The Enigmatic Life of Homer and the Mystery Behind the Odyssey

On the 8th of August 1824, the German classical scholar, Friedrich August Wolf, died in the city of Marseilles. In nineteenth-century scholarly circles Wolf was famous for his work on the writings of the ancient Greek poet, Homer. By using the Venetus A manuscript codex, Wolf revolutionised the study of the semi-legendary author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. His work raised questions which scholars still battle with today. Did he really write the Iliad and the Odyssey? When did he live? Was he even a real person? This is the story of Homer, the chronicler of Achilles, Odysseus and the Trojan War.

The man known to history as Homer was born around 1100 BC in the city of Smyrna, the present-day city of Izmir in western Turkey. At least this is what one of the many legends surrounding Homer's life claims. He was also allegedly the illegitimate son of a woman named Cretheis and an unknown man and was originally named Melesigenes after the River Meles. These are the claims made by the author of the Life of Homer, one of the numerous biographies of the poet written in ancient times. At the beginning of the Life of Homer, the author claimed to be the fifth-century

BC historian, Herodotus. However, the real Herodotus wrote in his Histories that Homer lived around 850 BC, 250 years later than the dates provided by the Pseudo-Herodotus, the name given by most scholars to the anonymous author of the Life of Homer. These two traditions point towards the complete lack of consensus, even in ancient times, about who Homer was and when he lived. Among the difficulties in presenting a traditional biography of Homer is that, as the American classicist Mary Lefkowitz observes in her book The Lives of the Greek Poets, "no surviving account of his life was ever accepted as canonical." The earliest accounts

place Homer's origins in Ionia, a region of western Asia Minor centred on present-day Izmir, around 200 miles to the south of the city of Troy on the western coast of modern-day Turkey. Homer was also associated with the island of Chios off the Turkish coast, with the seventh- century BC poet Semonides of Amorgos describing Homer as the "man from Chios." The author of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, traditionally attributed to Homer, refers to himself as the "blind man of Chios." Homer's association with the island was so strong that a group of poets on Chios called themselves

"the sons of Homer." By the fifth century BC, the poet Pindar acknowledges Homer's origins in Chios but also associates him with Smyrna on the mainland. By the following century, the historian Ephorus of Cyme placed Homer's birthplace in his own hometown of Cyme, around 50 miles north of Smyrna. Later accounts place Homer in mainland Greece, in cities such as Argos, Athens and Pylos, and islands such as Salamis and Ithaca, the home of Odysseus. Basically, there is no consensus about where Homer was born or lived and during what century he lived.

Evaluating Homer's alleged life story is made doubly difficult by the fact that the Iliad and Odyssey do not offer any biographical information of any kind about their author. The widely accepted notion that Homer was blind is based on the character of Demodocus, a blind singer from Book 8 of the Odyssey. Some ancient accounts claim that his name "Homeros" was a term used in certain parts of the Greek world to refer to a blind person, while other accounts claim that "Homeros" meant hostage, and that either Homer or his father had been prisoners of war at some point.

In Greek mythology and literature, blindness is often associated with the seer, whose inability to see the world around him is compensated for by the gift of prophecy from the gods. Likewise, Homer is supposed to have made up for his deficiency in sight by his literary genius, a gift from the gods that enabled him to compose and sing thousands of lines of verse from memory. Homer's association with the gods is sometimes made explicit, and the philosopher Aristotle claimed he was the son of a mortal mother and a divine father. Other ancient genealogies of

Homer make him a descendant of Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, and of Orpheus, the legendary bard best known for his descent into the underworld. The people of Smyrna believed that he was the son of the local river-god Meles and the nymph Cretheis. When the Roman Emperor Hadrian asked the oracle at Delphi about Homer's origins, he received the answer that Homer was born in Ithaca to Telemachus and Polycaste, respectively the son and daughter of the Homeric heroes Odysseus and Nestor. While Demodocus may have been the inspiration for the blind Homer, the ancient

biographers also associated Homer with Phemius, the bard who performs at Odysseus' court in Ithaca. In short, there were dozens of traditions about who Homer was and where he came from. Another theme of the ancient lives of Homer is that of the travelling bard or rhapsode who journeyed across Greek cities to participate in singing contests at religious festivals. In sixth-century Athens, during the reign of the tyrant Peisistratus and his sons Hippias and Hipparchus, wandering bards often gave performances of the Homeric epics during the

