Comment by somat
"Some version of the Iliad most likely became relatively fixed by around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE and a version of the Odyssey by the middle of the same century."
So I suspect this is a clever literary sort of joke, I appreciated it as such. But I was not exactly sure and wanted to talk about it. The two time periods are the same right?
IMHO more likely that TFA's author is a product of the modern University system, which is to say strong on postmodern critical theory and light on arithmetic.