According to legend, Homer was a blind poet from the Greek island of Chios who lived in the eighth century BCE. He is said to have composed two epic poems. His Iliad tells of a war waged by the Greeks against the city of Troy (located in modern-day Turkey). His Odyssey follows the postwar adventures of Odysseus (often known by the Latinised Ulysses), one of the Greek heroes involved in the battle, as he journeys home to his wife, Penelope.These works focus on two specific episodes of the broader story of the Trojan war, which was probably a well-understood folk or cult narrative of Greek society of the time. We are able to piece together the complete narrative through various other sources (apart from Homer’s works), namely through a collection of poems known as the Epic Cycle1 (whose contents only survive in the form of summaries by an unknown ‘Proclus’ written some 12–15 centuries later); through the accounts of ancient historians, dramatists, and philosophers; and through depictions in excavated pottery, friezes, and mosaics.According to this tale, the Trojan prince Paris abducts Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman on earth, who is also the wife of the king of Sparta (a Greek city state). The Greeks gather an army and sail to Troy in a battle that would last ten long years. The resolution occurs through the well-known story of the Trojan horse, a giant wooden horse left behind by the Greeks, who feign defeat and sail for home. Inside the horse hide Greek warriors, including Odysseus, who steal out and open the gates of the walled city as night falls, leading to its sacking. Apart from the mortal heroes, the plot involves various Greek gods who side with either the Trojans or the Greeks, while Zeus, the king of gods, remains largely neutral. After the war, further strands of the narrative (including Homer’s own Odyssey) follow the adventures of various Greek heroes as they journey home.The Iliad (the Greek term for Troy being Ilios) tells the story of Achilles, chief amongst the Greek warriors, and Hector, his Trojan counterpart, in the tenth and final year of the war. It stops short of the war’s conclusion; there is no mention of the Trojan horse, in fact, there is only a passing mention of the horse in the Odyssey, and the story comes to modern readers through the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BCE), which tells the tale of the Trojan Aeneas, who flees to Italy after the fall of Troy to found the Roman state.The Iliad contains 15,693 lines of text, while the Odyssey contains 12,109. Each is composed of 24 books, which while complete in themselves go on to tell a constituent part of the overarching story. The second book of the Iliad, ‘Catalogue of Ships’, for example, gives an account of the troops dispatched to fight the Trojans, including the formidable Athenian contingent which counted Salaminean troops (from the city state of Salamis in Cyprus) amongst its ranks. Also uniquely, book ten, ‘Doloneia’, is a somewhat stand-alone tale of a common soldier and spy named Dolon, who is cut down in a particularly unheroic fashion.The epics are written in a type of poetry, in which much of ancient Greek poetry is written, called dactylic hexameter. Poetic metre describes the rhythm embedded in each line, as created through stressed syllables. If we ignore words and instead break a line into its constituent syllables, we could create groups of syllables where at least one syllable receives stress. Such a group is known as a poetic foot. A dactyl is a foot consisting of three syllables where the first receives the stress (from Greek daktylos for ‘finger’ referring to the three joints of the finger). The term Hexameter (from Greek hex for six) tells us that there are six (typically) dactyls per line.The Odyssey begins with ‘Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ, πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν’ translating roughly as Speak to me, Muse, of the versatile man [ie Odysseus], who wandered very far, after he sacked the city of Troy.2 A phonetic rendering of this in which the long syllables are indicated in bold gives a sense of the effect that dactylic hexameter creates: And-ra moi en-ne-pe mou-sa po-lu-tro-pon, hos ma-la pol-la planch-thē e-pei Troi-ēs hi-e-ron pto-li-eth-ron e-per-sen.3Other features of the epics include the extensive use of set phrases. For example, lines with ‘and then, in reply, Person A said’, taking up nearly the first three feet in a hexameter, occur over one hundred times.A further formulaic effect is added through the fixed (also called the Homeric) epithet, where a particular adjective or phrase is always associated with a given character. For example, only Odysseus is referred to as ‘much-suffering’, and only Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warfare, as ‘grey-eyed’. These epithets are sometimes adapted to the needs of the dactylic hexameter, for example, Odysseus is variously described as ‘much-suffering, bright’ but also simply as ‘much-suffering’ or ‘bright’,4 in order to form the six dactyls. These formulaic elements (which were broadly unearthed by the American classicist Milman Parry, who around 1928 used extensive analysis of living oral poetry traditions in Yugoslavia to identify parallels with the Homeric epics) favour the idea that Homer used them as mnemonic aids to recite the poems — in other words, there is good evidence that the epics drew upon an existing Oral Tradition for their content.This finding poses problems regarding the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Was the oral tradition merely an influence on Homer's writing or does it discredit the very idea that Homer even existed — a controversy that has become known as the Homeric Question. If the poet were only a conduit, merely reciting material handed down through the generations, perhaps occasionally improvising and embellishing it, then it would not be right to speak of Homer as the author of the epics. (In fact Homer is traditionally portrayed as blind, a rather moot point as nothing is known of the man himself, but one that reinforces the oralism theory.)The earliest surviving papyri of the epics date from the third century BCE.5 Well before then, from the fifth century, the Homeric epics were a staple of Greek education and also featured in city festivals. In the fourth and third centuries BCE, the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle are known to have studied and quoted from the epics. However, as to the identity of the man named Homer, that remains shrouded in myth. We can, however, turn our attention to the works he is supposed to have left behind to see what they can tell us. The nature of a work composed by hand by a single author is very different from a composition deriving from an oral poem drawn from disparate sources. The former involves a fixed and analytical process of thought, writing and revision, while we can expect the latter to be fluid and nonconstant, lacking the touch of a master’s hand. The epics, however, do come down to us as written pieces of work each with a basic unity and overall design that clearly reveals the hand of a supreme master craftsman at work. Through careful textual analysis we are able to say that, although the epics retain features of an oral tradition, that tradition was only relevant to the extent it provided source material on which the author drew.Was there, then, a single author behind the works? Linguistic and historical analysis of the texts today suggest that the Iliad and the Odyssey are separate works, each written primarily by two independent poets. In plot and subject matter too they are different: the Iliad features two main protagonists amidst the passion and chaos of an epic battle, while the Odyssey is of one man’s journey. Furthermore, we can discern the geographic bias of each author: the Iliad poet shows an affinity to the eastern coast, while the Odyssey poet shows familiarity with mainland Greece or the Aegean Islands.6Over time, minor additions appear to have been made by scribes and others with vested interests. For example, Athens only won Salamis in a naval battle in 480 BCE — three to four centuries after Homer’s supposed lifetime. Yet in the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ Salamis is supposedly already aligned with Athens. The size of the Athenean force is also possibly inaccurate at a time when this city state was still relatively undeveloped. The overstatement of its military prowess and the laying claim to Salamis may have been later insertions intended to glorify Athens.7 Also as mentioned above, book ten, Doloneia, is at odds with the rest of the epic, and now accepted as a later insert. These, however, do not detract from the fact there were primarily two poets involved in the works.In the present day, notwithstanding these arguments, there are also those who continue to believe that the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two foundational works of Western literature, were indeed written by one exceptional poet named Homer.8