Generally, contemporary scholarship believes that the Iliad and the Odyssey have a consistency of style and outlook indicating that they are the work of one writer. That a man named Homer actually composed the Iliad and the Odyssey as an original and entirely individual composition as Virgil composed the Aeneid seems highly doubtful. Various time references and other irregularities in the poems suggest that parts of the poems were written in entirely different periods of Greek history. However, the obvious structural complexity and thematic unity of the poems as well as their set metrical pattern of dactylic hexameter indicate a single author of great sophistication. As with the great English epic, Beowulf, the Iliad and the Odyssey may have existed as oral tradition for some time and eventually were put into final, written form by a single poetic genius. The poet may have composed the epics himself, or he may have borrowed from the works of earlier bards. Because the people living nearest to the era of the composition of the poems believed them to be the product of one hand, the modern critic accepts this view and attributes the stylistic differences between the two epic poems to their having been composed at different stages in the poet's life and to the different themes of the works. Rather than take a defensive or apologetic position, the contemporary scholar insists that the burden of proof be on those who deny the existence of Homer. To date, this position has not been successfully challenged.
While little if anything is known of Homer's life, his works are an everlasting tribute to him. For thousands of years, the Iliad and the Odyssey have been the standards by which poets of all languages have measured themselves. Homer is unsurpassed in his understanding of human nature in all its aspects, for his keen observation of the world in which people live, for his essential sanity and good taste, and for his superb control of all the technical devices of his medium.
