When I was growing up, it was believed that Homer (the author of The Odyssey) was a blind black man. Was he?

Answer 1

Homer was a white family man. He was married to Margaret (Maggie) and had 2 children, Bart and Lisa.

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Answer 2

No one actually knows if 'Homer' existed or if that was merely a name given to stories collected over time, much like the stories of the Bible, authorship is debated. That said, there was/is a tradition that storytellers were blind. The thought being, what else is a blind person to do for a wage but tell stories and sing.
As for being black - - - that is a new one for me, I have heard that Jesus was most likely black but have never heard the same about Homer but it could be possible.

http://www.timelineindex.com/content/view/591
"""No one is exactly sure who Homer was. Theories abound, and some even think he never existed. Regardless, he is traditionally recognized as the original creator of two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Living sometime in the second half of the 8th century B.C., Homer was probably a minstrel - a man who traveled constantly, singing songs and telling stories. His two works were probably handed down orally for centuries before they were actually put down on paper, which means the versions we have today may or may not be close to the original.""
http://www.greektexts.com/library/Homer/index.html
"""Homer (Greek ?μηρος Homeros) was a legendary early Greek poet and rhapsode traditionally credited with authorship of the major Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War"), the corpus of Homeric Hymns, and various other lost or fragmentary works such as Margites. A few ancient authors credited him with the entire Epic Cycle, which included further poems on the Trojan War as well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and his sons.

Tradition held that Homer was blind, and various Ionian cities are claimed to be his birthplace, but otherwise his biography is a blank slate. There is considerable scholarly debate about whether or not Homer was actually a real person, or the name given to one or more oral poets who sang traditional epic material.
It has repeatedly been questioned whether the same poet was responsible for both the Iliad and the Odyssey; the Batrachomyomachia, Homeric hymns and cyclic poems are generally agreed to be later than these two epic poems""

Peace

PS Homer Simpson is Yellow not White

Answer 3

Homer is not thought to be a man so much as a way of writing controlled by the Homeridia a guild of story tellers who worked in 8Th and 7Th Centuries BCE. This would mean that the two great Homeric Epics could have been written by more than one person.

It was the Roman Emperor Hadrian who asked about Homer's parentage of the Oracle at Delphi and that the idea that he was one man began. The idea that he was blind may come from the Miss interpretation of the translation of homeros been blind in the Anatolian Greek dialect .

Wither he was Black or White is very minor in that the two stories that are attributed to Homer are classics in the Western and part of the Eastern world

Answer 4

I have read that no one really knows who Homer was, or if he even existed, because it could be that the Iliad and the Odyssey are oral traditions and someone just finally wrote them down and one man was not responsible for creating them, but many men, kind of like the argument about Shakespeare.

According to popular belief, Homer was blind; however he was also Greek and I don't think there were any black Greeks.

Answer 5

There is no evidence whatsoever that Homer actually existed. For starters, his birthplace is disputed, which is an unusual situation for a historical person in ancient Greece. Usually, the birthplace is either known (and undisputed) or unknown (but, again, undisputedly so). With Homer, neither applies. Several Greek cities bitterly argued over which one of them was Homer's birthplace. Compare this with his supposed contemporary Hesiod, whose birthplace is commonly believed to be a village near Thespiae in Boeotia.

Another hint at Homer's being a legend is the fact that he was worshiped as a demi-god in several cities, some of which claimed to be his birthplace. This makes Homer look more like Hercules than Hesiod.

The notion that Homer was blind may actually be a reflection of the fact that in Aeolian dialect of ancient Greek, "homēros" actually means "blind".

As to Homer being black, this is highly unlikely. There is no evidence that black people lived in Greece at the time. Even if they did, they would most likely be either slaves or foreigners, and neither would be revered by Greeks as a poet regardless of the quality of poetry.

Answer 6

I have never heard that Homer was black, and I very much doubt that he would have been. He was said to have been blind, but the truth is we simply don't know what he really looked like or anything else about him. Some doubt he ever existed at all. There is one famous bust of Homer, but it was crafted several hundred years after his death and not likely to be accurate.