1. Looking for Homer

Abstract

The first extant sources that mention Homer by name date to the sixth century BCE: from them, we can establish that the Greeks considered him an outstanding poet of great antiquity, but that they knew nothing certain about him. ‘Looking for Homer’ explains that there was no agreement about Homer’s birthplace or life and there were doubts about which poems, exactly, he had composed. As views about poetry changed, so did definitions of ‘Homer’. To this day, some classicists see the Iliad and the Odyssey as the work of one exceptional poet, or perhaps two, while others postulate a drawn-out process of re-composition in performance over generations.