The monthly biography and author timeline has been useful to me, in terms of organizing when people wrote and what experiences helped to develop them. For instance, I'd been vaguely aware that the Great Books authors were clumped in certain times and places but I hadn't realized just how distinct that 'clumping' was until I broke it all down. Now that I've seen that I can wonder what happened to make Ancient Greece, Enlightened Paris, etc., so special.
Anyway, the process doesn't work as well with Homer. The joke is that after many years of study, some scholars have determined that Homer didn't actually create his epic poems. They were done by a different man with the same name. (Ba-dum-bum!) In short, we don't really know anything about the author. There is some dispute if both of the epic poems were created by the same man, but there is wide belief that they were.
We have traces of written Greek language dating back to 1400 BC (according to Wikipedia) but the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' weren't actually written down until the 6th century or so, a century or two after they were believed to have been developed. Before then they were passed down by word of mouth.
There is reason to believe that Homer may have been blind. There is also a theory that 'Homer' is a title similar to that of 'bard'. In short, we don't know anything about the author except a very large time frame in which he worked. Unless we get time travel, we almost certainly never will.
But man, what a legacy!
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