Homer
8th century BCE · Greece
Nothing certain is known about Homer, which has not stopped anyone. Ancient tradition made him a blind bard from Ionia, on the coast of what is now Turkey; modern scholarship treats the Iliad and Odyssey as the culmination of a long oral tradition, composed or set down somewhere around the eighth century BCE. Whoever Homer was, the two poems that carry the name were the foundation of Greek education, quoted by Plato, imitated by Virgil, and are still the first thing most Great Books programs assign.
