Homer
Two epics composed for performance become the shared inheritance of Greek culture.
- When
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
The Iliad and Odyssey take written form around 750 BCE out of a long oral tradition — Milman Parry demonstrated in the 1930s that their formulaic phrasing is the signature of composition in performance rather than writing. Whether one poet made them is unresolvable. They function for Greeks as something between scripture and national literature: quoted, memorised, taught, and argued with by every later Greek writer.