Homer
Homer is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, yet no one can say for certain that he ever lived. He was possibly born around the 8th century BC. His life and his authorship remain obscure. Ancient Greek society revered him deeply, and he is counted among the most influential authors in history. Plato put it plainly. Homer, he said, was the one who "has educated Greece". In Dante's Divine Comedy, Virgil names him "Poet sovereign", king of all poets. Alexander Pope, in the preface to his translation of the Iliad, granted that Homer had always been the "greatest of poets". How can a figure this towering be a figure this uncertain? Who composed these two epics, and when, and where, and why does the argument still rage today? What follows is the story of a name that may belong to no single person at all.
The most widespread account in classical antiquity held that Homer was a blind bard from Ionia. That region covered the central part of the western coast of Anatolia, in present-day Turkey, along with the Greek islands of Chios and Samos. Modern scholars treat these accounts as legendary. The biographical details only multiplied with time, fed by Homer's own anonymity.
The two best-known ancient biographies are the Life of Homer attributed to Pseudo-Herodotus and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. The Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda traced Homer's descent to one of the Muses, or to Apollo, Orpheus, Thamyris, Telemachus, or Musaeus. Another tradition, from the time of the Roman emperor Hadrian, named his parents as Epicaste, daughter of Nestor, and Telemachus, the son of Odysseus.
Pindar is credited with placing Homer's origin in both Chios and Smyrna, cities that other fifth-century writers mention as well. The Greek historian Ephorus said Homer studied poetry with the bard Phemius and was born in Cyme. Philochorus argued for Argos, while later writers proposed Pylos and Athens. No single account ever became mainstream. Most traditions, however, place his death on the island of Ios.
Today only the Iliad and the Odyssey carry the name "Homer". In antiquity a far larger body of work was sometimes pinned to him. The list ran long. It included the Homeric Hymns, several epigrams, the Little Iliad, the Nostoi, the Thebaid, the Cypria, the Epigoni, the Margites, the Capture of Oechalia, and the Phocais.
One of these stands out for its tone. The Batrachomyomachia, a comic mini-epic, translates as "The Frog-Mouse War". Its survival under Homer's name is a reminder that the Homeric poems hold instances of comedy and laughter, not only tragic and serious themes.
None of these wider attributions are considered authentic today, and they were not universally accepted even in the ancient world. What they reveal is less about the texts than about the man. They mark how central Homer had become to ancient Greek culture, a figure to whom almost anything great might be assigned.
François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac, wrote in 1664 that the Homeric poems were incoherent, immoral, tasteless, and without style. He declared that Homer never existed, and that incompetent editors had cobbled the poems together from unrelated oral songs. Fifty years later, the English scholar Richard Bentley concluded that Homer did exist but was an obscure prehistoric oral poet. Bentley wrote that Homer composed "a Sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small Earnings and good Cheer at Festivals", adding that "the Ilias he wrote for men, and the Odysseis for the other Sex".
Giambattista Vico, in his philological treatise The New Science of 1744, concluded that Homer was not one man but many. Homer, Vico wrote, "was a purely ideal poet who never existed as a particular man". Friedrich August Wolf pressed the case further in his Prolegomena ad Homerum of 1795. Wolf argued that the raw material was first composed in the tenth century BC as short separate oral songs, assembled into prototype poems only in the sixth century BC.
Wolf led the "Analyst" school, which dominated the nineteenth century. Within it sat two camps. The "lay theory" held that the poems were stitched from many short independent songs. The "nucleus theory" held that Homer composed shorter versions that later poets expanded. A small opposing group, the "Unitarians", judged the later additions superior, the work of a single inspired poet. By around 1830 this whole tangle of disputes had acquired a name, "the Homeric Question".
Starting around 1928, Milman Parry and Albert Lord studied folk bards in the Balkans. From that fieldwork they built the "Oral-Formulaic Theory", which held that the Homeric poems were first composed through improvised oral performances. Those performances leaned on traditional epithets and poetic formulas. The theory won very wide scholarly acceptance.
It also explained features that had long puzzled readers, including the poems' unusually archaic language and their heavy use of stock epithets. Many scholars concluded that the "Homeric Question" had finally been answered. The Analyst school, meanwhile, fell out of favor after World War I and came to be seen as a discredited dead end.
The "Neoanalysts" tried to bridge Analysts and Unitarians by tracing links between the Homeric poems and other epics now lost. They argued that anomalies in the surviving texts point to earlier versions. In one such version of the Iliad, Ajax played a larger role and Patroclus was mistaken for Achilles by the Trojans. In an earlier Odyssey, Telemachus searched for news of his father not from Menelaus in Sparta but from Idomeneus in Crete, met his father there, and disguised himself as the soothsayer Theoclymenus.
