The earliest know European poems are the Iliad and its sequel the Odyssey thought to have been compiled around 800 BC. The Greek epics - the first dealing with the events of the Trojan war, the second with the eventful journey home of Odysseus from the war - are thought to have been written by Homer, a blind poet (bard) from either Smyrna (in present-day Turkey) or the Aegean island of Chios.

The Odyssey

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Some scholars, however, assert that the epics are the work of a number of poets over many years and that they were memorized and added to by wandering poets long before they were written down. In other words, Homer may merely have been the last in a chain of authors. Robert Graves - an expert, and the 20th-century poet - even thought that the Odyssey was written by a woman.

Works and Days

Works and Days, The Theogony, and the Shield of Heracles

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First European Poet

There is an indisputable documentary that the first European poet is Hesiod, who lived in the 8th century BC. He was a Greek farmer who lived in Ascra, on the slopes of Helicon. He wrote Works and Days, which contains a poetical treatment of the ages of man and an account of a year in the life of a farmer.

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Augustus who saved the Aeneid

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Virgil reading the Aeneid

The first Roman emperor Augustus (63BC - AD 14), who founded the Empire in 27 BC, became a dedicated patron of the arts, giving financial help to the poet Virgil, among many others. When Virgil died in 19 BC, leaving instructions that his unfinished epic on the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, should be destroyed because it was incomplete. Augustus stepped in to save it. He overruled the dead poet and insisted that the poem should be published - establishing Virgil's reputation ever since as the most important poet of classical Rome.

The Divine Comedy by Dante

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Inspired by the Girl he never met

The Italian poet was inspired to write two of his finest works - The Devine Comedy and The New Life- by a fair-haired, blue-eyed maiden whom he never spoke to and only saw twice. The girl whom he simply called Beatrice was Beatrice Portinori, who died in 1290 at the age of 24. Dante first saw her at a party at her parents home in Florence in 1274, when he was only nine and she was eight. He spotted her again nine years in a street, and after her death, he wrote: The New Life (La Vita Nueva) in which he describes his ideal love.

Dante was born in Florence

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