("Homer and Vergil" source from <http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320Hist&Civ/chapters/03EPIC.htm>)

While history encompasses many a fiction, fiction can also embrace much history. Homer, the earliest Western author whose work survives, shows this very clearly. His epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are literary tales steeped in historical realities, revealing much about life and times in early Greece. Many centuries later, another ancient author, Vergil who was the greatest of Roman poets, also preserves a complex and sophisticated picture of politics in his own day, even if his epic, The Aeneid, is on the surface a mythical saga. In sum, what-really-happened-in-the-past does not have to be packaged as history to deliver an accurate picture of life long ago.
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Literature and History

History and literature share much in common, not only the written word but the exploration of humanity. If history sets out to tell explicitly what-really-happened-in-the-past, fictional stories do much the same by engaging their readers' imagination and appealing to their sense of logic about what's possible or likely to have happened. That is, to be effective, literary works depend on the readers' ability to see some larger truth behind the façade of made-up characters and situations and to connect fiction with fact because of the story's immediacy and pertinence to the audience's world. Thus, authors hope the reader will connect with their work somehow and see that it's not just a story but, as Vergil puts it, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt ("there are tears for what's happened and mortal matters touch the mind"). In the end, history and literature have a similar agenda, to reflect truth—however imperfectly—and, in doing so, illuminate the human condition.
Literary and historical styles are not all that different, either, since the principles which drive and govern literature also inform history to some extent. For instance, if a historian's work does not provide some readership with a certain level of reading enjoyment, it tends not to be read, making its impact just that much less widespread and instrumental in the formulation of our understanding the past. Indeed, a good story lies at the heart of every influential historical work, so it behooves historians not only to examine the substance of literature for the history it may contain but also to study the methods used by writers of fiction in advancing their art.

With that in mind, we will look at two of the greatest authors in ancient Western civilization: Homer and Vergil. They rank among the best "singer of tales" who've ever lived. The epics they composed contain and use history liberally and, by visiting these works, we learn much about the past and the ways in which history and literature overlap.
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Homer

Homer was called by the Roman writer Quintilian "the river from which all literature flows." Homer is indeed among the first and finest literary voices in European civilization. However, that his work is of such an extraordinary quality, exhibiting a fully developed sense of narrative and human psychology, is somewhat ironic. It means that with Homer Western literature emerges into history full-blown, which gives us little chance to gauge the evolution of literature in the West. By being so superlative at so early a date—some would argue no writer has ever surpassed the quality of Homer's narrative—he is not only the beginning but also the culmination of Western literature! Whatever one's opinion, it is certainly worth the effort to learn ancient Greek just to read Homer in the original. Many have done so to great profit.

With such acclaim surrounding him, several important questions concerning Homer have naturally accrued over the years. Who was he? How could he be so good an author, living when he did? As brilliant and realistic as his characters and situation seem, is it possible that his epics reflect actual history? These are the questions which swirl like dust around our feet as we walk the Elysian fields of Homeric epic.

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