Homer was using roman gods because he was not greek but ILLYRIAN, ILLYARIANS they had strong connection with romans and use to live in today Greece.
If anybody has seen or read words that ILIAD and ODYSSEY was written , those words there are not greek. People who live today in Greece are north egiptians.
If you really READ AND STUDY ILIAD and ODYSSEY you will belive my opinions.
Note, this is a comment on Butler’s translation of the Iliad, which used Roman names for gods.
Personally I’ve always suspected Homer was an Anatolian hermaphrodite with many heads. Wait, maybe that was Vergil. No, Vergil was 7th century, right? Visigoth, I believe.
Well, everybody knows that Homer came from the Myceanean age and participated in the Trojan war, but while he was returning home with Odysseus he was abducted by (quickly looks up AOIDOI.org reference), yes, “a hyper-intelligent race of space-faring esthetes” as annis puts it, who kept him for the next few centuries of earth years and then sent him back to earth in the 8th century AD. Nobody knew what to make of Homer, which is why antiquity has passed down so many confusing accounts of his life.
I didn’t know about the abduction! Thanks for the info!
(seriously though my two favourite bits of nonsence is that Demetra’s name was Illyrian and therefore Albanian and that the real name of Homer was Omar)
While I agree that the quote GGG posted is downright hilarious…it should be noted, that (if my 4th year Greek prof is correct) that the name Homer is a Semiticism that crept into the Greek language very early. One thinks of the WaiYoMer…that is Waw followed by the Hebrew Verb )MR (Amar) and means “to call out” or “to speak”. There aren’t a whole lot of Classical (or Homeric) Greek words that end in the letter M…in Semitic languages they are quite common though. In all likelyhood the word was probably a Aramaic loanword that transliterated into English would read Omar.
But of course…I could be wrong (wouldn’t be the first time)!
I guess I should have explained further my comment on Homer’s name.
While there are other ethymological suggestions for his name, I can’t of course discard the viable one that says it is of Semitic origin, a suggestion I am aware of.
What I found laughable was that, the suggestion I refer to in my frst post goes as follows: His name was Omar, so he wasn’t Greek, so he belonged to one of the people afterwards intergrated into the Turkish people -the theory that Turks are descendants of the original inhabitants of the region having nowadays been more or less completely discarded even in Turkey- and so on and so forth.
Except for the Sumerians and Egyptians, the Greeks so often get picked on for this sort of psychoceramic silliness. I still get email from some guy claiming Troy is really in England. People with ideas about the site of Atlantis are also legion. I sometimes get translation requests emailed to me at Aoidoi about this stuff.
The less we really know about something, the more numerous the crackpot theories about it.
To add to the Homer = Omar thing, the secret is in a Levantine idiom. Members of professions are often called the ‘sons of shipwrights,’ ‘the sons of blacksmiths’, etc. Reciters would be something like ‘bar omar’, i.e., the sons of reciters. Keeping in mind that the final form of Epic that entranced the entire Greek word developed in Ionia (i.e., in territory where Semitic languages, esp. Aramaic were spoken, too) if we produce a Greek calque on the profession we get, ta-dah, Homeridae.
The Homeridae may have come before Homer. No way to prove this at the moment, of course, but it’s not an unreasonably theory, and more likely than some.
Thanks for the Clarification Irene. I wasn’t poking fun at you, and I do think the idea that Homer was anything but Greek is most likely wrong. Personally, my favorite quote from the link above is that we refer to Odysseus as “Norman the Nipp1e”. What that means, I’m not sure, but is beyond laughable. I always like to give characters in books (especially the Bible) shortened names, or pseudonymns…but "Norman the Nipp1e " takes the cake!
The whole issue arises from the Albanian propaganda. In fact, they try to make a connection through the centuries and write their history. Actually, we do not have many historical witnesses for them. They are rarely mentioned in the antiquity (if any!), and suddenly we have written marks of them in the 13th century by Greek chronicles, and the first script written in the Albanian language comes from the 15th or 16th century. History tends often to be used as a political weapon, especially in this region and in this case by the Serbs. The Albanians try to survive as a political identity; to achieve that they think they have to prove their connections with Illyrians and Pelasgeans. Homer mentions both of them. Some of them go further and claim Homer, Alex the Great and lot of Greek gods to be of Illyrian, Phrygian or Pelasgean origin (and partly… are of Albanian origin). About Homer they might be wrong, but the etymology for “Odysseus? and “Ulysses? looks to justify them. In modern Albanian both words are even today used for “to travel’, “traveler? (odhes, ulles). Also “Athena? looks to make sense in Albanian, but none in Greek. At least, that’s what they claim.