Panathenaia festival, dedicated to the city's patron goddess Athena. It was easy to imagine Homer as a forerunner of these travelling poets. The ancient biographers also used the idea of Homer as a wandering bard to explain his familiarity with far-flung locations and to establish a time and a place for the composition of other poems traditionally attributed to him, such as the Homeric hymns. A text known as the Contest of Hesiod and Homer dates from the second century AD but was based on a narrative by the orator Alcidamas from the fourth century BC. It

describes Homer and Hesiod, a near contemporary of Homer's and the author of the Theogony and the Works and Days, competing against each other at Chalcis on the island of Euboea. While Homer is shown as the more accomplished poet, King Panedes grants victory to Hesiod on the basis that his concern for agriculture and peace was more worthy than Homer's poetry about war and strife. Homer is described in similar terms by Socrates in Plato's Republic. Although Plato acknowledged that Homer was the greatest of all the tragic poets, Homeric poetry has no place in Plato's ideal state,

where poetry and art were tools of moral instruction rather than about violence. Plato believed that Homer's portrayal of flawed gods and heroes would risk corrupting its readers. Criticisms by Plato and others of Homer's poetry demonstrate they were already central to Greek education in the fifth century BC. Th-eee-OG-on-ee While there are many different accounts of Homer's birth and life, ancient accounts tend to accept the same version of Homer's death. A surviving fragment of Alcidamas' life of Homer describes the poet encountering a group of young fishermen on the island of Ios, who challenge him to make

sense of the riddle "those who we caught we left behind, and those we did not catch, we bring." When Homer failed to answer the riddle, they told him that the answer was lice. The lice that they caught while delousing were left behind, but those that they did not they brought with them in their clothing. At this point Homer was reminded of a warning from an oracle that suggested his death was near. The content of the oracle's pronouncements is unclear and may have been a reference to a lost text. Acknowledging his imminent demise, Homer composed his own epitaph:

"Here the earth covers the sacred head, the glorifier of heroes, divine Homer." He then slipped on muddy ground and suffered a fatal fall. Alcidamas' account appears to have been inspired by an anecdote related by the philosopher Heraclitus, who related Homer's failure to answer the riddle about the lice posed to him by a group of boys to demonstrate how even the wisest human minds are capable of being deceived. Aristotle later followed Alcidamas' account when narrating Homer's death, although the warning from the oracle on this occasion was to beware

of a riddle from young men on Ios. Moreover, Aristotle's Homer dies of depression after being unable to solve the riddle, and his epitaph is composed by his mourners. The Contest of Hesiod and Homer follows Aristotle in the content of the oracle's prophecy that he would die on Ios and to beware of young children telling riddles, but echoes Alcidamas' account that Homer composed his own epitaph before dying. While the riddle of the fishermen also appears in Pseudo-Herodotus, Homer does not die because he has failed to answer it, but because he was already ill.

Despite the best efforts of the Pseudo-Herodotus to reconcile these conflicting accounts, the existence of several competing traditions about the life of Homer by late antiquity raises considerable doubt about whether any of them can be considered authentic or if we can really know anything for certain about the historical Homer. Nevertheless, the ancient lives of Homer exhibit shared characteristics, such as the figure of the blind travelling bard and the desire to connect Homer with dozens of ancient Greek cities, a testament to his popularity. For

centuries there has been a general belief that Homer had been a shadowy figure who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey in ancient times, but about whom little could be known concretely, but beginning in the early nineteenth century classical scholars and philologists began to try to study him more systematically. This became known as the Homeric Question in scholarly circles and involved several questions. A huge proportion of this focuses on the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey. Scholars from different academic disciplines have approached the Homeric Question

in different ways. As Barry Powell explains in his book Homer, philologists are primarily interested in ascertaining the origins of the Homeric texts, while historians are more interested in understanding whether the Homeric epics are based on real historical events or what they reveal about ancient Greek society, politics and military tactics. Such questions are less relevant to general readers of the Iliad and Odyssey, whose experience of the texts is based on literary factors such as plot, drama, the characters and their moral virtues or lack thereof.

