Homer, the subject of fascination and controversy right from the beginning of the Western literary tradition, occupies an exceptionally lofty place in universal culture, though his identity stands as one of history’s oldest enigmas.
Ninguno es mi nombre recounts the resolution of the Homer question for non-specialists without the resources to study the original texts.
The legislator and poet Thales was born at Gortina in Crete in 665 BC. In association with Thrasibulus, he set up in Miletus the tyrannical regime arbitrated in 624 BC. He died in 581 BC.
In 613 BC, when the war between Miletus and Lydia started, Thales promoted the acting out of the Homeric epics in the allied Ionian cities of Chios, Smyrna and Colophon. Thus did the Iliad and Odyssey reach the ears and the memory, first of Ionia and later of Greece as a whole.
The war between Lydia y Miletus came to an end in 602 BC. The Iliad from that time on included the shield of Achilles as homage to the peace; and the Odyssey had a new ending in which Ulysses agreed the peace with the relatives of the pretenders.
Towards 590-585 BC, Thales published through the Homeric epics a pamphlet in which he revealed that he had himself written the Odyssey, and that Homer, author of the Iliad, was so named because his father, king of Paphos and high priest of Aphrodite was delivered to King Midas as a hostage (“hómero”) by the Cypriots.