An eighth-century date for Homer is, I think, the most widely held. In 1966 M. L. West championed the priority of Hesiod, on whom he had written a commentary, and since then he has continued to publish arguments for putting Homer in the first half of the seventh century BC. In 1976 W. Burkert supported such a dating from the mention of Egyptian Thebes in Iliad Book 9 in an article which proved influential (for instance, on R. G. Osborne, Greece in the Making (1996), 159) but is no longer convincing (my Chapter 19 n. 35, with bibliography attacking it from two different directions). In passing or at length, a seventh-century Homer has been proposed by a few scholars since: they are listed by M. L. West, ‘Iliad and Aethiopis’, CQ 53 (2003), 12 n. 56 (‘as many lines of evidence indicate and many modern scholars agree’). Bibliography and arguments for such a dating are advanced accessibly by H. J. van Wees, ‘Homer and Early Greece’, in Irene J. F. de Jong (ed.), Homer: Critical Assessments, vol. 2 (1999), 1–32.
I certainly do not believe them. My arguments for an eighth-century Homer include the following, (i) Nestor’s cup on Ischia presupposes Nestor’s cup in the Iliad, which existed, therefore, before c. 740 BC. Seventh-century Homerists, naturally, do not accept this natural inference (van Wees, ‘Homer and Early Greece’, 5). (ii) I accept the linguistic analysis of R. Janko, Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns (1982), which convincingly places the Homeric epics before Hesiod. Janko’s suggested dates may be too precise, but the sequence stands up and requires Homer to belong in the eighth century as Hesiod belongs in the late eighth century, c. 710–700 BC. I accept that Amphidamas at Works and Days 654–6 did indeed die in the Lelantine War and that that war was a late eighth-century event. The case was well set out by A. Blakeway, ‘The Date of Archilochus’, in C. Bailey et al. (eds.), Greek Poetry and Life: Essays Presented to Gilbert Murray… (1936), 47–9, and although it has been amplified, contested and despaired of so often, nothing written since persuades me that it is wrong. I accept that Amphidamas did die in the War, as Plut., Mor. 153F eventually implies from earlier sources. Of course seventh-century Homerists see their need to contest the war, the link with Amphidamas and Janko’s datings, but they do not persuade me. Their need will ensure that such arguments continue to appear.
(iii) When orally-composed poems are set in an earlier age, their composers tend not to succeed in excluding altogether anachronisms from, or near to, their own lifetime. For example, Homer does not exclude three (Doric, post-Trojan War) tribes on his Rhodes: Iliad 2.668. It is interesting to consider a rather different example from more recent times. There was elaborate anachronism in the orally composed Cretan ‘epic’ of the capture of the German general Kreipe by Paddy Leigh Fermor and his associates on 27 April 1944. It is memorably discussed by J. A. Notopoulos, ‘The Genesis of an Oral Heroic Poem’, GRBS 3 (1960), 135–44. Admittedly, the plot and date encouraged it, but ‘the oral tradition adjusts itself to deal with the contemporary’. Homer, however, does succeed in excluding hoplite warfare altogether, a major change of the early seventh century BC: J. Latacz, Katnpfparänese, Kampf dar Stellung und Kampfwirklichkeit in der Ilias… (1977) fails in the attempt to countenance a ‘hoplite Homer’. He was accessibly answered by H. van Wees, ‘The Homeric Way of War: The Iliad and the Hoplite Phalanx’, G&R (1994), 1–18 and 131–55, though van Wees also tries to maintain an early seventh-century date for Homer. Homer succeeded in excluding all traces of hoplite warfare because he composed before it existed.
(iv) The Odyssey is the later of the two epics, a fact neatly presented by R. B. Rutherford, ‘From the Iliad to the Odyssey’, BICS 38 (1991), 37–54. Even so, it reflects ‘the exploration and not the colonization of the West’: I cite here the acute summary and discussion by O. Murray, ‘Omero e l’etnografia’, Kokalos, 34–5 (1988–9), 1–17, at 11. As he rightly sees, Odysseus’ contacts with faraway peoples are not ‘those of a “culture-hero” who is anticipating the future Greek expansion’. Verses such as Horn., Od. 9.110–30 do not alter this point, nor does Horn., Od. 7.43–5 on the Phaeacians’ town, which merely projects what Homer imagined from his own home region. L. H. Jeffery, Archaic States of Greece (1976), 50–51, claims wrongly that the ‘extended descriptions of natural scenery in the Odyssey… [in foreign lands] are one of the debts of literature to the colonial movement’. They are a debt to an earlier generation, the ‘travelling heroes’ of my Chapter 8. From the mid-730s onwards Greek settlements proliferated in Sicily and elsewhere: I find it more plausible to place the Odyssey before this rush began. A date for it c. 760–740 BC means that the poet was composing in the age of Pithecussae and Cumae, but not much else, in the faraway west. The ‘pre-settlement’ tone of Odysseus’ travels fits very easily then. It is quite different from the tone of the next travelling ‘culture-hero’, Heracles, in the seventh to sixth centuries BC (my pp. 207–9, with notes), an age of widespread Greek settlement.
