Who created the Odyssey and the Iliad ? A portrait of the poet and the world. Scholar Andrew Dalby delves into the world that first heard the Odyssey and the Iliad, and asks new questions about the poet named Homer. Dalby follows the growth of the legend of Troy from its kernel of historical truth, and retraces the succession of singers who re-created the unforgettable story for generations of audiences. He asks why the two great epics at last crossed the frontier from song to writing, and how this astonishing transformation from the singer's mouth to the goatskin page was achieved. A gifted detective of the classical world, Dalby finds new approaches to the personality of Homer, showing how the earliest evidence has been misread. He makes a powerful case that both poems are the work of a single poet and comes to an ultimate conclusion that will surprise even serious classical scholars: Homer was most likely a woman.
Author
Andrew Dalby (born Liverpool, 1947) is an English linguist, translator and historian who most often writes about food history. Dalby studied at the Bristol Grammar School, where he learned some Latin, French and Greek; then at the University of Cambridge. There he studied Latin and Greek at first, afterwards Romance languages and linguistics. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1970. Dalby then worked for fifteen years at Cambridge University Library, eventually specializing in Southern Asia. He gained familiarity with some other languages because of his work there, where he had to work with foreign serials and afterwards with South and Southeast Asian materials. In 1982 and 1983 he collaborated with Sao Saimong in cataloguing the Scott Collection of manuscripts and documents from Burma (especially the Shan States) and Indochina; He was later to publish a short biography of the colonial civil servant and explorer J. G. Scott, who formed the collection.[1] To help him with this task, he took classes in Cambridge again in Sanskrit, Hindi and Pali and in London in Burmese and Thai.
