Was Homer a person?

[Tsontos]

I noticed a couple of people in the Greatest Greeks thread included Homer in their lists. But was he a person?

wiki has an interesting page put together:

The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was a historical individual, but some modern scholars are skeptical. No reliable biographical information about Homer has been handed down from classical antiquity, and Martin West has said that "Homer" is "not the name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name."[1] The poems are now widely regarded as the culmination of a long tradition of orally composed poetry, but the way in which they reached their final written form, and the role of an individual poet, or poets, in this process, is disputed. For some scholars, such as Geoffrey Kirk, both poems were created by a single author whose individual genius composed them while drawing much of his material from various traditional stories. Others, such as Martin West, hold that the epics were composed by different poets. Gregory Nagy maintains that the epics are not the creation of any individual, but rather slowly evolved towards their final form over a period of centuries; in this view, they are the collective work of generations of poets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer

[Andrew]

Homer was one of the many Rapsodists who were encomizing the heroic heritage. There were many "Homers" , but only one name left .Odyssey and the Iliad weren't written by the same person and the biggest proof of that is the fact that who wrote the Iliad didn't knew the Dorians nor the Thessalians (since in Iliad Thessaly is Argos Pelasgicon), but who wrote the Odyssey knew that the Dorians had already colonized Crete since in (XIX,177) Odysseus talks about the three subtribes of the Dorians that inhabite Crete:

Κρήτη τις γαῖ' ἔστι μέσῳ ἐνὶ οἴνοπι πόντῳ,
καλὴ καὶ πίειρα, περίρρυτος· ἐν δ' ἄνθρωποι
πολλοὶ ἀπειρέσιοι, καὶ ἐννήκοντα πόληες· -
ἄλλη δ' ἄλλων γλῶσσα μεμιγμένη· ἐν μὲν Ἀχαιοί,
ἐν δ' Ἐτεόκρητες μεγαλήτορες, ἐν δὲ Κύδωνες
Δωριέες τε τριχάϊκες δῖοί τε Πελασγοί·

Since the Dorian descent to Peloponnesus and the Thessalian invasion to Thessaly are contemporarely facts , both related to the migrations of the whole north-western greek groups due to the Phrygian press , and dated to 1200 BC , and the Dorian colonization of Crete is at least 200 years retarded from their arrival in Peloponnesus , we must conclude that there is a 200 years (at least) gap from the formation of the "Catalog of Ships" in Iliad and the Odyssey part that talks about the Dorians in Crete.Homer is a figure that dates around 800 BC so he must be one of the last in a series of poets that arrive at least before 1100 BC (excactly after the end of the Trojan war , which is dated to 1250-1150 BC).

[Mygdonia]