Homer and the Greek Epics

For four centuries after the Bronze Age collapse, Greeks had no writing at all. The Iliad and the Odyssey were composed and carried in memory across that gap by singers using formulas and repeated phrases as scaffolding, and were written down only once the alphabet arrived. They gave scattered, quarrelsome Greek cities a shared past, a shared pantheon, and a shared idea of what a person could be. Greeks who agreed on nothing else could quote Homer, and every Greek achievement afterward argued with him.