Homer - Ancient Greece for Kids


To the classical Greeks, Homer's epics played very much the same role that the Bible plays for a lot of people today. People memorized big chunks of Homer's writings in school, and they repeated bits of it in order to convince other people to do something or think something.
Homer lived around 700 BC, in the Archaic period in Greece. We don't know where in Greece he lived exactly. People said he was blind, but poets were often said to have been blind, so this might not be true (people say poets are blind because they think that being blind helps the poets to "see" things other people can't, like to know what the gods are doing).

When Homer was born, the Greeks had just recently learned how to use the alphabet from the Phoenicians. Homer used the alphabet to write down two long epic poems called the Iliad and the Odyssey. Probably Homer didn't make up these stories, or even the words, himself. Poets or bards had been going around Greece telling these stories for hundreds of years already. But Homer wrote them down, and gave them their final form. Probably he also did a lot of work on them, to make them as good as they are.

To find out more about Homer, check out these books from Amazon or from your library:






The Iliad
The Odyssey
Greek literature
Ancient Greece
Kidipede home page

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