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
The Byzantine Suda even traced his ancestry to a Muse, Apollo or Orpheus.
Q 02The most widespread ancient tradition made Homer a bard from which region of the Anatolian coast and nearby islands?
Ionia
Modern scholars regard all such accounts as legendary.
Q 03Pindar is credited with saying Homer came from Smyrna and which island?
Chios
Other writers claimed Cyme, Argos, Pylos and Athens as his birthplace.
Q 04Most ancient accounts place Homer's death on which small Cycladic island?
Ios
Two epigrams in the Greek Anthology by Alcaeus of Messene commemorate his burial there.
Q 05Legend says Homer died after failing to solve a riddle posed by whom?
Boys fishing on the shore
The riddle was about lice: what they caught they left, and what they did not catch they carried.
Q 06One ancient etymology linked the name Homer to the Greek word for what?
Hostage
Gregory Nagy prefers 'he who fits the song together'.
Q 07Which philosopher described Homer as the one who "has educated Greece"?
Plato
The same philosopher famously banished the poets from his ideal Republic.
Q 08The Iliad centres on a quarrel between Achilles and which king?
Agamemnon
The dispute over the captive Briseis unfolds in the last year of the Trojan War.
Q 09How long does Odysseus's journey home from Troy take in the Odyssey?
Ten years
Add the war itself and he is away from Ithaca for two decades.
Q 10Both Homeric epics open with an invocation to whom?
The Muse
Virgil copied the device for the Aeneid.
Q 11Which of the nine Muses presides over epic poetry?
Calliope
She was also the mother of Orpheus.
Q 12Homer's poems were composed in which unrhymed metre?
Dactylic hexameter
The name comes from the six feet in each line; Virgil used the same metre for the Aeneid.
Q 13Homeric Greek is an artificial literary language based mainly on an archaic form of which dialect?
Ionic
It also mixes in Aeolic features, and was never anyone's spoken language.
Q 14Which stock epithet does Homer attach to Dawn?
Q 21Antiquity held that the Homeric poems were first collected and organised in Athens under which sixth-century tyrant?
Pisistratus
Cicero mentions the story, and scholars call it the Peisistratean recension.
Q 22Which scholar, the first head of the great Ptolemaic library, was also the first critical editor of Homer?
Zenodotus
He was appointed in 284 BC and doubled as tutor to the royal children.
Q 23The word "aristarch", meaning a severe critic, comes from which Homeric scholar who ran the library from 153 to 145 BC?
Aristarchus of Samothrace
He is credited with doing most to establish the canonical text of the epics.
Rosy-fingered
Silver-footed is Thetis and white-armed is Hera.
Q 15Which goddess does Homer call "owl-eyed" or "grey-eyed"?
Athena
Epithets mark a permanent quality: Achilles is swift-footed even when sitting in his tent.
Q 16Homer's famous phrase "wine-dark" describes what?
The sea
The same word is used twice for oxen, where it means a reddish colour.
Q 17Which British statesman's 1858 study noted a total absence of blue in Homer's descriptions of nature?
William Gladstone
He wrote Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age while between spells as prime minister.
Q 18The narrative pattern in which ideas appear as A, B, C and then return as C, B, A is known as what?
Ring composition
Scholars still argue whether it was a conscious device or a memory aid.
Q 19Each Homeric epic is divided into 24 books, a division usually credited to scholars in which city?
Alexandria
The books are labelled with the letters of the Greek alphabet; very few scholars credit Homer himself.
Q 20The Iliad's standard edition runs to roughly how many lines?
15,693
The Odyssey is shorter, at just over 12,000 lines.
Q 24Venetus A, the tenth-century codex of the Iliad kept in Venice, is prized above all for what?
Its marginal scholia
Its notes derive from the four-man commentary of Aristonicus, Didymus, Herodian and Nicanor.
Q 25The first printed edition of Homer appeared in Italy in which year?
1488
It was produced by the Greek scholar Chalkokondyles.
Q 26Which twelfth-century Byzantine scholar wrote an Iliad commentary that fills nearly 4,000 oversized pages in modern print?
Eustathius
His Odyssey commentary adds another 2,000 pages.
Q 27In 1664 which French cleric declared that Homer never existed and the poems were cobbled together from unrelated songs?
The abbe d'Aubignac
Fifty years later Richard Bentley decided Homer did exist but as an obscure oral poet.
Q 28Which Neapolitan philosopher argued in The New Science (1744) that Homer was "a purely ideal poet who never existed as a particular man"?
Giambattista Vico
He saw Homer as an idea: the Greek people telling their history in song.
Q 29Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum, which launched modern debate on the Homeric Question, was published in which year?
1795
He argued the poems began as short oral songs of the tenth century BC, assembled by literate editors four centuries later.
Q 30Nineteenth-century scholars who insisted each epic was the work of a single inspired poet were nicknamed what?
Unitarians
Their opponents, the Analysts, split into the lay theory and the nucleus theory.