Homer Trivia
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60 free Homer trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Homer is the poet Plato said had educated Greece, and nobody can prove he existed. This Homer trivia quiz covers the man, the myth and the scholarship: the blind bard of legend, the seven cities that claimed him, the riddle that supposedly killed him on Ios, the works attributed to him beyond the two great epics, and the Homeric Question that has run from a scathing French abbe in 1664 through Wolf, the Analysts and Unitarians to Milman Parry recording bards in the Balkans. There are questions on how the poems work, from dactylic hexameter and rosy-fingered Dawn to ring composition and the wine-dark sea, and on how they reached us: Pisistratus, the librarians of Alexandria, Venetus A and the first printed edition of 1488. The reception questions take in Alexander the Great's annotated copy, Horace's nodding Homer, Dante, Pope, Keats, Schliemann at Hisarlik, Rembrandt, Ingres, Emily Wilson and, yes, Homer Simpson. Difficulty runs from easy to expert. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on Homer, the epics and the people around them, and each question links to its source. For the poems themselves, try our Iliad and The Odyssey quizzes next.
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Q 01In most ancient biographies, Homer is depicted as having what condition?
Blindness
Blindness also marks the singer of an early hymn once credited to him, who signs off as a blind man from a rocky island; scholars treat all such biography as legend.
Q 02The most widespread ancient tradition made Homer a bard from which region of the Greek world?
Ionia
Ionia, on the coast of modern Turkey, fits the poems themselves: their Greek is built mainly on the speech of that coast, though scholars treat the ancient biographies as legend.
Q 03Pindar is credited with saying Homer came from Smyrna and which island?
Chios
Chios was home to the Homeridae, a guild of reciters who claimed to be Homer's descendants and made performing his poems their trade.
Q 04What false name does Odysseus give the Cyclops Polyphemus?
Nobody
Nobody: so when the wounded giant roars that Nobody is hurting him, his neighbours go back to bed, and the Greeks slip out clinging to the undersides of his sheep.
Q 05Legend says Homer died after failing to solve a riddle posed by whom?
Boys fishing on the shore
Boys fishing on the shore told him that what they caught they left behind and what they missed they carried home: they meant their lice. In one telling the baffled poet slipped in the mud and died.
Q 06One ancient etymology linked the name Homer to the Greek word for what?
Hostage
Hostage is what the everyday Greek word homeros meant, but the name was explained in other ways even in antiquity, and modern scholars call its true origin unknown.
Q 07Which philosopher wrote that admirers call Homer the poet who "has educated Greece"?
Plato
Plato reports the praise in the Republic, then shuts Homer out of his ideal city anyway, allowing in only hymns to the gods and praise of famous men.
Q 08The Iliad centres on a quarrel between Achilles and which king?
Agamemnon
Agamemnon, made to give up his own captive, seizes Achilles' prize Briseis instead, so the Greeks' best fighter refuses to fight and the Trojans start winning.
Q 09Which nymph keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years and offers to make him immortal?
Calypso
Calypso holds him for seven of his ten years away and promises he will never grow old; he turns her down, and when the gods order his release he sails off on a raft.
Q 10Both Homeric epics open with an invocation to whom?
The Muse
The Muse is asked to sing or tell the story herself, because the poet claims only to pass it on: the goddesses saw everything, he says, while mortals know nothing but hearsay.
Q 11Which enchantress turns Odysseus's men into pigs?
Circe
Circe drugs the crew's food and shuts them in her sties, but Odysseus, protected by a herb the god Hermes digs up for him, makes her turn them back and then stays a whole year.
Q 12Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, but Homer's epics were composed in which metre?
Dactylic hexameter
Dactylic hexameter is built on the length of syllables, but English verse runs on stress, so English hexameters can only approximate Homer's metre.
Q 13Aeolus gives Odysseus a tightly tied leather bag holding what?
The winds
The winds, all but the one blowing him home: within sight of land his crew, sure the bag held treasure, untie it while he sleeps, and the storm drives them all the way back.
Q 21Antiquity held that the Homeric poems were first collected and organised in Athens under which sixth-century tyrant?
