The fountainhead of Western literature, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey
The blind bard revered as the beginning of Western literature. The two epics under his name — the Iliad and the Odyssey — tell of the wrath at Troy and of Odysseus’s ten-year voyage home, and for more than two thousand years have been the source Western literature keeps turning back to. Whether Homer was a real person or a name for many oral poets is still disputed — the "Homeric question" is itself the oldest riddle in literary study.
The Iliad opens with "Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles" — the first great work of Western literature is not about who wins the war, but about how one man’s anger brings countless deaths. Homer trained the lens on emotion and human nature rather than mere deeds, a choice that deeply shaped the whole of Western narrative ever after.
Whether Homer was a real person or a name for many oral poets — the "Homeric question" — is one of the oldest riddles in literary study, still unsettled; this site states that the dispute exists.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.