Who is the most overrated person in history?

In the first of a new monthly series, we asked an expert team of historians to tackle one of the big questions about the past

- ISABEL KING

Homer

Composite figment of imaginations

The writer credited with composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, and often regarded as one of the most important authors of all time, is to my mind the most overrated historical figure. That's mostly because it's likely that there was no one person called Homer.

Careful study of those works, as well as other surviving epic fragments, has shown that they weren't written at a single time by one person (see Michael Wood's column on page 16 for a different view). Instead, it is likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed over generations by poetry performers known as rhapsodes. Each of these improved on the work of their predecessors, curating these epics and honing them to a point of perfection. From that time, probably around 700 BC, these works started to be transmitted in a more stable format. By around 550-500 BC, they were written down for the first time.

By then, the belief was circulating that their genesis lay with one particular poet, Homer - not least because the idea of a single, genius author is simpler and more attractive than a slow process of evolution involving hundreds.

A whole narrative was woven about the likely fictitious Homer: that he lived on Chios, that he was blind, even that he may have had some divine parentage.

In fact, the notional Homer became so popular that later rhapsodes, doing performances of these now 'finished', stable poems, liked to claim themselves as 'sons of Homer' to give themselves more gravitas and fame. Ancient historians even wrote biographies of Homer as a historical figure, and busts were created of him. Yet, as a single man, he probably never existed at all.

Charles Dickens