Posted on 06/19/2023 2:49:54 PM PDT by nickcarraway
I guess when you get right down to it Homer was what we would describe as a media person today and was spinning a good tale in support of his side.
Ticking off a bucket list item. Will be in Troy in a little over a week during a trip o Istanbul.
Don’t forget to bring back some Urfa biber if you like to cook.
Everybody knows the gods were right there fighting away...
The Trojan horse later won the Derby...
Within my lifetime, Troy was considered by many experts to be a myth, until it was found. I think it is safest to assume that these things are historical at the core, with the same amount of embellishments used in modern war movies to tell a good story, and to compel support for the right side ( which in those days meant a generous helping of gods). Homer was too good to make it one sides propaganda, though.
Sounds great, let us know hw it goes and pics.
On the 1800s Heinrich Schliemann tested his possible discovery of Troy by running around it anc comparing it to Homer.
It’s all Greek to me.
Perhaps, but I don’t even think we need to blame Homer for spinning....he likely inherited a story that was somewhat spun already.
Greeks returning from an Anatolian war would have retold what happened from their perspective. Their Greek listeners, who likely had never been to Anatolia, then imagined the city based on what they knew in Greece.
Schliemann got close in 1873 and also found gold, but it was later determined to be too old to be Priam’s treasure.
Some people still argue that some of Shakespeare’s works were written by someone else, so it’s not surprising that Homer would be in dispute.
What is important is that the legend of the brave Greeks who besieged Troy and conquered it by using the Trojan Horse inspired generation upon generation, as does Homer’s Iliad, which remains one of the greatest works of world literature and a masterpiece of our intangible cultural heritage.
Are we still allowed to have heroes?
Istanbul? Not Constantinople?
#3 Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XlO39kCQ-8
Only Tranny anti-Christian "heroes" allowed by the current administraion. /S
Today the horse would show up in an Amazon package
I always thought Shakespeare was a face for a writing company like Betty Crocker was for food.
As I remember heinrich Schliemann used the Illiad to find the city he discovered...so he says.
Others dug into the mound before him I read too
The Iliad is a masterpiece in a lot of ways. My first reading in high school (back when we read that sort of thing in high school) led me to believe that it was a case of the winners writing the history; later readings convinced me that that was only partially true, for in the Iliad the Greeks aren't the good guys, at least not by the standards of later Greek morality. They are presented as violent, vengeful, squabbling, barbaric, and generally with a sense of honor mitigated strongly by vanity. Consider the real beef of Achilles with his king - it was over the possession of a slave girl. He pouted, Patroclus borrowed his armor and went to his death at the hands of the Trojan hero Hector, who was by our own lights today and that of the Greeks of the fifth century B.C., a far more civilized individual than Achilles: a family man whose relations with wife and son are among the most tender passages in the Iliad, whose death at Achilles' hands causes the latter to change into something better. The scene of the Trojan king Priam humbling himself before Achilles to beg for the recovery of his beloved son's body is central to the development of the character. It would have been very much in character for the prior Achilles to haughtily refuse; instead, he relents, agrees, and becomes a finished man. The fall of Troy (no, the silly Trojan Horse is NOT in the Iliad) is presented in tragic language, not in triumph, as Hector's bride throws their son from the walls and goes off to her own enslavement.
This is brilliant, subtle, complex stuff, far from a chest-thumping campfire recitation it may resemble and is often accused of being. The victors (or putative victors) of the literature may have written it, but not with themselves as irreproachable heroes.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.