How Historically Accurate is the Iliad? A Short Introduction
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- čas přidán 26. 04. 2024
- The Iliad is one of the great epics of Ancient Greece. It tells, at least in part, the story of the Trojan War, and it appears to contain valid elements of the Bronze Age world. Which has led scholars to debate whether or not the Iliad is historically accurate, and whether or not the poet Homer was a real person. This video briefly investigates the subject.
Sources:
A History of the Archaic Greek World, Hall
The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction, Cline
Ancient Greece, Roberts et al
I don't find "there are anachronistic details, therefore false" persuasive, because there's so many absolutely known events, with written firsthand accounts that remained known, which STILL have numerous anachronisms baked into popular coverage of the events, nevermind retellings which spent at least some time as oral tradition. It's like if we lost all record of Julius Caesar and the first known mention ended up being Shakespeare's play, and someone said "well, there's a clock, so it's probably not true."
""well, there's a clock, so it's probably not true." " - well, Shakespeare's play _is not_ true, if by "true" we mean a factual account. But here we find the origin of myth: human creativeness, working over some past event or person so said event/person is useful for telling a contemporary story.
I mean to me as a student of history (Not like in the academic sense of being a student, but like the Philosophical Sense of ever a student) Its very clear that the Illiad is a 'true' story in so far as it is an account through oral traditions of a real history ambiguated by several centuries of Oral telling. It takes only looking at the 'bards' of cultures that still utilize oral traditions to know how reasonable a conclusion this is.
In addition to anachronisms, I think fantastical elements, such as dragons, are also viewed as falsifying other parts of the story too often. It is easy to change one word in an oral tradition.
E.g. changing the name of one person in a story is easy. The events in the story might still have happened but the whole story mught be dismissed as a fairytale because it couldn't have involved that person.
@@TheDanEdwards not all myths have a factual basis
@@TheDanEdwardsYou're missing the point, really. 'Julius Caesar' is not the best historical source for that particular period of Roman history, but certainly plenty of it *is* true.
This reminds me of how artists in Renaissance Italy used to paint scenes from the Bible in which everyone was dressed like Renaissance Italians. 😅
Or medieval paintings of the Trojan war! I find those super interesting because Troy is depicted like a typical european medieval castle with knights in plate armor
Tbf what else would they used as reference?
I certainly think the Iliad is based in historical events from the Bronze Age. It’s quite clear there were conflicts involving and around Troy over a long period of time, and either the Iliad is recounting one of these conflicts, or probably melding things together. I mean we have Hittite texts with references to Priam and Alexandros (Paris), and we know from Hittite texts the Achaeans were campaigning around Troy.
The Hittites also recorded languages and events of the people they conquered. Because of this there’s a Hittite tablet quoting the beginning of an Anatolian epic tale of Troy.
Homer’s descriptions are clearly descended from historical events that he never saw himself. He accurately described parts of the ancient walls of Troy, which no one from his generation would have seen because they were covered up by an artificial mound of dirt. The fact that the catalog of ships preserves a list of Bronze Age cities that were no longer inhabited is another testament to historical memory.
Not exactly. The Greeks weren't too involved. Most of the soldiers and the leaders were locals.
@@zaco-km3su I was talking specifically about the Greek here, not the ‘Assuwa Confederation’ mentioned in Hittite texts of which Troy was just one member. As far as I’m aware we don’t have a complete list of the confederation members, so it’s difficult to say who all participated.
i think homer got a story of a war passed down from somebody else as it happens with most bards. so even though he gets his facts mixed up and embellishes the story. there really was a war and hes simply the first to right it down.
@@zaco-km3su How do you know that?
@@zaco-km3su What.
It's literally the founding greek epic.
As an aside, as a teen I read in the Guinness book that the unit of female beauty was a millihelen, being sufficient to launch one ship. Also being 1/1000 of Helen of Troy's beauty.
there were 1.186 ships in the greek fleet
so one Helen is the beauty that launches 1186 ships and a Millihelen would be enough for 1.186 ships
Then we get the negative milliHelen, the unit of ugliness necessary to sink one ship.
If you want to appreciate how accurate the Illiad is I have two books for you to read, neither of them are about the Illiad.
1. Fóstbrœðra saga - Saga of the Sworn Brothers
2. Gerpla - The Happy Warriors (1958)/Wayward Heroes (2016)
It is one of the most popular Icelandic Sagas, full of adventure and action and a retelling of the story by a modern nobel prize winning author.
The Illiad is a story from a time that was incomprehensible to the Greeks. The Greeks of Homer's day lived in self governing towns while the Daanans of the Illiad lived in a strict hierarchical tribute empire. Their weapons were different, their tactics were different their social structures were different. Anything that isn't typically greek in the stories is something that survived the dark age and anything that is typically greek is something added later to fill in some gap.
Funny that you mention Icelandic Sagas because it never ceases to amaze that Snorri knew about the Iliad.
@@BlaBla-pf8mf Snorri was a Christian priest who likely new Latin.
