Homer's The Iliad and the Odyssey : a biography

Abstract

It seems fitting that the two books which, more than any others, have fed the imagination of the Western world for over two and a half millennia, should have no clear starting-point and no identifiable creator. Homer begins long before Homer. In all probability, the Iliad and the Odyssey drifted into being gradually, indefinably, more like popular myths than formal literary productions, through the untraceable process of ancient ballads sifting and blending until acquiring a coherent narrative shape, ballads sung in tongues that were already archaic when the poet (or poets) whom tradition agreed to call Homer was at work in the eighth century BC. For many centuries, the poor, blind singer begging his way through ancient Greece was generally regarded as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in time, he came to be replaced by a kind of inspired spirit, part fable and part allegory, the ghost of Poetry.