Greek literature contains two epics
known as the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Greeks b
elieved
believed a storyteller
named Homer
wrote the poems about 1200 years before the Common Era (or before
the birth of Jesus Christ). We don't know much about Homer,
we don't even know he existed, but the poems do give us an insight
into early Greek civilization.
The ancient Greeks considered the
Iliad and the Odyssey great ancient classical literature
in the sixth century before the common era. The poems' dialect suggest
that Homer came from Ionia, on the western coast of the modern nation
of Turkey. Greek legends suggest that Homer was blind, but the vivid
imagery of the Iliad and the Odyssey suggest that
the author of the poems must have had sight at some point in his
life. Modern scholars believe that the poems were based on oral
legends, but they contain almost 28,000 verses, so they had to have
been written down at some point, because few people could memorize
that many verses. This tells us that the Greeks had some form of
writing long before their civilization flourished.
Ancient Greece