The Odyssey

We do not know who Homer was. That has to be said plainly at the start, because a great deal of confident writing about him is guesswork wearing a straight face.

The ancient Greeks believed in a single poet named Homer who composed both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the tradition that grew up around him described a blind travelling singer, probably from somewhere on the coast of Asia Minor, probably from the island of Chios or the city of Smyrna. Seven different cities claimed to be his birthplace, which is usually a sign that none of them had a real claim. Estimates of when he lived cluster somewhere in the eighth or seventh century BCE, four or five hundred years after the events the poems describe.

What scholars have been arguing about ever since is whether "Homer" is a person at all. In the 1930s a young American researcher named Milman Parry went to Yugoslavia and recorded illiterate village singers performing enormous heroic songs from memory. He found they did it using a stock of repeated phrases, ready-made building blocks that fit the rhythm of a line and could be assembled on the spot. Then he showed that the Iliad and the Odyssey are built the same way. That is why Homer's characters are forever "swift-footed Achilles" and "grey-eyed Athena", why dawn is always "rosy-fingered", why the same lines about a meal being prepared recur word for word. These are not a lazy writer repeating himself. They are the load-bearing structure of a poem composed out loud, in performance, without writing.

So the honest position is this. The Odyssey came out of a long oral tradition, sung and reshaped by many performers across generations, and at some point it reached the form we have, probably when it was written down. Whether a single outstanding poet gave it that final shape, or whether the shaping was gradual, is genuinely unresolved. Most readers today land somewhere in the middle: the material is inherited, the design is too good to be accidental.

The two poems also do not feel like the work of the same sensibility, and readers have noticed that for a very long time. The Iliad is tight, furious, and narrow. It covers a few weeks and it is obsessed with rage and death. The Odyssey is loose, curious, and wide. It covers ten years and half the known world, it is interested in food and hospitality and lying and marriage, and it is the only one of the two with a happy ending. Samuel Butler, who translated both in the late nineteenth century, was so struck by the Odyssey's attention to domestic life and its unusually capable women that he wrote a whole book arguing the author was a young Sicilian woman. Almost nobody accepted the theory. It is still a useful reminder of how differently the two poems behave.

For a reader coming to this now, the not-knowing is less of a loss than it sounds. The Odyssey does not depend on a biography. It was made to be spoken to a room of people who already knew the story, which is why it can afford to begin in the middle, jump between islands, and hand the best section over to an unreliable narrator. It survived because audiences kept asking for it. That is a stronger claim to authorship than a name.