Who is Homer?
From a grammar school child’s paper found on the Web… Homer was a Greek poet and lived around 700 BC, in the Archaic period in Greece, but we don’t know where in Greece he lived exactly. People said he was blind, but poets were often said to have been blind because people think that being blind helps the poets to “see” things other people can’t, like to know what the gods are doing. To the classical Greeks, Homer’s epics played very much the same role that the Bible plays for a lot of people today. People memorized big chunks of Homer’s writings in school, and they repeated bits of it in order to convince other people to do something or think something. When Homer was born, the Greeks had just recently learned how to use the alphabet from the Phoenicians. Homer used the alphabet to write down two long epic poems called the Iliad and the Odyssey. Probably Homer didn’t make up these stories, or even the words, himself. Poets or bards had been going around Greece telling these stories f
