It seems that Homer with his poems is something distant, archaic, hard to read and naive. But it's not. We are all permeated with Homer, the ancient Greek culture from which all of Europe emerged: our language is replete with words and quotations from ancient Greek literature: take at least such expressions as “Homeric laughter”, “battle of the gods”, “Achilles heel”, “apple of discord” and our native: "Trojan horse". It's all in one way or another from Homer. And the influence of the Hellenistic culture, the language of the Hellenes (the Greeks did not know the word "Greece" and did not call themselves that, this ethnonym came to us from the Romans) is out of the question. School, academy, gymnasium, philosophy, physics (metaphysics) and mathematics, technology ... choir, stage, guitar, mediator - you can’t list everything - all these are ancient Greek words. Didn't you know?
...
And it is also claimed that the Greeks were the first to invent money in the form of minted coins ... The alphabet as we know it. The first money was minted from a natural alloy of silver and gold, which they called electr (hello to electronic money from the past). The alphabet with vowels, etc. the transfer of all the sounds of a word when writing is undoubtedly a Greek invention, although many consider the founders of the enterprising Phoenicians (a Simite people who lived on the territory of modern Syria and Israel), who did not have vowels. Interestingly, the Latin alphabet came directly from the Greek, like the Slavic. But the later alphabets of Western European countries are already derivatives of Latin. In this sense, our Cyrillic alphabet is in the same place with the Latin alphabet ... And how much Greek is in science, literature? Iambic, trochee, muse, lyre, poetry, stanza, Pegasus with Parnassus. The very word "poet", "poetry", finally - all of them are now obvious from where. You can't list them all! But the title of my text betrays the pathos (the ancient Greek word) of my "discovery". And therefore, I will hold my horses and move on to Namely, I argue that the first open source (so be it, I will add) with git appeared far in the past: in ancient Greece (more precisely, in archaic ancient Greece) and the most prominent representative of this event is the well-known great Homer.
Well, the introduction is done, now about everything in order. Disclaimer: I will give the original meanings of the above Greek words to the topics at the end of the text (they are unexpected in places) - this is for those who read this text to the end. So let's go!
Homer.
It is customary to date the poems of the great Homer to the end of the 3th beginning of the XNUMXth century BC, although these texts obviously began to emerge immediately after the events described in them, that is, somewhere in the XNUMXth century BC. In other words, they are about XNUMX thousand years old. Homer is directly credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns and a number of other works, such as the poems Margit and Batrachomyomachia (a satirical parody of the Iliad, which literally translates as “The War of Mice and Frogs” (machia - fight, blow, miss - mouse).According to scientists, only the first two works belong to Homer, the rest, like many others, are attributed to him (why I will tell below), according to others, only the Iliad belongs to Homer ... in general , disputes continue, but one thing is certain - Homer definitely was and the events he describes at the walls of Troy happened (the second name of the city is Ilion, hence the “Iliad”)
How do we know this? At the end of the XNUMXth century, Heinrich Schliemann, a German who made a huge fortune in Russia, realized his old childhood dream: he found and unearthed Troy on the territory of modern Turkey, literally turning over all previous ideas about those times and texts on this topic. It was previously believed that the Trojan events, which began with the flight of the beautiful Helen with the Trojan prince Paris (Alexander) to Troy, are all a myth, since even for the ancient Greeks, the events described in the poems were considered ancient. However, not only the walls of Troy were excavated and the oldest gold jewelry of that time was found (they are in the public domain in the Tretyakov Gallery), later clay tablets of the most ancient Hittite state, neighboring Troy, were discovered, in which famous names were found: Agamemnon, Menelaus, Alexander ... So literary characters became historical as these tablets reflected the diplomatic and fiscal realities of the once powerful Hittite state. Interestingly, neither in the Troad itself, nor in Hellas (it's funny, but this word did not exist in those distant times either) there was no writing by that time. This is what gave impetus to the development of our topic, oddly enough.
So Homer. Homer was an aed - that is, a wandering singer of his songs (aed - a singer). Where he was born and how he died is not known for certain. Including because no less than seven cities on both sides of the Aegean Sea fought for the right to be called the homeland of Homer, as well as the place of his death in ancient times: Smyrna, Chios, Pylos, Samos, Athens and others. Homer is actually not a proper name, but a nickname. It means from ancient times something like “hostage”. Presumably, the name given to him at birth was Melesigen, which means born of Melesius, but this is not certain either. In ancient times, Homer was often called this: Poet (Poetes). It was with a capital letter, which was denoted by the corresponding article. And everyone knew what they were talking about. Poetes - means "creator" - is another ancient Greek word in our piggy bank.
