The Works of Homer: The Homeric Hymns, the Iliad, and the Odyssey

The Homeric Hymns are a collection of Ancient Greek hymns celebrating individual gods. They were uncritically attributed to Homer himself in Antiquity—from the earliest written reference to them, Thucydides (iii.104)—and the label has stuck. "The whole collection, as a collection, is Homeric in the only useful sense that can be put upon the word;" The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles. The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second oldest extant work of Western literature, the Iliad being the first. It is believed to have been composed near the end of the 8th century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the Greek coastal region of Anatolia.