Little can be said about Homer. Ancient Greek tradition, as well as a study of the language and style of the poems, indicates that he probably lived and wrote sometime in the eighth or ninth centuries B.C., but no more definite date can be determined. In ancient times, seven different cities claimed the honor of having been his birthplace. None of these assertions can be validated. However, Homer may have come from the island of Chios, on the western coast of Asia Minor—in earlier times, a family of the same name lived there and claimed him as an ancestor, and devoted themselves to the recitation of his works. Whether he came from Chios or not, it is highly probable that Homer was a native and resident of some part of Eastern Greece or Asia Minor, for the dialect he used in his works is that of the Asian Greeks.
Tradition has it that Homer was blind, but the evidence for this idea is unreliable. This evidence is based on the portrayal in the Odyssey of a blind minstrel who sings a poem about the fall of Troy. But there is no reason to believe that the poet was describing himself in this scene. Throughout the two epics, no consistent autobiographical information exists, and no other literature of the period survives that describes the poet.
The early Greeks insisted that there was a single individual named Homer, to whom they ascribed the Iliad, the Odyssey, and several minor works called the Homeric Hymns. However, around the third century B.C., the so-called Homeric Question was first propounded. Several of the grammarians of the time asserted that the Iliad and the Odyssey were actually composed by two different writers. At various times, later European critics supported this view. Another school of thought, especially popular in the nineteenth century, claims that Homer never lived, and that the two epics are the collective works of groups of anonymous bards to whom the name Homer was later applied. These scholars suggest that the two poems were constantly revised and added to whenever they were recited and did not reach their present form until the 6th century B.C. when, in Athens, they were written down for the first time.
Whatever one thinks of the existence of Homer, certain facts concerning the composition of the Iliad are firmly established. Originally, it was an oral composition meant to be sung or chanted for an audience. Research, particularly on living bards in the former Yugoslavia, has shown that epic length poems are composed and presented through a combination of stock phrases and scenes coupled with extemporaneous composition. The Iliad shows evidence of similar elements. Stock phrases and scenes exist in the epithets for character (“old Gerenian Nestor”), descriptions of natural settings such as dawn, battle preparation scenes, and the battle scenes themselves. Set speeches may also be used. Agamemnon’s speech is echoed in a speech by Odysseus in the Odyssey. The catalogue of ships in Book II is also such a set piece, although it was probably added when the poem was written.
Generally, contemporary scholarship believes that the Iliad and the Odyssey have a consistency of style and outlook indicating that they are the work of one writer. That a man named Homer actually composed the Iliad and the Odyssey as an original and entirely individual composition as Virgil composed the Aeneid seems highly doubtful. Various time references and other irregularities in the poems suggest that parts of the poems were written in entirely different periods of Greek history. However, the obvious structural complexity and thematic unity of the poems as well as their set metrical pattern of dactylic hexameter indicate a single author of great sophistication. As with the great English epic, Beowulf, the Iliad and the Odyssey may have existed as oral tradition for some time and eventually were put into final, written form by a single poetic genius. The poet may have composed the epics himself, or he may have borrowed from the works of earlier bards. Because the people living nearest to the era of the composition of the poems believed them to be the product of one hand, the modern critic accepts this view and attributes the stylistic differences between the two epic poems to their having been composed at different stages in the poet’s life and to the different themes of the works. Rather than take a defensive or apologetic position, the contemporary scholar insists that the burden of proof be on those who deny the existence of Homer. To date, this position has not been successfully challenged.
While little if anything is known of Homer’s life, his works are an everlasting tribute to him. For thousands of years, the Iliad and the Odyssey have been the standards by which poets of all languages have measured themselves. Homer is unsurpassed in his understanding of human nature in all its aspects, for his keen observation of the world in which people live, for his essential sanity and good taste, and for his superb control of all the technical devices of his medium.