Much of this study of the Homeric Question focuses on how the poems he was alleged to have written would have been performed and heard. While modern audiences are predominantly familiar with the Homeric epics as written texts that are read either in the original Greek or in translation, Greek audiences would have usually heard them sung and performed orally. Accordingly, while philologists cannot hope to recreate the Homeric epics as Homer would have known them, they use evidence from the Homeric texts and other sources to approach the original Homer. The texts

themselves have evolved over the centuries, both with respect to how the letters appear on the page, and the material they were written on. Standard classical Greek orthography was not codified until the late eighteenth century, and archaeological evidence shows that the earliest forms of the Greek alphabet had differently shaped letters, no spacing, and the direction of reading switched from right to left and then from left to right across alternating lines. The earliest surviving complete text of the Iliad is a codex on vellum dating to the

tenth century AD. Prior to the second century AD, texts were written on papyrus scrolls, and each of the 24 books of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey would have been a separate scroll. There are more papyrus fragments of Homer in the archaeological record than any other classical author, with the earliest dating from third-century BC Egypt where the warm climate meant shards of papyrus have survived in the desert over thousands of years. Canonical texts for the Iliad and Odyssey for festival performances are understood to have existed

during the era of Peisistratus in sixth-century Athens, while the earliest reference to Homer is by the poet Callinus in the first half of the seventh century BC. Thus, while our evidence for the historical Homer is virtually non-existent or consists of deeply contradictory literary traditions, we can at least be sure that the Iliad and the Odyssey were complete by around 650 BC. This is a useful anchoring point for studying the Homeric Question. One of the other key aspects of the Homeric Question is whether the full Greek alphabet

had been invented when Homer composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the first century AD, stated that "They say that even Homer did not leave behind his poems in writing, but that they were transmitted by memorisation out of the songs, and that therefore they contain many inconsistencies." The German scholar Friedrich August Wolf came to the same conclusion in his 1795 publication Prolegomena to Homer, one of the most influential pieces of Homeric scholarship. Wolf noted in the Prolegomena that

there is not a single reference to any form of writing in the Iliad and the Odyssey. He believed that in the absence of written versions of the poems, Homer composed shorter songs that were passed down orally for several centuries until a certain point when they were written down for posterity and combined into a single narrative. Wolf favoured the concept of the "Peisistratean Recension," citing the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, who wrote that Peisistratus established the accepted order of the 24 books of the Iliad when previously they had been independent poems

and were recited in different orders. In the Platonic dialogue Hipparchus, which modern scholarship no longer attributes to Plato himself, Socrates credits Peisistratus' son Hipparchus for bringing Homer's poems to Athens and for determining their canonical order for performance. Wolf concluded that while most of the content of the Iliad and Odyssey were compiled from shorter songs composed by Homer, some were composed at a later stage by the Homeridae, followers of Homer in Chios, who then subsequently introduced Homer's poems to Athens.

Owing to this nineteenth-century scholarship, the predominant view developed that "Homer" was not really a historic figure, but was a kind of amanuensis to describe the poets and scribes who had written down and refined the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, the American classicist Milman Parry challenged this prevailing view and returned to arguing that the Homeric epics were composed by a single creative mind, that there really was a historical person named Homer who

produced these two great epic poems about the Trojan War. Advocates of a historic Homer like Parry note that the two poems are filled with stylistic terms like "swift-footed Achilles", "the wine-dark sea," or "rosy-fingered dawn" which appear again and again throughout the poems and which suggest a sole author. Beyond these lingual aspects, there are metrical building blocks in the rhymes and the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey which point towards a common author. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is known by various epithets including "noble Odysseus,"

