Two of the world's most famous poems are the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad is the story of the Trojan War. The Odyssey is the story of the wanderings of the Greek hero Ulysses after the Trojan War. The poems are so long that each one fills an entire book.
The author of these poems, Greek legends say, was a blind poet named Homer. But no one knows anything about Homer. No one knows when or where he was born. There are pictures and busts of Homer, but they are based only on imagination. Some people think that there never was such a person. Other people think that Homer really lived but that he did not write the poems. They believe that he was a minstrel who went about singing poems that had been made up in earlier times. It is surely true that the Greeks told the stories of Ulysses and the Trojan War long before anyone wrote them down.
Whether there ever was a Homer does not really matter. For we have the poems, and they are two of the greatest poems of their kind ever written. They have lived for more than 2,500 years and are still widely read.
