Was Homer a real person? Michael Wood on the surprising origins of The Iliad

" Scholars have applied models used in genetic research to Homer’s Iliad", writes Michael Wood

An illustration showing a man dressed in a pale blue robe, and a red hat. He has curly brown hair and a thick beard. He is speaking and large waves with ships on them are coming out of his mouth

Published: February 4, 2026 at 3:30 PM

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Proust’s famous novel is called In Search of Lost Time, and isn’t that the key to why we love history? It’s the urge to recover the lost past. Can we get beyond the mysterious veil to real events and people? Can we even feel how they felt? And as historians, we always hope to find new sources and new ways of seeing.

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In our time, many new paths have been opened up by science. For example, scientists have adopted techniques used for decoding the genetic history of humans, not only through their genes, but by tracking transformations in language. This form of historical linguistics, known as time depth linguistics, has helped establish the family tree of languages. One branch, the Indo-European languages, has been known since the 18th century, connecting Greek, Latin, Persian and Sanskrit in the east, and English, Welsh and Old Irish in the west. Now we can see when and where the branches on the family tree diverged. It’s been proved, for example, that, as tradition had always said, Sanskrit-speaking migrants – so called ‘Aryans’ – migrated from Afghanistan into north-west India in the late Bronze Age, the period of the earliest Sanskrit texts in the Rig Veda.

Scholars have applied the same models used in genetic research to one of the most celebrated texts in western culture, Homer’s Iliad. As a tool kit, they used word lists invented by the linguist Morris Swadesh (1909–67) and other scholars. In this case the focus was key words shared among the Indo-European languages. With the Iliad, science came up with a likely date of composition: 762 BC (plus or minus 50 years). The exactness is perhaps illusory: but it corroborates the older ideas of Homeric scholars that the poem dates from the eighth century BC.

It has long been known that the Iliad is the product of oral composition, a tissue of repeat phrases that allowed the poet to improvise his story. In fact, the Homeric epics came out of centuries of oral transmission. The heroes’ weapons are of bronze, though Homer lived in the Iron Age; Ajax’s tower shield comes from the middle Bronze Age, Odysseus’s “silver studded sword” is of the late Bronze Age. Conversely, you could argue that the story of the wooden horse comes not from the likely time of the Trojan War (just after 1300 BC?) but from the eighth century BC, when the new technology of siege warfare included wheeled engines shaped like a giant bull, inside which men worked a battering ram. Was this a brilliant invention by the poet, introducing a piece of modern technology as a plot device and a metaphor? It all emphasises how the poem came at the end of a long process of invention and performance.

Another aspect of Homer that has come to the fore in the last few years is his debt to near eastern storytelling, borrowing stories and motifs from the Epic of Gilgamesh and other myths from Mesopotamia. These came from versions in Hurrian, Ugaritic and Hittite, transmitted by travelling bards and minstrels at local courts, religious fairs and festivals.

That’s where Homer comes in. It is now thought Homer was a single person, an itinerant bard composing and singing his stories towards 700 BC, perhaps as tradition said, in Smyrna, or on the nearby island of Chios. Whether blind or not in old age, he must have seen some of the local scenes he so minutely describes, like the flocks of geese and cranes, and long-necked swans “rising and circling noisily, rejoicing in their wings by the streams of the Cayster in the meadow of Asia”.

The text we have was first written down a century or so after his death, perhaps towards 600 BC, and from then on it was performed annually at festivals in Athens. In the tones and accents, it retained the tell-tale signs of the generations of sung oral performance that lay behind it. Homer’s text reached the form in which we know it in around 200 BC, though marginal notes in later manuscripts preserve alternative readings, some of which, like shards of memory, pass down no-longer-understood words of Bronze Age origin, or reflect ancient variants in the long storytelling tradition.

That, of course, continues, giving birth to countless new tellings, in books, poems, films and video games, as the tale continues to spread and multiply across the world. And now, like tree-ring dating, we have another window on the first work of European literature.

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This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine

Authors

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester

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