The great epic poet of Greece, and the greatest of all time; author of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," and for the honour of being the place of whose birth seven Greek cities contended; is said, when old and blind, to have wandered from city to city rehearsing his verses, and to have lived 900 years before Christ, some time after the reign of Solomon; it is only modern criticism that has called in question his existence, and has ventured to argue that the poems ascribed to him are a mere congeries of compositions of the early fabulous age of Greece, but the unity of the plan and the simplicity of the style of the poems go to condemn this theory in the regard of most Homeric scholars.