Homer

Homer is the name the ancient Greeks gave to the poet behind the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epics that stand at the very start of Western literature. The truth is that we know almost nothing certain about him. Tradition says he lived around the 9th or 8th century BC, probably on the coast of Asia Minor (today's Turkey) or a nearby island like Chios, and later legend pictured him as blind. Some scholars even doubt one person wrote both poems. What we do know is how these epics were made. Homer worked in a long tradition of oral poets, singers who performed stories aloud from memory, building verses out of stock phrases like "rosy-fingered dawn" so the tale could flow for hours. The Iliad tells of the rage of the warrior Achilles during the Trojan War, a legendary siege of the city of Troy. The Odyssey follows the cunning hero Odysseus on his ten-year voyage home from that war. Together they shaped how Greeks understood honor, grief, hospitality and homecoming. They have fed storytellers ever since, because Homer saw human beings whole and never looked away.