HOMER Homer is not a man known to have existed, to whom the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey is imputed. Homer is the author of the Homeric poems, a hypothesis constructed to account for their existence and quality. There were several “Lives of Homer” in antiquity. Their date is uncertain, but the Homer they present is certainly a figure of romance and conjecture. Seven cities, though not always the same seven, are recorded as claiming to be the birth-place of Homer; six centuries