163 "Homer, the blind Greek poet" "Homer (ancient Greek ˜µηρος, Homēros) was an ancient Greek (Ionian) epic poet, traditionally considered the author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. No reliable biographical information about Homer survives from classical antiquity. The cardinal qualities of the style of Homer have been well articulated by Matthew Arnold "the translator of Homer" he says, "should above all be penetrated by a sense of the four qualities of his author that he is eminently rapid that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas and finally, that he is eminently noble. The language used by Homer is an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with admixtures from certain other dialects, such as Aeolic Greek. It later served as the basis of Epic Greek, the language of epic poetry, typically in dactylic hexameter. A number of traditions hold that he was blind (perhaps because, in the Aeolian dialect of Cyme, homēros bore this meaning) and that he was born on the island of Chios, at Smyrna or elsewhere in Ionia, where various cities vied in claiming him as one of their native sons. The characterization of Homer as a blind bard is supported by a possibly self-referential passage in the Odyssey in which a shipwrecked Odysseus listens to the tales of a blind bard named Demodocus while in the court of the Phaeacian king" -- Reference Wikipedia.org back to 163)