What is the biography of Homer (poet)?

Question

What is the biography of Homer (poet)?

Answer 1

As a lover of both of the works ascribed to Homer, I have come to the conclusion that there was no such person. Although the stories of _The Iliad_ and _The Odyssey_ are related in that they are both about the Trojan war and both feature Odysseus, Akhilleus, Agamemnon, Menelaos, Helen, and other more or less prominent warriors and personages, the emphasis and treatment of these persons and the sensibility of the works are so subtly and pervasively different that it is beyond credibility that the same mind produced them both.

Was Homer blind? Is the harpist or poet in _The Odyssey_ a representative or self-portrait? There's no way to know. Probably the works were composed somewhere around 750 B. C.--from linguistic evidence that I have read about but cannot judge for myself--but the composition was probably oral and communal; and the text was altered in the way poems remembered this way are. Homer is a construct that later civilizations require, and that is a handy way of centering a text around an author, a post-scribal notion.

It's interesting to compare _The AEneid,_ definitely composed by Publius Vergilius Maro, with these two works. Most of what we know beyond uncertain birth and death dates for this person is extrapolated from _The AEneid_ and the _Ecologues_ and _Georgics._ If there were no Virgil, would we have to invent him? We almost have, in the way that we have tried, less successfully, to write a biography of Homer.

Answer 2

Sher gives the good info...

Truth be told, we really have no idea who Homer was. He was ancient to the Ancients.

Answer 3

Homer (ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος, Homēros) is an ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was a historical individual, but some modern scholars are skeptical: no reliable biographical information has been handed down from classical antiquity. According to Martin West, "Homer" is "not the name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name.