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The achievements of our most mysterious poet have yet to be matched
By
Homer is everywhere and nowhere: while there is no major work of the western literary canon that has not been profoundly influenced by his poetry, he is also a figure almost impossible to pin down in time and place. Like Odysseus’ famous ruse in the cave of Polyphemus the Cyclops, by immersing himself as the ubiquitous but anonymous narrator of his two great works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the single most influential poet of history has singularly managed to adopt the guise of Oudeis: Mr Nobody.
Homer’s poems are best viewed as majestic vessels which landed ashore from the wine-dark seas of 8th-century-BC Greece, richly freighted with songs and stories loaded several centuries prior. For already in the mid-second millennium BC, the Greeks were politically dominant and culturally powerful: the Mycenaeans on the Greek mainland had risen in influence around the Aegean Sea and subdued the remarkably colourful culture of the (non-Greek) Minoans on Crete. Both of these peoples used a syllabic form of writing, if mostly for accounting; both were deeply invested in myth, religion, and art.