@@KoryMalleus Priest is an exhaggeration. He had no theological training and, like many other lords and chiefs of the period, adopted the mantle of priest as an excuse to sieze and exempt himself from taxes intended for the church.
Famous quote, (maybe Aldous Huxley?), "The Iliad was written either by Homer, or by someone else in the same time frame who was also named Homer."
The boar-tusk helm and the Hittite writing suggest that not everything was fantasy.
Suggests it was well rooted in reality but details were lost and later substituted like a game of telephone over several hundred years before it was written down.
Historical fiction then.
There are kernels of truth there, but a lot got lost or garbled during the Greek dark age
Hittite writing?
@@koboldgeorge2140 yup. . The hittites wrote correspondences with the kings of Wilusa in the period before the Trojan War is said to have tsien place.and many describe conflict with the Greeks
The catalogue of Ships in the Iliad is not a list of actual ships, but of heroes, their forces, and number of ships they brought.
The poet Christopher Logue created an interesting pastiche of the Iliad(War Music) that retells the story(loosely) using strikingly anachronistic imagery. The result is a poem that mixes references and ideas from across several centuries to convey the grim details of war. For example, one description of a character compares him to a grim faced Rommel in his Afrika Corps uniform. It struck me that a storyteller always goes for story over accuracy and a poet(in the oral tradition, especially) must also use memorable images and words that meter so that the people listening could remember and relate to his poem.
Oral traditions accrete like coral over the decades and centuries of retelling, embellishing, misremembering and confusion over things never seen. It would be more surprising if there weren't historical errors and anachronism in the Iliad. The earliest oral versions were probably quite accurate and placed in the correct time and context. Centuries later when it was finally written down, it would likely have a lot of legends, lies and outright horseshit baked in, like a Hollywood Western about gunfighters.
Why did you just copy and paste a Wikipedia article? How lonely are you?
@@darkjudge8786 Two questions, asked twice. We CZcamsrs are not as literate as the schoolboys who mangle WikiPedia, so we need to have it predigested for us.
i always thought the Illiad was so important to the Greeks because it preserved the history of what we call the Bronze Age collapse
in the most basic sense the story is: sea raiders come to the shores of Anatolia and raid a city
that's "sea peoples"
They were myceneans.
What Homer describes isn't the Dendra panoply, for one thing the injuries suffered often in the Iliad are attacks at the belt line, which would be impossible through the Dendra style panoply. Rather, and especially in case of the hyper-detailed description of Agamemnon's panoply, this dead to rights to armor styles right before the bronze age collapse, not to mention it also matches pottery paintings and other ceramic depictions of the era which show horned helmets, simple cuirasses, greaves, and sometimes vambraces as well (along with thick belts sometimes laid over a gap between a cuirass and a small abdominal plate), and in use of infantry as well which is an important distinction from the chariot dominated context of Dendra's era. The salimbeti website which comes up in google is a good starting resource of pictures of such pottery and the like.
I comment I often hear about the combat in the Iliad is that chariots are used more for transportation, but there are large sections where characters on both sides fight from their chariots, only dismounting to strip the dead or pick up large rocks to throw.
So. Much. Rock. Throwing. That was my main takeaway from the iliad.
Another epic with anachronistic warfare is the Pentateuch, in which the war chariots of the captivity in Egypt during the 2nd millennium BC are actually those used in Babylonia during the 1st millennium BC, when the Israelite elites were in captivity and most of those books were probably written.
That leads to the suggestion that the captivity in Egypt was just a metaphor for the real captivity in Babylon, which it was not safe to preach about in public. So the tale of Moses, the escape from Egypt to the Promised Land and the genocide of the Canaanites was wishful thinking, which turned out to be unnecessary when Babylon was conquered by Persia and the captives were free to return.
Im not sure if you've answered this before in another video but, I wonder if the Ancient (classical) Greeks thought the Illiad was real or not.
Sure they did - why would they have doubted it? Keep in mind that the classical Greeks also believed in the literal existence of the Olympian gods. If you believe that Athena is real, then Achilles won't place any additional strain on your credibility.
Wow very interesting. Did 6 years of Latin and used many of Homer's verses to compare it with another famous Epos: Aeneas of Vergilius, but never heard Homer's existence was being debated.
Thank you for all your wonderful, carefully-researched videos :) You are one of my favourite history CZcams channels
Love the increased output! Thanks!
I tend to think that the Iliad is fiction based on events from the distant past. And that some of the characters, including Homer likely existed. But that the actual events in the Iliad did not occur as portrayed. My speculation is that the Iliad is basically fanfiction for the purposes of maintaining cultural cohesion.
I think that's about right.
The Ancient Greeks didn't didn't make our distinctions.
