The poet “Homer” is typically supposed to have lived in the mid-8th century somewhere in the eastern region of the Aegean Sea. “Homer” and “Homeric” stand for a tradition of composition in performance that extended through the centuries of archaic Greece until a fixed text was established on the cusp of the 6th and 5th centuries.
On the island of Lesbos Sappho lived in the mid-7th century. The poet seems to have played an important role there in the social and cultural lives of girls and women. For a time Sappho lived in exile on the western island Sicily, far from her native Lesbos.
Alkaios lived on the eastern Greek island of Lesbos in the late 7th century. An aristocrat involved in the politics on Lesbos and the wider Greek world, Alkaios endured periods of exile.
Like Homer, “Theognis” and “Theognidea” refer to a tradition and to the supposed founder (or exemplar) of that tradition. The poet’s dates vary, ranging from the mid-7th century to the mid-6th century, the latter being the more traditional view. Theognis was associated with the mainland Greek city of Megara near Athens and may have lived for a time in exile on the island of Sicily.
Xenophanes, from the eastern Greek city Kolophon, roamed widely throughout the Mediterranean basin after his exile in the mid- 6th century. He seems to have passed through many Greek settlements in Italy and Sicily and has been viewed as one important conduit through which philosophy spread through the Greek world.
In the late-6th and early 5th centuries Parmenides lived at Elea, a city founded by members of a community of the Greek east that spread in diaspora across several Mediterranean sites during the turbulent mid-6th century. Parmenides was said to be a healer, politician, and Pythagorean, and became a monumental influence on Greek and later European philosophies.
Empedokles lived in the early to mid-5th century in Akragas, a Greek city on Sicily. Like Parmenides and Xenophanes, his philosophy took shape in the poetic meter and language of the Homeric poems. A legend surrounding his death tells of his leap into the Sicilian volcano Mt. Etna.
All dates are BCE.
(Bios by D. M. Spitzer.)