Homer Who is this Guy? In point of fact is it only one guy? Could it be a gal?

Homer is... Homer is the name given to the unitary author of the early Greek poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is now generally believed that they were composed by illiterate aoidoi (rhapsodes) in an oral tradition in the 8th or 7th century BC. Homer's works begin the Western Canon and are universally praised for their poetic genius. By convention, the compositions are also often taken to initiate the period of Classical Antiquity.

What Do We Know? We don’t know much: The Emperor Hadrian asked the Oracle at Delphi who Homer really was, and she said that he was Ithacan, the son of Epikaste and Telemachus, from the Odyssey. The Greeks themselves traditionally believed there was a single poet of The Iliad and The Odyssey. He was certainly an accomplished Greek bard, and he probably lived in the late eighth and early seventh centuries b.c.

However, Greeks of the third and second centuries b.c., already questioned whether Homer existed and whether the two epics were even written by a single individual. There are a number of traditions holding that he was blind (perhaps because in the Aeolian dialect of Cyme, homēros [on his name] bore this meaning.). Another is that Homer was born on the island of Chios or, elsewhere in Ionia, where various cities vied in claiming him as one of their native sons.

Homer’s Raw Material Most modern scholars believe that even if a single person wrote the epics, his work owes a tremendous debt to a long tradition of unwritten, oral poetry. Stories of a glorious expedition to the East and of its leaders’ fateful journeys home had been circulating in Greece for hundreds of years before the Iliad and Odyssey were composed. Casual storytellers and semiprofessional minstrels passed these stories down through generations, with each artist developing and polishing the story as he told it.

Homer must have decided to elaborate his materials not only in quality but also in length and complexity. –All oral poetry is cumulative in essence; the verse is built up by adding phrase upon phrase, the individual description by adding verse upon verse. –The whole plot of a song consists of the progressive accumulation of minor motifs and major themes, –from simple ideas (such as "the hero sets off on a journey" or "addresses his enemy") through typical scenes (such as assemblies ofmen or gods) to developed but standardized thematic complexes (such as episodes of recognition or reconciliation). According to this theory, one poet, multiple poets working in collaboration, or perhaps even a series of poets handing down their work in succession finally turned these stories into written works, again with each adding his own touch and expanding or contracting certain episodes in the overall narrative to fit his taste.

Many 21st century readers have noticed some gender-bending scenes in "The Odyssey." –The goddess Athena cross-dresses and calls every shot regarding the fate of the hero, –Odysseus, while other female characters, Kirke, Kalypso and Nausikaa, each dally with the protagonist, then shuttle him off, like a toss-around boy, to his next adventure. These subversions of gender roles don't tell us anything about the gender of the author, but they have piqued some scholars' curiosity. In 1897, Samuel Butler scandalized Victorian England by claiming that a woman wrote "The Odyssey." (Homer’s Daughter) In Rediscovering Homer, Andrew Dalby goes further -- arguing that a woman probably composed both The Odyssey and The Iliad. –Dalby derives the idea that a woman wrote "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" from anthropological research into modern oral cultures. Nineteenth century anthropologists overlooked female oral poets because they performed at home for friends and family, while their male counterparts performed in public. But more recent researchers have discovered that some of the best oral poets are women.

Sites Cited Montanarelli, Lisa. “Who really wrote 'Odyssey,' 'Iliad'? Evidence Points Not to Homer, Not to Any Man, but to a Woman.” (Review of Rediscovering Homer By Andrew Dalby). SFGgate.com 2 Oct.2007 Reviewed by Lisa Phillips, Brian and Hunter, James. SparkNote on The Odyssey. 2 Oct "Homer." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1996