The historical Homer remains invisible behind his poems. The epics say nothing about their composer, and no contemporary inscription or document names him. By the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, however, Homeric verse was widely recognised as a special kind of poetry. Archilochus, Alcman, Tyrtaeus, Callinus, Sappho and later poets adapted Homeric phrases, metre and scenes. Vase painters illustrated characters and episodes from the poems. Homer appears not as a securely documented person but as the name through which Greeks organised their earliest epic tradition.

Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, says that Hesiod and Homer lived no more than four hundred years before his own time. That statement places them around the 9th or 8th century BCE, depending on the interpretation of Herodotus's date, but Herodotus himself admits that the chronology was controversial. Ancient writers made Homer older or younger, Ionian or Aeolian, a native of Chios, Smyrna, Colophon, Cyme, Ithaca, Salamis, Argos, Athens or Egypt. Seven cities competed for the honour of his birth. The competition says less about biography than about the poems' authority in many different Greek communities.

The most famous image of Homer presents him as blind. The tradition probably began with Homer's own bards. In the Odyssey, Demodocus is a blind singer whom the Muse loved and to whom she gave sweet song. Phemius, another bard, says that a god has planted all kinds of song in his heart. Later Greeks identified these fictional performers with Homer himself. The Hymn to Delian Apollo calls its blind singer a man who dwells in rugged Chios and will carry his fame wherever Greeks sail. The tradition gave Homer a face: sightless eyes, flowing hair, a beard, a lyre and a solemn mouth open in song.

Ancient biographies invented a full life around that face. The Pseudo-Herodotus, a Hellenistic biographical fiction, made Homer the son of Cretheis and a wandering singer who travelled among cities, composed hymns, taught pupils and quarrelled with hosts. The Contest of Homer and Hesiod made him compete with Hesiod at the funeral games of Amphidamas in Chalcis. In the contest Homer wins the popular vote, but King Panedes awards Hesiod the prize because he sang of peace and agriculture rather than war. The Contest adds Homer's death at Ios from a riddle about lice and mentions a tomb inscription in which the poet claims to have made his home among all cities but belonged to none. None of these details is reliable. They reveal how ancient audiences wanted to imagine their national poet.

The Iliad is the one poem that ancient and modern tradition most confidently connects with Homer. It contains 15,693 lines of dactylic hexameter and is divided into twenty-four books, probably in the Hellenistic period. The poem begins in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the captive Briseis. Achilles withdraws from battle, and his friend Patroclus enters the fighting in Achilles' armour. Patroclus dies at Hector's hands. Achilles returns in grief and rage, kills Hector, drags the body around Troy and finally accepts Priam's ransom after the old king kneels before him. The Iliad does not narrate the whole war. Its action covers only a few weeks, while its background carries the memory of ten years of siege and its ending anticipates Achilles' own death.

The Iliad's central subject is not Troy but Achilles. The first word is wrath. The poem asks what honour costs, how a hero's rage destroys friends and enemies, how mortality gives human life its value and how grief can open even enemies to pity. Its battles move between mass violence and intimate death. Its divine scenes join comedy and terror. Its similes turn from warfare to harvests, storms, lions, shepherds, childbirth, fire and the sea. The Iliad preserves names, weapons, objects and social customs that seem to reach back toward the Mycenaean age, but it interprets them through the language, values and performance practices of a much later period.

The Odyssey is the second surviving epic under Homer's name. It contains roughly twelve thousand lines and likewise survives in twenty-four books. Its first word is man or man of many ways. The poem begins after Troy has fallen, when Odysseus is missing and the suitors are consuming his household in Ithaca. Athena prompts Telemachus to seek news of his father at Pylos and Sparta. On Scheria, Odysseus tells the Phaeacians the stories of the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, the Underworld, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of Helios and Calypso. The Phaeacians carry him to Ithaca, where he appears in disguise, receives the recognition of Argos and Eurycleia, defeats the suitors with the bow contest and reunites with Penelope through the secret of their olive-wood bed.

