By the Classical period at the latest, the Greeks possessed a series of heroic epics singing about a long past Heroic Age, the geography of which was, at least in its principal points, reminiscent of the Mycenaean Bronze Age (16th–12th centuries BC ( All the following dates are BC)). Thematically, the epics covered a wide range of subjects from almost the whole Heroic Age. Yet a number of epics were focused on the Trojan War as the most glorious event of this legendary era. During the Classical and Hellenistic periods, these epics formed a ‘Trojan Cycle’, narrating the whole story from the judgement of Paris to the return of the heroes from the war. The Iliad and the Odyssey, which unlike the others have survived, also belonged thematically to this cycle. The Iliad and the Odyssey give an apparently coherent view of the Heroic world, providing rich evidence for many aspects of social life and human activity. This evidence is much richer than anything else we possess from before the Classical period, which makes it completely natural that it has regularly been used for reconstructing early Greek society.

The way this evidence can be used is debatable. On the one hand, the epics did not purport to describe the present time of the poet, but rather a distant past which was supposed to be different from the present world. On the other hand, the world described must have been meaningful for the people listening to the poems, which suggests that the poet must have derived the evidence for this past world from the world familiar to himself and his public – thus presumably mainly from the realities of his present. In order to understand the value of the epics as a source for historical reconstruction, it would therefore be necessary to establish which was the present time of the poet, thus the time of the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and to what extent the world described in the poems could correspond to this specific historical period.

The opinions of the Ancients are not helpful for dating the poems, except for suggesting that they had attained their more or less final form by the late 6th century. The internal linguistic evidence for this dating is inconclusive, while possible allusions to the epic narrative in the rest of Archaic poetry and visual art do not suggest a date before the late 7th century at the earliest. However, historians who try to use the Homeric evidence for reconstructing the everyday life and socio-political realities of early Greece generally prefer to date the poems to the 8th or the early 7th century. This dating is mainly based on the assumption that the epics must describe the world of the present or of a recent past, and that the apparently stateless (or rather pre-state, or perhaps proto-state) society described in the poems can match the 8th century or slightly earlier social order suggested by the archaeological record. This produces an apparently convenient sequence of stages of social and political development: the stateless ‘Homeric society’ following the 12th century fall of Bronze Age civilisation (the Dark Age and the 8th century), followed by the emergence of city-states in the Archaic period (7th–6th centuries). This sequence represents a widely accepted view of the development of early Greece, which is, to a great extent, based on the 8th or early 7th century dating of the poems.

The concept is based on an obviously circular argument: the Dark Age to the 8th century world is reconstructed according to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and this reconstruction in turn is used for dating the poems. There is not much independent evidence to verify this reconstruction and the dating.

However, a largely neglected field can make it possible to check the concordance between the epic description and 8th century realities. The poems describe in some detail the palaces of the elite leaders, particularly the house of Odysseus, a fairly detailed view of which is presented in the course of the narrative. Both the poet and the public must have been able to vividly imagine this. There is no doubt that Homer was describing a substantial two-storey multi-room house, which could have housed numerous people and might legitimately be called a ‘palace’. But nothing even nearly approaching this can be found in the 8th or early 7th century archaeological record. This demonstrates, first, that the poet did not give a realistic description of 8th to early 7th century realities, and second, that the poet and his audience were able to imagine complex entities which they had never seen in reality but which were organically tied to the action described by the traditional poetry. Since they could imagine this in the field of architecture, they could probably imagine this in other fields as well.

There is therefore no reason to assume that the epics give an adequate description of 8th century realities, and consequently to stick to the early dating of the epics. We must accept a wide range of possible dates extending from the 8th to the 6th century suggested by numerous influential Homerists. The acceptance of a later dating, however, will have serious implications for using the poems as evidence for life in early Greece. With the help of some imagination, it might be possible to view the epic world as a relatively faithful representation of the present time or the recent past of a late 8th to early 7th century poet. Yet the later the date for the epics is that we accept, the more problematic the accommodation of the epic world to the contemporary world of the poet will be. Since there is no sign in the epics of the elaborate polis constitution, written laws, tyranny, fairly developed literacy, etc., all of which were usual features of later 7th and especially 6th century Greece, it would be virtually impossible to accept the ‘Homeric world’ as a description of the realities of this period. A later dating compels us to view the epic world as an archaising imagination on the part of the poet attempting to describe life in the distant heroic past as having been notably different from the present. There would be no historical ‘Homeric society’ and the whole concept of development from ‘Homeric society’ to the archaic polis will fall apart.

The reluctance of historians to accept this is probably caused by the need for a reliable and usable source for the period between the fall of Bronze Age civilisation and the advanced Archaic era of the 7th and 6th centuries, particularly the 8th century, for which almost no literary evidence is available. The Homeric epics could fill the gap, but only in the case of the early dating, while a later dating would preclude the relatively easy and straightforward use of the epic evidence. It is the wish to believe the historicity of the ‘Homeric world’, as formulated by Oliver Dickinson, which keeps historians in favour of an early dating. An objective analysis of the evidence argues against this.