Who was Homer, author of the ‘Odyssey’?

Homer, obviously: that is what we’ve been told since the late 6th century BCE, when ancient Greeks started crediting the Odyssey to a blind bard from the rocky isle of Chios. When the Odyssey first began to circulate in ancient Greece, no one knew its author. ‘Homer’ and the HomeridaeBut how was a poem without an author attributed to Homer? This line comes from Hymn to Apollo , a poem from the late 6th century BCE, which, like the Odyssey, was attributed to Homer in antiquity. But as the Hellenist Martin West argued , this little-known forger might be responsible for the legend of its author, Homer, the supreme poet.