In ancient Greek chronology, the sack of Troy was dated to 1184 BC. By the nineteenth century, scholars widely doubted that the Trojan War had ever happened or that Troy had existed at all. Then in 1873 Heinrich Schliemann announced that he had found the ruins of Homer's Troy at Hisarlik, in modern Turkey. Some scholars now connect the destruction of Troy VIIa, around 1220 BC, to the origin of the myth.
The heroes of the poems carry bronze weapons, fitting the Bronze Age in which the stories are set. Yet those same heroes are cremated, an Iron Age practice, rather than buried as Bronze Age dead were. In some passages they bear large shields like those of the Mycenaean period. In others they carry the smaller shields used when the poems were written down in the early Iron Age.
At Iliad 10.260 to 265, Odysseus wears a helmet made of boar's tusks. Such helmets were not worn in Homer's own time. They were common among aristocratic warriors between 1600 and 1150 BC. The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris deepened understanding of the Bronze Age Aegean, a world that in many ways resembles the ancient Near East more than Homer's does.
Some details appear simply invented. At Iliad 22.145 to 156, two springs run near Troy, one steaming hot and one icy cold, the spot where Hector makes his final stand against Achilles. Archaeologists have found no evidence that springs of that description ever existed.
The Homeric epics are written in an artificial literary language, a "Kunstsprache" used only in epic hexameter poetry. It is built fundamentally on Ionic Greek, in keeping with the tradition of a poet from Ionia, while mixing features of multiple dialects and periods. Linguistic analysis suggests the Iliad was composed slightly before the Odyssey, and that Homeric formulae preserve older features than the rest.
The poems run in unrhymed dactylic hexameters, in a metre based on quantity rather than stress. Homer reaches again and again for set phrases. "Crafty Odysseus", "rosy-fingered Dawn", and "owl-eyed Athena" recur as epithets. Whole formulae return intact, such as "thus he spoke". These habits ease the work of the extemporizing bard and mark the poetry as oral.
Walter Arend named the "type scenes" in 1933. He observed that for recurring activities like eating, praying, fighting, and dressing, Homer deployed blocks of set phrases in sequence, then elaborated them. The Analyst school had dismissed such repetitions as un-Homeric. Parry and Lord later found the same conventions in many other cultures. Both poems open by invoking the Muse. In the Iliad the poet asks her to sing of "the anger of Achilles", and in the Odyssey to tell of "the man of many ways".
The orally transmitted poems were put into written form at some point between the eighth and sixth centuries BC. Some scholars believe the poet dictated them to a scribe. Albert Lord noticed that the Balkan bards he studied revised and expanded their songs as they dictated, and some suspect the same happened with Homer.
After being written down, each poem was divided into 24 rhapsodes, today called books and labelled with the letters of the Greek alphabet. Most scholars credit those divisions to the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria in Egypt. Few credit Homer himself. Antiquity widely held that the poems were gathered and organised in Athens in the late sixth century BC by Pisistratus, who died in 528 or 527 BC, in what later scholars called the "Peisistratean recension". The Roman orator Cicero, writing in the first century BC, refers to this account.
From around 150 BC, the texts in surviving papyrus fragments show much less variation, and the wording settled into relative stability. After the Library of Alexandria was established, scholars such as Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and above all Aristarchus of Samothrace worked toward a canonical text. The first printed edition appeared in 1488 in Milan, produced by Demetrios Chalkokondyles, the moment Homer's voice passed fully from breath into print.
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Common questions
Who was Homer the ancient Greek poet?
Homer was an ancient Greek poet widely credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two foundational works of ancient Greek literature. He was possibly born around the 8th century BC, though his life and authorship remain obscure. Ancient Greek society revered him as one of the most influential authors in history.
What did Homer write?
Homer is associated today with the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War. The Odyssey chronicles the ten-year journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, back home after the fall of Troy.
What is the Homeric Question?
The Homeric Question is the ongoing academic debate over Homer's authorship and the origins, composition, and transmission of the poems attributed to him. By around 1830 it had acquired that name, covering whether Homer existed, when and how the poems originated, and how they were finally written down.
When were the Iliad and the Odyssey composed?
Scholars think the poems were composed around the late eighth or early seventh century BC. Barry B. Powell dates them between 800 and 750 BC. Martin Litchfield West argues the Iliad was composed around 660 to 650 BC at the earliest, with the Odyssey up to a generation later.
Was Homer blind and where was he from?
The most widespread ancient account described Homer as a blind bard from Ionia, a region on the western coast of Anatolia in present-day Turkey, along with the islands of Chios and Samos. Modern scholars regard these accounts as legendary. No single account of his origin became mainstream, though most traditions place his death on Ios.
How were the Homeric poems written down and preserved?
The orally transmitted poems were put into written form between the eighth and sixth centuries BC, and each was divided into 24 books labelled with Greek letters. Antiquity held they were organised in Athens by Pisistratus, who died in 528 or 527 BC. The first printed edition was produced in 1488 in Milan by Demetrios Chalkokondyles.