Ancient accounts of Homer

The ancient accounts of Homer include many passages in archaic and classical Greek poets and prose authors that mention or allude to Homer, and ten biographies of Homer, often referred to as Lives.

Establishing an accurate date for Homer's life presents significant difficulties. No documentary record of the man's life is known to have existed other than his writings of the Odyssey, as well as the Iliad. All accounts are based on tradition. Only one explicit date exists. Herodotus maintains that Hesiod and Homer lived not more than 400 years before his own time, consequently not much before 850 BC. Herodotus admits that this is his own opinion. He was not sure of the dates of some of the poets believed in his time to have been earlier, but he relies on the priestess of Dodona in asserting that they were actually later. Modern opinion is that the priestess was right; the poets were later.

A less opinionated indirect date does exist. Artemon of Clazomenae, an annalist, gives Arctinus of Miletus, a pupil of Homer, a birth date of 744 BC. Received opinion generally dates him approximately between 750 and 700 BC. But West (2010) dates the composition of the Iliad to the period 680-650 BC, with the composition of the Odyssey being later still.

The extant lives of Homer are ten in number. Eight of these are edited in Georg Westermann's Vitarum Scriptores Graeci minores, including a piece called the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. The longest Life of Homer is written in the Ionic dialect, and claims to be the work of Herodotus, but is certainly spurious (Pseudo-Herodotus). In all probability it belongs to the 2nd century AD, which was fruitful beyond all others in literary forgeries. The other lives are certainly not more ancient.

The lives preserve some curious short poems or fragments of verse attributed to Homer, the so-called Epigrams, which used to be printed at the end of editions of Homer. They are numbered as they appear in Pseudo-Herodotus. These are easily recognized as popular rhymes, a form of folklore to be met with in most countries, treasured by the people as a kind of proverbs.

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