[Verginius Rufus]

Never heard of Adam Nicolson before. 1000 years before the commonly estimated date of Homer would be before the Trojan War.

Whoever wrote this piece seems unaware of all the work that has been done on oral poetry since the 1920s by Milman Parry, Albert Bates Lord and many other scholars. Homer would have been illiterate. Whether the same poet created the Iliad and the Odyssey is still debated.

There were performers of epic poetry called Homeridae who claimed to be descendants of Homer but whether he really existed is unknown.

Archilochus of Paros was active in the mid-600s and we know something about him. If Homer was as late as the 7th century we probably would know something definite about him.

[nicollo]

If Herodotus said that Homer did not write any of the other Epic Cycle poems, would that not point to Homer’s authorship of the two attributed to him?