But The Iliad is a made - up story, so it should go in the *fiction* section of a modern library.
love it!!!
great voice, good info
a pleasure to hear
and accurate images....great work
Another fascinating video. The mention of the 21st Century being known by its cars brought to mind a spoof future archaeology book called, "The Motel of the Mysteries." This can be seen as making fun of both archaeological malpractice and the public's irrational method of understanding history and archaeology. It actually reminded me of the unhinged rationalizations of the infamous pseudo-archaeologist Error von Dummkopf! [name changed to protect the guilty]
Arrggghhh way to build a boatload of suspense. I already immediately watch your videos, you can’t make me watch them any quicker !!! 😂
Been following from long ago, you are getting close to that magic number my guy
Excellent video! Thanks!
You see it today in modern Hollywood movies set in the past, like A Knights Tale, or Excalibur, where they might add later and more familiar armour, clothing and hairstyles.
That's true of the recent past too. Men in films set in the Victorian Age have short Brylcreemed hair in films from the 30's and 50's, but long flowing locks, floral waistcoats, etc if filmed in the 60's or 70's.
I’m a new comer to your channel. Enjoyed your enlightenment on Iliad and look forward to checking out your video on Yam!! Nice work
Keep up the good work 💯
The oral history probably has some basis. The city existed, and something happened to it dated to the late Bronze Age. The Homer exisitance and/or veracity questions seem academic given the fact the writing down of oral history attributed to Homer came from epic poems that had ~six centuries of exciting embellishments.
Eh, maybe it was like Gilgamesh, where different cities eventually added their own embellishments to the tale.
Speculating that the Greeks decided to claim credit for a Hittite/Troy Fight strains credulity. Not when you have such long and detailed lists of GREEK Bronze Age Cities involved.
This is akin to saying that since the Vikings also invaded Paris, the English conquest of Paris didn't happen, they just stole it from the Vikings.
In relation to the Hittite records, the Greeks were mercenaries in conflicts around West Asia, I reckon their memory was of that, being mercenaries which led to the romanticized themes being added in the iron age, hence the melding of two different eras as you describe. The iron age contamination was a heroic sheen added to older tradition.
It’s a great story just the same.One of my favorites.I read it when I was eleven and then the Odyssey.Great books for sure.
Need more.... Lots More!! More please!!!
Theodoric the Great is known to have been a prototype for Thidrek or Dietriech of Bern. We happen to have good grasp of the historical Theodoric and we have numerous epic poems containing elements of his cycle and if you've ever delved into this topic you know that it's all over the place. Theodoric doesn't conquer Italy but rules part of it from Bern and is then removed by his uncle Ermanrik(4th century Gothic king maybe?), due to the plot by his advisor iirc. Sivka(there are some parallels in this story with certain Scandinavian sagas to make it even more bizarre) and then he ends on the court of King Attila(Theodoric was probably a child when he died), sometimes also Etzel, who's court is located somewhere in Germany and we can go on and on and on.
By the 12th century it's a literally character who's probably merged with his father(service to Attila) and the few parallels between him and his historical version become extremely surface-level.
This comparison is rarely brought up when discussing the Trojan war, but it should. Illiad was written at the best of times 400 years after the Troyan war, the earliest texts mentioning the legendary version of Theodoric show up after about the same interval. You shouldn't measure the discrepancies and assume dis proportionality, but assuming that what we see in Illiad is a similar mish-mash of events and characters and only some particulars are similar(some war happened, some of the cities match etc.) is a reasonably fair bet.
Several mistakes were made on chariots - chariots as a mobile platform from which arrows are shot is a specifically Egyptian and Mesopotamian style of warfare, with these areas focused more on light infantry and skirmish warfare than were Anatolia or Greece. Hittite chariots were designed for charging at the enemy with three person crews, one to drive, one with a lancing spear to attack enemies, and one shield-bearer to ward off attacks, although the Hittites may also have employed Mesopotamian-style chariots. Mycenaean Greek chariots, from Mycenaean depictions and archaeological finds, were NEVER missile platforms, and do appear to have been employed as suggested by Homer, with one driver and one heavily-armoured passenger who fights from the chariot and then uses the chariot as something akin to a battlefield taxi. Chariots had also fallen completely out of usage in warfare by the Greek Archaic period (when Homer was writing), making this not an 'Iron Age' feature at all.
If we eliminate the fanciful - a ten year siege (populations were nowhere big enough to maintain a siege of that length), starting a war over the kidnapping of a Spartan noble, and a fleet of one thousand ships, etc . . . there is still more than enough left to suggest that a war between the Greeks and Trojans was an actual event. There was a time when oral history was looked down upon and doubted as a source of real history - this is no longer so, obvious exceptions notwithstanding. A fine video, very well done. Cheers!
I have been researching the Amarna letter period and the late Bronze Age for a few years now. One day I will finish my 'source book' for a role-playing game of your choice :)
I think you hit the nail on the head. To me its important to note that "Homer" probably came from from the coastal region of western Anatolia. So I see the Illiad as a garbled folk memory of the late Bronze Age in the region with added on 'modern elements' (Iron Age) from Homer's life time.
I think the Illiad 'collects' or 'compresses' events that occurred over two or three hundred years into one text. You see the stages of early raiding and pillaging of western Anatolia by the Late Bronze Age Achaens and then the political intrigue and interference by the Achaen city states in what the Hittites regarded as their 'sphere of influence'. To me 'Helen' is just a story telling element because the knowledge of the real political events had been lost by the time Homer was telling his stories.
