Lander, WY – Surprising Greek and Literature scholars around the world, shocking new evidence suggests that the ancient writer of the epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey may not have been so ancient after all.. World-famous and long-read as well as a key part of the Wyoming Catholic College Humanities sequence, they may in fact have been written by none other than college senior Parker “Pako” Eidle. A computer analysis gave confirmation of this fact, already suspected by some freshmen who had been aided last semester by the senior with their papers on the Iliad. Comparing the writing style of the Iliad to Pako’s, the study, conducted by The Conservative Imagination, gave the two styles a 100% match, far above the 70% threshold IIT experts believe prudent for determining identity (by our popular correlation equals causation rule). After questioning by faculty who had already been alerted to the possibility, Pako reportedly fully admitted himself to “literally being Homer”, an announcement that is shocking and confusing scientists, historians, and students alike.
“It certainly surprised me,” said WCC senior Theodore Terreri, a close friend of Pako’s. “But I should have known that Pako always did seem a little too knowledgeable about Homer.” For it appears that not only is Pako’s thesis and oration on the Iliad and the Odyssey, but the senior over his long career as a student here at WCC, also drew quotes from the epics into every single paper he wrote here as a student, did his Junior Author Project on Homer, has styled every integration nugget he has presented on something Homer-related and reportedly “even dresses and looks like what Homer would’ve looked like”.
No one really knows how he’s still around, or what “literally being Homer” actually means, however. According to Professor Cleanet, WCC dean, “its most likely that Pako wrote the two epics in the present asd himself and somehow went back in time to distribute them among the Greeks”. Thus Homer never existed, and his epics were written in the present, with a modern mind, by someone with an ability to time travel. However, some at the WCC Student Life Office disagree with this assessment, as with assistant director Patrick “Longboard” Wonnigan, who says “its obvious that Pako is really three-thousand or so years old and has been working through the past millennia merely to popularize his books, to great success”. However, one even wilder theory contrasts these others, suspecting that the Iliad and the Odyssey were never really written, but are simply being copied now by a time-travelling Homer come to the present to research for writing (and simply copying) the works in the past so that they can be copied down by him in the present, and so on… In other words we’re just standing and watching the edge of a time-loop, a bootstrap paradox in which no human really wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, and they can be considered instead part of God’s natural creation. (Which means that effectively God wrote them with Pako as some sort of time-travelling medium in a continuous time-loop of existence.) This is borne out by school records that tell more by their absence of information on Pako than they do by what they tell. “He came out of nowhere” says former admissions director Sam Wainwright who was involved. “I only remember that he wrote his admissions essay on the Iliad but we don’t have anything else in our files about him, no address, no relatives, no background of any kind.”
Pako has not commented on any of these reports, let alone his reported avowal to be Homer, but the Student Life Office is currently conducting a review of whether “Pako’s being Homer represents a violation of policies as to thesis-subject, Junior Author choice, and potential for self-plagiarism”.
Pako is currently proving his similarity in actions, however, as he was last seen telling a story to an enthralled crowd of onlookers in front of a bar, playing with a guitar on his lap as he did so.