Homer
(9th or 8th century BC)

Whether or not Homer was an actual person or not is still debated. This is called The Homeric Question and there has been suggestions that he was really a group of people under the name Homer, which in Greek means witness, or that he was a woman or that he actually was a blind man by that name. No one really knows.
Neither does one know where Homer was from, and there has been many suggestions. Nevertheless, Homer works were major sources of inspiration and widely quoted in the ancient world.
It is believed that Homer lived sometime during the 9th or 8th century BC and the Iliad and the Odyssey are considered the oldest books of western civilization. The Iliad tells us the story of the Trojan War and the Odyssey is the saga of Odysseus return from the war to his home Ithaca. It is believed that there were actually many more books, but only these two have survived. Homer is also credited with some hymns.