Remember book reports? You were supposed to put down the name of the author and when it was written. These are elementary factoids, but for The Iliad, each of those ridiculously simple questions take pages to answer. Fortunately, the answers are really damn interesting.
Who was Homer? Um, well, we know that he was a bard, and that at some point he was elderly. Although it's his name on the cover, most people will readily admit that Homer had little to do with the actual creation of The Iliad, or with any other mythology for that matter. You see, although The Iliad may have been written down at about 750 BC, it's pretty obvious it's a much older story than that, older than its surrounding mythology and older than its companion poem, The Odyssey. How can we tell? There are a bunch of cool ways.
One way is by exploring themes of gender. Some of the women in The Iliad are damn strong characters. For example, Hecuba, whom for some reason I had always thought of as wishy-washy, shouts at everyone that a suitable punishment for Achilles would be for her to tear his liver out with her teeth. Dude.
That would definitely not be acceptable in real life at the time The Iliad was being recited. In fact, dental disembowelment still isn't legal (thank God). Another interesting point is that Andromache, essentially a calm housewife, has a name that means "fights like a man" (andros=man + mache=fight). This suggests that at one point in the tale she had been a warrior, but retellings since shaped the epic to reflect the increasingly patriarchal Greek society. Given her company of the powerful prophetess Cassandra and the Amazon queen Penthesilea, this isn't too surprising.
Retellings of The Iliad since it was written down also change the role of women. Eurpides, writing hundreds of years later, systematically demeaned and disempowered the female heroes of that poem. In his drama The Trojan Women you find Queen "The Ripper" Hecuba reduced to telling Helen that if she didn't commit suicide after being raped by Paris, she obviously wanted it. This made a twisted sort of sense to Euripides, who was living in the wonderful world of absolute Athenian gender slavery.
Another way of telling the age of The Iliad is the fact that Athens sabotaged it. In "The Catalogue of Ships," the Athenians were included as contributing to the anti-Trojan force, when in reality they weren't even around at the time. Call it patriotic revisionism.
Last, it's of note that human sacrifice is a popular method of problem-solving in The Iliad. Its 750 BC audience wouldn't have found that quite so normal.
But back to the other question: who was Homer? Legend has us believe him to be blind, and that's not such a bad assumption. In order to show you why, first you'll have to know something about the poem's structure and conception. Go fetch a hard copy of The Iliad and plunk it down on your desk. Then pick it up again and feel its weight. Long, eh?
It's improv.
Yup, Homer, like all bards of his time, was the master of thinking on his feet. Sure, great long parts of it were memorised, but the poem had to be in strict iambic hexameter. So you're singing merrily along and you suddenly realise that your last line is "Hector"---four syllables short! If you were in ancient Greece, all you'd have to do would be to reach into your bag of stock titles and similes and pull out something like "tamer of horses." That's why, incidently, you have to go through so many damn descriptions of Dawn's "rosy fingers."
Back to the blindness. It's been said that a good reason for thinking Homer couldn't see is because there isn't a lot of visual imagery there, and when there is, it would be under the part that was learned and memorised, not the improvised part he made up himself, and even so, visuals are scarce. When Hector's horsehair helmet scares his son, the main reason you know this is because the poor kid is screaming. Most warriors are given audial or intangible titles like "of the loud war-cry" or "glory of the Greeks." Nifty, eh?
So now when anybody asks you "Hey, who wrote that book you're reading? Is it kinda old?" you can barrage them with a slough of half-useless information, thus dazzling them with your obscure intellect.