We Believe In A Great Poet As The Author Of The Iliad and The Odyssey—But Not That Homer Was This Poet

Project Gutenberg has archived a Nietzsche lecture from 1869.  Nietzsche lectures on Homer and classical philology.  Among the things the lecture focuses on is just who, or whom, Homer was:

They conceived the Iliad and  the Odyssey as the  creations  of one  single Homer; they declared it to be psychologically possible for two such different works to have sprung from the brain of one genius, in contradiction to the Chorizontes, who represented the extreme limit of the scepticism  of  a  few  detached  individuals  of  antiquity  rather  than  antiquity  itself considered as a whole.

Nietzsche also wonders how much of Homer was actually left in The Odyssey by the time it was written down:

The name of Homer, from the very beginning, has no connection either with the conception of æsthetic perfection or yet with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not a historical tradition, but an æsthetic judgment.