Life of Homer (Pseudo-Herodotus)

The Life of Homer, whose unknown author is referred to as Pseudo-Herodotus, is one among several ancient biographies of the Greek epic poet, Homer. It is distinguished from the others by the fact that it contains, in its first lines, the claim to have been compiled by the early historian Herodotus:

Herodotus of Halicarnassus wrote the following history of Homer's background, upbringing and life, and sought to make his account complete and absolutely reliable.

Despite being written in the Ionic dialect, it is not generally, and has not been since a time before the publication of books, considered to be the work of Herodotus and therefore according to current scholarly conventions the author merits the name "Pseudo-Herodotus." Although used in this context as a proper name, it is also used as a common name, "the pseudo-Herodotus," whenever a writer questions the authorship of any or any part of the writings of Herodotus.

The text concludes with a calculation showing that Homer was born 168 years after the Trojan War and 622 years before Xerxes I of Persia (a major figure in the real Herodotus's Histories) invaded Greece. That invasion took place in 480 BC; by this calculation, therefore, Homer was born in 1102 BC. This contradicts the estimate given by the real Herodotus, that Homer lived "not more than 400 years before our own time", thus around 850 BC.

The invalidation of the author's stated identity threatens to disqualify the work's entire project, including all of the biographical claims made by the author about Homer. What, if anything, within the work can be retained in light of the author's apparent illegitimacy is a question that has been debated throughout classical scholarship.

The most skeptical interpretation is that the text is patently false. It was, in this view, written long after Herodotus' time, perhaps in the 3rd or 4th centuries AD, when there was apparently an audience for literary pastiches, such as the Letters of Alciphron, and fraudulent attributions, as in the Historia Augusta (Lefkowitz 1981, p. 20). Thus the Life of Homer would be best treated as historical fiction.

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