Authorship of The Odyssey is attributed to a person called Homer. Not much is known about him. Some scholars believe there were two Homers, one who composed The Iliad and another who composed its sequel, The Odyssey. It has even been suggested--sometimes playfully, sometimes seriously--that Homer was a woman.

The general view is that Homer was the last in a long line of poet-performers who recited or chanted or sang stories of the heroic past. He was from the Ionian area of Greece. He probably couldn't read or write. The Iliad and The Odyssey reached their highest form through his telling of them. He used familiar material that had been passed along through the ages by word of mouth, but he shaped this material and embellished it. These two epic poems were probably written down by someone else around 750 B.C., five hundred years after the fall of Troy.

When The Odyssey was finally recorded it was written by hand on a scroll, probably made of papyrus reed. From the original, copies were made, first on papyrus, later on vellum, which was animal skin specially prepared for writing. Neither of these materials lasts forever, and what gets copied and preserved is a matter of changing taste. But Homer was a champion in the struggle for literary survival. When scholars took stock of surviving Egyptian papyri in 1963 they found that nearly half of the 1,596 individual "books" were copies of The Iliad or The Odyssey or comments about them. During the Classic Age of Greece--the time of the playwright Sophocles and the philosopher Plato--if a Greek owned any books at all, they were likely to be a papyrus scroll of The Iliad or The Odyssey. He would also probably have memorized long stretches of the two poems. Even today The Odyssey is more widely read than any other classic of Greek literature. The ocean spray, the exotic islands, and the story's adventures are infectious. People have even boarded ships and tried to retrace Odysseus' journey, book in hand.