It’s about identity. Definition. Distinction. What Derrida termed différance — the ever-reductive process of making meaning about the world by defining things by what they are not. Red is not blue, nor is it green or yellow or brown. It stands next door to, say, pink, with purple over there on the other side, whose further neighbor is in fact blue. Red is red.
“Homer,” as traditionally understood, was a blind bard who rattled off the Iliad and Odyssey one night by the campfire and the poems became what we know them as today.