Ask who wrote the Iliad or the Odyssey, and anyone with a literary mind (or some good pub trivia experience) will no doubt tell you that they were the works of Homer. 

Homer, they might even be able to tell you, was an Ancient Greek poet, perhaps of Ionian heritage, who flourished sometime around the 8th century BC as the popularity of his two epic poetic works grew, and they were at long last put down in writing for the first time. They might even tell you that Homer was probably blind—a bizarre yet often-repeated detail of his life that many early descriptions and accounts of him claim to be true. Beyond that, though, they might not be able to tell you much. 

And they wouldn’t be alone. 

CLUES SURROUNDING HOMER’S ALLEGED EXISTENCE

In fact, so little is known of Homer that even the scant few details of his life that are popularly circulated—his birthdate, his birthplace, his blindness—are still open to considerable debate. As a result, people have long pondered and theorized over the true details of Homer’s life, basing their ideas and suppositions on the few clues his writing, and his ancient biographers and historians, have to offer. 

The fact that the surviving texts of the Iliad and Odyssey themselves are predominantly written in Ionic dialect, for instance, has led to the perfectly reasonable suggestion that Homer himself must have come from Ionia—a central-western region of Asia Minor (that now stands on the coast of modern-day Turkey). There are even tales in the ancient world of a band of talented poets and writers dwelling on the island of Chios, not far from the coast of Ionia, who called themselves the Homeridae, or “children of Homer.” The name Homer itself, meanwhile, could be connected to homeros, a Greek word meaning “hostage,” one theory claims, and as a result some historians have suggested he may have been a captive. (Puzzlingly, though, the same word could also mean “blind,” and so it is perhaps it was from there that tales of his supposed blindness emerged.) 

But if all that sounds like we’re slowly piecing together a life story here, it’s worth noting that not one of these details is in any way certain. And in fact, with so many dubious, differing, and often inconsistent details of Homer’s life in the historical record, some historians have not only questioned the veracity of details like these, but whether or not “Homer” himself even existed at all. 

Details from the surviving texts of the Iliad and Odyssey provide hints that they must have been in circulation verbally long before anyone had the foresight to write them down, around 2,500 years ago or thereabouts. And given that they were therefore being passed on from person to person, told and retold over decades (if not centuries) before finding their way into writing, we can presume that the stories gradually became embellished over time, as performer after performer made the tales their own and added new characters, scenarios, and details along the way. Perhaps what we now think of as a pair of epic sagas, therefore, might once have been far simpler tales that simply grew and became altered and expanded over time. And if that were the case with the poems themselves, there’s no reason to think that the same thing couldn’t happen to their supposed author. 

THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSEY AND THE MYSTERIOUS AUTHOR

Rather than have a single creator to whom these works should be attributed, ultimately, perhaps the Iliad and the Odyssey essentially emerged piecemeal—contributed to and enlarged by a string of performers over a great many years. And as the tales became even more widely circulated, in the absence of a single attributable author, perhaps fictional tales too began to emerge of who created them, where he came from, and who he was in life. Tellingly, many ancient accounts of Homer’s life present him as a semi-mythological figure, descended from or related to various figures from the ancient world—while one account of how he supposedly became blind claims he lost his sight glancing at the glare reflecting from the sword of Achilles. 

As shadowy a figure as Homer is in the historical record, however, in truth the notion that he did not exist at all is just as murky. And although many scholars believe this to be true, still, in the absence of any watertight details, we can’t say for sure whether or not it is correct. As a result, Homer’s life remains just as storied and as mysterious as many of the greatest works of ancient literature.

More About The Odyssey: