Beyond a few fragments of information, historians and classicists can only speculate about the life of the man who created The Iliad and The Odyssey. The details are few. We do not even know the century in which he lived, and it is difficult to say with absolute certainty that the same poet created both works. The Greeks attributed both of the epics to the same man, and we have little hard evidence that would make us doubt the ancient authorities, but uncertainty is a constant feature of scholarly work dealing with Homer's era of Greek history.
The Greeks hailed him as their greatest poet, as well as their first. Although the Greeks recognized other poets who composed in Greek before...