Fifteen Eighty Four

For over two millennia, readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey have imagined a single, blind poet called Homer singing the deeds of the great heroes of the Trojan War. Captivating as this image may be, it owes more to romantic imagination than to historical evidence. The reality behind the origins of Greek epic poetry are far more complex and much more fascinating.

In The World of Homer, I explore one of the most enduring questions in classical scholarship: how did these magnificent epics come into being? Who (or what) is “Homer”? And how did these tales of powerful gods and extraordinary heroes, of great adventures and perilous journeys endure across the centuries to be written down in the form we recognize today?

Rather than focusing on a single authorial figure, the book traces a long and intricate process of cultural transmission shaped by evolving historical contexts, oral tradition, and the collective creativity of generations of performers. What emerges is not the story of one,  but of many “Homers,”, a long chain of brilliant composers, singers, and storytellers reaching back to the Bronze Age, whose creativity gave rise to the epics we still read today.

One of the points of departure of the book is the absence of any mention of Homer or of a “Homeric” Iliad and Odyssey before the second half of the sixth century BCE. It is only in that period, particularly in Athens, that we begin to hear of “Homer” as a named figure. This raises an intriguing possibility: was Homer invented, perhaps by rhapsodic guilds like the Homeridai, to lend authority to a now-canonized body of poetry?

This question opens the door to a deeper investigation. If there was no Homer in the historical record before the sixth century, who created the epics? And how did they come to be shaped into the monumental forms that have survived?

One of the central themes of the book is the layered nature of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The poems weave together elements from many different periods, spanning the centuries from the Bronze Age to the Archaic era. Drawing on archaeological evidence, Homeric scholarship, and orality studies, the book examines  how these layers were formed and preserved. In doing so, it reconstructs the world of the epics in all its dimensions, from society, politics, and economy, to war, violence, and religion.

This reconstruction lays the groundwork for understanding the processes through which the epics emerged. Building on the interpretive frameworks of social memory and composition-in-performance, the book traces the stages in the evolution of the poems, from small-scale local performances to more formal, panhellenic recitations. Understanding this evolution, and the insights it offers into authorship, tradition, and poetic creativity, is a central focus of the book.

In the end, the question is not simply “Who was Homer?” but how a vast and evolving oral tradition became attached to a single name. The World of Homer invites readers to rethink the epics not as the creation of one poet, but as the culmination of centuries of collective artistry. In doing so, it opens up a deeper appreciation of the Iliad and the Odyssey as living records of memory, performance, and identity.

To follow this thread—to uncover the voices behind the tradition, the role of archaeology in tracing them, and the forces that shaped the poems’ emergence—read more in The World of Homer.