4. The poet in the poems

There is little evidence about the person or people responsible for the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Within the epics themselves, however, the voice of the narrator can clearly be heard. That voice was important to ancient audiences and readers, influencing what they thought about the legendary ‘Homer’—and that voice remains important today, not because it reveals the actual author(s) of the poems, but because it characterises the narrative. ‘The poet in the poems’ suggests that two rather different narrative voices emerge from the Iliad and the Odyssey.