When was the Iliad discovered?
It was never discovered, it has been a continuous part of Western Culture since it’s composition some 800 years before Christ. It immediately spread throught the Greek world and became as much of a cultural touchstone to them as the Bible is to us. The Greeks spread all through the dominions of Alexander the Great and, as the became a profound cultural influence on Rome, to the Western Roman dominions. No Roman of the imperial period, or even the lat erepublic, would consider himself educated if he had not memorized large parts of both poems, if not there entireties. When the Roman Empire fell, the works of Homer were two books which were not lost in the ensuing chaos but indeed became the basis for education in the Dark Ages. They have always been there, always informing our defdinition of ourselves, even when we did not know it.
