Homer
3 entries
Biography
Homer is the legendary ancient Greek poet to whom the Iliad and the Odyssey, the oldest works of European literature, are attributed. Almost nothing certain is known about him: ancient tradition made him a blind bard from Ionia, on the coast of today’s Turkey, and several cities claimed to be his birthplace. Scholars place the two epics in the eighth or seventh century BC and still debate whether they are the work of one poet, of two, or of a long tradition of singers who composed them and passed them on by heart.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Trojan War, from the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles to the funeral of Hector. The Odyssey follows Odysseus on his ten-year journey home to Ithaca and to his wife Penelope. For the Greeks, Homer was the teacher of all Greece, the poet on whom children learned to read, and his heroes, gods and images have shaped Western art and literature ever since.
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