During the period of the real 'Trojan Wars' the coastal regions of western Anatolia were made of up of a set of small and medium sized city-states (probably made up of Luwian speakers). The Hittite empire to the east had ambitions of controlling and then engulfing these states. Some of the states were Hittite 'clients' with their rulers being vassals of the Hittite King. The coastal states had first been raided by the Achaens but eventually became trading partners. In fact some of the coastal cities had Greek trading posts and enclaves. In fact western Anatolia was 'sandwiched' between two powerful and aggressive entites. The Hittites and the Achaens/Greeks.
Some of the city states of Anatolia formed alliances with the Achaens as a counter to Hittite aggression. This inevitably lead to a 'cold war' between the Greeks and Hittites. The Trojan war probably stemmed from a Greek attempt to force Troy/Willusa into becoming a Achean 'partner' or vassal. Perhaps its ruler would not accept an Achaen trading post? The location of 'Troy' also controls access to the Black Sea and the Greeks perhaps wanted free access or port location as a staging post for vessels moving into the Black Sea basin. I suspect the Greeks considered the whole region as both strategical important and a rich prize. It was a long a way from Hittite assistance and was considered easy pickings.
The Illiad is a likely a compressed narrative of a very long period of political intrigue and warfare between the Achaens, Hittites and the west Anatolian city states stuck between them composed by an individual who knit together half remembered folk memories that lacked the full political and geographic context of the Late Bronze Age.
It's kind of like watching Star Wars IV: A New Hope and it never getting any sequels or prequels. Your stuck with a good story but your missing a lot of the backstory.
Great video. And the Trojan Horse was probably ? the first time Greeks used a siege engine to break down a wall ???? Also, tower shields sounds a bit like Minoan pikemen and their large shield, not the same but probably similar fighting technique ? More questions than answers. :D
No one knows. Big problem we have is the book that talked about the fall of Troy and the horse didn’t survive the fall of Rome. We have only 2 books of the 5 in the saga and some other works talking about the other books.
Or maybe it wasn't the Greeks.
Such questions are interesting, but what I find even more amazing is the influence these two books have had on the process of storytelling even in modern times. In Hollywood films there are two kinds of hero. One is the lone crazed avenger whose best buddy gets it so he loads up and heads off for the final showdown. Just about every western, war film, or detective thriller contains some elements of The Iliad. Tombstone, Unforgiven, The Maltese Falcon, The Road Warrior, John Wick, Saving Private Ryan, etc. The second is the lovable scoundrel who outwits his enemies and goes back home to the girl he left behind him. Think every rom-com ever, from Cary Grant or William Powell to Tom Cruise or Matthew McConnaughey.
the lovable scoundrel was the most bad A55 guy the greeks had in their ranks, that's why he made it back alive (after raiding egypt - just like the C people)
That's interesting, I never heard of the multiple Homer theory. It's sorta similar to Chinese history where many classics like Art of War are considered to be the work of multiple scribes credited to a made up person. And if in a court scribe in a later dynasty writes another book, it can also be credited to these same authors made up centuries ago.
I think there's a misunderstanding here about The Art of War. There is no question that there were two writers of the final text because the second writer is self-identified as the general Sun Bin from the Qi state. The issue is whether the first writer (Sun Wu) was a historical person, as his life story only exists in myths and historical fiction novels. However, we do know that the original core of The Art of War and the name of its supposed author predated Sun Bin because the historical Sun Bin himself used his supposed descent from Sun Wu as a selling point both in his writings and for getting a job. Chinese historians generally agree that the original core was written by a single author from analysis of its writing style. What they disagree on is whether it was the author's original work or a compilation work from multiple lost sources.
the shield depicting a gorgon is actually Agamemnon's shield
Very interesting
Great video. Whether Homer was a real person is not important at all. Many people from many cultures around the region knew the story and they weren't getting it all from one dude. I read somewhere that there were songs of the fall of troy in anatolian cultures as well.
Also, one thing hardly mentioned is that Bronze age Greeks and the Iliad had widespread human sacrifice. Whereas that practice had disappeared by classical times.
4:46 while it could be an instance of two oral traditions being mixed, we also shouldn't assume that greek bronze age cities were abandoned or uninhabited by the iron age, many show signs of continuing occupation such as Tiryns or formed the basis for new cities (such as the Athenian acropolis being the remains of a bronze age citadel). Often they were also not fully abandoned until later in the classical period, but would have been populated during the archaic and proto-geometric periods to some degree.
Homer created the Iliad from oral accounts current among islanders. There were many versions of the same stories and he picked those he found useful and probably modified even some of these. I think Robert Graves' account, though purely subjective, intuitive reasoning, gives the best probable account of this war.
