The Birth of Literature: When Stories Were Still Made of Air—And Why Homer Probably Never Existed

 

There are moments in history so distant and hazy that they feel closer to legend than to anything resembling fact. And yet, somewhere in that mist—around the eighth century BCE—a spark caught fire that would become what we now call literature. Granted back then, it had nothing to do with books, not even with scrolls or words on a page.

There was only a voice, a rhythm, a lyre, and an audience gathered under an open sky.

The earliest literary works of in the so-called West did not emerge from scribes hunched over desks but from performance: A singer standing before a crowd at a religious festival, plucking a lyre, chanting the deeds of heroes.

Before Literature Was Written—When It Was Simply Sung

Imagine a society that had a writing system—Mycenaean Greeks certainly did – but used it strictly for bureaucratic minutiae. Grain receipts, inventories, administrative details. When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet in the mid–8th century BCE, they certainly had a necessary tool to put their stories into writing. Yet, no one seems to have used it that way. Not then.

The literary culture of the archaic age was fully oral. Works were composed, transmitted, and “published” through live performance. To “release” a poem meant to stand before a festival crowd and recite it—once, emphatically, without revisions. Literature was event-based, occasion-driven, inseparable from the social contexts that produced it.

The earliest epics existed in a kind of fluid continuum. Poets drew on shared mythic material—the Trojan War, the wanderings of Odysseus—recombining and reshaping it with each performance. There was no definitive text, only an evolving repertoire.

Homer: The Author Who Probably Wasn’t an Author

No wonder, that scholars have wrestled with the Homeric Question for centuries: Was he one poet, many poets, or a convenient fiction invented to provide authorship to anonymous traditions?

The safest academic answer is also somewhat of a fink-out: Homer was not an author in the modern sense.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are best understood as the end-products of a long oral tradition, eventually stabilized and perhaps lightly edited by one or more skilled performers. The “author” Homer is less a historical figure than a symbolic signature—a way of naming the collective memory of the Greek world.

Ancient biographers tried to fill the gaps. They deduced Homer’s life from his poems, imagined him blind (because two singers in the Odyssey are blind), and claimed a dozen different cities as his birthplace. These accounts are rich, inventive, and almost certainly fictional.

Yet the symbol mattered: Homer belonged to all Greeks. He was a pan-Hellenic inheritance, a cultural anchor.

Epic as Public Performance: Music, Myth, and Cultural Ideology

The epic genre in archaic Greece was a public institution. Performances occurred at festivals—panēgyreis—where the community gathered to honour gods and to witness excellence. The poet competed in an agon, a contest with symbolic stakes similar to athletic games.

The form of epic itself shaped the experience. The Hexameter verse for example provided rhythmic stability. A single singer (aoidos) recited or chanted the narrative. A lyre or phorminx offered musical accompaniment, never dominating but reinforcing the cadence. And then the content of the tale? Mostly Myths – that served edutainment.

Epic poetry instructed its audience in aristocratic values: bravery, honour, generosity, reverence for the gods. It provided models of behaviour. For example: Achilles as the ideal warrior and Odysseus as the cunning strategist. In this sense, epic functioned as a cultural encyclopaedia, offering a shared framework for identity.

A Genre Shaped by Occasion

Ancient literary genres were not abstract categories but institutions tied to specific circumstances. Epic belonged to the festival; tragedy to the Athenian theatre and its civic-religious calendar; lyric to weddings, funerals, drinking parties, and communal hymns.

Each genre had predictable forms (meter, language, structure), expected themes, and a characteristic social setting. Lyric poetry, for instance, was not simply “short” or “emotional”. It was verse performed with music in a specific context. Tragedy was not merely sad drama; it was a civic ritual performed once at a festival in honour of Dionysus.

From Voice to Page: The Rise of the Book

It was only after the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE), in the Hellenistic period, that a full book culture emerged. Scholars in Alexandria, philologists before the word existed, collected, catalogued, and edited Greek literature. They turned fluid oral traditions into fixed texts. They created critical editions, commentaries, and reference works. As such the library at Alexandria did not invent Homer, but it did canonize him. In doing so, it transformed literature from an ephemeral performance into a durable object.

 

More about literary history: 

• The Life of Literature Beyond the Page -  Between Definition, Context, and Reception
• From Black Death to Bedtime Stories - Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron made the novella sexy, scandalous, and unforgettable
• Kisses, Contradictions, and the Prince of Poets - Ronsard and the Sweet Games of Petrarchism 
• The Long Game of Love: From Troubadours to Petrarch