| Summary: | Homer’s authority is everywhere in the ancient world; from biography to history, art and literature, yet the two poems which have come down to us under his name tell us nothing about their author. Unlike their near contemporary Hesiod, who is very forthcoming about biographical details and family quarrels, neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey – though they contain plenty of first person pronouns referring to the ‘poet’ – give us anything like that kind of detail.1 Presumably this helped to make his later biographical tradition so rich and contested, but it poses an interesting problem for any interpreter of Homeric poetry: why, in a world in which who you are matters as much as what you say, is this absent figure granted so much authority? What is it about his poetry that makes Homer such a uniquely trusted figure in the history of ancient narrative? Though modern scholars have approached this question from a number of angles, the particular approach in this chapter has not, to my knowledge, been explored before, or at least not in this way. And that is perhaps rather fitting for the strategy with which we are concerned.
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