Homer

Homer is the ancient Greek poet traditionally credited with composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational epics of Western literature.

Homer is the name traditionally assigned to the author or authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems composed in ancient Greece, likely between the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. Whether Homer was a single historical individual, a loose tradition of oral poets, or a later figure who compiled and refined existing oral tradition remains genuinely uncertain — the “Homeric question” has been debated for centuries without resolution. What is not uncertain is the extraordinary quality and influence of the poems themselves, which are among the oldest surviving works of Western literature and foundational to the entire literary tradition that followed.

The Iliad recounts a compressed episode from the Trojan War — focusing on Achilles’s rage, withdrawal from battle, and return — with a moral seriousness and psychological depth that remain astonishing given the poem’s antiquity. The Odyssey, following Odysseus’s decade-long journey home after the war, is looser in structure and warmer in tone, and has generated readings ranging from adventure narrative to philosophical allegory. Both poems operate simultaneously as entertainment, as theology, and as sustained meditations on heroism, fate, grief, and the relationship between mortals and gods.

Modern readers approach Homer through translation, and the choice of translation matters enormously. Emily Wilson’s recent Odyssey is precise and muscular in a way that removes accumulated Victorian grandeur and makes the poem feel genuinely strange and immediate again. Robert Fagles’s translations of both poems have been widely praised for their energy. The poems reward multiple readings and reward the effort of engaging with secondary scholarship, but they are also directly accessible to any reader willing to meet them on their own terms.