Follow-up question (no this isn't a joke): was Homer even a real person?

About 10 years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Hisarlik and took the opportunity to make an advanced-for-an-amature study of the historic Trojan War vs the Iliad. The short and widely accepted version is there was a city that came to be known as Troy, there was a war around 1200 BCE, and "Troy" lost... and Homer wrote down his Iliad 500 years after the actual events took place. Well, 500ish years. Maybe 400, maybe 700... We obviously don't have a first-edition published version, the oral history is convoluted at best, and Herodotus didn't even invent "history" until ~450 BCE.

We don't know; there may have been wars between certain Mycenaean states and the city of Troy during the late Bronze Age, but it's not very likely that the Trojan War is a historical event. I wrote about this in more detail here.