Homer is the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two earliest and greatest poems of the Western tradition, and the foundation of Greek heroic myth. Almost nothing is known about him with certainty. The ancient tradition placed him in the eighth century BCE, in Ionia on the eastern Aegean coast (at Smyrna, at Chios, or at Colophon), and it gave him a mother, a father (in some versions, the river-god Meles), and a blind or near-blind life. The tradition is largely legendary, and the Life of Homer attributed to Herodotus (but probably by a later author) is one of the standard ancient fictions. The poems themselves are anonymous, and the question of whether they were composed by a single poet, by a group of poets, or by a long oral tradition is the Homeric question — the most-debated question in classical scholarship, and one that has not been finally resolved.
The Two Poems
The Iliad tells the story of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in the tenth year of the Trojan War, and of the consequences of the quarrel: the withdrawal of Achilles from the fighting, the death of Patroclus, the return of Achilles to the battle, the killing of Hector, the ransoming of Hector’s body. The poem is set in a few weeks of the war, and the action moves from the Greek camp to the plain of Troy and back. The Odyssey tells the story of the homecoming of Odysseus after the fall of Troy, and of the trials he endures on the way: the Cyclopes, the Lotus-Eaters, the Sirens, Circe, the cattle of the sun, the Phaeacians. The poem is set in the forty days after Odysseus’s departure from the island of Calypso, with the bulk of the poem told as a long first-person narrative of the previous ten years. The two poems are, by subject matter, complementary: the Iliad is the poem of the war, the Odyssey is the poem of the return. They are also, by tone, complementary: the Iliad is the poem of wrath, the Odyssey is the poem of cunning.
The two are not, however, a single continuous story. The Iliad ends with the funeral of Hector; the Odyssey begins twenty years later, with the assembly of the gods on Olympus. The Iliad does not mention the fall of Troy; the Odyssey does. The two poems are, in short, separate works, and they are usually attributed to the same author by the Greek tradition. Whether they were actually composed by the same poet is part of the Homeric question.
The Epic Cycle
The Iliad and the Odyssey were not, in the Greek tradition, the only Homeric poems. The Epic Cycle was a series of eight poems, attributed in part to Homer and in part to other poets of the Homeric school, which told the story of the Trojan War from beginning to end. The cycle included the Cypria (the events before the Iliad), the Aethiopis (the events after the Iliad and the death of Achilles), the Little Iliad (the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy), the Iliou Persis (the sack of Troy), the Nostoi (the homecomings of the Greek heroes), and the Telegony (the death of Odysseus). All eight poems are now lost except for fragments and summaries, and the loss is one of the great losses of Greek literature. The standard modern reconstruction is by Martin L. West, The Epic Cycle (2013).
The relation of the Iliad and Odyssey to the Epic Cycle is debated. The traditional view is that Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey as the two central poems of the cycle, and that the other six poems of the cycle were composed later, by other poets, to fill in the story. The newer view, of scholars like M.L. West, is that the Iliad and Odyssey themselves are part of a longer tradition of epic composition, and that Homer’s distinctive contribution was to make the Iliad and Odyssey the two great poems that have come down to us. Either way, the Iliad and the Odyssey are the two surviving poems of the tradition, and the other six are gone.
The Homeric Question
The Homeric question is the question of how the Iliad and Odyssey were composed. The traditional view, going back to antiquity, is that the two poems were composed by a single poet, Homer, who lived in Ionia in the eighth century BCE and who composed the poems by a kind of inspiration. The alternative views, beginning with Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), are that the poems were composed by a long tradition of oral poets, and that Homer (if he existed) was the last and greatest of them. The discovery of the oral-formulaic theory in the twentieth century, by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, has given the Homeric tradition a plausible material basis. The poems are full of stock formulas (the “rosy-fingered dawn,” the “wine-dark sea”) that work as compositional aids for an oral poet working without writing, and the formulas are repeated often enough that they cannot be accidental.
The standard scholarly view, as of the 2010s, is that the Iliad and Odyssey are the work of one or two great oral poets, working in the eighth or seventh century BCE, who composed the poems as a long performance, using the stock formulas of the tradition, and that the poems were eventually written down (perhaps by the poet himself, perhaps by a later scribe). The poems as we have them are the result of a long process of oral composition, transmission, and standardisation, and the question of who composed them is, in the end, less important than the fact that they were composed at all. The poems are the foundation of Greek myth, and they are the foundation of the Western literary tradition, and the fact of the foundation is what matters.
Homer in the Greek Tradition
Homer was, for the ancient Greeks, the foundation of their literary culture. The Iliad and Odyssey were the first texts taught in the Greek schools; the great Athenian tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) all drew on the Homeric epics; the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria edited Homer and produced the first critical editions of the poems; the Roman poets (Ennius, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid) treated Homer as the master of the epic form. The Greek literary tradition did not just respect Homer; it built itself on Homer, and the Roman tradition built itself on the Greek.
The Greek philosophical tradition, beginning with Plato, had a more complicated view. Plato excluded Homer from the ideal state of the Republic, on the grounds that Homer’s gods were too often vicious, and that the poets were a danger to the moral education of the young. Aristotle, in the Poetics, defended Homer against the Platonic critique, on the grounds that Homer’s poems were the supreme examples of mimesis (imitation), and that the Iliad and Odyssey were the models of the epic form. The debate between Plato and Aristotle about the value of the poets is the foundation of the Western literary criticism, and Homer is at the centre of it.
Homer in the Visual Arts
Homer is one of the most frequently depicted poets in the Western tradition. The earliest known depictions of Homer are the archaic Greek vase paintings of the sixth century BCE, which show a blind poet singing the Iliad to a group of listeners. The most famous ancient portrait of Homer is the Hellenistic bronze, of the second century BCE, of which the best surviving copies are a Roman marble in the British Museum and another in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. The Roman tradition added the legend of Homer’s blindness (a motif borrowed from the Greek depiction of the blind singers Thamyris and Demodocus), and the standard Roman image of Homer is a blind, bearded old man with a scroll.
The Renaissance rediscovered Homer through the Latin translations of the Roman poets, and the standard Renaissance image of Homer is the bearded poet with the Aeneid (Virgil’s Roman successor) under his arm. The Romantic poets — Blake, Keats, Hölderlin — made Homer central to their poetics, and the Romantic image of Homer is the inspired poet, the vates, the singer of the gods. The modern Homeric scholarship is one of the great scholarly enterprises of the Western tradition, and the editions, commentaries, and translations of the Iliad and Odyssey are some of the most-read books in the Western canon.
A Note on Reading Homer
The right way to read Homer is to read him slowly. The poems are not narratives in the modern sense; they are performances, designed to be heard in a long session, with the audience held in suspense by the formulaic repetitions and the slow accumulation of detail. The first reading should be in a translation, and the best translations for the first reading are those of Richmond Lattimore (the Iliad and the Odyssey, both published by the University of Chicago Press) and Robert Fagles (the Iliad for Viking Penguin, the Odyssey for Viking). The first reading should also be in one of the modern verse translations, not in a prose version, because the poetry of the original is partly lost in the prose. After the first reading, the reader who wants the original Greek can move to Lattimore’s facing-page translation (the right-hand page has the original, the left-hand page has the English). The reader who wants the scholarly apparatus should move to the Cambridge or Oxford commentaries. The poems repay any level of attention, and the rewards are not exhausted in any number of readings.
For more, see the Hesiod page, the Achilles profile, the Odysseus profile, the Odyssey story, and the Iliad (Homer’s poem) for the primary text.