Homer

The name behind two poems

Homer is the name the ancient Greeks gave to the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, their two great epics, or long poems about heroes. No ancient source agrees on who he was, where he was born, or whether one poet wrote both poems. What survives is a set of claims, each resting on a line, a tradition or a later scholar.

The closest thing to a signature comes from the Hymn to Apollo. A hymn is a song of praise to a god, and this one belongs to the Homeric Hymns, a collection of such songs. Near its end, the singer stops speaking to the god and gives the girls of Delos, the island of the festival, 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 the best. The lines never give the name Homer.

How the hymn became Homer’s

The historian Thucydides is the first surviving writer to fill that gap. He argues that the games and gathering once held at Delos were grander than the thin affair of his own day. He writes that this “is principally declared by Homer”. Then he quotes the hymn at length, the blind man’s lines among them, as evidence from the poet himself.

This is the earliest surviving mention of Homer by name. It treats a line spoken in the first person inside a poem as a fact about the poem’s author. Every life of Homer written since has had to make that same move in some form.

The cities that claimed him

No ancient list of Homer’s birthplace agrees with another. Between them, ancient writers named 17 or 19 different cities. Later opinion settled on Smyrna over Chios, but the question was never closed.

Chios had more than a line in a hymn to stand on. A guild there, the Homeridae, traced their descent from the poet and worshipped a hero named Homeros on the island. The poet Pindar calls them “the singers of woven verses” at the opening of his second Nemean ode.

A separate tradition placed his death elsewhere. The geographer Strabo lists the small islands between Thera and Melos. Among them he names “the little island Ios, where, according to some writers, the poet Homer was buried.” His wording keeps the claim at a distance even as he records it.

The reciters of Athens

The earliest claim by an institution on the text comes three centuries before the scholars of Alexandria. It appears in a dialogue named after Hipparchus, the son of Peisistratus, who ruled Athens as a tyrant, a ruler holding sole power. In it, Socrates says Hipparchus was the first to bring the poems of Homer to Athens. He also made the rhapsodes, the professional reciters of poetry, perform them at the Panathenaea, a festival at Athens. They recited in relay, each one taking up where the last had stopped.

The story may or may not be history. Either way, it records an idea the scholars of Alexandria would later act on: by then “Homer” was a fixed sequence that someone could be made to perform in order.

What the scholars of Alexandria did

Around 280 BC, Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first head of the Library of Alexandria, produced what ancient scholars remembered as the first critical edition of Homer. A critical edition is a text a scholar has checked and corrected line by line. Zenodotus struck out lines he judged false. He marked others as doubtful without removing them, and he changed or moved readings he thought were corrupt. It was the earliest recorded attempt to fix the text, not only to copy it.

Two generations later, Aristarchus of Samothrace refined the method instead of replacing it. He put an obelus, a short dash, against a line he thought did not belong, and an asterisk against one he judged especially fine. The scholars who followed him judged that his edition of the Iliad and Odyssey became the basis of every later edition. So the text a modern reader opens has passed through his hands, whether or not it passed through Homer’s.

One poet or many

For over 2,000 years after Zenodotus, people worked on the assumption of one poet and one set of poems. That changed in 1795, when a scholar argued in print that the Iliad and Odyssey were never written as single, continuous works. In that view they were put together from shorter songs composed separately.

The debate that followed asks whether one mind shaped either poem, and if so, when. It has never been settled. Each generation restates it with new evidence.

What later readers took back

Ancient writers gave Homer’s name to more works than modern scholars accept. In the Poetics, his book on poetry, Aristotle credits Homer with the Margites, a comic poem about a fool. He treats it as standing to comedy just as the Iliad and Odyssey stand to tragedy. Few now accept that Homer wrote it, though Aristotle meant it seriously.

The Cypria, an epic about the events leading up to the Trojan War, came with its own story. Its stated author was Stasinus of Cyprus, and the story said Homer gave him the poem as a dowry when Stasinus married his daughter. By the time later scholars wrote the claim down, it was already treated as baseless. It survived anyway, attached to a poem that needed a reason to stand near his name.

All these pieces carry the same name: a blind singer from Chios, a grave on Ios, two epics edited at Alexandria and a lost poem imagined as a wedding gift. None of them identifies the man himself.