How the Greek Nation Emerged from Greek Literature

A History of Mankind (61)

Welcome! I'm David Roman and this is my History of Mankind newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone kind and decent forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this little button below:

To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.

The Olympic Games became a strong unifying force for Greeks, but perhaps not as much as two sets of epic poems. Before they were written down, these were performed orally, usually by men called rhapsodes, singers/reciters who relied on poetic metrics as aide-memoires, while traveling from city to city or being kept by wealthy patrons[1].

Such recitations were sometimes competitive, taking place in festivals and funeral games help by different poleis eager to prove their cultural importance[2], and their competitive nature probably helped improve the tales.

The Iliad and Odyssey were transcribed for the first time in the 8^th century BC, by a man named Homer, for several ancient sources a blind bard from Ionia in central coastal Anatolia. The two books compiled multiple Indo-European myths and legends about the War of Troy in the 12^th century BC, re-told by story-tellers over the centuries, that became the basis for all Greek and much of Western European culture over the next centuries, and even millennia[3].

The first written reference to Homeric themes comes from an island off the Italian coast, which goes to show how important Homeric literature, as the apex of Greek culture, was to the development of the Greek nation and ethnicity, just as Greeks themselves were physically spreading all over the Mediterranean basin.