The historical shape of European literature owes much to the fact that it begins from a singularity. No literary text earlier than the Iliad was known in antiquity; yet for a millennium Homer was the unattainable summit of the cultural canon, casting an enveloping shadow over all literary production. No other literary tradition erupts out of vacuum in this way, and we still do not really know why it happened with the Greeks. We can piece together much more than they could of the preliterate development of the oral tradition from which the epics emerged; and we can hazard a guess that the manner of their emergence had something to do with the unusual historical conditions of the Greek rediscovery of writing, and something to do with the eighth-century social changes bound up with the ‘rise of the polis’. But current views on why the Iliad and Odyssey were so different from everything else that emerged from the same tradition; on why there were two monumental epics, rather than one or many; on how and when they were composed on such a scale, and how and when they came to exist in writing – all these, like faith in a personal Homer, remain articles of belief rather than investigable hypotheses.

The historical impact, at least, is clear enough. The only emulator successfully to challenge the Iliad's supremacy as a model of how narrative should be done was the Odyssey, apparently a generation or so later.