Homer, source and subject of texts for translators, is also source and subject of questions for scholars. The seventeenth-century prose writer Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the Urn Burial (1658): ‘What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.’ These were the questions supposedly put by the Roman Emperor Tiberius to grammarians as examples of unanswerable questions at the limits of scholarship. Browne tried to controvert the original point by asserting that they are ‘not beyond conjecture’; his purpose for doing so is to draw a contrast between such questions and the more immediate, mystical, and insoluble question of the contents of the urns he was writing about – ‘who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism’. However, his assurance about the Homeric questions would not be shared by the many scholars who have written on Homer and his poems between Browne's time and our own.

A first set of questions the scholars have addressed over this period concerns Homer himself.

There is nothing to prove incontrovertibly that a historical personage named Homer ever existed. His blindness, which is an important motif for the approach of translators such as Chapman, is a later tradition. We cannot even be sure of Homer himself: the late-nineteenth-century writer Samuel Butler wrote a book based on the premiss that the author of the Odyssey was female, and there is nothing to disprove this apart from overwhelming assumptions and stereotypes about authorship. Nor do we know who wrote the poems down first or from where they derived the material they wrote down. It is clear that the poems are rooted in an oral tradition. A major piece of evidence for this is the stock formulae – godlike Achilles, rosy-fingered Dawn – which are one of their most immediate features. The existence of these formulae had been recognized from a very early stage; but our understanding of them has been deepened by the work of the American scholar Millman Parry and his followers in the first half of this century, who sought parallels in the epic recitations of oral bards in the Balkans and Eastern Europe.