It is generally accepted that Homer (Omir in Old Russian) was blind and old, but there is no evidence for this. Homer himself did not describe himself in any way in his songs, nor is he described by conventional contemporaries (the poet Hesiod, for example). In many respects, this idea is based on the description of the Aeds in his Odyssey: old, blind, gray-haired elders in their declining years, as well as on the widespread departure of blind people of that time into wandering singers, since a blind person could hardly work, and then pension not invented.
As already mentioned, the Greeks did not have a written language in those days, and if we assume that most of the Aeds were blind or blind (glasses had not yet been invented), then they would not need it, therefore, the Aed sang his songs exclusively from memory .
It looked like this. The wandering elder alone or with a student (guide) moved from one city to another, where he was warmly received by the locals: more often the king himself (basil) or a wealthy aristocrat in their homes. In the evening, at an ordinary dinner or at a special event - a symposia (symposium - a feast, a booze, a party), the aed began to sing his songs and did this until late at night. He sang to the accompaniment of a four-stringed formingo (the progenitor of the lyre and late cithara), sang about the gods and their lives, about heroes and deeds, about ancient kings and events directly related to listeners, because all of them certainly considered themselves direct descendants of those who were mentioned in these very songs. And there were many such songs. The “Iliad” and “Odyssey” have come down to us in full, but it is known that only about the events in Troy there was a whole epic cycle (the cycle in our opinion, the Greeks did not have the letter “c”, but to us many Greek words cycle, cycle, cynic came in a Latinized form: cycle, cyclops, cynic) from more than 12 poems. You may be surprised, reader, but in the Iliad there is no description of the “Trojan horse”, the poem ends a little earlier than the fall of Ilion. We learn about the horse from the “Odyssey” and other poems of the cycle cycle, in particular from the poem “The Death of Ilion” by Arktin. This is all very interesting, but it doesn’t lead to the topic, so I’m only talking about it in passing.
Yes, we call the Iliad a poem, but it was a song (to this day its chapters continue to be called songs). Aed did not read, but sang lingeringly to the sounds of strings from bull veins, using a honed bone - plectrum as a mediator (another hello from antiquity), and enchanted listeners, knowing the outline of the events described, savored the details.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are very large poems. More than 15 thousand and more than 12 thousand lines, respectively. And so they sang for many evenings. It was very similar to modern TV shows. In the evenings, the listeners again gathered around the aed and with bated breath, and in places with tears and laughter listened to the continuation of the stories sung yesterday. The longer and more interesting the series, the longer people remain attached to it. So the Aeds lived and fed with their listeners while they listened to their long songs.
» Cloud-collector Zeus Kronid, lord over all, burned his thighs,
And then the richest sat down at the feast ... and enjoyed.
The divine singer sang under the forming, - Demodok, revered by all people. "
Homer. "Odyssey"
So, it's time to get straight to the point. We have the craft of the Aeds, the Aeds themselves, very long poem-songs and the absence of writing. How did these poems come down to us from the XNUMXth century BC?
But first, one more important detail. We say "poems" because their text was poetic, poetic (verse is another ancient Greek word meaning "system")
According to the historian of antiquity, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Igor Evgenievich Surikov: poetry is much better remembered and passed down from generation to generation. “Try to memorize prose, especially a large piece, and poetry - so I can immediately reproduce a number of poems that I learned at school,” he told us. And it is true. Each of us remembers at least a few lines of poetry (and even poetry) and few people remember at least a full paragraph taken from prose.
The ancient Greeks did not use rhyme, although they knew it. The basis of poetry was rhythm, in which a certain alternation of long and long syllables formed poetic meters: iabm, trochee, dactyl, amphibrach and others (this is an almost complete list of poetic meters of modern poetry). The Greeks of these sizes had a huge variety. They knew the rhyme but didn't use it. But the rhythmic variety also gave a variety of styles: troche, sponde, sapphic verse, alcaean stanza and, of course, the famous hexameter. My favorite size is the iambic trimeter. (joke) Meter means measure. Another word for our collection.
Hexameter was a meter for hymns (himnos - a prayer to the gods) and epic poems like Homer's. You can talk about it for a long time, I will only say that many, and much later, including Roman poets, wrote in hexameter, for example, Virgil in his Aeneid, an imitation poem of the Odyssey, in which the main character Aeneas flees from the destroyed Troy to his new home, Italy.
“He rivers - and it became bitter for Pelid: a mighty heart
In the feathers of the hero, hairy between the two, thoughts were agitated:
Or, immediately pulling out the sharp sword from the vagina,
Scatter those who meet him and kill the lord Atrid;
Or to humble ferocity, curbing a distressed soul ... "
Homer. "Iliad" (translated by Gnedich)
As I seem to have already said, the Aeds themselves began to sing the events of the Trojan War almost immediately after its completion. So in the "Odyssey" the title character, being away from home, on the tenth year of wandering, hears the song of the Aeda about himself and begins to cry, hiding his tears from everyone under his cloak.
