Was Homer a real person?

Nobody knows, and the question has been debated for over two thousand years. It has a name — the Homeric Question — and the range of serious positions is wide.

What is attributed to him. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational works of Western literature, composed in Greek somewhere around the eighth century BC.

What is known about the person: essentially nothing. Ancient sources disagree about where he was born, when he lived, and whether he was blind. Several cities claimed him. The biographical traditions were written centuries later and are regarded as legendary.

The decisive modern development came from the work of Milman Parry in the 1920s and 30s. Parry noticed that the poems are built from formulaic phrases — "swift-footed Achilles", "wine-dark sea", "rosy-fingered dawn" — used repeatedly and fitted precisely to the metre.

He hypothesised that these were the tools of oral composition: a bard performing without writing needs ready-made metrical building blocks. To test it, Parry and Albert Lord travelled to Yugoslavia and studied living illiterate oral poets who could perform enormously long narrative poems. They found the same formulaic technique in use.

This transformed the question. The poems appear to be products of a long oral tradition — generations of singers, each recomposing in performance rather than reciting a fixed text.

The current range of positions:

No single Homer — the poems are the accumulated tradition, credited to a name.

A final shaping poet — an exceptional individual who gave an inherited tradition its finished form, possibly at the point of writing down.

Two different poets for the two poems, which differ in vocabulary, outlook and structure enough that many scholars think so.

Analysts and Unitarians have argued these positions since antiquity.

Troy itself was real — excavated at Hisarlik, though whether the war occurred as described is separate.