Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Subverting Social Order: Investigating Class Critique In Homer’S Odyssey, Riley R. Mayes

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The ‘Homeric Question,’ or the question of who Homer was, has long preoccupied the minds of the Western world (Foley 2). Due to the amorphous nature of oral tradition and the lost histories of ancient Greece, it is likely that this question may never be answered to satisfaction. However, what historical data we do have allows us to synthesize a composite character of who Homer might have been and, more importantly, what he represented. As we will explore, records reveal that the mythology of ancient Greece arose from the lower rungs of the social ladder; storytellers were often members of …