Remember back in school when you had to struggle through the “the Iliad” and its companion, “the Odyssey”?

Both written back Greek writer Homer……who is also famous for perpetrating the myth of Atlantis……sure you remember….all those long hours of wading through illusions and such that were……at best….mind numbing.

Yes, I know they are all Classics!  But what about the man, the writer, Homer?

When we think of The Iliad and The Odyssey, we shouldn’t give credit to a single man, says a historian: “It’s a mistake to think of Homer as a person,” historian Adam Nicolson tells National Geographic. “Homer is an ‘it.’ A tradition. An entire culture coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of telling stories that are important to it,” adds the author of Why Homer Matters. Modern readers want to know the story of individual writers, but “Homer has no biography,” Nicolson says. He also argues that the works may have emerged some 1,200 years before many historians say Homer lived; he dates the epic poems to around 2000 BC.

He supports his theory by noting that parts of Homeric stories “are shared among the Indo-European world as a whole, all the way from north India through Greece to Germanic and Icelandic stories.” What’s more, Greece, in TheIliad, is full of “barbarians,” and that description “doesn’t make sense any later than about 1800 to 1700 BC.” The works combine the “hero-based culture of the Eurasian steppes” with the “sophisticated, authoritarian, and literate cities and palaces of the eastern Mediterranean,” Nicolson writes, as Guardian reviewer Charlotte Higgins notes. Meanwhile, the Washington Post observes that questions over Homer’s existence, or lack thereof, aren’t new; no “reliable historical information” exists about the poet, Terrence McCoy writes.

Will this make a difference?  Probably not!  They will always be classics…..and will be required reading….but the man may not have been the MAN!