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. And yet the
Iliad and the
Odyssey have always enjoyed such strong and universal popularity in the Western European world that Homer is the one poet's name that can be expected to be known by almost anyone.
The ancient Greeks generally described Homer as a blind poet who lived on the island of Chios in the eastern Aegean Sea. Since Demodocus, one of the two poets described in the Odyssey, is blind, this aspect of the traditional portrait of Homer probably came from the poetic description. It is probably fair to say that the idea of Homer that was developed over the centuries by the early Greeks was altogether inspired by the poems themselves. It is interesting to note, however, that the modern theory of the origin of the poems insists on a poet who neither read nor wrote; blindness is the perfect metaphor for this condition.
The theory that posits a preliterate poet in the creation of the Iliad and Odyssey starts with the fact that during the period in which the two poems most likely took shape, the ancient Greeks had no system of writing capable of transcribing or transmitting such long and complex poems.
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