Homer

The singer asks the girls of Delos to remember him

Near the end of the Hymn to Apollo, the singer stops addressing the god and gives the girls of Delos an instruction. When a stranger asks which singer they love best, they should answer with one voice: he is a blind man who lives on rocky Chios, and his songs are supreme. It is the closest thing the Homeric poems contain to a signature, but it never supplies the name Homer.

Thucydides is the first surviving writer to close that gap. Arguing that the games and assembly once held at Delos had been grander than the thin affair of his own day, he writes that this “is principally declared by Homer” and quotes the hymn at length, the blind-man lines among them, as testimony from the poet himself. It is the earliest surviving citation of Homer by name, and it treats a first-person line inside a poem as a fact about its author. It is the move every biography of Homer since has had to make in some form.

The cities that claimed him

No ancient list of Homer’s birthplace agrees with another. Between them, ancient writers named seventeen or nineteen different cities, and later opinion settled on Smyrna over Chios without ever closing the question. Chios had more than a line in a hymn to stand on: a guild there, the Homeridae, whom Pindar calls “the singers of woven verses” in the opening of his second Nemean ode, traced their descent from the poet and kept the cult of a hero named Homeros on the island.

A separate tradition sent him the other way to die. Strabo, listing the small islands strung between Thera and Melos, names “the little island Ios, where, according to some writers, the poet Homer was buried.” His own phrasing keeps the claim at arm’s length even as he records it.

Before Alexandria: the rhapsodes of Athens

The earliest institutional claim on the text predates the scholars of Alexandria by three centuries. In the dialogue named for him, Socrates credits Hipparchus, son of the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, with being the first to bring the poems of Homer to Athens, and with compelling the rhapsodes at the Panathenaea to recite them in relay, one reciter taking up where the last stopped. Whether or not the story is history, it fixes an idea that the Alexandrians would later act on: that “Homer” was, by then, a fixed sequence someone could be made to perform in order.

What the Alexandrians did to the text

Around 280 BC, Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first head of the Library of Alexandria, produced what ancient scholarship remembered as the first critical edition of Homer. He struck out lines he judged spurious, marked others as doubtful without removing them, and altered or transposed readings he thought corrupt. It was the earliest recorded attempt to fix, rather than simply copy, the text.

Aristarchus of Samothrace, two generations later, refined the method rather than replacing it: an obelus against a line he thought did not belong, an asterisk against one he judged especially fine. His edition of the Iliad and Odyssey became, in the judgment of the scholars who followed him, the basis of every edition that came after. That means the text a modern reader opens has passed through his hand, whether or not it passed through Homer’s.

For over two thousand years after Zenodotus, one poet, one set of poems, was the working assumption. It stopped being one in 1795, when the German philologist Friedrich August Wolf published his Prolegomena ad Homerum and argued that the Iliad and Odyssey were not written as single continuous works at all, but assembled from shorter, separately composed songs. The argument that followed, over whether one mind shaped either poem and if so when, has not been settled since, only restated with new evidence each generation.

What antiquity gave him that later readers took back

Antiquity was generous with Homer’s name in ways modern scholarship has mostly reversed. Aristotle, in the Poetics, credits him with the Margites, a comic poem about a fool, and treats it as standing to comedy exactly as the Iliad and Odyssey stand to tragedy, an attribution few now accept, though Aristotle wrote it in earnest. The Cypria, an epic covering the events leading up to the Trojan War, carried its own story of how it reached its stated author, Stasinus of Cyprus: that Homer gave it to him as a dowry with his daughter. The claim was already treated as baseless by the time later scholarship got around to writing it down, but it survived anyway, attached to a poem that needed a reason to stand near his name.

The biography ends where it began, with words assigned to a person they cannot securely identify. A blind Chian singer, a grave on Ios, two epics edited at Alexandria and a lost poem imagined as a wedding gift all carry the same name. None supplies the man who first spoke it.