The enigmatic figure of the poet and rhapsodist Homer looms from the dark beginnings of the West into our present. Little is known about his life and environment, but his work has lost none of its validity even after more than two and a half millennia. Homer's two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, not only mark the glorious beginning of European epic poetry but also of Western, indeed world literature as a whole. They are the "ur-novels" of humanity, as Jean Paul once said. The greatest minds from antiquity to German classicism, from Virgil to Goethe, have admired and praised him, composing their own works in his powerful shadow. In Homer's heroic songs about the struggle for Troy, all the motives and driving forces of human poetry seem to be exemplarily prefigured: struggle and adventure, victory and downfall.