Homer

Ancient sources already disagreed about Homer. Seven cities competed for the honour of being his birthplace, with Smyrna and Chios the strongest claimants. His date ranged from the generation of the Trojan War to the seventh century BCE. Herodotus placed him no more than four hundred years before his own time, which would make him roughly a contemporary of the eighth century. Most modern scholars place the composition of the poems in the late eighth or early seventh century.

Whether there was a single man called Homer is the heart of the so-called Homeric Question. Even in antiquity some critics, the “Separators,” argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey were by different poets. In the eighteenth century Giambattista Vico went further and suggested that “Homer” was simply a name for the collective singing of the Greeks.

The work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the twentieth century showed that the poems are built out of formulaic phrases, repeated epithets, and typical scenes—evidence of composition in performance. A poet could therefore make a long poem without writing it down in the modern sense. Even if a historical Homer existed, he is better understood as the master of a tradition than as an inventor working from nothing.

This wiki treats Homer as the traditional author while keeping the distinction clear: the poems were sung, recorded, edited, and divided into books over a long period. The English text used here is the Loeb translation by A. T. Murray, not a modern paraphrase.