<P> Today only the Iliad and Odyssey are associated with the name' Homer' . In antiquity, a very large number of other works were sometimes attributed to him, including the Homeric Hymns, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, the Little Iliad, the Nostoi, the Thebaid, the Cypria, the Epigoni, the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog - Mouse War"), the Margites, the Capture of Oechalia, and the Phocais . These claims are not considered authentic today and were by no means universally accepted in the ancient world . As with the multitude of legends surrounding Homer's life, they indicate little more than the centrality of Homer to ancient Greek culture . </P> <P> Many traditions circulated in the ancient world concerning Homer, most of which are lost . Modern scholarly consensus is that they have no value as history . Some claims were established early and repeated often - that Homer was blind (taking as self - referential a passage describing the blind bard Demodocus), that he was born in Chios, that he was the son of the river Meles and the nymph Critheïs, that he was a wandering bard, that he composed a varying list of other works (the Homerica), that he died either in Ios or after failing to solve a riddle set by fishermen, and various explanations for the name' Homer' . The two best known ancient biographies of Homer are the Life of Homer by the Pseudo-Herodotus and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod . </P> <P> The study of Homer is one of the oldest topics in scholarship, dating back to antiquity . Nonetheless, the aims of Homeric studies have changed over the course of the millennia . The earliest preserved comments on Homer concern his treatment of the gods, which hostile critics such as the poet Xenophanes of Colophon denounced as immoral . The allegorist Theagenes of Rhegium is said to have defended Homer by arguing that the Homeric poems are allegories . The Iliad and the Odyssey were widely used as school texts in ancient Greek and Hellenistic cultures . They were the first literary works taught to all students . The Iliad, particularly its first few books, was far more intently studied than the Odyssey during the Hellenistic and Roman periods . </P> <P> As a result of the poems' prominence in classical Greek education, extensive commentaries on them developed to explain parts of the poems that were culturally or linguistically difficult . During the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, many interpreters, especially the Stoics, who believed that Homeric poems conveyed Stoic doctrines, regarded them as allegories, containing hidden wisdom . Perhaps partially because of the Homeric poems' extensive use in education, many authors believed that Homer's original purpose had been to educate . Homer's wisdom became so widely praised that he began to acquire the image of almost a prototypical philosopher . Byzantine scholars such as Eustathius of Thessalonica and John Tzetzes produced commentaries, extensions and scholia to Homer, especially in the twelfth century . Eustathius's commentary on the Iliad alone is massive, sprawling nearly 4,000 oversized pages in a twenty - first century printed version and his commentary on the Odyssey an additional nearly 2,000 . </P>

Why is homer honoured with the title father of european poetry