Homer is the name that Greek tradition gives to the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two oldest poems of European literature. Almost nothing is known about the man. Ancient tradition made him blind, and several cities of Asia Minor and the islands disputed the honor of being his homeland, among them Smyrna and Chios. Scholars place him around the eighth century BC, some four or five centuries after the destruction of Troy that the poems presuppose.
Both poems are composed in hexameters, in a literary language that mixes dialects, mainly Ionic, and that nobody spoke in everyday life. They bear the marks of a long tradition of oral poetry: epithets that repeat, typical scenes, whole lines that come back unchanged. Whether they are the work of one poet, of two, or the written close of centuries of recitation is the so-called Homeric Question, which remains open. Since the studies of Milman Parry, in the 1920s and 1930s, most scholars read the poems as an oral tradition fixed by one or a few poets.
The importance of the work lies in the use the Greeks made of it. Homer was the schoolbook, from which they drew their gods, their virtues and their examples of conduct, and the critic Otto Maria Carpeaux compares his place in Greece to the one the Bible would later have for Christians. The myths that Athenian tragedy rewrote come largely from him, Aristotle takes from the Iliad and the Odyssey the examples of the Poetics, and Virgil imitated both poems to give Rome its epic, the Aeneid. In the Western tradition, literature begins with Homer.
On Clavis: The Iliad, The Odyssey.