AbleMedia LLC

MEDFORD, MA - February 14, 2001 - Wondering "who was Homer," detective Steve Reece ferreted out the answer through a series of "mistakes." "Reece unravels the mystery behind this ancient whodunit through his thorough rendering of entrenched errors in the text that support his hypothesis that there really was a 'Homer,'" said Wendy E. Owens, CTCWeb Editor-in-Chief. Reece, a professor of Classics at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, is this week's AbleMedia Bronze Chalice winner for Have We Homer's Iliad (Again) published on the Classics Technology Center on the Web (CTCWeb, http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb).

In Have We Homer's Iliad (Again), Reece resolves to answer the age-old question of whether Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are orally dictated texts transcribed millennia ago during a spoken performance or whether the texts are the result of many rewritings and revisions by countless contributors. "We can say very few things about the Homeric epics with utmost confidence, but among these few things is that at some moment in time the fluid words of an orally composed and performed epic song were recorded as written text on a physical object and thereby fixed in space and time," Reece said.

To support his argument, Reece offers evidence that includes the linguistic unity of the Iliad and Odyssey narratives, the absence of multiple versions of these texts, and numerous metrical, textual, and factual errors in the texts themselves. "For example, in the Iliad, the Trojan soldier Melanippos, perhaps the most resilient of all Homeric heroes, is killed three times," Reece said. "He has outdone the Phocian leader Schedios, who is killed but twice, and the Paphlagonian leader Pylaemenes, who is killed in Book five, but eight books later, though tearful and in mourning, is still vigorous enough to attend his son's funeral." Reece said that if the Iliad and Odyssey had been revised by the hands and mouths of generations of contributors, these errors would have been corrected along the way.

Each week AbleOne’s sponsor, AbleMedia, salutes contributors for outstanding submissions to the AbleOne Consortium (http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/consortium/), the CTCWeb Showcase (http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/showcase/), and CTCWeb Netshots™ (http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/netshots.html). Each receives the Bronze Chalice award. AbleMedia awards Silver Chalices for the outstanding submissions of the month. At the end of each year, AbleMedia awards Gold Chalices for the outstanding submissions of the year.

AbleOne serves millions of educators, students, and other users in over 100 countries and the number of users is tripling annually. AbleOne’s CTCWeb is a repository of practical tools, for classicists and other educators, to enhance the use of computer technology in Classics education. At CTCWeb, students, educators and others find the free dissemination and open exchange of practical educational materials, systems, and applications by individuals and organizations involved in the Classics community. AbleMedia sponsors CTCWeb as part its AbleOne Education Network.

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