A brief orientation
"Homer" is the name the Greeks gave to the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Whether a single historical poet by that name composed both works, whether the two were composed by different poets, and whether the texts as we have them stand at the end of a long oral tradition of bardic performance — these are the questions of what modern scholarship calls the Homeric Question, and they are open.
This entry is the figure page. The platform's full treatment of the poet and the problem is the authority cluster: Homer for the overview, the works attributed to him, oral tradition and the making of the poems, Homer and history, and the Homeric Question itself.
What is known, and what is not
What can be stated without qualification is narrow. Two long poems in dactylic hexameter survive, divided in transmission into twenty-four books each. They are the earliest substantial European literature we have. From at least the sixth century BCE the Greeks treated them as the work of one poet named Homer, and treated that poet as the head of their literature.
Everything past that is inference. The conventional eighth-century dating is a modern reconstruction from language, material culture and historical reference, not a transmitted fact. Herodotus, our most useful ancient witness, offers his own estimate — that Hesiod and Homer lived some four hundred years before him and no more (Histories 2.53) — and presents it as an argument against people who thought them older.
The ancient biographical tradition is abundant and untrustworthy. Several cities claimed him; the lists of claimants do not agree. The tradition of his blindness draws strength from the blind Phaeacian bard Demodocus in Odyssey 8, who is a character in a poem rather than a self-portrait. The surviving Lives are late compilations. Whether there was a poet named Homer at all is not something the evidence settles, and this platform does not pretend that it does.
The two poems
The Iliad takes a few weeks of the tenth and final year of the Greek war against Troy and makes its subject the wrath — mēnis — of Achilles, in around 15,700 lines. It ends with Priam ransoming Hector's body. The fall of Troy is not in it.
The Odyssey tells the homecoming — nostos — of Odysseus and the restoration of his household on Ithaca, in around 12,100 lines. It is the later poem on most current views, and it is a different kind of work: domestic where the Iliad is martial, interested in disguise, recognition, endurance and the government of a household, and structured around a hero who does not appear until its fifth book and who narrates his own adventures in retrospect.
Both were the foundation of Greek paideia for as long as there was a Greek paideia to speak of.
Why he matters for Virtue & Power
The classical philosophical tradition is unintelligible without Homer in the background. Plato's Republic spends considerable space arguing about the place of Homer in education, and the seriousness of the worry is a measure of the position the poems actually held; Aristotle treats him in the Poetics as the model of epic construction and quotes him as a moral authority elsewhere. The entire ancient inquiry into courage, war and peace, hospitality, kingship, honour and the shape of a heroic life begins with the poems and continues by arguing with them. Reading the philosophers without Homer is reading the second half of the conversation.
A note on the characters
The people in Homer's poems are not filed here. Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Circe, Athena and the rest are collected under Figures of the tradition, kept structurally apart from the historical figures in this Philosophers layer. A tradition preserving a character is not the same thing as a record attesting a person, and the library is arranged so that the difference is visible rather than assumed.