What Did Homer See?

The fates of Homer and of Troy’s destruction are intertwined: the one cannot be imagined without the other. Yet neither Homer nor Homeric Troy is likely to have existed. Even if they did, Homer was notoriously blind, which raises the question again, What did Homer see and know about the Trojan War? And why was he imagined to be blind? These problems troubled Homer’s readers from Aristotle and the Hellenistic grammarians to Schliemann and his successors, down to Borges (e.g. in “The Immortal”)...