Was Homer a she or a they?

Reading Homer for the first time is like watching Athena crack out of Zeus’ skull fully armed or like opening the caves at Lascaux and discovering the Sistine Chapel ceiling inside. He arrives on the field of literature like a meteorite out of a cloudless sky, our very own qibla, our inscrutable Black Stone. That the first surviving Western poetry, born within a generation or two of the alphabet, should also be so well-achieved is astonishing. There is nothing tentative about the opening books of the Iliad or the Odyssey, no indication that these are literature’s first faltering steps; and there is no sense as we travel through the length of his narrative that there is anything more for poetry to achieve. When we have stopped marvelling, however, we are left with an aporia. If it is the ordinary function of a classic to obliterate local frames of reference and smooth away points of critical purchase, how much more difficult is it to place Homer, the first classic, who materialises out of nowhere, without juvenilia or antecedents, or any kind of poetic hinterland to help comprehend his project. Later traditions about Homer are quite unreliable. What we definitely know about him amounts to nothing at all. He might belong to the mainland or to Italy, to Cyprus or Syria even, rather than Anatolia. He might have lived two hundred years later than we imagine, or five hundred years before. We don’t even know if he is a him, and not a she or a they.