At Home With Homer

An exhibition devoted to the most famous poet of antiquity is on show at the Louvre-Lens Museum – but what do we really know about him, and are we even sure that he composed the great epic poems for which he is famed? Barbara Graziosi sorts out fact from fiction

- Barbara Graziosi

Many legends about Homer have reached us from antiquity: from these, we can surmise that the Greeks considered him the greatest poet that ever lived – but that they knew nothing certain about his life. They depicted him as a blind wanderer who suffered many indignities in the course of his travels and yet managed to compose epics of true poetic vision. According to the earliest traditions, he hailed from Ionia – that is to say, the area that now comprises western Turkey and the nearby islands.

More specifically, he was supposed to have been born on the island of Chios, or in the port of Smyrna, or in the Aeolian city of Cyme. Some accounts also mentioned Athens and Argos, in mainland Greece, and the islands of Rhodes and Salamis as his places of origin. These seven, traditional ‘birthplaces of Homer’ were not, though, the only possibilities; as the horizons of the Greeks expanded, so the number of Homer’s alleged birthplaces multiplied. In a game of one-upmanship, some ancient Greek writers even claimed that he was an Egyptian, or an early Roman, on the grounds that the heroic practices he described resembled those of foreign people.

The satirist and rhetorician Lucian, writing in the 2nd century AD, made fun of that whole game, claiming (in a fictional tale entitled A True Story) that he had visited Homer in the Elysian Fields (the Land of the Blessed Dead) and had established, once and for all, that the poet hailed from Babylon. In a grand flourish, he added: ‘... as for whether he was blind – for that too is rumored about him! – I knew straight away that he was not, for I could see it and did not need to ask.’