This text is about Homer and the Achaeans

At the very origin of Western civilization, there are two great literary monuments, surprising for their great magnitude and beauty, they are the two Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, assigned to antiquity specifically to a poet named Homer. Only fantastic biographies of it are found.

It is believed in the existence of a singer by profession and blind from birth, called Homer, perhaps he was a native of Smyrna, because he used the Ionian dialect and, referring in the Iliad to Locris, which is on the other side of the Euboean island, he says, that is, on the western coast of that one, with which it could not be affirmed if the author spoke from European Greece. But except for these two data, everything known is pure legend about the supposed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Now, for many philological and historical reasons, these Homeric poems are now believed to date from the 9th or 10th century B.C. This name of Homer, however, is not mentioned until the year 550 by Xenophanes, and until a century later Herodotus cites the Iliad and the Odyssey. There is, then, a period of nearly five hundred years when complete darkness reigns over Homer and these Homeric poems.

This fact of not being mentioned, does not mean that they did not exist, since the great popularity they enjoyed later would not be explained without a long period of time to spread their story and build their reputation, During the classical era, Homer was almost the only indisputable text of the schools and there were sages who could recite 13,000 verses of the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart.

Also in one of Xenophon's dialogues, one of the interlocutors says this: ¨My father wishing to make me a good man, I force myself to learn by heart all the poetry of Homer, so that now I can repeat the Iliad and the Odyssey without committing errors in a single word.¨

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