I have decided, effective immediately, to question the authenticity of Homer’s Iliad. It is my belief that we, the English-speakers of 2008, are heretofore unaware of the real Iliad as it was originally written. My reasons?
First, the sheer lack of existing manuscripts. There exist today only 643 original manuscripts of the Iliad, and this is clearly not enough to make it trustworthy or authentic. Second, the fact that the earliest manuscript we have is from 500 years after the fact! Homer is said to have written it in 900 BC, while this early manuscript is from 400 BC. Anything could have changed in 500 years!
I’m starting to doubt the existence of Julius Caesar as well, but I’m still researching that one.
Today’s Random Links
The giant pink rabbit that can be seen from space.
The 6 most disastrous uses of work e-mail ever.
The 10 sports franchises most likely to move.
Now Playing
Ray LaMontagne – Gossip in the Grain
Good stuff. This is the first step to breaking the mold. Keep digging…
1. HA! The Rays could win a WS now and then move… classic stuff.
2. No sympathy for those idiots who lost their jobs because of the email fallouts. They all deserved it.
I thought I would help in this quest…
It is most likely that the Homeric tradition contains elements of historical fact and elements of fiction interwoven (similar to most works from that time). Homer describes a location, presumably in the Bronze Age, with a city. This city was near Mount Ida in northwest Turkey. Such a city did exist, at the mound of Hisarlık. Homer describes that the location was very windy, which Hisarlık almost always is, and several other geographical features also match, so it appears, therefore, that Homer was describing an actual place, although this fact does not in itself prove that his story is true.