The Europeans No 24: Homer

Homer, celebrated in the Western cultural canon as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, may have lived in the seventh or eighth century BC, or indeed a few centuries earlier, closer in time to the supposed date of the conflict of which he gives an account, the Trojan War. He may have been born on the island of Chios, or at Smyrna (today Izmir in Turkey). His name may indicate that he was a hostage of war or a descendant of such hostages, or that he was blind.

Alternatively this most fundamental of European cultural figures, credited with composing the books which – apart from the Bible – have been the most influential in our history over two and a half thousand years, may never have existed, the works themselves being not the creations of any single person but a collective achievement, the product of a tradition of oral composition and recitation to which an individual’s name was attached only by posterity.

If that is the case it provides a reminder that however convenient it may be to string our cultural history of Europe in 26 episodes across the lives of a selection of great men and women, it can just as easily be understood as relying on a number of important institutions, traditions, inheritances and practices: the Roman Catholic and other churches, the Latin language, universities, scientific institutes, merchants' guilds, the book trade, mapmakers, great libraries, the fine houses of the wealthy and the paintings and music they filled them with, the craft traditions which produced beautiful books and musical instruments, the reading clubs and coffee houses in which, as democratic ideas emerged, some of the less "well-born" also began to discuss emerging knowledge and to see society as a thing that might not be immutable.

The Iliad, taught at the best schools to young boys from landed families who would take the places of their fathers and grandfathers in Europe's ruling and fighting classes, showed how warfare and slaughter must be viewed – "constructed", the academics say – if one is to persuade people to take part in them. The Odyssey teaches something more cheerful; that man, through his intelligence and adaptability, can sometimes overcome the enmity of gods and the malevolence of monsters.

The particular god that the cunning and resourceful Odysseus (for the Romans, Ulysses) outsmarts in the course of his 10-year voyage home from Troy to Ithaca and his wife is the sea deity Poseidon, and the sea, "our great sweet mother" as it is referred to in the opening pages of Joyce's Ulysses, is of course central to the story of European civilisation and particularly vital to some of its most highly achieving peoples – Greeks, Venetians, Genoese, Spanish, Portuguese, English and Dutch.

The sea, particularly the Mediterranean, can be understood not just as a complement to the land but almost as an alternative. We are used to thinking in terms of continents and attribute to them characteristics, “European civilisation”, “American dynamism” etc, which appear to bestow on them a uniformity they may not have. But what really, historically speaking, unites Spain and Estonia? Culturally, there are perhaps more patterns in common around the great sea, where the Phoenicians established trading cities, Greeks and Romans cultivated wine, wheat and olives and Turks and Berber pirates fought Spanish and Venetians, Muslims against Christians, for marine supremacy. This is a history in common, but as some of the people involved are not what we would call Europeans we will certainly be expected to exclude them.