"wily Odysseus," and "city-sacking Odysseus," each of which are used by the poet when he needs a particular combination of long and short syllables to fit the complex metrical framework. It could be argued that the entirety of Homer's poetry was constructed from such formulas, which could be a whole line, since it is not uncommon for whole lines to be repeated in the poem. These stylistic elements suggest that it is plausible that the Iliad and the Odyssey could have been written by a sole individual and the Homeric idea might be historically accurate, though

it still cannot be proven beyond a doubt. Of course, regardless of whether a person named Homer wrote them or not, the Iliad and the Odyssey would have been performed in different ways in ancient times. There were both aoidoi, singers who improvised every time they performed the epic poems, so that no two performances were the same, and the rhapsodes who memorised the written text and performed it virtually the same way every time. If Homer was a real person then, based on the way he describes poetic performances in the two works, he was most likely an aoidos

just like the singers that he described in the Odyssey. He would have sung songs about the anger of Achilles before the walls of Troy and Odysseus on several occasions during his career. This does not mean he was the one who wrote down these texts. In fact, in all likelihood, if there really was a poet named Homer, he was an oral poet who was credited with reforming the two poems into their final format and then what we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey today were finally written down by scribes in the seventh century BC. Indeed, some historians even argue that the ancient Greek

alphabet evolved around the eighth and seventh centuries BC in order to be able to write down poetic works like those of Homer and Hesiod that had been circulating in oral form for a long time. One theory holds that the Homeric epics were first written down on the island of Euboea, to the east of Athens, which was one of the most advanced societies in Greece during this period, and where the Ionian Greek dialect of the Homeric epics was also dominant. Others contend that there were various Homeric traditions circulating at the same time between 800 BC and 300 BC until

the canonical text of the Iliad and Odyssey were decided upon and codified by editors working in the great Library of Alexandria in Egypt in the third century BC. So, at this stage we have two distinct theories about Homer. One holds that he was basically an invention, a pseudonym for a mythical character to whom the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey were attributed, whereas in reality these two epic poems evolved orally within Greek society over hundreds of years during the Early Iron Age. The other contends that there genuinely was a man named Homer who was responsible to a significant extent for devising the story of the Iliad and

the Odyssey, perhaps sometime between 800 BC and 650 BC. His work was then written down around the seventh century BC and transmitted forward as a written text which became standardised over time. However, there is a third theory again, one which contends that the Iliad and the Odyssey could have been single-authored works in the traditional sense, but that Homer did not write both of them. In order to evaluate this, we need to look a bit more closely at the two texts. The Iliad and the Odyssey share a similar cast of characters and it is assumed that

Homer's audience would have already been very familiar with the wider story of the Trojan War. For instance, tales of the Trojan War appear throughout Greek literature and mythology, while there are also lost epic poems that made up parts of a wider Trojan Cycle. For instance, the story of the city of Troy being breached using the Trojan horse and then sacked by the Greeks actually appears in the Iliupersis, a part of the Trojan Cycle that is lost and which we only know about through fragmentary references. This part of the story of the siege of Troy does not

appear in the Iliad. Instead, the Iliad is set during the ten-year siege of Troy by a coalition of Greeks. The main action takes place over a few days near the end of the war. The poem's focus is not the siege itself but the anger of Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior. This is made explicit in the poem's iconic opening, "Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles son of Peleus." Achilles was angered when the head of the Greek coalition, King Agamemnon, took away his concubine, Briseis. Achilles had been awarded Briseis as a prize of war and is reluctant to give her up

to a man who stands back and gives orders rather than personally engaging in combat. After Achilles withdraws into his tent and threatens to sail back home, the Trojans counterattack and inflict heavy casualties upon the Greeks. Meanwhile, the gods on Mount Olympus are not impartial observers but have their own favourites in these mortal clashes. Hera, Athena, and Poseidon favour the Greeks, while Apollo, Ares, and Aphrodite support the Trojans. In Book Sixteen, the King of the Gods, Zeus, is resigned to the death of his son Sarpedon, a Trojan ally. Sarpedon is slain

