The most influential author of the ancient world might never have existed. With no birth records, letters, or verifiable documents, reconstructing the life of Homer becomes a forensic detective story. This episode examines the legends the Greeks invented, the strange clues buried inside the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the modern fieldwork that finally explained who or what Homer really was.

We start with the blind bard of Ionia, the cities that competed to claim him, the claims that he descended from Apollo or was the son of Telemachus, and the tale that he died of frustration over a fishermen’s riddle about lice. Then we put the text under a microscope: a mashup dialect nobody ever spoke, boar’s-tusk helmets beside Iron Age cremations, and shields from centuries apart. We trace the Homeric Question from Friedrich August Wolf’s 1795 bombshell through the war between analysts and Unitarians, to Milman Parry and Albert Lord recording living bards in the Balkans and discovering the oral-formulaic method.

• Why the ancients gave a demigod poet an embarrassing death story
• How anachronisms in the poems reveal a story snowballing across centuries
• Why rosy-fingered dawn and crafty Odysseus were memory hacks for dactylic hexameter
• How dictation to a scribe may have allowed the epics to expand into their final form
• The theory that the name Homer means he who fits the song together