Homer
To the classical
Greeks, Homer's epics played very much the same role that the Bible
plays for a lot of people today. People memorized big chunks of Homer's
writings in school, and they repeated
bits of it in order to convince other people to do something or think
something.
Homer lived around 700 BC, in the Archaic
period in Greece. We don't know where in Greece he lived exactly.
People said he was blind,
but poets were often said to have been blind, so this might not be true
(people say poets are blind because they think that being blind helps
the poets to "see" things other people can't, like to know what the
gods are doing).
When Homer was born, the Greeks had just recently learned how to use the alphabet from the Phoenicians. Homer used the alphabet to write down two long epic poems called the Iliad and the Odyssey. Probably Homer didn't make up these stories, or even the words, himself. Poets or bards had been going around Greece telling these stories for hundreds of years already. But Homer wrote them down, and gave them their final form. Probably he also did a lot of work on them, to make them as good as they are.
To find out more about Homer, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
The Life and Times of Homer, by Kathleen Tracy (2004). For kids.
The Iliad of Homer (Oxford Myths and Legends), by Barbara Leonie Picard. A retelling of the story, for kids.
The Odyssey of Homer (Oxford Myths and Legends), by Barbara Leonie Picard.
Approaches to Teaching Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, by Kostas Myrsiades (1987).
The World of Odysseus, by Moses Finley and Bernard Knox (1954). A standard for anyone interested in Homer.
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Hesiod
Main Greek literature page
Main Greeks page
Main literature page
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