Homer

Homer is the name given to the poet credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epics standing at the start of the European literary tradition. Nothing about his life is known, and whether one person composed either poem has been argued over since antiquity: both came out of a long oral tradition of sung verse, and both carry its repeated phrases and formulas. They were probably fixed in something like their present form in the 8th century BC. The Odyssey — a soldier taking ten years to get home from a war he had already spent ten years fighting — is the older of the two stories and the more widely read.