This Site

About

This site is an introduction to Homer for intelligent general readers: who the poet was and wasn't, what the Iliad and Odyssey contain, what archaeology and the Hittite archives actually document, how the poems reached us, and how they keep reaching the screen. It is about Homer; it does not reproduce the poems — for reading them in full, free public-domain translations are linked from the resources page.

How claims are labeled

Three badges run through the site, because with Homer the difference between what is attested and what is beloved matters more than usual: Legend marks ancient tradition (the blindness, the seven cities); Disputed marks live scholarly argument (one poet or two, the date of composition); Evidence marks datable material — inscriptions, tablets, destruction layers. The Trojan War position in one sentence: Troy is real; Late Bronze Age conflict over Wilusa is documented; Homer's specific war is unproven.

Sources and dates

The content is derived from a research report compiled in late July 2026, drawing on standard scholarship (the Cambridge and Oxford commentaries, Parry and Lord's oral-formulaic work, the Korfmann excavation literature) and July 2026 trade coverage for the Nolan film. Box-office and reception figures for The Odyssey (2026) are opening-weekend numbers, cited to their trade sources and stamped "as of late July 2026" — they will rise, and this site's figures are snapshots, not final tallies. Quotations from the poems come from public-domain translations and were verified verbatim against Project Gutenberg; translations still in copyright are named and described but quoted only under fifteen words.

AI disclosure

This site is AI-generated: the research, the prose, and the design were produced by Claude (Anthropic), operating in a "dark factory" pipeline in which machine judges reviewed the design, the pages, and the prose — a human wrote the brief, and a human reviewed the finished site before publication. The six black-figure plates on the essay pages are AI-generated images (rendered with pixbridge in the site's own vase-painting idiom); none depicts a real artifact, and the footer of every page says so. Openly saying so is the point: the site's builder, Jörn Dinkla, publishes AI-generated work as AI-generated. If you find an error, reach the author through the site linked above.