time; several centuries after Herodotus, Aristarchus, the head of the Library of Alexandria (the greatest scholarly institution of the ancient world) and a renowned authority on Homer’s texts, surmised that the poet had lived about 1050 B.C., a century and a half after the Trojan War itself was supposed to have taken place. It was generally believed that Homer wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey; but some ancient scholars, called the Separatists, thought the poems were written by two different people. No fewer than seven cities in ancient times claimed Homer as a son.
That was the received wisdom until, in the late 1700s, a French scholar called Villoisin discovered a tenth-century manuscript of the Iliad moldering away in a library in Venice. This manuscript was unlike others that had circulated over the centuries: along with the Greek text of the epic it included transcriptions of the marginal notes of ancient commentators, from Byzantine sages back to the Librarians of Alexandria themselves, writing in the 200s and 100s B.C. The notes made it clear that those earlier commentators had had access to different and sometimes competing versions of the poem. Seizing upon this revelation, a German scholar who was reviewing Villoisin’s work—none other than Friedrich August Wolf, as it happens, the great advocate of philology, the scientific study of literature—arrived at a revolutionary insight: the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey that we possess could not have been fixed in writing until relatively late in their history. Wolf argued—shockingly, to many of his contemporaries—that Homer himself must have been illiterate. Rather than writing his poems down, as had previously been thought, he had instead composed a series of ballads (known as lays) that were short enough to be memorized and which were transmitted orally for generations, perhaps by guilds of professional reciters. At some point later on, these discrete lays were assembled into the immensely long and complex poems we have today by a sophisticated editor/compiler who, unlike his predecessors, did know how to write.
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