ANSWERS: 1
  • There is no evidence that Homer ever existed and it's generally believed that the Iliad and the Odyssey are examples of oral poetry created by more than one person before the 8th century BC and only written down after this. Wikipedia gives this: "Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis," wherein a non-literate "Homer" dictates his poem to a literate scribe between the 8th and 6th centuries. The Greek alphabet was introduced in the early 8th century, so that it is possible that Homer himself was of the first generation of rhapsodes (poets) that were also literate. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BCE)."

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