According to tradition, the Greek poet Homer lived in Ionia, possibly in the second half of the 8th century BCE and may or may not have been blind. However, practically nothing about the supposed author of The Iliad and The Odyssey is known for sure. 'Homer' may be an identity invented to personify unknown anonymous poets and singers who produced the two works.
Four locations (Smyrna, Colophon and Ephesus, and the island of Chios) claim Homer's birthplace. His presumed lifetime seems to have coincided with the introduction of writing into the Hellenic world.
One school of thought suggests that he, or someone like him, collated and combined shorter works by earlier anonymous poets into his two distinct but complementary epics.
Another suggests that the two pieces are the original work of a single supreme literary genius.
A third believes the poems to be the outcome of a process where many contributors worked and reworked the same material, so "Homer" becomes a personification of an entire tradition.
A fourth position lays disagreements about the origins of the two works aside. Instead, based on differences in narrative style and inconsistencies between the two works, it suggests that the same author did not produce them.
However, it is generally accepted that Homer's supposed lifetime coincided with the introduction of writing into the Hellenic world.
The consensus is that both are in an artificial dialect, drawing on elements from different periods and different Greek dialects, but based on Ionian Greek.
So, in the traditional account, the poet either wrote the epics down or dictated them to someone else who produced the text. That 'someone may have been a scribe, or possibly, the members of a guild of professional reciters called the 'Homeridae'.
Either way, some unknown individual gave each poem its coherent shape and unity.
While we do not know when or where the epics were written down, it seems to have happened at some point between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE.
So the poems may have been created in the eighth century, transmitted orally, and written down in the sixth. Cicero and two ancient Lives of Homer attribute the first written versions to the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos.
However, once they were committed to writing, someone seems to have divided each work into twenty-four rhapsodes (books), labelled with the letters of the Greek alphabet. While the most likely suspects are the scholars and grammarians gathered in Alexandria under the Ptolemies, some sources trace the divisions further back to the late sixth century BCE.
In any case, by around 150 BCE, the texts of the two poems seem to have become established. At that point, Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace set about establishing definitive texts from an assortment of existing versions. Their work is the basis of modern texts.