The Phocais was an ancient Greek

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 epic widely attributed to Homer

Homer

In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

. In the Life of Homer, a biography of Homer falsely attributed to Herodotus, it was said to have been written while Homer lived at Phocaea

Phocaea

Phocaea, or Phokaia, was an ancient Ionian Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia. Greek colonists from Phocaea founded the colony of Massalia in 600 BC, Emporion in 575 BC and Elea in 540 BC.-Geography:Phocaea was the northernmost...

 with a man named Thestorides

Thestorides of Phocaea

Thestorides of Phocaea was a legendary or semi-legendary early Greek poet, one of those to whom the epic Little Iliad was ascribed.Thestorides figures as a major character in the fictional Life of Homer fraudulently ascribed to Herodotus...

; however, whether Thestorides actually existed and where he lived is highly suspect. Like all Homeric works, its true author is unknown; today only a single fragment (three to four sentences of text) claiming its existence survives.