3011 AM · 750 BCE · world history
Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey
Two poems are written down that become for the Greeks what scripture was for others.
For centuries wandering singers passed down tales of Troy. When Greece regained writing, the songs were fixed into two poems: the Iliad on the rage of Achilles and the mortality of heroes, the Odyssey on the long road home. Greeks learned to read from Homer, argued ethics from Homer, and quoted him in court.
Sources
Documents of the period
- the text of the poems and the earliest Homeric papyri — the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves — the first long texts of the Greeks
Scholarship
- general histories of the region — the “Homeric question”: how the poems took shape and were written down
Basis: documents and evidence.