The Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic poems attributed to a blind poet named Homer, record the adventures of the great heroes of ancient Greece who fought in the Trojan War. They are, to date, the two oldest known pieces

of literature from Europe. They are not the oldest poems in the world— the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh is certainly older—but these works date to the time when the Greek writing system appeared more than 2,500 years ago.

The profound age of these epics led to a number of questions concerning their origins and creation. Do they recount history or fantasy? How old are they? Who wrote them, and how? Who was Homer, and was he really blind?