Homer

Homer is the name traditionally given to the ancient Greek poet credited with composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two foundational epics of Western literature. Nothing certain is known about his life. Ancient sources placed him in the eighth or ninth century BC and located his birth variously in Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, and several other Ionian Greek cities along the eastern Aegean coast. Seven cities famously claimed him.

The biographical traditions that survive, including the so-called Lives of Homer attributed to Herodotus and others, describe a wandering bard who was blind in old age and recited his poems at festivals and royal courts. Modern scholars treat these stories as legend rather than history. Some have argued that "Homer" represents not a single author but a tradition of oral poets whose work was eventually fixed in writing, a position associated with the eighteenth-century Prolegomena of F. A. Wolf and refined in the twentieth century by Milman Parry and Albert Lord through their study of South Slavic oral epic.

The Iliad, in twenty-four books and roughly fifteen thousand lines of dactylic hexameter, narrates a few weeks in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War, focused on the wrath of Achilles after his quarrel with Agamemnon. The Odyssey, of comparable length, follows the ten-year homecoming of Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca and the slaughter of the suitors who have besieged his wife Penelope.

The Homeric epics shaped Greek education for a thousand years, were revered by Plato and Aristotle, translated into Latin by Livius Andronicus in the third century BC, and have been continuously read, studied, and retranslated ever since. Plato called him "the educator of Greece."

The name Homer comes from the Greek Hómēros, generally interpreted as "hostage" or "he who is forced to follow," though some ancient sources connected it instead with a word meaning "blind." He carries it as a masculine given name with deep classical resonance.