Homer (c. 8th century BCE)
Life
Nobody knows who Homer was. That sounds like a joke but it’s the actual scholarly position. The ancient Greeks said he was a blind poet from Ionia — maybe Chios, maybe Smyrna — who composed The Iliad and The Odyssey sometime around the eighth century BCE. Modern classical scholarship spent a century arguing whether “Homer” was one man, several men, or the name given to a long oral tradition that finally got written down. The current consensus is boring: probably a real poet (or two), working inside a centuries-old oral tradition, who gave the shape and the stitching that turned a floating body of heroic songs into two permanent epics. Whoever he was, he was the first European writer, and in a sense he is European writing.
The poems themselves suggest a bard performing at aristocratic feasts — stock phrases, recurring epithets (“rosy-fingered Dawn,” “swift-footed Achilles”), repeated scenes, all the memory-aids of a storyteller working without a text. But inside those oral conventions, Homer does something no bard before him had done: he makes the psychology move. Achilles is not just angry; he evolves. Odysseus is not just clever; he changes. The epics read like the moment when Greek literature realized character was a thing, and that recognition is why the poems outlived their world.
What They Were Doing
The Iliad and The Odyssey are the two halves of the Western imagination. The Iliad is a war poem about the wrath of Achilles, compressed into a few weeks of the tenth year of the Trojan War. The Odyssey is a homecoming poem about Odysseus’s ten-year journey back from that war. Between them they cover the two ancient questions: how do you die well, and how do you live. Achilles chooses a short, glorious life and gets immortality in poetry. Odysseus chooses to survive and get home, and the poem makes survival itself into a form of heroism. Every Western literature after Homer is downstream of one or the other.
Homer’s moral vision is ambivalent in a way most ancient literature isn’t. He doesn’t pick sides. Hector the Trojan is as noble as Achilles the Greek. The gods are capricious, petty, and often unjust. War destroys agriculture, family life, cities, and souls — and the poet keeps cutting away from the battle to show what’s being destroyed. The climax of The Iliad isn’t the death of Hector; it’s Priam, the enemy king, coming at night to beg for his son’s body, and Achilles — still holding the corpse — looking at the old man and seeing his own father. Two enemies weep together. The whole war is suspended inside a single moment of shared mortality. That scene, more than any other, is why Homer is still read.
The Odyssey has a different engine. Odysseus is the first true protagonist of Western literature — a man defined not by birth or strength but by mētis, cunning intelligence. He lies constantly. He takes disguises. He survives by thinking. And the poem’s structure — framed narratives, unreliable narrators, flashbacks, an ending that refuses to be triumphant — is already the novel in embryo. Bloom wanders Dublin because Odysseus wandered first.
Influence
There is no Western literature without Homer. Dante takes Virgil as his guide, and Virgil takes his whole Aeneid from Homer. Milton wrote Paradise Lost against both. Joyce called his novel Ulysses and structured it on the Odyssey. Dostoevsky read the epics as moral documents; Tolstoy compared his own War and Peace project to The Iliad. Nietzsche built his whole early philosophy on the Greeks and treated Homer as the pre-Socratic pinnacle. Simone Weil wrote her essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” in the middle of World War II and insisted Homer had understood violence better than anyone before or since. The twentieth century could not stop going back to these two poems, because the twentieth century was, in its own way, the return of the Bronze Age.
Connections
- The Iliad — the wrath-of-Achilles poem. War, honor, and the terrible cost of holding a grudge.
- The Odyssey — the homecoming poem. Cunning, endurance, and the invention of the wandering hero.
- The Divine Comedy — Dante’s descent into Hell borrows directly from Odyssey Book 11 (Odysseus among the dead) and Virgil’s Book 6 (Aeneas with the Sibyl). Dante makes Odysseus one of the damned in Inferno 26 — a Christian verdict on Greek restlessness.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — the Christian-psychological tradition’s reading of the Greek heroic code as a spiritual dead end. Raskolnikov’s “extraordinary man” is Achilles-the-superhuman restaged in St. Petersburg, and the novel’s argument against him is the counter-argument the Iliad itself began to sketch in its final book.
- Friedrich Nietzsche — treated Homer as the high point of the “tragic age of the Greeks,” before Socrates ruined everything with reason. The will-to-power of Achilles is Nietzsche’s preferred ethical model; the slave-morality Christianity of Dostoevsky’s Sonia is its mirror.
- The Knight in the Panther’s Skin — Rustaveli’s twelfth-century Georgian epic inherits the heroic code (honor, friendship, martial glory) and reconfigures it inside a Christian-Platonic framework. Comparing Homer’s Achilles and Rustaveli’s Tariel gives you the before-and-after of the heroic ideal under Abrahamic pressure.
- Joseph Campbell — built the monomyth on Odysseus’s template. The hero with a thousand faces is Odysseus with a thousand nametags.
Key Works
- The Iliad (c. 750 BCE)
- The Odyssey (c. 725 BCE)
Themes He Anchors
The Shadow · Free Will and the Moral Law · Power and Morality