We basically know nothing about who Homer was or whether he really wrote both stories. There are only a few survivng accounts about him, but they’re all conflicting and could all be bogus.

Maybe he really did write both books. Maybe one but not the other. Maybe these stories were first passed down orally and he was just the first to write them down. Maybe he never existed at all.

The stories have a certain style of writing that in different ways showed techniques people used to use to remember their songs and folklore, like specific alliterations. This aligns with the theory that it’s all oral history, told and retold over many a year.

I’ve read it’s theorized he might have existed and wrote the core of the story, but that over time, other authors expanded the story making it what it is today.