So, it turns out that songs appeared in the 200th century, Homer sang his Iliad in the XNUMXth century. Its canonical text was recorded XNUMX years later, in the XNUMXth century BC in Athens under the tyrant Peisistratus. How did these texts come about and come down to us? And the answer is this: Each subsequent aed modified the source code of previous authors, and often forked other people's songs, and did it as a matter of course, since this was considered the norm. Copyright in those days not only did not exist, very often and much later, with the advent of writing, “copyright in reverse” was in effect: when a little-known author signed his works with a big name, because he not without reason believed that this would ensure the success of his work.
Git was used by students and listeners of the Aeds, who later became singers, as well as Aed contests, which were held periodically and where they could hear each other. So, for example, there was an opinion that once Homer and Hesiod reached the final of the poets and that, according to numerous judges, oddly enough, Hesiod won the first place. (why am I omitting here)
Each performance of his song by the Aed was an act not only performing, but also creative: every time he composed his song, as it were, anew from a whole series of ready-made blocks and phrases - formulas, with a certain amount of improvisation and borrowing, polishing and changing pieces of the “code “on the fly”. At the same time, since the events and persons were well known to the listeners, he did this based on some “core” and, not least, on a special poetic dialect - a programming language, as we would now say. Just imagine how it looks like modern code: introductory variables, condition blocks and loops, events, formulas, and all this in a special dialect that is different from the spoken language! Following the dialect was very strict and after centuries different poetic works were written in their own special dialects (Ionian, Aeolian, Dorian), regardless of where the author was from! Just following the requirements of the "code"!
Thus, from borrowing from each other, a canonical text was born. Obviously, Homer himself borrowed, but unlike those that had sunk into oblivion (summa is one of the rivers of the underground kingdom of Hades, threatening oblivion), he did it brilliantly, compiling one song from many, making it whole, bright, imaginative and unsurpassed in form and in content option. Otherwise, his name also remained unknown and would have been replaced by other authors. It was the genius of his “text”, memorized by generations of singers after him (it was undoubtedly reworked, but to a much lesser extent), that secured his place in history. In this regard, Homer became such a hard-to-reach peak, a standard, figuratively speaking, a monolithic “core” of the entire ecosystem of songs, that, according to scientists, he reached his written canonization in the version closest to the original. And this seems to be true. It's amazing how beautiful his text is! And how it is perceived by the prepared reader. Not without reason, Pushkin and Tolstoy admired Homer, and even Tolstoy, Alexander the Great himself never parted with the scroll of the Iliad for a single day - just a historically recorded act.
I mentioned above the Trojan cycle, which consisted of a series of works reflecting one or another episode of the Trojan War. In part, these were original "forks" of Homer's Iliad, written in hexameter and filling in the episodes that were not reflected in the Iliad. Almost all of them either did not reach us at all, or came only in fragments. Such is the judgment of history - apparently, they were much inferior to Homer and did not become so widespread among the population.
Let me summarize. A certain strict language of songs, the formulas from which they were composed, freedom of distribution and, most importantly, their openness to constant modifications of others - this is what we now call open source - arose at the dawn of our culture. In the field of authorial and at the same time collective creativity. It is a fact. In general, much of what we consider ultra-modern can be found in centuries. And what we consider new may have existed before. In this regard, we recall the words from the Bible, from Ecclesiastes (attributed to King Solomon):
“There is something about which they say: “Look, this is new,” but this was already in the centuries that were before us. There is no memory of the former; and about what will be, there will be no memory of those who will be after ... "
end part 1
School (schola) - entertainment, free time.
Academy - a grove near Athens, the site of the philosophical school of Plato
Gymnasium (gymnos - naked) - gymnasiums were called gyms for training the body. In them, the boys practiced naked. Hence the single-root words: gymnastics, gymnast.
Philosophy (phil - to love, sophia - wisdom) is the queen of sciences.
Physics (physis - nature) - the doctrine of the material world, nature
Metaphysics - literally "outside of nature". Aristotle did not know where to classify the divine and called the work like this: "Not nature."
Mathematics (math - lesson) - lessons
Technique (tehne - craft) in Greece - artists and sculptors, like the manufacturers of clay jars, were technicians, artisans. Hence the "craft of the artist"
Chorus - originally dances. (hence the choreography). Later, since the dances were performed with the singing of many, the choir is a many-voiced singing.
Stage (skena) - a tent for dressing artists. Stood in the center of the amphitheater.
Guitar - from the ancient Greek "cithara", a stringed musical instrument.
Source: habr.com