Believing the war to be won, the Trojans moved the horse inside the city walls, intending to use it to honour the gods. They built a large wooden horse, hid some of their best fighters inside and left it as a ‘propitiatory gift’ for the Trojans, before packing up their camp and seemingly sailing away. The Greeks, unable to gain a clear victory on the battlefield – even after Achilles killed Hector – turned instead to a cunning trick. How the war ended is the most famous element of the story.
Such an error of scale suggests a major frailty in the account’s historical rigour.” They thought 50 was an appropriately sizeable holding for a great king, whereas in reality a Bronze Age Agamemnon could command the unfree labour of thousands. Though the institution and importance of slavery are recognised in the Homeric epics, their author(s) had absolutely no idea of the scale of slaveholding that was practised in the great Mycenaean palace economies of the 14th or 13th centuries BC. “We should doubt the idea that they imply historically authentic backgrounds for the late Bronze Age Greek world – what scholars conventionally refer to as the ‘Mycenaean’ world after its most wealthy and powerful city. “There are many reasons for us to be sceptical about the assertion that the Homeric epics are historical documents,” explains Paul Cartledge. So while the real Homer built on a tradition of oral epic poetry that went back generations before him, he came to be seen as the forefather of that tradition.Ĭan we consider Homer’s epics historical documents?
In the sixth century BC, the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus paid for the best of these Homeridae to dictate the Homeric epics for his scribes to write down, helping turn them from an oral to a written art. Not only did poets and reciters come to style themselves as ‘Homeridae’, or the ‘children of Homer’, but later generations ascribed much of oral epic poetry to him. While he would have been one of many oral epic poets over many generations, he came to be regarded as the embodiment of the tradition. Homer may have composed and performed his epics for royal courts and festivals. When did he live, though, and for whom did he compose? Again, there was no agreement or certainty – mainly for lack of decisive evidence,” explains Paul Cartledge, former AG Leventis professor of Greek culture at the University of Cambridge. “No fewer than seven cities claimed him as their own favourite son. Yet Homer became one of the greatest influences on Greek culture and education, and a main source on the Trojan War – despite being thought to have lived in the eighth or ninth century BC, some 500 years after the Trojan War is thought to have occurred. Early records claimed Homer was blind and hailed from the west coast of what is now Turkey, but any firm details are still unknown. The man named as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey is as much a myth as the tales he told of warriors, gods and wooden horses.
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