He is the earliest and greatest of the Ionian poets. We do not
know much about his exact birthplace. It is widely believed that
he was born either in Chios or in Smyrna in the 8th century B.C.
He spent most of his life in Smyrna.
The famous poems of Homer, Iliad and Odyssey, were written in Ionian (language).
He was described as blind according to some early Greek and Ionian documents. But this does not exactly explain, how he wrote about the earth, the sea and the nature so well.
Even if there are some critics, claiming that Homer might not be the only poet of these two important poems, Aristotle points out convincingly in Poetics that Iliad and Odyssey differ from all the other compositions of the epic cycle through the unity and tautness of their action.