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oral poetry was composed and preserved, have changed the debate. There are several schools of thought concerning Homer. While one school contends that Homer actually composed and wrote down the poems himself just as writing emerged in Greek history, others say he was an illiterate bard who only sang the poems until writing emerged near the end of his life. At that point, literate scribes came to Homer’s assistance and took dictation. Still a third school of thought contends that Homer’s poems were memorized by a guild of public reciters called “rhapsodes”—the ancient Greek version of “wedding singers”—who carried on Homer’s oral tradition until writing appeared in Athens much later.

During the twentieth century, researchers in the Balkan regions, where bards once sang, found living bards who still recite epics the length of Homer’s and even longer. Accustomed as we are to instant news—with short attention spans and memories completely reliant on our Palm Pilots or Blackberries to keep track of a few phone numbers—to most of us that sort of expansive storytelling ability seems astonishing. But the Homeric epics originated in centuries long before Homer’s time, when the bards were improvising and improving and even adding to older story lines. Most likely, the bards created a series of poems that told the entire story of the Trojan War, and it was Homer who may have given these stories their characteristic individual genius.

In Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, Thomas Cahill persuasively makes the case that Homer not only existed but had firsthand experience with what he wrote. “Homer was thought to have been a wandering blind bard, but this is almost certainly due to Homer’s description of a blind bard who performs in the Odyssey, later taken to be a self-description of the poet. Whatever the case, he must have been sighted, at least earlier in life, for there is too much in the Iliad of gritty reportage for us to think that the poet never saw battle. It would, in fact, be most unlikely if Homer did not serve as a soldier…. There is scarcely a Greek figure of any consequence who did not serve in the military as a young man or did not afterwards take a keen interest in warfare.”

Blind or not, real or not, the man we call Homer transformed the way people experienced myth. And finally it all comes down to the poems anyway. When you compare the words, emotions, and action of his two epics to the earlier literature of mythology—in Egypt and Mesopotamia, for instance—you see how Homer humanized the myths. Certainly, his gods could be remote and powerful. But they were also powerfully human—with all the flaws that implies. They raged, they lusted, they envied, and, like Hera, they sought vengeance. And it was that sense of making the divine human that may lie at the heart of what Homer and the rest of the “Greek Miracle” was all about.

How did Homer fit a ten-year war into a poem?

First of all, the Iliad—which means a poem about Ilium (Troy)—is not the history of the Trojan War. Rather it describes events in the final year of the Trojan War, fought between armies of the kingdoms of Mycenaean Greece and the city of Troy, located on the coast of what is now Turkey. According to legend, the Trojan War lasted ten years, until Greece defeated Troy—all because Helen, the young wife of Sparta’s King Menelaus, had run off with the handsome Paris, prince of Troy. But the story of the Iliad—divided into twenty-four books and consisting of more than 15,600 lines—covers only fifty-four days. And much of it describes only four days of fighting, separated by two days of truce. When it ends, Achilles is still alive and Troy not yet taken.

So, what’s the story?

Believe it or not, stubborn men fighting over a beautiful woman. The war itself, of course, is ostensibly fought over Helen. But as the epic opens, an angry quarrel has broken out between Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus, king of the Mycenaeans and leader of the Greek forces, and Achilles, the greatest warrior among the Greeks. Agamemnon demands that a captured Trojan girl be given to