Homer

The name "Homer" is attached to the two foundational works of Western literature, but almost nothing is known about the person behind them — or whether a single person wrote both. Ancient Greeks generally believed he was a blind bard from Ionia (the coast of modern Turkey), but even in antiquity there was debate about his identity, his dates, and whether one poet could have composed both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Modern scholarship (the "Homeric question") ranges from the "single genius" camp to theories of collective oral composition over generations. What's not debated is the result: two poems of extraordinary sophistication that defined the epic form, established the literary vocabulary of the ancient world, and remain the starting point for the entire Western literary tradition. Every epic that followed — Virgil, Dante, Milton — is in conversation with Homer.

Conventional dating places the poems in the 8th century BCE, but they draw on oral traditions stretching back centuries earlier to the Mycenaean age.