The research on the oral transmission of epic poems should meaningfully affect how you read/think about the Iliad and The Odyssey. Further, the absence of knowl

The research on the oral transmission of epic poems should meaningfully affect how you read/think about the Iliad and The Odyssey. Further, the absence of knowledge about Homer himself is useful information (you might even try to use the text itself to make inferences about Homer but that is complicated by the oral transmission). I agree that there are limits though (what the author had for breakfast on his/her third birthday is probably uninteresting wrt to the text). Drawing the line is necessarily hard.