Who Was Homer? A Name Attached to Two Poems and Very Little Else

It amounts to very little. The earliest references treat the poems as already old and their author as already legendary. The various ancient biographies were written centuries later, contradict each other, and read as constructions from details in the poems themselves, which is a standard pattern for figures about whom nothing is known. The tradition of blindness may derive from a blind singer who appears as a character in the Odyssey. Dates offered by ancient writers range across four centuries. Modern scholarship generally places the composition of the Iliad in the eighth or early seventh century BC, on the basis of language, of the material culture described and of when writing became available in Greek, with the Odyssey somewhat later and probably by a different hand, since the two differ in vocabulary, in theology and in outlook in ways that specialists take seriously.

The formal debate begins with Friedrich August Wolf in 1795, who argued that the poems were assembled from shorter oral songs and could not have been composed by one author in a society without writing. That split scholarship into two camps for a century and a half. The Analysts dissected the texts for inconsistencies, repetitions and seams, arguing for multiple authors and later editing. The Unitarians pointed to the architecture of the poems, particularly the Iliad's tight construction around the anger of Achilles across a few weeks of a ten-year war, and argued that such design implies a single controlling intelligence. Both sides were arguing about evidence internal to the text, and the deadlock held until someone examined how oral poetry is actually made.

Milman Parry noticed in the 1920s that the poems' fixed phrases are not stylistic decoration but a system. Each major character carries epithets of different metrical lengths, so that a singer needing to fill a particular part of a line has a ready-made phrase that fits, and the system is both extensive and economical, with remarkably little duplication of function. That is not how a writer works and it is exactly what a performer composing in real time needs. Parry and Albert Lord went to Yugoslavia in the 1930s to test the hypothesis against living practice, and what they found supported it in detail:

• •Illiterate singers performed heroic poems of comparable length from memory and invention combined, never producing an identical text twice
• •They used the same kind of formulaic system, built from phrases fitting the metre of their own tradition
• •They composed in performance rather than reciting a memorised fixed text, which is the crucial distinction
• •Larger units, typical scenes such as arming, feasting or receiving a guest, were similarly ready-made and expandable
• •One singer, Avdo Mededovic, produced a poem of roughly the length of the Odyssey over several days of recording

The oral-formulaic finding reframes the question. The poems are the product of a long tradition rather than of one writer sitting down, which explains the formulas, the repetitions and the inconsistencies that the Analysts catalogued. It does not follow that no individual shaped them, and the current majority view is something in between: a tradition of oral composition over generations, culminating in a monumental version, probably by an exceptional singer, fixed in writing at a moment when the Greek alphabet had just become available, either by dictation or by a poet who had learned to write. Whether the same person produced both poems is separately disputed, with the linguistic and thematic differences suggesting not. The name may belong to that culminating singer, to a guild of performers called the Homeridae who claimed descent from him, or to nothing in particular.

The texts sit at the foundation of the tradition that followed. They were the basis of Greek education, quoted and taught for a thousand years, and the scholarly work of the librarians at Alexandria in establishing a reliable text of them founded the discipline of textual criticism. Virgil wrote the Aeneid in explicit dialogue with both. Every subsequent European epic works against them. The archaeology has its own history, since Heinrich Schliemann excavated at Hisarlik in the 1870s convinced he was finding Troy, damaged the site considerably, and did establish that a substantial fortified settlement stood there and was destroyed more than once, which does not confirm the poem and does mean it is not set in an invented place. The translation history is a tradition in itself, from Chapman and Pope to the twentieth-century versions and to Emily Wilson's Odyssey of 2017, the first into English by a woman, whose choices about how to render the enslaved women in the household provoked an argument that is really about how much earlier translations had softened.

Nothing verifiable is known about the person named as the author, and the ancient biographies appear to be reconstructions from the poems. Wolf's argument in 1795 that the texts were assembled from oral songs split scholarship until Milman Parry showed that the fixed epithets form a metrical system serving composition in performance, confirmed by recording illiterate singers in Yugoslavia who produced poems of comparable length without ever repeating a text exactly. The consensus now is a long oral tradition culminating in a monumental version fixed in writing.