by Achilles' close companion Patroclus, who takes to the battlefield wearing Achilles' armour to try to reverse the Trojan advances. Patroclus helps the Greeks regain the initiative but is killed under the walls of Troy by the Trojan prince, Hector. With Patroclus' death, Achilles diverts his rage towards Hector. Donning a new set of gleaming armour made by Hephaestus, god of the forge, Achilles breaks through the Trojan ranks and kills Hector. He brings Hector's lifeless body back to his camp and drags it around Patroclus' funeral pyre. The

poem ends on a poignant note as King Priam of Troy personally asks Achilles to return his son's body and the two men lament the loss of their loved ones. Thus, the Iliad takes place over about ten days towards the end of the ten-year long siege, but it focuses on the rivalry between Achilles and Agamemnon and the clash between Achilles and Hector. It does not cover the whole war. While the narrative of the Iliad ends before the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy, both events are mentioned in the Odyssey. It begins after the war, as the Greeks are returning

to their homelands. It focuses on Odysseus, the ruler of the island Kingdom of Ithaca. He was responsible for building the large wooden horse that the Trojans mistook as a gift and brought inside their city walls, only to find later that Greek soldiers were hidden inside the horse. They jumped out in the night and opened the city gates to allow the Greeks to capture the city and burn it to the ground. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus and his companions spend ten years voyaging home. Meanwhile, on Ithaca, Odysseus' wife, Penelope, and their son, Telemachus, have no news of him and

he is presumed dead. His palace is consequently teeming with ambitious suitors keen to marry Penelope. While Penelope resorts to delaying tactics to keep the suitors at bay, Telemachus is advised to seek news of his father by the goddess Athena. He learns from King Menelaus of Sparta that Odysseus has been held captive for seven years by the nymph Calypso on the island of Ogygia. The gods eventually force Calypso to allow Odysseus to leave, but he is shipwrecked by Poseidon in the land of Phaeacia, where the princess Nausicaä rescues him and takes him to

her parents, King Alcinous and Queen Arete. At the Phaeacian court, he is overcome with emotion as the bard Demodocus, who as we have seen, some scholars perceive as being Homer inserted into his own work, sings of the Trojan War. Odysseus reveals his identity here and tells his hosts about the other obstacles he has encountered after leaving Troy including fighting the cyclops Polyphemus and the witch Circe, who transforms his crew into pigs before taking Odysseus as her lover. Odysseus is nevertheless desperate to return to Ithaca and eventually manages to do so.

When he gets there, he disguises himself as an elderly beggar at first until he can defeat the suitors in an archery contest. During this, having secretly confiscated their weapons beforehand, Odysseus and Telemachus proceed to slaughter the suitors. Odysseus then confirms his identity to Penelope by referencing their marriage bed which he carved many years earlier from an olive tree. Some scholars contend that the sheer contrast between the two stories, one a tale of conflict amongst humans at the siege of Troy, and the other a long fantastical story of voyages, monsters and

one man's tribulation, means that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by different poets and that Homer at best only created one of these. While we may never know if Homer existed or what role he actually played in composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, a subject which has held an equal amount of attention for historians and archaeologists is whether the Trojan War around which his stories are centred took place or not. For more than two thousand years, Homer's readers have sought to uncover the history behind the Trojan War. According to Herodotus, the Trojan War

was an historical event that took place around 800 years before his time, so around the thirteenth century BC. This remained the prevailing view when Heinrich Schliemann discovered the site of Troy in the early 1870s. Schliemann only realised in the final months of his life that he had dug too far down and much of the archaeological evidence of Troy had been destroyed through his unsophisticated archaeological methods. While Schliemann's sceptics argued that the Trojan site which he found was too small to be Homer's Troy, more recent excavations have uncovered

evidence of a large walled town that actually corresponds to Homer's descriptions of the city and which would have been a wealthy trading metropolis with commercial links to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age when the Trojan War was said to have taken place. This was during the same era as the Hittite Empire based out of central Turkey and the New Kingdom of Egypt. Both Hittite and Egyptian sources offer strong evidence of Greek armies sailing across the Aegean to attack Troy in the thirteenth century BC. While this means that the Homeric

