Was Homer a real person

Answer 1

For centuries the tales of the Trojan War were sung by the bards. As these bards (rhapsodes) made up their performance (along the general theme) as they went along from a collection of stock phrases they memorised, each bard not only delivered different versions from the other, but also each of their own performances was different.

After syllabic writing was adopted in Greece in the 8th Century BCE, versions began to be written down. The most popular one was the one attributed to Homer 'the blind poet of Chios'. Whether the tradition is fact, whether Homer was indeed an individual - the individual - or represented a group or series of bards, is unknown, however it is convenient to simply use the word Homer, even though the stories were delivered for hundreds of years before about 725 BCE when 'Homer' is considered to have been recorded.

The text we have today is considerably different from then. Ancient sources comment on the endless versions and variants which came into circulation in the following centuries. Peistratos, tyrant of Athens two centuries later, commissioned a team of scholars to try to purify the texts. It is indicative of the licence taken in even this apparently noble endeavour that it became a joke in Athens that this 'purified' text was perverted to support Athens' case in the current dispute it had with Megara over the ownership of the island of Salamis.

Some misguided scholars even today work on the holy grail of trying to retrieve the 'original' text which of course never existed as such.