10. Did the Greek Poet Homer Actually Exist?
Homer is the name ascribed to the author of the Iliad and Odyssey, ancient Greece’s national epics about the closing stages of the Siege of Troy and its immediate aftermath, and the centerpieces of Greek literature and culture. They are arguably history’s most influential poems. They shaped not only ancient Greek culture, which viewed the epics as sources of moral and practical instruction, but also exerted an outsize influence on Western culture in general.
Homer was not a contemporary of the Trojan War, believed to have been fought sometime between 1260 – 1180 BC, but lived hundreds of years later, in the eighth century BC. Greek tradition has it that Homer was a wandering blind bard from Chios in Ionia, a region of former Greek settlement on the western coast of modern Turkey. Scholars doubt that the epic poems were actually the work of a single author, as opposed to the outcome of a process spread over generations, and to which numerous poets contributed.
