The Slavic element in Homer's epics

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"Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who
hides one thing in his heart and speaks another."

Homer, The Iliad

Greek epic poet (800 BC - 700 BC)

"Homer (ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος,
Homēros) is an ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the author of
the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The ancient Greeks generally believed
that Homer was a historical individual, but some modern scholars are skeptical:
no reliable biographical information has been handed down from classical
antiquity.

According to Martin West, "Homer" is "not the
name of a historical poet, but a fictitious or constructed name."[1] The
poems are now widely regarded as the culmination of a long tradition of orally
composed poetry, but the way in which they reached their final written form,
and the role of an individual poet, or poets, in this process is
disputed."

"The Homeric Question is the doubts and consequent
debates over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey
and their historicity. These debates have roots in classical antiquity and the
scholarship of the Hellenistic period, but reached a floruit among Homeric
scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries. The main subtopics of the Homeric
Question are:

* "Who is Homer?"[1]

* "multiple or single authorship?"[2]

* "By whom, when, where, and under what circumstances
were the poems composed?"[3]

To these questions the possibility of archaeological answers
have added a few more:

* "How reliable is the tradition embodied in the
Homeric poems?"[4]

* "How old are the oldest elements in Homeric poetry
which can be dated with certainty?"

Now if we take all of this into consideration and observe
Homer from the point of view of the oral tradition, which was handed down from
antiquity to classical times when it was first recorded, we may say that the
final product was a work of many authors who have retold the epic poem over and
over again, over the centuries, adding to it words from various languages!

Take a look at the following study:

"More evidence that gives credence to the existence of
an ancient prehistoric Macedonian civilization comes to us from ancient
literature. One such source that greatly influenced our impression of the
ancients and inspired Alexander the Great to seek adventure was Homer’s epic
poems. About five hundred years after the Trojan Wars, Homer wrote the Iliad
and the Odyssey. Homer’s work captivated his audience with events that,
according to Tashko Belchev, began and ended in Macedonia. Homer was born in the
8th century B.C. and created true literary masterpieces that are enjoyed as
much today, as they were in the days of Alexander the Great. Originally,
Homer’s stories were folktales told and retold for millenniums until they were
immortalized in print in the 6th century B.C."