Transcript The Odyssey - 9th Grade English

The Odyssey
Background
Information
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.
 Greeks started to buy things from the Phoenicians (or
Canaanites) with their gold.
 Greek graves from this time, excavated at Mycenae (mySEEN-ay), have a lot of gold cups, jewelry, and beautiful
swords in them.
 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.
Late Bronze Age
1275-1250 B.C.
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.
 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.
 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).