Achilles

Iliad Author, Selection & Connection Summaries Author Summary: Oral poetry was developed in Greece before writing was, so the poetry was either memorized or improvised depending on the poet/actor as long as they had the basic plot line it worked. When writing finally appeared, the poems were written down. Even though people consider Homer the greatest oral poet of his time, no one knows anything about him for sure. Legend says that he was blind, and that he composed the two building blocks of epic poetry, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which in are presumed to have originated in the 7th or 8th century BCE.