It’s really very uncertain. On the one hand, there are eminent scholars who think the epics were sung with musical accompaniment and with a definite melody: two of the most prominent voices in favour of this are Stefan Hagel and Georg Danek, and you can read bits of their ideas here: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/sh/https://soundcloud.com/ott-r-tsep/sets/georg-danek-and-stefan-hagel – reconstructed performancehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y&t=433Armand…

It’s not impossible, but direct influence is vanishingly unlikely.Not impossible: yes, Sumerian was long dead, and so were the Sumerian Bilgames poems. But the most prestigious story of Gilgamesh is the Standard Version of the Gilgamesh epic, composed by Sîn-liqe-unnini sometime around the 11th century BCE in Akkadian. That’s the one that survives in dozens…

When Homeric epic became famous, it was in the context of very public performances in a major festival, the Great Panathenaia in Athens. Individual rhapsodes would declaim or perhaps chant parts of the epics, keeping time by beating a staff. They would presumably have had a sizeable audience, though presumably not as colossal as the…

Most of them interpret it the same way you do, as a contradiction of the Iliad. Lucian’s Dialogues of the dead has Antilochos criticising Achilleus for his ‘ignoble and unworthy’ words (Dialogue of Achilleus and Antilochos, opening). Stobaios, Florilegium 4.52.2 lists the lines under the heading ‘praise of life’ But quite often, ancient readers looked…

Yes. Not in Homer, but then again Homer is very coy about anything sexual. The earliest explicit reference to a sexual relationship is in Aeschylus, in the first half of the 400s BCE — possibly in the 480s — in his play the Myrmidons. The play as a whole is lost, but a few fragments…

Summary of answer: Yes.Yes, he does predate the Iliad, and he was an existing mythological character.The name Achilleus is attested in Bronze Age Greek: a dative form a-ki-re-we (~ Ἀχιλ(λ)ηϝεῖ) in PY Fn(1) 79, and nominative a-ki-re-u (~᾿Αχιλ(λ)εύς) in KN Vc(5) 106. That doesn’t mean we have Bronze Age references to Achilles: it just means…

Claim: the Iliad is usually dated to 13th to 12th century BC and written down ~8th c. BC.Response: A speculative historical Trojan War is customarily imagined as taking place in the 13th or 12th century BCE, on the supposition that it happened at all. But the Iliad itself is very definitely a 7th century poem.…