So "Homer" might have been a group, "collecting" parts of the story from all over the Greek world, shaping the myth like we know it today - that reminds me a lot of the Grimm Brothers who collected all kinds of fairy tales in the 19th century by traveling around Germany and it's surrounding states and creating the versions we mostly know today. From all the evidence stated I think this might be quite possible, "Homer" didn't live at that time of the war described because it probably never happened exactly like it did in the epic (the name of the genre alone suggests fiction added to it afterall) but molded a unified version from all the different orally transmitted versions that the people knew around Greece. Obviously with some historical "mistakes" but who knows, maybe they were stilistical methods "he" needed for his story to make it more compelling and interesting? Afterall, that's what most historical fiction movies do to this day, add some historical inaccuracies because they are simply "cool" (because let's face it, the fighting scenes described in the illiad could come straight out of some super hero movie and no one would notice the difference haha)
An epoch story of before the Trojan war? Where can I find that Kipria ? And of the earliest Hittite documents too?
You’ll want to look into what’s called The Epic Cycle for the Cypria and the other stuff related to it. I have a video coming soon on the Hittite texts. It’s going on my patreon and will be released on CZcams in probably about two weeks. If you are interested in that, the documents you’ll want to google are “The Ahhiyawa Texts”. There is a translation of them on Amazon for $40.00, but you can probably find them online for free
arguable the trojan war was war that happen some time during the bronze age collapses but elements of artistic licences like weapons and armor were used by bronze age to iron age so yes in a way
Thanks
What about the War at Troy by Quintus of Smyrna? This picks up where the Iliad leaves off and before the Odyssey.
The Trojan war and the Bronze age collapse are clearly related, in time, and in the fall of a previously impregnable city.
the major reason so many cities fell in the Bronze age collapse (100 years to destroy a civilization) was that an offensive weapon had been invented to get past city wall defenses. Hear the Trojan Horse gives us a clue, it was a horse shaped device with about 10 men inside that opened a city gate. This did not work by guile (as per the story) but was clearly a covered bettering ram. The story was a bit of military fiction to retain secrecy on how this "horse" worked.
A person of a contemporary time having detailed knowledge of antiquated equipment, but nonetheless applying a modern understanding of fighting isn't uncommon nor unheard of. That would be like someone today going into detail about world war II weapons, (of which many survive and still are used in warfare) but describing fighting with them in a modern formation.
It could be that knowledge and memory of these old weapons was passed down and preserved, whether as relics or oral history. But when pressured to describe scenes of fighting they just assumed what they were familiar with in their contemporary iron age of warfare.
I mean look at how wildly off Hollywood can be about history despite having a level of access to information that would be incomprehensible to an illiterate Dark age Greek.
It is very likely that true reason for Trojan war was taxation Troy forced on Greek trading ships going for Black Sea. Greece had chronic shortage of grain for growing population at least from Classical era and Black sea area was one of favourite destinations. Now imagine someone with perfect view over fairly narrow Dardanelles and fleet ready to extract tribute. Elopement of someone's wife would be just a nice excuse, similar to political assasinations and other insults in newer history.
I don't like the argument that you can't use the illiad as a source because it would be like using fiction to learn about the 21st century.
Okay! Challenge accepted!
Imagine you get someone who has no familiarity with the 21st century, and you show them Marvel's Avengers.
What can they learn about the 21st century from it?
I think it's very likely they can comb through the fictional elements, removing loki and the tesseract and the helicarrier since theyre impossible and get: "Huh, so the 21st century has massive cities, theres one called New York, they have carriages that go fast called cars and projectile weapons called guns, they have emergency personnel called cops that... Respond to emergencies i guess?"
And stuff like that.
Why couldn't you use modern fiction media as a source about the 21st century?
You'd have to be of a skeptical and discerning type, but why not?
You can learn quite a bit about Archaic/early Classical Greece from The Iliad.
What you can't do is learn anything about Mycenaean Greece the period where it's *set*.
The main question is: Is Troy really where we currently place it? The trajectory described by Homer in no way corresponds to Troy in present-day Türkiye.
Ancient Serbs lived at that time in Anadolia.
Another possibility is that the agreed upon time period for the war is wrong. An error in dating would lead to a lot of the problems described here.
Imagine, for example, that in the future we find out more about Greek history and the Dark Ages just magically disappear.
I heard one way to describe the illiad is like if there was post apocalyptic story featuring Audie Murphy and his mad max-esque biker gang defeating the Nazis.
Damn that’s good
I won’t compare Trojans to nazis . In this story I somehow find them the good guys
Does that make the Odyssey Audie Murphy and gang trying to return to America via SIberia then?
@@rahulbatsyes, I imagine Trojans were just defending themselves from violent attempts by Homer's Achaeans to control the sea trade and colonise their land.
@@stephena1196 Not just that, they wanted to burn the city, kill all the men, rape all the women and enslave them.
Which is exactly what they ended up doing.
Homer calls one of the Greeks the "destroyer of cities", so it was obviously a habit.
I think there is a lost precursor to the ill-advised. There are details like the mention of leopards and other things that point to an earlier Era than homer.
