By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. He thought Homer was a woman.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Victorian novelist and thinker, wrote translations of both the Iliad (1898) and the Odyssey (1900), and in 1897 wrote a book about his theory, The Authoress of the Odyssey, which presented the ‘evidence’ for the case that Homer, far from being a blind man, or a team of writers, was actually female. Few were convinced, although Robert Graves notably took up the theory in the twentieth century, in his novel Homer’s Daughter.