What Other Works Are Attributed To The Iliad Author?

Flipping through a dusty translation of 'Iliad' late at night always makes me curious about the company the poet keeps — who else did the same hand, or same tradition, supposedly write? The immediate and safest name to drop is 'Odyssey' — that winding, sea-strewn counterpart that ancient readers paired with 'Iliad' like bookends of the heroic age. Beyond that pair, an older literary tradition piles on a grab-bag of titles: the 'Homeric Hymns' (a group of short poems celebrating individual gods), the comic-seeming 'Margites', and the playful 'Batrachomyomachia' or 'Battle of Frogs and Mice'. All of these were sometimes credited to Homer in antiquity, though modern scholars treat most of them as products of a broader oral-poetic world rather than the autograph of a single genius.

If you dig into the nitty-gritty, the picture gets messier — and more interesting. There’s the whole Epic Cycle: poems like 'Cypria', 'Aethiopis', the 'Little Iliad', 'Iliou Persis' (sometimes called 'Iliupersis'), 'Nostoi', and 'Telegony' that narrate the Trojan saga’s events not covered in 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey'. Ancient librarians and ancient audiences sometimes listed these alongside Homeric works, but they were probably composed by other bards (names like Arctinus, Lesches, and Cinaethon show up in the sources). Then there’s the longstanding academic debate — the so-called Homeric question — fueled by Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s oral-formulaic studies, which argue that these texts grew from an oral tradition where authorship is communal and evolving. Dialectal mixtures in the poems, stylistic inconsistencies, and fragmentary evidence all support a complex genesis rather than a single author chalking off dozens of distinct epics.

I love that this uncertainty leaves room for imagination: you can read 'Odyssey' right after 'Iliad' and feel a strong artistic kinship, or you can follow the fragments and later poems to construct a whole mythic tapestry of Troy and its aftermath. If you want to chase this rabbit hole, start with a good translation of 'Odyssey' and a modern commentary on the Homeric Hymns, then try a book about the Epic Cycle or Parry and Lord’s essays. It’s the kind of rabbit hole that rewards small, late-night plunge-ins — and keeps sending me back for more.

Here’s a quick rundown I usually tell friends when they ask: the poet traditionally named as the author of 'Iliad' is also linked to 'Odyssey'—that pairing is the classic duo everyone knows. Beyond those, ancient tradition sometimes ascribes several shorter pieces and parodies to the same hand: the 'Homeric Hymns' (a set of deity-focused poems), the humorous 'Margites', and the mock-epic 'Batrachomyomachia' ('Battle of Frogs and Mice').

Then there’s the bigger list connected to the Trojan story called the Epic Cycle: titles like 'Cypria', 'Aethiopis', 'Little Iliad', 'Iliou Persis', 'Nostoi', and 'Telegony' filled in events before and after 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey'. Ancient sources sometimes lumped these in with Homer, but modern scholars usually credit different authors or oral traditions. If you want to read beyond the two big epics, I’d suggest picking a good anthology or a modern guide to the Epic Cycle and the 'Homeric Hymns' so you can see which pieces feel Homeric and which don’t — it’s a fun split between mystery, history, and literature that kept me hooked when I first started poking around.