A Questão Homérica e a Existência de Homero

Homero existiu? Ele compôs a Odisséia e a Iliada? Há 100 anos um  professor de Harvard respondeu nao a ambas as questões:
Parry’s stroke of genius was to realize that the answer to this question was hidden in plain sight, in the two most obvious features of Homeric poetry—the meter and the epithets. In his doctoral thesis, Parry showed that these features were directly connected, in a way no one had noticed in millennia of reading. His argument rests on the fact that Greek, unlike English, is an inflected language, where the forms of words and names vary according to their grammatical function: Achilles is Achilleus when he’s the subject of a verb, Achillea when he’s the direct object. These forms have different metrical values, meaning that when they appear in a line of poetry the syllables around them have to be different, too, in order to preserve the pattern of the hexameter.
Parry, Kanigel writes, showed that “for each hero, god, or goddess, in each grammatical case, in each position in the hexametric line, there was normally only a single epithet that went with it.” Homer didn’t call the Achaeans “strong-greaved” in one place and “hairy-headed” in another because he thought those adjectives were particularly apt at that moment in the story. Rather, he had a supply of ready-made epithets in different metrical patterns that could be slotted in depending on the needs of the verse, like Tetris blocks. As Parry wrote in one of his papers, “The Homeric language is the work of the Homeric verse,” not the other way around.