“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilles.”
Iliad, opening line
Homer is credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational epics of Greek culture. Tradition calls him a blind bard from Ionia, but nothing certain is known about him. Even in antiquity some scholars doubted a single author existed, proposing that the poems were shaped by generations of oral performers.
Whoever composed them, the epics were written down around 750 BCE. They became the common reference for every Greek city, taught in schools, quoted in arguments and used to define heroism, honour and the will of the gods.
Legacy
Later Greeks treated Homer as an authority on the gods themselves; Herodotus said he and Hesiod gave the Greeks their pantheon.