Homer

Almost nothing about Homer is known, and the honest version of his life is a list of things that cannot be established. Not his birthplace — seven cities claimed him in antiquity. Not his dates, though the poems are usually placed in the eighth or seventh century BC. Not whether he was blind, a tradition that may simply be borrowed from the blind singer inside the Odyssey. Not, most importantly, whether he was one person at all.

The strongest evidence came from fieldwork rather than literature. In the 1930s Milman Parry recorded illiterate singers in the Balkans composing long heroic poems in performance, assembling them from ready-made phrases that fitted the metre. The repeated formulas in Homer — swift-footed Achilles, the wine-dark sea, rosy-fingered dawn — turn out to be the working tools of exactly that craft. The Iliad and the Odyssey were sung and re-sung for generations before anyone wrote them down.

So "Homer" may be a man, or the name a tradition gave itself. What is certain is that two poems came out of it that stand at the head of European literature, and that everything after them is, in some measure, a reply.