Homeric epics Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of Times Forgotten

No, Archaeologists Have Not Found the Trojan Horse

On 10 August 2021, the website Greek Reporter published an article written by a contributor named Philip Chrysopoulos titled “Archaeologists Claim They’ve Discovered the Trojan Horse in Turkey.” The article claims that archaeologists have discovered the remains of a wooden structure inside the ancient city of Troy that they think is the actual Trojan horse. On the same day, The Jerusalem Post copied Greek Reporter’s story, publishing their own article titled “Did archaeologists find the Trojan horse?” that cites the Greek Reporter article as its only source.

The problem is that the whole story is a steaming pile of horse manure. The Greek Reporter article contains obvious signs that it is a deliberate hoax written in order to attract views in order to drive up ad revenues. By publishing this ridiculous, easily debunked story, Greek Reporter and The Jerusalem Post are both showing that, at the very best, they do not conduct even the most basic fact-checking or source verification and that they are not trustworthy news sites.

Why Did the Patriarchal Greeks and Romans Worship Such Powerful Goddesses?

It is widely known that the ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped many powerful goddesses, whom they held in extremely high regard. At the same time, it is also widely known that ancient Greek and Roman societies were deeply patriarchal. Misogyny and machismo were rampant among men of all social classes. Women’s lives were, in general, strictly socially controlled and women were excluded from holding most official positions of power.

As a result of this, one of the most common questions people have asked me about classical mythology is how the Greeks and Romans were able to accommodate such powerful goddesses within their respective pantheons while simultaneously denigrating human women. In this essay, I will try to answer this question to the best of my ability. I will give several different plausible explanations in the hope that some of them, or the combination of all of them, may be satisfactory.

The “Hero’s Journey” Is Nonsense

In 1949, an American author named Joseph Campbell published a book titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he claims that, fundamentally, all the great stories that human beings have ever told follow the exact same pattern, which is innate in the human consciousness and therefore present in every culture during every time period. In his book, he usually refers to this supposed pattern as “the monomyth” or “the hero’s journey.”

Campbell’s theories have now become thoroughly entrenched as orthodoxy in high school English literature classes all over the English-speaking world. Whenever teachers introduce students to mythology, the first thing they usually talk about is Joseph Campbell and the so-called “hero’s journey.”

Many people will be shocked, however, to learn that academic folklorists and scholars of ancient literature almost universally reject Campbell’s theories as nonsense—and for good reason. Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey” is so hopelessly vague that it is essentially useless for analyzing stories across cultures. It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.

Were Achilles and Patroklos Lovers?

In twenty-first-century adaptations of the story of the Trojan War, Achilles and Patroklos are often portrayed as gay lovers. This is how they are portrayed, for instance, in Madeline Miller’s novel The Song of Achilles (published in 2012) and in the BBC television series Troy: Fall of a City (released in 2018). Many people have wondered how faithful these portrayals are to the ancient sources. In other words, were Achilles and Patroklos really in a sexual relationship?

As it turns out, the debate over whether Achilles and Patroklos were lovers goes all the way back to antiquity. There are some surviving ancient sources that unambiguously portray them as lovers—but there are also ancient sources that explicitly deny that their relationship was ever sexual.

Were Achilles and Zeus Black in Greek Mythology?

The miniseries Troy: Fall of a City, which originally aired on BBC One in the United Kingdom in spring 2018 and was thereafter distributed internationally on Netflix, created quite a stir of controversy due to the fact that, in the series, the characters Zeus and Achilles are portrayed by black actors. Many people attacked the series, accusing it of “blackwashing.”

It is true that, in ancient Greece, Achilles and Zeus were both consistently portrayed as what most people today would generally consider “white.” That being said, I think that most of the outrage over the fact that Troy: Fall of a City portrays Achilles and Zeus as black is motivated more by racial prejudice than by actual concern for faithfulness to traditional portrayals.

The Amazing Origin of the Story of Achilles’s Heel

We all know the story of “Achilles’s heel.” The story you probably learned in school goes like this: When Achilles was a baby, his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx to make him immortal and impervious to all wounds—except she held him by his heel, meaning his heel was the only part of him that was vulnerable. Many years later, near the end of the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Paris shot him in the heel with an arrow guided by the god Apollon and killed him.

This story is the source of our English phrase “Achilles’s heel,” which is often used to refer to a single fatal weakness in something that is otherwise seen as invincible. It may come as a surprise to some people that this story is not actually found in the Iliad or in any other work of classical Greek literature from before the Roman Era. In fact, in the Iliad, Achilles isn’t even invulnerable at all!

How Do We Know Ancient Texts Are Really Ancient?

There seems to be a lot of people who think that, because we do not have the original manuscripts of ancient texts, that is somehow deeply suspicious. While it is certainly true that there are some places in some texts where we are not completely sure what the original text said, in the vast majority of cases, it is possible to reconstruct exactly or at least almost exactly what the original text said. Even when the exact original wording of a text is unclear, we usually have a pretty good idea of what the original author wrote.

Here’s Where You Can Buy a Real First Edition Copy of the ‘Iliad’!

In 2015, a certain Hollywood film notoriously claimed that you can get an original, first edition copy of the Iliad for “a buck at a garage sale.” After the film came out, large numbers of people around the world began searching for places where they could buy their own first edition copy of the Iliad. I decided to take a look into this issue. If you have ever wanted to own a first edition copy of the Iliad, here’s how to get one.

The Importance of the Homeric Poems in Ancient Greek Culture

The Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, and the Homeric Hymns formed the foundation for all of ancient Greek literature and they were the basis for a large swathe of ancient Greek culture. Of these poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey were the most important and influential. It can sometimes be difficult for modern audiences to understand the sheer importance of the Homeric Poems in ancient Greek culture. These poems held a revered status that is paralleled in our own culture only by the revered status of the Bible itself, but yet it would be a mistake to call the Iliad and the Odyssey “the ancient Greek Bible.”

The Other Homeric Poems (The Ones Most People Have Never Heard Of)

Everyone has heard of the Iliad and the Odyssey. They are considered masterpieces of world literature and the foundation of the western literary canon. Likewise, everyone knows that the Iliad and the Odyssey are traditionally attributed to a poet named “Homer.” Most people, however, are not aware of the fact that there were many other poems that were sometimes attributed to Homer in antiquity aside from just the Iliad and the Odyssey.