As they say, where theres smoke
The Greeks could have exaggerated their role in the war greatly.
It has been suggested, that Homer tried to tell lessons by the retelling of actual events, about good and bad leadership and how heroic ideals can ruin a civilization.
By the way, there is a book by David Rohl, "A Test of Time", where he points out that the end of the bronze age and the roaming of the sea people might have occurred in the 9th century BCE. So that would separate the "homeric" trojan war (wich the greeks dated to around 1200 BCE) from the fall of the mycenean civilisation. It would also shorten the greek "dark ages" a lot, wich would make it more believable.
I urge everyone who reads this to search CZcams for the remarkable docuseries narrated by Michael Wood entitle "In Search of the Trojan War". He really knows how to tell a story mixed with real history.
Saw it on TV many years ago. I agree, a great series.
I think one thing that would make some difference is if we could know for sure one way or another if the Bronze Age Greeks did use their chariots the same way everyone else did or if they actually did use them as taxis. It seems to me like they did most of their fighting on the sea or coastal areas, with some inland but mountainous regions. I can’t imagine they took chariots along when they went to fight as mercenaries, so maybe they did just use them as transportation and fought mostly on foot.
Approximately as historically accurate as The Book of Exodus.
Or Geoffrey of Monmouth's History.
Which Trojan war was being described? Perhaps all of them, just mashed together in one huge epic cycle
My personal opinion is based on the old book Hamlet’s Mill and that it’s the Greek version of an old core story from the steppe and a cousin of Ragnarok and the mahabatra war in Hindu tradition
10 year events with gods, personal combat, and maybe other similarities that I don’t know about.
Each one was changed to account for the local area and events locally after the yamnaya migrations separated the people
There were numerous scripts other than the Greek alphabet. I heard the narrator state that Iliad/Odyssey were necessarily an oral tradition until the actual Greek alphabet.
I thought it starts with the poetry competition @ Chalcis on the isle of Eubia (forgive spelling) around 800b.c.e.
People would practice literacy with Theogeny & works and days by Heisieod.
And then the oral history or better still the songs of thare Homer's ( mutch like a canter to the jews) with the Odessy & the Illad. I suspect the Cypriade & Aetheopiade were latter literary inventions
There's software that tries to determine if the same person wrote two different texts, even if they're trying to conceal their identity. Like an automated version of that line-by-line analysis you described. It wouldn't give a conclusive answer, but I'm curious if anyone has tried that on the Illiad and the Odyssey.
Interested idea but between retellings and translations and bastardisations I don’t think it would shed any light on the topic.
The problem with that is that the Iliad and Odyssey are very clearly mixes of various authors, and very clearly reflect language passed down over time. There is some amount of actual Mycenaean-period Greek in at least the Iliad (I know less about the Odyssey), some Archaic Greek that reflects language from certainly earlier than Homer's time but post-Mycenaean, and some Ionic Greek contemporaneous with Homer. The version of the poems 'Homer' gives are almost certainly amalgamations of different poets over time and simply reflect the version perhaps a particularly famous poet who for the sake of argument we can call Homer, related to scribes some time around 800-700 BCE based on the age of the newest material in the poems.
Some of the clearest evidence of passing down of Mycenaean terms is that the kings of various places as well as gods are called 'anax', which is a Mycenaean term that does not survive in later Greek outside of Homer (and the highly isolated Greek communities in Cyprus speaking a descendant of Mycenaean Greek) and Homer is using this term correctly for Mycenaean Greek, the fact that Homer uses Mycenaean grammatical forms in several places that also do not survive in later Greek, and that the metre of the poetry in places also indicates that it was designed for phonological features present in Mycenaean and Archaic Greek, but not Homer's Ionic Greek (particularly visible in datives).
I am also put in mind of the tendency to see the past through modern eyes from the late Middle Ages we have paintings of historic events, but the people in the paintings have modern armor and dress for the time
Though an epic poem, meant for entertainment, The Iliad does contain some historical content. Witness Homer's description of Troy, with its angle walls and high gate towers. There were buried and not visible during "Homer's" time. So, this story does preserve an oral tradition of a real event. Perhaps the details are skewed, but such sieges were not unknown during the Bronze Age.
Factor that in with the fact that this appears to have occurred at the onset of the Bronze Age Collapse, but you have many possibilities. Add again, the possibility of an earthquake, fortuitous for the Greeks (or perhaps Sea Peoples) that felled the walls of Troy, thus ending the siege....and you have another possibility.
All of this can only be speculation of course, but remember.....the god of earthquakes was Poseidon...who was also closely associated with horses. Get the connection?
