I found this bit of trivia interesting...

Samuel Butler, the author of The Way of All Flesh, and Erewhon, believed that The Odyssey was written by a Sicilian woman, not Homer. According to Butler, The Odyssey takes places on the coast of Sicily, rather than Greece. Butler investigates this theory in the work The Authoress of The Odyssey. Interestingly, Robert Graves, the famous poet and author of I, Claudius agreed, and further investigated this theory in this novel Homer's Daughter.

Perhaps I'm new to this game, but I thought Homer was generally considered to be THE writer of his works, unlike Shakespeare, who, depending on the week, can be the Earl of Oxford, a woman, a Catholic, etc. Homer as a woman...who knew?

Comments

  1. I remembered reading a couple essays on the side about this when I took an undergrad classics course. Since so little is known or even guessed of Homer's actual life, a common joke has it that the poems were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name, and the classical scholar Richmond Lattimore, author of well regarded poetic translations to English of both epics, once wrote a paper entitled "Homer: Who Was She?"

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