Homer Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Homer

Homer is the name that has come down through the centuries as the author of the two earliest surviving poetic works of ancient Greece, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yet nothing is securely known about the authorship of these poems. Such was the reverence with which the ancient Greeks approached these poems that Homer was often called "the holy poet"--not because he had produced sacred verse, but because the two poems established a view of humankind that was highly satisfying to their audience and because these texts, the earliest poetry the Greeks had, were suitable for recitation at the most solemn civic occasions. It is mildly ironic, therefore, that modern scholarship has established a theory of the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey that more or less dismisses the possibility of there having been any one author of both poems--or, for that matter, of either poem. Homer, it seems, was not an individual poet but, more likely than not, a group of singers who composed the works attributed to the name of Homer.

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