Long before written literature evolved, myths, legends, customs, fables and history were preserved orally by professional traveling storytellers.
Out of the multitude of unknown storytellers stretching back centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ, emerged the genius Homer in the 8th century B. C.
Homer is said to have born in Smyrna Lydia, Asia Mimor, in the 8th century B. C. This first known poet of western literature could neither read nor write.
Singing to the accompaniment of a lyre, a small stringed musical instrument, he composed his poetry orally. An authoritative edition of his poems was not published until about 150 B. C., hundreds of years after his death, by scholars at the Alexandrian library in Egypt.
Little is known about Homer’s life, though his authorship of the two great epic poems the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odessey’ is established by tradition.
Some scholars believe Homer lived in a city on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, but others doubt he ever existed.
The Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century B. C., was one of several who wrote early biographies of Homer. According to legend, Homer was a poor, old, blind poet of great wisdom, who wondered from city to city singing his verse.
By 400 B.C. Homer’s epics had become classics, as well as a vital part of Greek life. They were recited as part of the great religious festivals, and Greeks revered them as a source of guidance in religious and moral matters.
Every Greek child who learned to read, studied Homer, for he was regarded as a master of literature and rhetoric too.
The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle often referred to his epics in their own writing, and the Greek playwrights Sophocles and Euripides based their dramas on characters and plots set down by Homer.
Homer’s influence gradually spread throughout the world, and he remains today one of the most widely read authors in western literature.
Much of literary heritage of the western world is rooted in his epics, and many generations of writers have been so inspired by his heroes and themes that they have created their works around them.
Homer was said to have lived on the island of Chios, Eastern Greece, and died on the Ios, an island in the Aegean Sea.
