Homer

Nothing about Homer is certain, including whether he existed as a single person. Ancient tradition made him a blind poet from Ionia, and seven cities claimed his birth; the dates given here (roughly 750 and 700 BCE) are conventional guesses pinned to when the poems seem to have taken final shape, centuries after the Trojan War they describe.

The Iliad and The Odyssey almost certainly grew out of generations of oral performance, sung and reshaped by bards using stock epithets and repeated formulas as memory aids, before someone (one poet, or an editorial tradition credited to one name) fixed them into the texts that survive. Scholars call this unresolved puzzle the Homeric question and have never settled it.

Whatever their origin, the poems became the bedrock of Greek education and the wellspring virtually every epic after them, from Virgil to Milton, measured itself against.