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Originally posted by Barukh:
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What do you think Homer was back in his day? Popular culture.
Well, to begin with, Homer was not 'popular culture' (nor was he even popular.). Homer was a
person. He wrote books in a time and world that was largely illiterate and agricultural. His work was not popular at the time; very few of the Greek aristocracy could access what he was doing. Popular culture needs a medium of mass communication to make it relevant and important. Ancient Greeks had no such thing.
This is what I am talking about. This vast ignorance regarding history and the humanities. You think Homer is 'pop culture' because you went to a modern American university and no one had the intellectual individualism to tell you otherwise.
It would seem to me that people 'back in the day' knew quite well who Homer was. He might have even qualified as 'pop-culture.' "No other texts in the Western imagination occupy as central a position in the self-definition of Western culture as the two epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. They both concern the great defining moment of Greek culture, the Trojan War. Whether or not this war really occurred, or occurred as the Greeks narrate it, is a relatively unanswerable question. We know that such a war did take place around a city that quite likely was Troy, that Troy was destroyed utterly, but beyond that it's all speculation. This war, however, fired the imaginations of the Greeks and became the defining cultural moment in their history. Technically, the war wasn't fought by "Greeks" in the classical sense, it was fought by the Myceneaens; the Greek culture that we call "classical" is actually derived from a different group of Greeks, the Dorians and Ionians. However, the Greeks saw the Trojan War as the first moment in history when the Greeks came together as one people with a common purpose. This unification, whether it was myth or not, gave the later Greeks a sense of national or cultural identity, despite the fact that their governments were small, disunified city-states. Since the Greeks regarded the Trojan War as the defining moment in the establishment of "Greek character," they were obsessed about the events of that great war and told them repeatedly with great variety; as the Greek idea of cultural identity changed, so did their stories about the Trojan War.
If the Greeks regarded the Trojan War as the defining moment of their culture, they did so because of the poetry of Homer. It would not be unfair to regard the Homeric poems as the single most important texts in Greek culture. While the Greeks all gained their collective identity from the Trojan War, that collective identity was concentrated in the values, ethics, and narrative of Homer's epic poems. Just as the Greeks were obsessed about the Trojan War, they were equally obsessed about the Homeric poems, returning to them over and over again, particularly in times of cultural crisis. The Greeks didn't believe that the Homeric poems were sacred in any way, or even flawless history. For most of Greek history, Homer comes under fire for his unflattering portrayal of Greek gods. The Greeks understood that the poems were poetry, and in the Hellenistic period came to the understanding that the poems had been deeply corrupted over the ages. So unlike most ancient cultures which rooted collective identity in religious texts of some sort, the Greeks turned to literature.
As the Trojan War was the product of Mycenean culture, the Homeric poems were the product of the Greek Dark Ages. Whatever happened at Troy, the events were probably so captivating, that the Greeks continued to narrate the stories long after they had abandoned their cities and abandoned writing. The history of the war was preserved from mouth to mouth, from person to person; it may be that the stories of the Trojan War were the dominant cultural artifact of the Greek Dark Ages. These stories probably began as short tales of isolated events and heroes; eventually a profession of story-telling was established—classical scholars call this new professional a "bard." This new professional began combining the stories into larger narratives; as the narratives grew, the technique of story-telling changed as well. Whereas early bards probably memorized their stories with great exactitude, the later bards, telling much longer stories, probably improvised much of their lines following sophisticated rules. Maybe. We have evidence from the classical age in Greece of people memorizing the complete poetry of Homer word for word (over 25,000 lines of poetry); it may be possible that the Homeric poems were memorized with more exactitude than scholars believe. No matter what the case, by the end of the Greek Dark Ages, these bards or story-tellers were probably the cultural center of Greek society; their status improved greatly as Greeks began to slowly urbanize."
More from academia.
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American academics, like the rest of white America, are fascinated and intrigued by black folk. Hiphop, since the early 90's has been little more than a grotesque minstrel show (watch Bamboozled, Ms. Academic) where titillated white people watch black people murder each other with reckless abandon.
Hiphop is bought by intregued young white boys and girls in the suburbs to piss off mom and dad. Hiphop has lost its power, its relevance and importance.
I don't think you could pack more generalizations into one post.
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