After the Mycenaean palaces fell around 1200 BCE, Greece entered a long Dark Age in which writing was lost and population shrank. Through those four centuries, memories of the older heroic age survived inside oral poems performed from memory by professional bards — the aoidoi. In the 8th century BCE, when the Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician, this accumulated material was set down in two monumental texts.

The Iliad concentrates on a short stretch in the final year of the siege of Troy — the wrath of Achilles — and in 15,693 hexameter lines holds together themes of mortality, honor, friendship, and loss. The Odyssey follows Odysseus on his ten-year return home after the war, a meditation on encounter with the unknown, cunning, and loyalty. Together the two poems would set the thematic and formal scaffolding of the Western literary tradition for the next three millennia.

Whether Homer existed as a single historical poet is debated. One bard, the name of a tradition, or two distinct authors for the two poems? Seven cities since antiquity — Smyrna, Chios, Colophon among them — claimed his birth; most place him somewhere on the Ionian coast of Anatolia. The language of the poems is the Ionic dialect of Greek, which makes the Anatolian coastal cities the most likely candidates.

The siege of Troy described in the Iliad may be a distant echo of a real conflict around 1200 BCE at the mound of Hisarlık — modern Çanakkale, in northwest Turkey. Heinrich Schliemann's excavations in the 1870s proved the city was real, though no evidence has confirmed a war of Homeric scale. The poems do not so much report history as build a world: a world where gods and mortals intersect, heroism pays its own price, and the memory of the late Bronze Age survives in cadenced verse.