Considering that there was no single person named Homer who wrote The Iliad, but rather a vast number of poets reciting the poem in public over and over, each adding and subtracting to the work as the muse took them, until centuries later it was finally formalized in written words, then yes, “Homer” probably forgot great chunks of the Iliad over the years.
Hearsay. I find it amazing that you both purport to know anything about Homer when not even the scholars who study him can come to a conclusion.
Huh? There’s several generally accepted theories on who Homer was and how the works were composed. You think that when someone brings up Homer experts on Greek literature suddenly start shouting, “I know nutzing!” like Sgt. Schultz? Jesus! Even the crappy college professors I had weren’t so dense as to make such a claim.
It’s actually pretty well agreed upon by the “scholars who study” Homer that the poems were originally oral compositions, accreted over many years until finally written down. In fact, I think you’d be hard pressed to find a major, well-respected classical scholar in the past quarter-century who thinks otherwise. At any rate, this is the majority opinion.
Cheers,
Daphne
Hearsay? No more than any other theory about the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Sure, there are some scholars who still hold to the idea that there really was an elderly blind man who composed these two (vastly dissimilar) poems, just as there are still some scholars who are convinced that the plays of William Shakespeare were not written by William Shakespeare. In both cases, I find their arguments unpersuasive, as does the majority of academia.
Incidentally, I think the word you were looking for was “consensus,” not “conclusion.” As Tuckerfan pointed out, every scholar who studies Homer comes to a conclusion. They just don’t necessarily all come to the same conclusion.