texts may have some historical value, it does not necessarily mean that all the events Homer described in the Iliad were real. Even the very earliest dating for Homer, if he really existed, places his lifetime hundreds of years later, while the Iliad and the Odyssey were only first written down in the eighth or seventh centuries BC, meaning that at best these stories constitute a cultural memory of a destructive war that had occurred within the Greek world hundreds of years earlier, rather than being any kind of accurate historical record. In the interim,

a Late Bronze Age Collapse had led to the downfall of the sophisticated Mycenaean civilisation in Greece around 1200 BC and an ensuing Greek Dark Age. Troy was abandoned in around 950 BC and not resettled until centuries later. Moreover, Homer's description of the Greeks in the Iliad combines Bronze Age elements with those of his own time. In the Iliad, Homer describes the Greek dead being cremated, while the Mycenaeans buried their kings in large round tholos tombs. The shields carried by the Greeks in the Iliad are mostly round, like those of the Iron Age,

but Homer also describes full-body shields of the kind used by the Greeks during the Bronze Age, most notably carried by Ajax, the strongest of all the Greek warriors at Troy. Conversely, the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon in the Iliad addresses political questions among the Greeks of Homer's day about whether nobility or ability should be the source of power. However, the catalogue of the ships from Book Two of the Iliad is an accurate representation of the Greek world in the Mycenaean age. Therefore Homer, or whoever was responsible for the Iliad and the Odyssey,

was trying to describe the long-lost Bronze Age world of around 1300 BC while also incorporating elements of his own Greek culture around 800 BC or so. Like any work of historical fiction, Homer was combining elements of historical realism with commentary on the politics and society of his own time. My-SEEN-eee-an Achilles, Agamemnon, Ajax and Odysseus were household names for centuries before the Iliad and the Odyssey were ever written down, although it remains uncertain if they were real historical figures. Perhaps they were loosely based on real men who fought in a Bronze Age war over the

city of Troy and about whom various stories had been passed down from generation to generation, obviously being embellished along the way. Alternatively, the stories found in these tales might reflect the political concerns of the Greek world around 750 BC or so. For instance, the tale of Odysseus' adventures was potentially inspired by Greek colonialism around the Mediterranean at a time when the Greek city-states were emerging from the Dark Age that ensued after the Bronze Age Collapse. In this interpretation, the monstrous creatures that Odysseus and his

companions encounter are allegorical depictions of hostile native populations who resisted Greek colonialism by force. Scholars who favour this view note that Odysseus' travels to unknown lands might have been designed to reflect Greek contact with places like Sicily, France and even Spain. Similarly, the bewitching figures of Circe and Calypso and their liaisons with Odysseus and his companions could have reflected contemporary concerns about Greek colonists having relationships with local women in these faraway lands in the eighth and seventh centuries BC.

Ultimately any assessment of these elements of the Iliad and the Odyssey will not reveal anything further about Homer himself, if he ever existed as a living, breathing person. One wonders if he knew Ithaca or modelled it after some land he was familiar with. Yet even the location of Odysseus' home island is contentious. In Book Nine of the Odyssey, Odysseus tells King Alcinous that his home is close to the islands of Dulichium, Same, and Zacynthus. In the poem it is stated that "Ithaca itself lies low in the sea,

farthest of all towards the darkness," a statement usually interpreted to mean the setting sun. While the Greek island of Ithaki has traditionally been identified as Odysseus homeland, with a third-century BC text referring to a shrine and games dedicated to Odysseus, it is mountainous and is directly east of the larger island of Kefalonia, which itself is west of the Greek mainland, not far from the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. Moreover, the islands of Dulichium and Same appears to have vanished without trace. While Same is usually identified as Kefalonia,

the identity of Dulichium has always been unclear. Archaeological studies have revealed little else. Even though the supposed palace of Agamemnon at Mycenae has been discovered based on Homer's descriptions, archaeologists have struggled to find any signs of Odysseus' palace. The German archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld proposed that Homeric Ithaca was the island of Lefkada to the north of Ithaki. Others placed Homer's Ithaca on Paliki, the western peninsula of Kefalonia, arguing that it had once been a separate island before a series of earthquakes