An ancient story applied onto current events
I am thinking an occasional rich iron age benefactor paid to have his lineage added into the story, and Homer was simply the most famous of the oral tellers of the stories
While the elements of the stories were predominately oral to start with, Homer (a real person-my conclusion) made choices as to what was incorporated and how and what flourishes to add (think Shakespeare's plays based on Holinshead and other sources, or new pieces added by the Greek tragedians to traditional mythic stories), with the result that the Iliad and the Odyssey were seen by the classical world (from the archaic age onwards) to be well-above the other works in the Epic Cycle; this supports the single-author concept for those works in the second half of the 700s. Other versions of Odysseus's voyage home (Books 9-12 of the Odyssey) might have had much more on the Laestrygonians and other shorter (in text) encounters, and less about Polyphemus and Circe, but it took a skilled storyteller to put things together in a way that works so well. Homer had been a soldier (he lost his eyes in a combat injury?); his description of battle, of seeing your friends horribly killed around you, seems based on personal knowledge (although see Stephen Crane for a contrary example), but as noted his familiarity with Bronze Age weapons was mixed. My favorite example of this is his use of chariots essentially as battle taxis, where they take a hero up to the front lines and then drop him off to fight on foot against an opposing warrior (if their families were not too closely connected). Homer clearly had no understanding of how chariots were actually used by the Hittites and the Egyptians in the late-Bronze Age.
Homer uses so much brilliant visual imagery that I cannot believe he had always been blind. I think he had normal vision for most of his life, and then may have gone blind in old age, maybe from cataracts or glaucoma or something. This would explain why people who only knew him towards the end of his life would have remembered him as "that old blind poet guy".
Your mom's stories were predominately oral
The thing is the iron age Greeks had pretty good access to artefacts from the bronze age via all the ruins of bronze age settlement. I think its a similar situation to the labyrinth myth on crete. The Greeks invented a story to fit the ruins that seemed plausible to them and so it seems plausible to modern archeologists.
the homeric question: is being called a Homer a compliment or an insult
Job description is a bust. If "Homer" were a general group of writers, there would have been more works attributed to him, even if no others survived. But we only hear of the Illiad and the Oddessy.
Many other epics about the Trojan War were ascribed to Homer. He was even said to have composed a Thebaid about the war against Thebes with the seven gates. But as these poems contained inconsistencies historians such as Herodotus argued that Homer could not have written both the Cypria and the Iliad and Odyssee. Initially there's reference to "Homer", and later on to "the poet of the Aithiopis", and the like. And there's several names of other epic poets that epic poems on Troy are ascribed to, although we do not know they really existed. But then again, we do not know if Homer did.
It's the same thing like Hollywood movies today being based on real events doesn't mean being accurate the key word is based on.
But it is based on real events 100%
Thanks bro. Interesting stuff.
If Homer lived only 200-300 yrs after the Trojan War (Sea Peoples era) one might imagine bronze weapons/armor were still around as being perfectly practical if not trendy. If not common, perhaps they were heirlooms, or symbols of status, etc. While looting from tombs supplied the needy.
We know how this works. The Icelandic sagas were written in the 13th century about events in the 9th and 10th century. That's the same difference between the Illiad and Homer. We can compare written sources from both periods to the depictions in the sagas to get a feel for their accuracy. My favorite bit is when a saga uses the word for a modern weapon at the time, a halberd, to describe an act that could only have been done by a danish great axe. Homer is just as much a product of his own time as it is a product of the stories that were passed down orally.
@@gudmundursteinar Welcomed reply . . .
@gudmundursteinar after only 50ish years of breathing I can very much understand and agree with how much language changes.
@@kalrandom7387 Having lived 3/4 of a century I tend to agree but with a reservation. A grand-uncle and other kin spoke English with a strong Scots influence (descended from Scots who arrived in America 150 yrs earlier). His sister much less so. She worked for wealthy American Salmon 'fly' fishermen and her educated daughters had no accent to 'my' ear - TV mono-culture. External cultural influence can be extremely rapid but without it, old ways carry on and on and on . . .
Just a note that bronze didn't suddenly disappear due to the iron age. Iron is just more plentiful and cheaper.
I am put in mind of Hollywood movies about the old west. Often they present real people like Jessie James or Hugh Glass, but present them in an ahistorical way. However these were real people who had real adventures.
We can combine myth and reality to make a good story
honestly the iliad isnt historical argument seems baselessly cynical. the fact that homer references things like boar tusk helmets that were no longer in use in the iron age is a huge thorn in that arguments side.
Absolutely nothing about The Iliad is historical.
It's like asking whether LOTR is historically accurate.
It's not a question.
It's a category error.