The Odyssey differs from the Iliad in structure, manner and tone. It contains marriage, hospitality, disguise, recognition, folktale and homecoming beyond warfare. Its hero wins through intelligence, endurance and narrative rather than through Achilles' destructive brilliance. Its geography shifts between the Bronze Age world and the wandering edge of the world. Its women, Penelope, Arete, Nausicaa, Circe and Calypso, play major roles in both plot and memory. Ancient critics called the Iliad a poem of tragedy and the Odyssey a poem of comedy in the classical sense of a story moving from trouble to restoration. Aristotle analysed the two poems as different epic structures.

The Homeric Question asks who composed the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences often assigned both to Homer, but the Chorizontes, the separatists, argued as early as the Hellenistic period that the Odyssey had a different author. Modern scholarship has produced several positions. Unitarians stress the artistic unity of each poem and sometimes of both. Analysts once treated the epics as assemblies of shorter songs. Neo-analysts reconstructed lost poems behind particular episodes. Oralists following Milman Parry and Albert Lord analysed the poems as oral-formulaic compositions. Some modern scholars assign the Iliad and Odyssey to different poets, while others retain a single master-poet tradition. A common position recognises one controlling design for each epic while allowing a long oral tradition, possible dictation and later editing.

The securest conclusion is narrow but important. Only the Iliad and Odyssey can reasonably be treated as the poems around which the name Homer crystallised. Everything else attributed to him in antiquity is secondary or spurious in the modern sense.

Many lost epics of the Trojan and Theban cycles were once given to Homer. The Cypria, which narrated the origins of the Trojan War, was said by some to be Homer's work given to Stasinus of Cyprus as a dowry, but it was also assigned to Stasinus or Hegesias. The Little Iliad, covering events between the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy, was attributed to Lesches or Thestorides. The Nostoi, the homecomings of the Greek heroes, was assigned to Agias or Eumelus. The Telegony, the story of Odysseus's final wanderings and death at the hands of Telegonus, was credited to Eugammon of Cyrene. The Thebaid and Epigoni were epic poems of the war against Thebes. None survives complete, and none is now considered Homeric.

The Margites was a comic poem about an exceptionally foolish man who knew many crafts but mastered none. Aristotle treated it as the ancestor of comedy and connected it with Homer, but its style, period and attribution were disputed even in antiquity. The Capture of Oechalia, a Heracles poem, circulated under the name of Creophylus and was sometimes credited to Homer. The Batrachomyomachia, the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, is a mock-epic parody of Homeric style and was attributed to Homer in late antiquity, although it is almost certainly a much later composition. A group of short epigrams was also attached to his name.

The Homeric Hymns deserve special care because their title can mislead. Thirty-three hymns survive in the corpus, including major hymns to Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, Aphrodite and Dionysus. They are archaic hexameter poems in the tradition of Homeric epic, and their language overlaps with that of the Iliad and Odyssey, but they are not by Homer. They vary in date and authorship, preserve regional cult traditions and were probably performed as preludes to longer epic recitations. Their connection with Homer is stylistic and generic, not biographical.

Homer's language is an artificial epic dialect built primarily from Ionic Greek but containing Aeolic forms, archaisms and metrically convenient variants. The dialect did not belong to a single place or century. It was the language of oral epic, refined by generations of singers who needed phrases that would fit dactylic hexameter. Achilles is swift or fleet-footed according to the line's metre. Hera is white-armed or golden-throned as the verse requires. Gods receive different titles at the beginning and end of lines. The repetition that once struck critics as crude became, after Parry's study of South Slavic bards, evidence of a sophisticated oral technique.

The dactylic hexameter became the metre of epic because it suited long public performance. Each line has six measures, each a dactyl or spondee, ending in a long syllable. The metre can carry names, speeches, similes, battle lists and catalogue passages without losing its rhythmic drive. Homer uses it for Achilles' grief, Odysseus's deception, Hector's farewell to Andromache, Calypso's cave, Penelope's weaving and the shield of Achilles. The same metre later carried Hesiod's didactic poetry, the Homeric Hymns, Apollonius' Argonautica and Virgil's Aeneid.

