them, so they can produce such a successful effect. Using metaphor to strengthen the atmosphere and make the characters more vivid is also a prominent artistic technique in Homer's epic. In addition, Homer's epics are also good at describing in a concise way and expressing deep feelings in a few words.
The super-long characteristics of epic poems
Homer's epics "Iliad" and "Odyssey" each have more than 10,000 lines; The Iliad has15,693 lines, and The Odyssey has 12 and10 lines, all of which are divided into 24 volumes. At the beginning, these two epics were just oral documents compiled according to ancient legends and scattered chapters handed down by musicians. Homer, if he exists, is probably the professional musician who finally finalized these two epics. Before the 6th century BC, these two epics had not been finalized. According to Cicero, a famous Roman essayist, in the middle of 6th century BC, under the leadership of Pisto, then the governor of Athens, scholars had compiled Homer's epic. In ancient times, other scholars believed that this happened when his son Chipad Coase was in power. Since the 5th century BC, there have been literary programs reciting Homer's epic on important festivals celebrated every four years in Athens. After the implementation of this system, the content and form of epic should be basically fixed. It's just that the artists who recited epic poems at that time, either according to their own "scripts" or by memory, may sometimes have some changes between the lines. In this case, it is understandable that some manuscripts of the epic at that time were somewhat different in some places. Whether Homer really exists or not, and whether the two epics are the works of the same poet, have been hotly debated by western scholars studying Homer in the past two hundred years. Some people think that the two epics are somewhat different in content description, as if they were not the works of people of the same era, while others think that the similarities in writing styles between the two epics are greater than the differences. Now most western scholars think that these two epics are the works of Homer, and Homer still exists. Of course, Homer is also based on oral chapters; Without the accumulation of long-term legends, Homer could not have created such two great ancient epics.
Version characteristics of history books
The old version of Homer's epic that can be seen today can be traced back to about 10 century. Both epics have preserved many manuscripts, but the contents are the same, and they are based on the revised versions of several scholars in Alexandria from the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century BC. There are still many incomplete fragments in the epic manuscript, some of which can be traced back to BC 1 century, and the content is exactly the same. That is to say, after several scholars in Alexandria revised it in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, this epic has been finalized, and its content has not changed since then. At that time, three most famous scholars finally revised Homer's epic. One is Zenodotus (about 285 BC). It is said that he did a lot of processing on the text of the original poem, and the content was also increased or decreased according to his own judgment. Now these two epics are divided into 24 volumes and compiled by Zenodotus. This shows that he made some big additions and deletions to the structure of the original poem. It turns out that the length of these two epics is probably not so neat. The second famous scholar who revised Homer's epic was aristophanes (about 195 BC). He seriously revised the epic, paid more attention to the old manuscript, and did not make many subjective additions and deletions. The third famous scholar was aristophanes's disciple arista Coase (around 160 BC), who also respected the old manuscripts and thought that all changes should be based on something. These three scholars were the curators of the famous library in Alexandria, the Greek academic center at that time. They have the opportunity to read many books and have good review conditions. It can be seen that in their time, the two epics still had different manuscripts and different words. Modern western scholars have sorted out quotations from Homer's epic from ancient works, and there are more than 480 lines of * * *, all of which are from the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Some of these quotations are exactly the same as the current final version, some are roughly the same, and some are not found in the current version. Generally speaking, about half of them are different. Many ancient Greek writers, such as Hippocrates, Aeschylus, Pindaros, Xenophon, Aristotle, aristophanes and Plato, have quoted Homer's epics, and those quotations are often not exactly the same as today's versions. For example, Aristotle quoted the description of cyclops in the ninth volume of Odyssey, with the same words, but he said it was from the Iliad 10, which was about a wild boar. He said that in the 23rd volume of Odysseus' Odyssey, there are 60 lines in his passage to Lop, Penie, but from the current books, this passage is only 33 lines. These changes are different from the complexity of the content, which shows that there are still many differences between the epic manuscripts prevailing in the 5 th and 4 th centuries BC and the current version.
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