Homer - The Life and Work of Homer

Homer was the most important and earliest of the Greek and Roman writers. Greeks and Romans didn't count themselves educated unless they knew his poems. Homer's influence was felt not only on literature, but on ethics and morality via lessons from his masterpieces. He is the first place to look for information on Greek myth and religion. Despite Homer's great importance, we have no firm evidence that he ever lived.

Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealing and adulteries and deceiving on one another.
Xenophanes (a Pre-Socratic philosopher)

Because Homer performed and sang he is called a bard. He is thought to have been blind, and so is known as the blind bard, just as Shakespeare, calling on the same tradition, is known as the bard of Avon. Learn more about whether Homer actually lived and wrote by reading these articles on the great 3000-year old mystery about Homer.

• Homeric Questions
  
• Homer By Any Other Name
  

Homer's name will always be linked with the Trojan War because Homer wrote about the conflict between Greeks and Trojans and the return voyages of the Greek leaders. He is credited with telling us the whole story of the Trojan War, but that's not true. There were plenty of other writers of what's called the "epic cycle" who contributed details not in Homer.

• What Is the Epic Cycle?
  
• Trojan War Events
  

Homer is the first and greatest writer of the Greek literary form known as epic and so it's in his work that people look for information about the form. Epic was more than a monumental story, although it was that. It was composed in a rigorous format and accomplished goals that Aristotle explains in his Poetics.

• Epic Poetry
  
• Prosody: Systematic Study of Poetic Meter
  
• Aristotle Poetics
  
• Homeric Epithets
  
• Epic Terms
  
• Meters in Greek and Latin Poetry
  
• Oldest Copy of the Iliad

Homer is considered the writer of the Iliad, and possibly the Odyssey, although there are stylistic reasons that make this subject to debate, but he is also sometimes credited with work named for him, the Homeric Hymns. The Homeric Hymns are currently thought to have been more recent than Homer.

1. Iliad
   
2. Odyssey
   
3. Homeric Hymns
   

In Homer's Iliad, the lead character is the quintessential Greek hero Achilles. The epic states that it is the story of the wrath of Achilles. Other important characters are leaders of the Greek and Trojan sides in the Trojan War and highly partisan human-seeming gods and goddesses. In Homer's Odyssey, the lead character is the title character Odysseus. Other major characters include the family of Odysseus and the goddess Athena.

• Names and Places in the Odyssey
  
• Trojan War People
  
• Immortals in Greek Mythology
  
• Deaths in the Iliad
  
• Major Characters in the Iliad
  

Although Homer is thought to have lived in the Archaic Age, the subject matter of his epics is the earlier, Bronze-Age, Mycenaean era. Between then and when Homer lived there was a "dark age." Therefore Homer is writing about a period about which there is no substantial written record. Homer's epics give us a glimpse of this earlier life and social hierarchy, although it is important to realize that Homer is a product of his own times as well as the mouthpiece for stories handed down across the generations.

• Who Were the Mycenaeans?
  
• Homeric Geography
  
• Dark Age Timeline
  
• The World of Odysseus
  
• Archaic Age

In his poem, "The Voice of the World," the second century Greek poet Antipater of Sidon, best known for writing about the 7 Wonders, praises Homer to the skies in this public domain translation from the Greek Anthology:

The herald of the prowess of heroes and the interpreter of the immortals, a second sun on the life of Greece, Homer, the light of the Muses, the ageless mouth of all the world, lies hid, O stranger, under the sea-washed sand.