(v) I cannot place Homer’s serene acceptance of aristocratic rule after the shock dealt to it by the first tyrannies in the Greek world in the early 650s BC.
(vi) Our earliest datable Greek inscription is still c. 750 BC, but the Greek alphabet existed earlier, as evidence from Gabii to Gordion now implies: my p. 33 and nn. 11–12; p. 71 and n. 83. Those who agree that Homer was aware of writing and/or that writing preserved his epics can date him in the mid- to later eighth century without too much difficulty.
(vii) Archaeologists continue to discuss items in the poems’ material culture as if they can set a ‘terminus’ after which Homer composed. A very thorough survey of this approach and some of its items is given by J. P. Crielaard, ‘Homer, History and Archaeology: Some Remarks on the Date of the Homeric World’, in J. P. Crielaard (ed.), Homeric Questions (1995), 201–88. We disagree on the implications of writing, colonization and ‘cult statues’ and on a date for Homer ‘somewhere in the seventh century BC’ (p. 274). Individual such items, whether the Gorgon on Agamemnon’s shield (Horn., II. 11.36) or Odysseus’ brooch (Horn., Od. 19.226–31), are not firm dating-points. Our archaeological record is so very far from definitive: Gorgons were depicted before 700 BC, but are merely not yet known on a shield before 650 BC. Furthermore, items may have been inserted by later singers into earlier wholes. On other grounds, too, M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (1979, rev. edn.), 149, rightly insists ‘no argument may legitimately be drawn from a single line or passage or usage’. Horn., II. 9.404–5 refers to ‘such things as the stone threshold of Apollo’ contains at rocky Delphi. The ‘threshold’ implies a temple and the context implies riches. C. A. Morgan, Athletes and Oracles (1977), 132, ‘can find no convincing evidence for temple construction in the sanctuary area at Delphi before the mid-seventh century at the earliest’. Even if her controversial view were to be correct, the lines in Iliad Book 9 can be understood as a later addition without damaging the surrounding sense of 9.403 and 406.
(viii) My discussion of Iliad Book 2’s ‘Ein arimois…’ in my Chapters 17 and 19 proposes an individual ‘terminus’ before which Homer composed (the big volcanic eruption on Ischia), not (like archaeological objects) after which a verse existed. This terminus is c. 700 BC.
(ix) The ancients’ dates for Homer, long after his lifetime, are too high. Herodotus (2.53) knows he is arguing against higher dates than the one he gives, what we calculate as c. 850 BC. We might argue here that he has reckoned ‘400’ years from ten forty-year generations, which should be scaled down, amounting only to 330–350 years: he would then place Homer on our calculation c. 790–760 BC, pretty close to my preferred date. He does not, however, imagine a seventh-century Homer, nor (I think) do any others in his mind. If Homer lived in the early seventh century it is surprising that the ancients remembered nothing correctly about his dating or career. H. van Wees, ‘Homer and Early Greece’, 9 and nn. 23–6, correctly observes that Terpander, just such an early seventh-century poet, was convincingly remembered for performing at the Karneia festival in Sparta in 676 BC: one ‘fragment’ fits that, famously well (Plut., Vit. Lyc. 21.4). Van Wees does not observe that no such ‘career knowledge’ was preserved about Homer. It did not survive, because he belonged to an earlier era than Terpander.
(x) I am in a minority, perhaps of one, in dating Archilochus c. 740–680 BC, contrary to F. Jacoby, ‘The Date of Archilochus’, CQ 35 (1941), 97–109, whose assault on views he found in Oxford is not convincing. Nothing so far known by Archilochus shows that he was writing with knowledge of Homer, but I find his ‘tone’ easier to place if the epics already existed.
(xi) First, the Iliad, then the Odyssey were composed, I believe, c. 760–740 BC, probably by one and the same Homer, not two separate poets. This date of composition naturally does not exclude the probability of a few later insertions into the poems we now read. I do not, however, accept two more extreme views of their ‘world’ and their ‘evolution’. Finley, The World of Odysseus, 49, proposed ‘pinning down the world of Odysseus to the tenth and ninth centuries before Christ’. ‘The poet’, he claims, ‘transmitted his inherited background materials with a deceptively cool precision’, partly because they were ‘built so much from formulas’. In fact, Homeric ‘formulas’ do not preserve social values, practices and ‘institutions’, items which Finley wished to locate c. 950–800 BC. ‘Formulas’ describe the sea or the dawn or things like horses, items which exist at any period. Alternatively, other scholars are attracted by a slowly evolving epic, even a sort of ‘people’s Homer’. R. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual (1994) is an accessible representative of this view, with the further belief that the Iliad and Odyssey predominated ‘over other possible versions of themselves and over the epic cycle’ because of ‘their exceptional embodiment of the aspirations of the early polis’ (pp. 153–4). I cannot see this ‘exceptional embodiment’ in our Iliad nor, apart from the problem of its ending, can I see that our Odyssey evolved into its (unified) plot. Neither poem has been seriously shaped by the early to mid-sixth century BC.
The majority view, an Iliad and Odyssey of the later eighth century BC, is upheld well by I. Morris, ‘The Use and Abuse of Homer’, Cl.Ant. 5 (1986), 81–138.