The epics probably began in oral performance before they became fixed texts. Rhapsodes recited portions of Homer at festivals and civic occasions. By the sixth century BCE, Athens had made the recitation of Homer part of the Panathenaic festival. Later tradition credited Peisistratus or his circle with producing a standard written edition, the so-called Peisistratean recension. That story is disputed, and many modern scholars doubt that a single Peisistratean edition ever existed. What is clear is that Athens institutionalised Homer, encouraged rhapsodes to perform in sequence and helped move the epics toward textual stability.

Writing may have entered the tradition in more than one way. Homer might have dictated the poems to a scribe. A literate poet might have composed with the help of writing. The poems might have remained orally transmitted until an editor or guild committed an authoritative version to papyrus. The spread of the Greek alphabet in the 8th century BCE makes a written fixation possible, but the poems' formulaic texture shows that they grew from oral performance. Their composition likely involved both long oral tradition and a crucial stage of textual fixation.

Alexandrian scholars later created the text from which medieval manuscripts descend. Zenodotus of Ephesus produced an early critical edition of Homer in the 3rd century BCE. Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace refined the text, marked suspected lines, discussed variants and divided the poems into books. The Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad preserves ancient scholia derived from Alexandrian scholarship. Over one thousand medieval and early modern manuscripts of the Homeric poems survive, making Homer by far the most widely transmitted ancient author.

The ancients treated Homer as more than a poet. Xenophanes attacked his immoral portraits of the gods. Heraclitus mocked him as the wisest of Greeks, yet said that he deserved to be expelled from poetic contests. Plato repeatedly praised and criticised him, removing Homer from his ideal city because poetry imitates passions rather than truth. Aristotle made him the model of epic and tragedy, praising his choice of a unified action. The Stoics allegorised his poetry. Alexandrian scholars studied every line. By the Roman period Homer had become a symbol of Greek education, culture and identity.

Virgil's Aeneid joined Homeric material to Roman destiny, drawing the Odyssey's wandering and Iliad's warfare into the story of Aeneas. Roman education studied Homer in Greek and adapted his stories in Latin. Byzantine scholars preserved, copied and commented upon the text, with Eustathius producing immense commentaries on both epics. After Greek scholars carried Homer to Renaissance Italy, printers issued editions and translators carried the epics into Italian, English, French, German and other languages. The Iliad and Odyssey became part of the canon of world literature.

The question of Homer's relation to history remains separate from the question of authorship. The epics preserve memories of the Bronze Age: Mycenaean names, elaborate objects, boar's-tusk helmets, the Catalogue of Ships and a social world organised around aristocratic households and guest-friendship. They also reflect the later world in which they were composed. Archaeology has shown that a major fortified city existed at Troy in the Late Bronze Age and that a destructive fire occurred there around the traditional date of the Trojan War. The epics are not historical documents, but they carry distant memories transformed by centuries of song.

Modern adaptations continue to retell Homer. The Odyssey has shaped novels, films, stage works and science fiction through its journey of return, while the Iliad has shaped works of war, heroism and grief. Homer's translators range from George Chapman and Alexander Pope to Emily Wilson, whose English Odyssey begins with Tell me about a complicated man. Every translation, adaptation and scholarly edition is another attempt to make Homer's distant voice speak in a new form.

Homer's greatest achievement is to have given human mortality a language vast enough to contain it. Achilles knows that glory will outlast life, yet his grief remains personal and unbearable. Odysseus rejects immortality with Calypso because mortality and home are bound together. Hector says farewell to Andromache knowing Troy may fall. Penelope weaves and unweaves because time itself can be undone by desire. Homer's heroes do not escape death. They discover what meaning can be made before it arrives.

Whether Homer was one poet, two poets or the name of a tradition, the ancient world made him its teacher. His poems taught Greeks the stories of their gods and heroes, the language of honour and hospitality, the structure of tragedy and return, the rhetoric of speeches and the pleasure of long narrative. Later cultures made him the foundation of their own literature. The name Homer has become less a biography than a doorway through which the Western tradition entered.

The works he can most accurately be credited with are the Iliad and Odyssey, not as signed documents but as the two great epics for which antiquity reserved his name. Everything else in the ancient corpus is an attribution, a stylistic relative or a later tribute. That distinction matters because it preserves both the power of the tradition and the mystery of the poet. Homer remains the singer whose life cannot be recovered and whose poems cannot be exhausted.