Pisistratus
Pisistratus also faced an ancient charge of tampering: he or Solon, the tellings differ, was said to have slipped a line into the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships to back his city's claim to Salamis.
Q 22Which director's 2026 film The Odyssey stars Matt Damon as Odysseus?
Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan had once been lined up to direct Troy, the 2004 film of the Iliad, before making Batman Begins instead; two decades on, he shot his Odyssey entirely on IMAX film.
Q 23Which old friend does Odysseus leave in charge of his household when he sails for Troy?
Mentor
Q 14Which stock epithet does Homer attach to Dawn?
Rosy-fingered
Rosy-fingered Dawn is a formula: a ready-made phrase cut to fit the metre, which a singer composing aloud could drop in whole each time a new day began.
Q 15Which goddess does Homer call "owl-eyed" or "grey-eyed"?
Athena
Athena's Greek epithet is glaukopis, which probably meant 'with gleaming eyes'; it shares a root with glaux, the little owl that became her emblem, so translators split between the readings.
Q 16Homer's famous phrase "wine-dark" describes what?
The sea
The sea is 'wine-dark' again and again in Homer, yet the same Greek word also describes a pair of oxen, one reason readers still argue over what colour he meant.
Q 17Which British statesman's 1858 study noted a total absence of blue in Homer's descriptions of nature?
William Gladstone
William Gladstone, a future prime minister, counted Homer's colour words and concluded that the Greeks' sense of colour was only partly developed, a claim still argued over today.
Q 18Homer often arranges ideas as A, B, C and then C, B, A, a pattern known as what?
Ring composition
Ring composition brings a passage back to where it began, which may have helped singers keep their place while composing aloud; oral poetry is especially rich in it.
Q 19Each Homeric epic is divided into 24 books, a division usually credited to scholars in which city?
Alexandria
Alexandria's librarians usually get the credit, but some scholars date the split earlier, and hardly any think Homer planned 24 books; each is still labelled with a letter of the Greek alphabet.
Q 20Which 1922 James Joyce novel moves the story of the Odyssey to a single day in Dublin?
Ulysses
Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus: Joyce's wanderer is Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser whose walk around the city on 16 June 1904 is retraced by fans every Bloomsday.
Mentor gave English its word for a trusted adviser, though in the poem it is often a goddess in his shape who does the advising.
Q 24Which comedy by Joel and Ethan Coen, set in 1930s Mississippi, is loosely based on the Odyssey?
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
O Brother, Where Art Thou? has a one-eyed Bible salesman for its Cyclops and three riverside sirens, though the Coens cheerfully admitted that neither of them had read Homer's poem.
Q 25The first printed edition of Homer came off the press in 1488 in which Italian city?
Florence
Florence: the text was edited by Demetrios Chalkokondyles, an Athenian who had moved to Italy to teach Greek, and until then every copy of Homer had been written out by hand.
Q 26How does Odysseus hear the Sirens' song and survive?
He is tied to the mast
He is tied to the mast on his own orders while the crew row past with wax in their ears; when he begs to be set free, they only bind him tighter.
Q 27In Homer's story, whose departure from Sparta with the Trojan prince Paris starts the Trojan War?
Helen
Helen is never called the face that launched a thousand ships by Homer: that line was written more than two thousand years later by the English playwright Christopher Marlowe.
Q 28Which nymph, the mother of Achilles, begs Zeus to make the Greeks lose until her son is honoured?
Thetis
Thetis clasps Zeus's knees until he nods his promise; she has also told her son his fate, a long quiet life at home or a short one at Troy with a name that lives for ever.
Q 29The Iliad's first word in Greek, menin, names its subject: which emotion of Achilles?
Rage
Rage, or wrath, is the announced theme, which is why the poem covers only a few weeks near the end of a ten-year war: it follows one man's anger rather than the whole siege.
Q 30Nineteenth-century scholars who insisted each epic was the work of a single inspired poet were nicknamed what?
Unitarians
Unitarians read each epic as one poet's design; their rivals, the Analysts, tried instead to peel away later additions and recover shorter original poems.