Homer stands as the shadowy giant at the very beginning of Western literature. While his epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have defined heroism and adventure for three thousand years, the man himself remains a total mystery. Scholars still debate if he was a single genius, a group of poets, or a legendary figure who never existed at all. Furthermore, his stories provided the roadmap that archaeologists eventually used to find the lost city of Troy. Prepare to set sail on the wine-dark sea with the blind bard of Greece.
Homer
Scholars still debate if he was a real person or a group of people. The “Homeric Question” asks whether one man wrote these massive epics or if they were a compilation of centuries of oral traditions stitched together. Consequently, many historians prefer to view “Homer” as a tradition rather than a specific individual.
Seven different cities claimed to be his birthplace. Because no official records existed, cities like Smyrna, Chios, and Rhodes all argued that the poet was their native son. This fierce competition highlights just how important his legacy was to the ancient Greek identity.
Tradition says he was blind, but this might be a translation error. The name “Homeros” can be interpreted to mean “he who does not see” or “the hostage.” Ancient sculptors therefore depicted him as a blind old man, establishing an image that has lasted for millennia.
He composed his poems entirely in his head without writing them down. The Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral performances meant to be sung, not read. He used a rhythmic structure called dactylic hexameter to help him memorize over 27,000 lines of verse.
The Trojan Horse does not actually appear in the Iliad. Although the wooden horse is the most famous part of the Trojan War, the Iliad ends with the funeral of Hector, before the Greeks build the trap. The story of the horse actually appears in the Odyssey, told as a flashback.
Alexander the Great slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. The young conqueror idolized the hero Achilles and carried the book with him on his military campaigns across Asia. Aristotle, his tutor, had prepared a special annotated version specifically for him.
Heinrich Schliemann used Homer’s books as literal maps to find Troy. While 19th-century scholars believed the city was a myth, Schliemann followed the geographical clues in the poems. Remarkably, he dug where the text suggested and discovered the real ruins of the ancient city.
He allegedly died because he couldn’t solve a riddle about lice. Legend says that young fishermen asked him: “What we caught, we left behind; what we didn’t catch, we brought with us.” The answer was lice, but the frustration of failing to solve the puzzle reportedly hastened the poet’s death.
His dialect was an artificial language that no one actually spoke. The poems use a unique blend of Ionic and Aeolic Greek dialects mixed with archaic words. Therefore, bards created this specialized “poetic tongue” specifically for storytelling, sounding ancient even to their own audience.
Plato called him the “Educator of Greece” but also wanted to ban him. The philosopher acknowledged Homer’s massive influence but felt his depiction of emotional, flawed gods set a bad example for citizens. Thus, Plato suggested censoring the poems in his ideal Republic.
The Odyssey represents essentially the first novel-like sequel in history. It picks up the story of Odysseus trying to get home after the war described in the Iliad. However, the tone shifts dramatically from a tragic war epic to an adventure story filled with monsters and magic.
He always invoked the Muses before starting a story. He believed that he was not the true author, but merely a vessel for the goddesses of art to speak through. The first line of the Iliad acts as a prayer asking the Muse to sing of the rage of Achilles.
The poems offer a surprisingly sympathetic view of the enemy. In the Iliad, the poet portrays the Trojan prince Hector as a noble, loving family man, while the Greek hero Achilles acts like a brute. This balance suggests a humanist perspective that respected the suffering of both sides.
His descriptions of color are famously strange. He describes the sea as “wine-dark” and the sky as “bronze,” but never uses the word “blue.” This has led to wild theories ranging from mass color blindness in ancient Greece to the idea that the color blue simply didn’t have a name yet.
Finally, his works are the oldest surviving literature in Europe. They date back to the 8th century BCE, marking the transition from the Greek Dark Ages to the Classical period. Without these two poems, history would have lost much of the Mycenaean Bronze Age forever.
