Almost nothing is known about Homer with certainty. Ancient tradition placed his birth in Ionia, on or near the island of Chios, in the eighth century BCE and described him as blind. Modern scholarship debates whether he was a single poet, the last and greatest of an oral tradition, or a name attached to a body of work that emerged from several hands. What survives under his name — the , on the wrath of Achilles in the Trojan War, and the , on the ten-year homecoming of Odysseus — runs to about 28,000 hexameter lines. They were composed for oral performance and only set down in writing perhaps a century after they were first sung. They became the bedrock of Greek education, the model for Virgil's Aeneid, the source of much of Western narrative form, and continue to be retranslated each generation.
All Figures
Poet · Author of the Iliad and the Odyssey
Homer
c. 800 BCE – 750 BCE
The (possibly composite, possibly real) Ionian bard to whom the West attributes its two founding poems — the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Lifetime
Date source not yet attached to this catalogue record.
Deeper Dive
Unlock Homer's full archive.
Notable works, life timeline, places lived, key quotes, reading list — all 158 figures' deep dives open with Epoch+.