Academic literature on the topic 'Homère. Homer. Ilias (Homerus)'

The essay offers a comparative examination of Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011), which re-works material from the Iliad, and the German poet Barbara Köhler’s poem cycle Niemands Frau (Nobody’s Wife, 2007), which responds to the Odyssey. I argue that in dissolving the narrative line that characterizes Homer’s epics, both poets perform ‘speculative archaeologies’. Oswald’s treatment brings to the fore traces of lament and pastoral lyric forms that may have predated Homer’s narrative organization, recollecting the function of formal poetry in social rituals of mourning. Through her handling of the similes in particular, Oswald draws out of Homer’s text those moments in it which encapsulate connectivity and collectivity. Köhler’s differential treatment of grammatical gender likewise highlights connectivity, encapsulated in the female figures in the Odyssey and their complex interrelations (also a figure for poetic speech), which contrasts with linear narrative as projected by the male hero’s story.

The first extant sources that mention Homer by name date to the sixth century BCE: from them, we can establish that the Greeks considered him an outstanding poet of great antiquity, but that they knew nothing certain about him. ‘Looking for Homer’ explains that there was no agreement about Homer’s birthplace or life and there were doubts about which poems, exactly, he had composed. As views about poetry changed, so did definitions of ‘Homer’. To this day, some classicists see the Iliad and the Odyssey as the work of one exceptional poet, or perhaps two, while others postulate a drawn-out process of re-composition in performance over generations.

Through close literary analysis of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, this chapter traces the various gradations of weak to strong machine ‘intelligence’ that these ancient poems describe and the mind models that they assume. Beginning with a re-examination of the weak AI evinced in Homer’s descriptions of relatively simple automata, it goes on to analyse Homer’s autonomous vehicles and golden slave girls, considering the more sophisticated models of artificial mind and machine cognition attributed to Homer’s stronger, embodied AI. Throughout, this chapter asks: What kinds of priorities and paradigms do we find in AI stories from Homeric epic and how do these still resonate in contemporary discourse on AI? In particular, what distinctions does Homer draw between artificial and human minds and intelligences? And what is the legacy of Homer’s intelligent machines and the ancient narrative history of AI?