The works attributed to Homer

Ancient attribution was generous. At various points antiquity credited Homer with the two great epics, a collection of hymns, several of the poems of the Trojan cycle, a mock-epic about frogs and mice, and assorted minor pieces. Modern scholarship credits him — insofar as it credits a “him” at all — with two. Knowing which is which matters directly for reading the Odyssey, because a great deal of what readers believe to be Homeric is not in Homer.

The Iliad

Roughly 15,700 lines in twenty-four books. The subject announced in the first line is not the war but the wrath — mēnis — of Achilles, and the poem covers a span of some weeks in the tenth and final year of the siege. It ends with the ransom of Hector’s body by his father Priam. The fall of Troy is not narrated in it. Neither is the death of Achilles, the wooden horse, or the sack of the city; all of those belong to other poems or to later tradition.

See the Iliad and Understanding the Iliad.

The Odyssey

Roughly 12,100 lines in twenty-four books, on the homecoming — nostos — of Odysseus and the restoration of his household on Ithaca. It is a later poem than the Iliad in the judgement of most specialists, and the two differ in temperament, structure, vocabulary and moral interest enough that the question of common authorship has been argued since antiquity. The ancient scholars who held that the two poems had different authors were known as the chorizontes, the “separators”; Aristarchus argued against them.

See the Odyssey, Iliad and Odyssey and the book-by-book guide.

The Homeric Hymns

A collection of thirty-three hexameter poems addressed to individual gods, ranging from a few lines to several hundred. They are called Homeric because they are in the same metre and the same traditional diction, and because antiquity sometimes attached Homer’s name to them. They are not by the poet of the epics on any current view, and they span a considerable period. The longer ones — to Demeter, to Apollo, to Hermes, to Aphrodite — are major literary works in their own right and are our principal early evidence for several myths.

For the Odyssey cluster their relevance is mainly negative: they are a common source of stories that readers then attribute to Homer’s epics, where those stories do not appear.

The Epic Cycle

A set of poems that filled in the Trojan story before, around and after the Iliad — the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the Little Iliad, the Iliou Persis (Sack of Troy), the Nostoi (Homecomings) and the Telegony. They survive only in fragments, in the summaries of the grammarian Proclus, and in later authors who used them. Ancient tradition attributed some of them to Homer at various times; the attributions are inconsistent and are not accepted now.

This matters more than it sounds. A great deal of the Trojan material that feels canonical comes from the Cycle or from later authors, not from Homer:

• The judgement of Paris, in the form usually retold, and the beginning of the war — Cypria.
• The death of Achilles at the hands of Paris and Apollo — Aethiopis / Little Iliad, not the Iliad.
• The wooden horse. It is referred to in the Odyssey — sung by Demodocus at Odyssey 8.499–520 and recalled by Menelaus at 4.271–289 — but it is narrated at length in the Iliou Persis and, for most later readers, in Aeneid 2.
• Sinon, the Greek who persuades the Trojans to take the horse inside, is a figure of the Cycle and above all of Virgil. He is not a character in either Homeric poem.
• Later wanderings and death of Odysseus, and the son by Circe who kills him — Telegony.

Whenever this platform cites a tradition, it names the source that preserves it. That is why every entry under Figures of the tradition carries a list of which ancient text carries which version, instead of running them together into a single biography.

The Batrachomyomachia and the minor attributions

The Batrachomyomachia, a short mock-epic on a battle between frogs and mice, was attributed to Homer in antiquity and is certainly not his; it is a later parody that depends on the epics being universally known. A group of minor poems, the so called Margites among them, were also attached to his name at various times. Aristotle took the Margites seriously enough to discuss it as a comic ancestor in the Poetics. None of this material is Homeric in the sense that matters.

Why the boundary is worth policing

Most popular retellings of “Homer” are really retellings of a composite: Homer plus the Cycle plus Virgil plus Ovid plus Renaissance and modern reworkings. That composite is a legitimate object of study — it is what the tradition actually transmitted — but it is not the poem. When an adaptation is judged against “Homer”, the first question is always which Homer is meant, and the second is whether the element in question is in the epics at all.

Our analysis of the 2026 film applies exactly this test. Some of what the film has been criticised for adding is not an addition to the tradition but an import from a different and later part of it — which is a real change to a specific poem, and a different kind of change from invention. See Homer versus the film.