Who was Homer, author of the Odyssey?

When the ancient Greeks first began sharing the Odyssey, they had no idea who wrote it. The poet we now call Homer appeared at least a century after the epic was already in circulation. American researchers Milman Parry and Albert Lord found crucial clues, as The Conversation reports, by studying living oral poetry traditions in the Balkans during the nineteen thirties. The Balkan bards improvised their epics using formulaic phrases passed down through generations — exactly the technique we find throughout the Odyssey, which repeats 'when early-born Dawn shone forth with rosy fingers' more than twenty times. Even Odysseus cycles through the same set of descriptions: 'divine Odysseus,' 'very crafty Odysseus,' 'long-suffering divine Odysseus' — each fitting the verse's rhythm without adding distinct meaning. Scholars now believe the Odyssey was composed over many generations by numerous poets, blending Greek dialects and linguistic forms from the Mycenaean period onward. In the sixth century BCE, the Homeridae — a professional singers' guild — attributed these epics to a legendary blind bard from Chios, with Cynaethus, a Homeridae member notorious for passing off his own work as Homer's, likely behind this legendary attribution.

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