Epic discovery: Homer was a woman!

New Delhi: This can be called the epic of all controversies. The debate over whether Homer, the creator of The Iliad and The Odyssey, actually existed or whether he was one person, has now got extended to a dispute over the poet's gender.

According to a report published in Times, London, the greatest poet of the seventh century could, in fact, be a woman.

Homer, who created the oldest literature in Greek language, may have been a woman, says Andrew Dalby, a historian and specialist in oral literature. He has challenged the accepted gender of one of the most influential writers of all time.

The theory is the centerpiece of Dalby's latest, yet to be published book, Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic.

Though most of Dalby's argument is based on speculations and assumptions, the book nonetheless is a thrilling read. He raises new questions about Homer's identity, follows the growth of Troy and retraces the history of those who recreated Homer's poems over the generations.

Dalby also reasons that women have long since been known as makers of oral tradition, citing Sappho, the best-known female poet of ancient Greece, who became the first-named poet in the world.

The scholar comes out with a powerful case on how the earlier evidence was wrongly read and that both The Iliad and The Odyssey are the works of a single, woman poet.

He justifies his conclusions by saying that there was never any evidence to support the theory that Homer was a man. He adds that there is more depth in the way the war has been described and the feelings of the women characters in the poems are dealt with more subtly and thus could be the work of a woman.

Dalby is of course ready for severe criticism and objections to his assumptions and conclusions but says in his own defence that no early author has ever described the composer of these two poems, let alone give the poet a sex or even a name.

He says the idea that Homer was the author was first proposed in an ill-informed post-classical text, The Anonymous Life of Homer, fraudulently ascribed to Herodotus.

Scholars are still divided over whether Homer ever existed and whether he was one person, but it is clear that the poems The Iliad and The Odyssey spring from a long tradition of oral poetry.

The Iliad, set during the Trojan War, tells the story of the wrath of Achilles, while The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus as he travels home from the war.