Who is Homer?

From a grammar school child's paper found on the Web...

Homer was a Greek poet and lived around 700 BC, in the Archaic period in Greece, but we don't know where in Greece he lived exactly. People said he was blind, but poets were often said to have been blind because people think that being blind helps the poets to "see" things other people can't, like to know what the gods are doing.

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.

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.

The Odyssey is the story of King Odysseus' return from the Trojan War to his kingdom of Ithaca, a small island on the far side of Greece from Troy.

Odysseus (oh-DISS-ee-us) had a lot of trouble getting home, because the gods were angry at him and he did not respect their power. First he sailed from Troy with many ships and a lot of gold and slaves and stuff he had taken from Troy, and many men from Ithaca who had followed him to war.

But he ran into trouble with the first island he stopped at on the way home, and continued to have trouble, especially with the god Poseidon, the rest of the way. Finally the goddess Athena helped him to get home.

Why was Homer important on our trip?

Because Kevin was reading about the Peloponnesian war, he purchased a small bust of Homer at a shop in Mourtos. The little Homer became our ship's mascot. Homer could be found taped to the navigation station overseeing our trip, he joined us for dinners at local tavernas, and he was always on our land excursions. One night, after much Mythos, we somehow drew the analogy to "Where's Waldo" and the trip became the "Where's Homer Tour". Mythos can be very inspirational.

However, because of Homer's ties to the Ionian Islands, and our planned travel from the Ionian Sea through the Corinth Canal into the Saronic Gulf of the Aegean, Kevin undertook a search for Pericles, the leader of Athens. Little Homer was soon joined by busts of Poseidon, Pericles, and Zeus. "The Boys" were given a prominent spot in Didimos' cabin.