Existing comment:
Roman
Head of Homer, ca 2nd century
"I cannot lay down a firm foundation for praising Homer as there is nothing but the poems themselves."
-- Lucian (2nd century)
No one knows whether a single author wrote the Iliad and Odyssey, but centuries after they thought Homer had lived, the Greeks created a portrait of an old man with deeply set eyes and parted lips. This portrait, a Roman version of a Hellenistic Greek original, reflects the literary tradition that Homer was a blind seer-poet and a wandering bard who sang his poems to an audience that had yet to learn to write. |