@@alanpennie baselessly cynical take as well
@@alanpennieLOTR has swords and bows, it must be accurate
@alanpennie I used to think similarly but I came across a really interesting rabbit hole about story telling and the Aborigines of Australia, in my opinion after looking into it, it adds good weight to aspects of the illiad being historical in the sense of the stories being transmitted one generation to another
@@alanpennieI recommend checking out " songlines" in aboriginal culture, my reasoning is if something like this can exist, it makes it possible that the illiad may have worked in a generally similar manner, but it's not a hill I would die on, if you do end up checking it out I'd love to know what you think
Long it was thought, cause the plot of the Ilias was far more heroic and heightened, that it matched to an old man, and that the not-so-noble Odyssey was just from his pupils, or similar... Nowadays, experts say, that the Odyssey is the far better one. There, Odysseus lands shipwrecked on an isle, is found half-dead, and he tells them his story. We never get a hint that he isn´t just lying, in order to soften their hearts, and it is much more intelligently constructed, like a good modern book from Goethe or Dostoevsky would be... It is the story of a modern citizen (citizens wouldn´t exist till 1450AD, 2250 years later, after the Dark Ages, when citizens slowly arose from slavery all over Europe, if you exclude classical-ancient-Greece-period), who isn´t heroic, and won´t kill for matters of honour, like Achilles does, but instead will kill, cause "guests"/strangers back home have wasted his fortune/wealth. That´s of course a far more sober view, compared with the romantic 18th-19th century view on Homer. So, it´s much more likely, that he wrote both, Ilias was his ""intiation, while the Oddyseey was the masterpiece, that many don´t understand even today (like the sudden objection of polytheism, cause of the conflict-potential showcased in the Ilias. So, in the Odyssey just Athena is relevant, a single god, and additionally, man is now emancipated. Odysseus doesn´t seem to want Athena´s help, almost shows her the middle-finger, but sometimes, he´s caught praying, and yet, despite his unsults, Athena will keep offering her help, almost like in Protestantism, which was invented 2300 years later).
May bet is that the Mycene, a trade-center and Troy-competitor, wanted to get rid of troy, in whichHector´s Grandfather, Laomedon, has invented money (according to greek mythology). Since money was invented much later very near to Troy (in the intersection of Lydia, the northern half of the western Asia Minor coast, and the greek southern half of the western Asia Minor coast, by Lydians and Greeks, barely 100miles to the south of Troy, to the times of the Lydian king Croesus). The Trojans must have invented some preliminary form of money and numismatic, and the Greeks needed to get the know-how, by war if needed. In the beginning iron-age, Lydia conquered the lands of Troy.
That "money" was actually/historically invented nearby, by cooperating Greeks and Lydians, at least 200-250 years AFTER the greek myth about the "trojan king Laomedon inventing money" was written (and after his death, the Greeks conquered his city, and killed his son and grandson), is proof, that there´s something true in the Ilias.
Ripples by Genesis is a song about this
The better question is how legitimate is the academic conjecture about something so ancient?
Homer existed and because he new so many details is known that he was the son of Telemachus and grand son of Odysseus and Nestor. When Telemachus visited the palace of Nestor he slept with one of his daughter
Iliad was not written by Homer but another man of the same name
Schliemann used it to find Troy, so yes, there is some accurate information.
I can't go grocery shopping without forgetting things and you're telling me that a list of over 1000 ships, their captains and cities of origin were recorded through oral tradition?
Yes, actors can memorise entire Shakespeare plays, people routinely remember all the lyrics of their favourite songs.
@@mhagain It's one thing to memorize a story with a narrative, or a song that goes to a rhythm and follows a structure, but a different thing to memorize a list of 3000 pieces of information.
It's almost silly to not treat is as historical at this point
Weee!
They found 14
ThAnk you
Was there a war between men and women? It was commonly referred to. . .
I say YES!
Homer was a profession sounds far worse a cop out than we simply don't know. If it was a profession than that word should have lived on. They would at least have to explain how "homer" got lost, what replaced it and so on. I'm of the opinion (opinion, mind you) that the Illiad is most likely based on some things that did happen at some time. With probably plenty of copying errors and artistic freedoms. I think it's actually a big mistake to wonder if and to which degree if it did happen at all ... because the Illiad is not about the history. That's not what it teaches.
so the collections of stories were pieces of bronzeage to collapse but where each different in time and place latter he made in to the epic cycle we know of so in a way the trojan war was based of events that were lost to time and plces like mycneanae gold age and the sacking of troy sea peoples raid
I Personally Think Illiad is Historical and Philosophical Fiction Like War and Peace!
How about we just say that both The Illiad and The Odyssey are great epic stories . True or not.
Using the Iliad as a primary source would be like trying to study World War 2 if the only document that survived was the movie Captain America the first avenger.
This may be the best descriptor I’ve seen for this matter.
Just as plausible, too.
No Homers Club
The war took place. Look at it as some Asia Minor Greeks fighting against some European Greeks. It would be nothing unusual. The Greeks in the antiquity were always fought each other. In that period of time only wars were happening and only wars were worth mentioning. If you are a writer in 900 BC, or before, war is your only choice of subject. Homer simply spices it up by fusing mythology in to reality and as a result it's difficult to say how many, and which, aspects are real.
HOMER (in Gr : ΌΜΗΡΟΣ) WHO WTOTE THE EPICS OF ILIAD AND ODYSSEY, WAS GRANDSON OF ODYSSEY HIMSELF.....NO ONE ELSE COULD HAVE SO ACCURATE DISCRIPTIONS AND INFORMATIONS THAN HIM WHO HEARD ALL INSIDENTS FROM HIS GRANDFATHER.....BESIDES INSIDE ODYSSEY WRITTING IS MENTIOND HOMER IS THE GRANDSON OF ODYSSEY