Homer

Who was Homer?

The ancient Greeks had no doubt that Homer was a real person, a blind poet from Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor, and seven cities claimed to be his birthplace. Modern scholars are less certain. The Iliad and the Odyssey grew out of a long tradition of oral poetry, composed and performed by bards who used ready-made phrases and repeated lines to help them sing for hours. Whether one poet, two or many shaped the final versions remains one of the great puzzles of literature, known as the Homeric Question.

The poems

The Iliad covers a few weeks in the final year of the Trojan War, centred on the anger of Achilles and its terrible consequences. The Odyssey follows Odysseus on his ten-year voyage home and his family’s struggle in his absence. Both are composed in dactylic hexameter and are filled with gods, heroes, battles and monsters, and with deeply human moments of love and grief.

Legacy

For the Greeks, Homer was the teacher of Greece. Children learned to read with his poems, and his stories shaped how people thought about the gods, honour and courage. Every later Western epic, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Milton’s Paradise Lost, looks back to Homer.