There was little doubt in antiquity that Homer existed. The author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two very different works that, in the words of the Berkeley classicist James I. Porter, “complement each other like a pair of gloves,” was considered as real as the next poet. The fact that no one knew for sure who he was or where he came from—or even whether “he” was a he at all—was less an inconvenience than an opportunity.

A great many theories about the poet’s identity emerged down the centuries. For some ancient authors it was obvious that Homer was the son of a river god and a nymph. Only someone with divine blood would be capable of producing such masterpieces. Other writers mined the epic poems for clues to his parentage, alighting upon Phemius, the talented court poet of Ithaca in the Odyssey, as his potential father and wise, doddering Nestor as his maternal grandfather. There was, as Porter says in his new book on the poet, Homer: The Very Idea, a “long lineup of suspects.”

Only someone with divine blood would be capable of producing such masterpieces.

What couldn’t be interpolated from the epics was sought in the poet’s own name. “Homer” was hardly “John Smith” in ancient Greece. From very early on, it was surmised that it was merely a sobriquet, a nickname, and that it must as such have reflected some attribute of the