"Homer," the generally credited author of the two great Greece epics, is also generally conceded not to have existed, or to have been, at most, a bard whose work was remembered and transcribed considerably after his own lifetime. However, modern research into pre-literate cultures and oral transmission has revealed the entirely unsurprising truth that every teller tells a different version of any story and very few ever repeat themselves.
Story-telling was a performance art and the bard looking for a good meal and a comfortable bed tailored what he said and sang to his audience of the evening. It was customary to praise one's host, for example, and to laud the richness, beauties, and skills of his possessions, including his wife.
As far back as Victorian times, it was suggested that The Odyssey might have been told by a woman, although The Iliad was felt to be too martial to have been a woman's creation. In Eastern cultures we know that many story-tellers were upper-class women and so were many of the first authors, for they were the people the leisure to create long stories and the learning to record them.
Which brings me to Salon's jazzy take on a new book by Richard Dalby, which suggests that both seminal Greek epics, at least in the form we know them, are by women. There's internal evidence that this might be so, not least that, although the two tales are set in a society where women were chattels, women play major roles in both epics. Helen, with her face that launched a thousand ships, may have had sisters who told her story.
We'll never know, although the easiest way to appreciate how different the Greeks were from what is in older history books is to remember that the Greeks were culturally Asiatic and looked East and South when they sought power and prestige, and that in those societies, women told stories, to their children, to their households, and to their husbands.
Scheherazade was neither the first nor the last woman whose life depended on the tales she told, and some of her foremothers just might have been—"Homer."