filled the narrow channel with rubble. Others argue that modern-day Ithaki is Homer's Ithaca, on the grounds that the island is low-lying in relation to the surrounding islands and fits with descriptions found in the Odyssey as a result. In 2016, Professor Thanasis Papadopoulos of the University of Ioannina presented the findings of his excavations between 1994 and 2012 at a site in northern Ithaca traditionally called the School of Homer or St Athanasius. While the existing ruins are medieval, Papadopoulos found evidence of Bronze Age settlement and concluded that this

was the site of Odysseus' palace. Others dispute this, suggesting that it could be the site of a Dulichian palace on Ithaca. Taking into account Homer's description of other locations on the island of Ithaca after Odysseus' return, the main city of Ithaca could not have been located on the northern part of the island and instead the city on the isthmus must have connected the northern and southern part of Ithaki at the foot of Mount Aetos. A nearby sanctuary of Apollo dating to Homer's time was discovered in the 1930s and aligns with the Odyssey's description of a

temple to Apollo near the palace. While the stone ruins on the summit of Mt Aetos has been proposed as a candidate for Odysseus' palace since the nineteenth century, a location on the southern slope of the mountain on the site of a series of old farm buildings is also possible. However, any archaeological work is unlikely to bear much fruit since the structure sits on bedrock, and all the candidate sites on the Aetos isthmus have been dismissed as too modest for Odysseus' palace. The site of the School of Homer proposed by Papadopoulos remains the more

widely accepted location. While no single site for Odysseus' palace has gained universal acceptance, the quest for Homer's Ithaca over the last two centuries has inspired valuable archaeological work on Ithaki and the surrounding islands, even though it unfortunately sheds zero light on the historic Homer. Moreover, the discovery of the remains of any great palace or building would not prove the existence of Odysseus as a ruler here in ancient times. A person buying a copy of the Iliad or the Odyssey in the early twenty-first century will still find the name "Homer" written on the front cover as the alleged author of these works. However, it is

debatable if any such person ever existed or if he did to what extent he was actually responsible for producing the two most important epic poems from the ancient Greek world. The literary tradition was extremely hazy about his life. There were many different stories about where and when he was born and a tradition developed that claimed that he was blind. But beyond this, and the fact that he was said to have composed additional works like the Homeric hymns, historians, philologists and literary scholars have almost zero evidence with which to reconstruct his life. In this vacuum of

information, a number of different theories have emerged. One claims that Homer was indeed a poet who lived at some stage between the eleventh and eighth centuries BC and that he was substantially responsible for producing the oral versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were then written down in the eighth or seventh centuries BC before gradually becoming standardised by around 200 BC. Advocates of this theory point towards stylistic similarities in the language used across the two lengthy poems to argue that they had a common author. Others argue that Homer may have simply

been a poet who was well known for his oral performances of the poems and that a tradition developed later that he had composed them. A middle ground suggests he could have been responsible for producing one of them or that he was a key figure in the gradual development of two epic poems that evolved over hundreds of years as they passed from one generation of poets and singers to the next. What is beyond doubt is that these two poems formed part of a wider literary and mythological culture that evolved across the Greek world in the Early Iron Age,

one which looked back to the days of Mycenaean Greece and which used a war which in all likelihood did take place around the city of Troy in western Turkey as a template for stories about the Trojan War of Greek literature and myth. Later Greeks of the Archaic and Classical eras fashioned elaborate stories about heroes like Achilles, Ajax and Odysseus around the Trojan War. Homer, whoever he might have been, was believed to have been the most famous of all these Greek poets and writers of the Trojan Cycle. While almost nothing can ever be known about him as a person,

his name has echoed through the ages. What do you think of Homer? Do you think he was a real person who was at least partly responsible for producing the Iliad and the Odyssey, or is he a mythical character and the two epic poems attributed to him simply evolved amongst the Greek poets of the period between around 1100 BC and 700 BC before finally being written down? Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.