The Iliad

Homer is a name that has survived nearly three thousand years, and yet we know almost nothing about the man behind it. He likely lived somewhere in the 8th century BCE, probably in the Greek-speaking world of Ionia, on the western coast of what is now Turkey, and the Iliad and the Odyssey are the two great epics attributed to him. Whether he was truly a single person or a name that accumulated around an oral tradition passed down through generations is a debate that classical scholars call the Homeric Question, and it remains gloriously unresolved. Ancient tradition held that he was blind, which has a kind of poetic justice to it: the man who saw everything, who gave the Western world its first great vision of war and grief and glory, could not see at all. What is certain is the scale of what he left behind. Alexander the Great slept with the Iliad under his pillow. Plato both quoted Homer constantly and proposed banning him from his ideal republic. Virgil, Dante, Joyce, and countless others wrote in direct conversation with him. Nearly three thousand years later, we are still reading him, still arguing about him, still finding new things inside him, which is perhaps exactly the kind of immortality Homer was writing about all along.