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margalabargala 10 hours ago [-]
Interesting story. Shame they AI'd it up...though it wasn't until this paragraph that it was obvious, so they probably edited it at least.
> A real city. A real war. A real text — composed four hundred years later, in Greek hexameter, by a poet or poets who had inherited the story without ever seeing the place — whose specifics turned out, in surprising number, to map.
yepyoukno 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it was composed 800 years later, and Homer was a headmaster of a school of oral poets.
The telling was only a fraction of the “epic cycle”, of which this is only a fragment which remains. There are other fragments which tell of Ephigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter who was human sacrificed for a good wind, as well as the story of the curse of the house of Atreas. Both of which explain the bad luck of Agamemnon’s home coming. Not to spoil that plot, you should just read the the plays of Aeschylus!
adrian_b 7 hours ago [-]
TFA is correct with about 400 years later.
The current form of the Iliad is estimated to have been composed around the middle of the 8th century BC.
The destruction of Troy is estimated to have happened around the beginning of the 12th century BC.
Some passages of the Iliad may refer to stories inherited from earlier times of the Mycenaean Greeks, e.g. from the 14th century BC.
It is unlikely that anything in the Iliad can be traced to specific events that have happened 800 years earlier, i.e. in the 16th century BC, even if some of the kinds of poetic formulae employed by Homer are much older and they may have been inherited from the common Proto-Indo-European language.
9 hours ago [-]
ge96 13 hours ago [-]
I was disappointed the horse wasn't real
moomin 13 hours ago [-]
Ben Bova hypothesized that Homer was actually describing early siege towers, but given the veracity of many mundane parts of the story it seems unlikely.
Tor3 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, I remember reading that - though it was just a passage in one book in the "Orion" series (that series also had an idea about the "real" Noah's Ark - that it was seeds and plants collected and saved in a hurry from a valley just about to be flooded. That would be from an early attempt at plant domestication).
The "horse" part of the siege tower idea was that the towers would be protected against fire etc. by horse hides.
10 hours ago [-]
detourdog 12 hours ago [-]
I have also heard it described as a boat.
nephihaha 7 hours ago [-]
Tunnelling is another possibility.
Andrex 10 hours ago [-]
So were the Trojans.
readthenotes1 13 hours ago [-]
How do you know? It was mentioned by Homer, wasn't it?
huxley 13 hours ago [-]
At least not in the Iliad though it gets short mentions in the Odyssey.
Most of what we know of it appeared in non-Homeric stories and most famously (nowadays) in Virgil.
elmomle 12 hours ago [-]
That is so, but my understanding was that those later stories tie back to a lost epic (Iliupersis) that, while not officially attributed to Homer, was being sung contemporaneously with the other stories of the Trojan war cycle.
ge96 13 hours ago [-]
I don't just online consensus. Need to simulate the universe's particles and rewind time like that show Devs to witness it myself.
satvikpendem 11 hours ago [-]
The show is based on a story by qntm [0] (which I submitted before to HN but sadly got no traction) who also wrote a great book recently called There Is No Antimemetics Division, to rave reviews on HN.
I’ve seen it fairly convincingly argued that he wasn’t!
Insanity 9 hours ago [-]
Take this with a bucket of salt because I haven't read much on this topic.
But just reasoning 'rationally', I assume the argument is that the Iliad / Oddysey were told in cultures of predominantly oral tradition? So likely, just as with the game of telephone, the story got told and retold, and distorted, many times until someone ("Homer") decided to write it down?
So the argument being that Homer is not the 'creator' of the stories, and might just be someone who wrote it down?
Or perhaps the argument is that no single person wrote it down?
adrian_b 7 hours ago [-]
There are some plausible arguments that the authors of the Iliad and Odyssey are not the same, even if they must have been closely related.
For instance I find very plausible the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by a man and the Odyssey was composed by a woman.
The main reason is the striking resemblance of the Iliad with an action movie, in contrast with the Odyssey that looks exactly like a chick flick.
More seriously, the Iliad focuses on a lot of things of great interest for the men of those times, like gory details about the best methods to kill or maim opponents in combat, or athletic competitions, while the Odyssey focuses on many things of interest for females, like clothes, food, gardens, romance, and it even has several passages that look quite feminist, despite being written millennia ago, by complaining about the discrimination unjustly enforced by men against women. The Odyssey also has a lot of strong female characters that are more important than the men, e.g. Calypso, Circe, Aurora, Nausicaa, Penelope.
The text of the Odyssey also contains evidence of being composed later than the Iliad, perhaps by several decades (due to some evolution of the language). So it has been hypothesized that the Odyssey was composed by a female relative of Homer, e.g. by his daughter or niece.
In any case, the author of the Odyssey mastered perfectly the same kind of language and poetic structures that were used in the Iliad, so he or she must have studied for many years the older poems in the same tradition, like the Iliad and the many others that have been lost.
A very large number of verses and short sequences of verses from the Iliad and the Odyssey are much older than the complete poems. However, someone, i.e. "Homer" alone, or with his assistants or relatives, had integrated all the older inherited poetic fragments into big coherent epic poems, before they were recorded in writing.
goldfishgold 2 hours ago [-]
I agree in broad strokes, but who is Aurora and what about the athletic games among the Phaeacians?
fleahunter 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zoeysmithe 11 hours ago [-]
Ignoring the historical record and academic consensus, its very unlikely this trick could ever work. Ancient people weren't simpletons and the logistics of it all are pretty silly.
Its just poetic fiction in what is a long form poem.
AdmiralAsshat 11 hours ago [-]
Virgil's version with Laocoön correctly guessing the plot and then being slain by Poseidon always felt to me like a later addition explicitly designed to explain "The Trojans weren't really that stupid, were they?" There's a similar undercurrent if you read Hesiod's Theogony, where Prometheus' famous "Trick at Mecone" is written as though Zeus knew it was a trick but chose the pile of bones anyway. It's as though the original story had Zeus being tricked in earnest, but later writers grew uncomfortable with the idea that their high god was so easily fooled.
With that said, it always in turn felt like the serpents' presence undermined Odysseus' claim of being clever, since from that perspective the Trojans didn't have much choice but to bring it in, or risk the ire of the gods. It's hardly a ruse if the enemy knows it's a trap but is compelled by supernatural forces to take it anyway.
masinini 10 hours ago [-]
pretty enjoyable read for an ai generated/assisted article
> A real city. A real war. A real text — composed four hundred years later, in Greek hexameter, by a poet or poets who had inherited the story without ever seeing the place — whose specifics turned out, in surprising number, to map.
The telling was only a fraction of the “epic cycle”, of which this is only a fragment which remains. There are other fragments which tell of Ephigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter who was human sacrificed for a good wind, as well as the story of the curse of the house of Atreas. Both of which explain the bad luck of Agamemnon’s home coming. Not to spoil that plot, you should just read the the plays of Aeschylus!
The current form of the Iliad is estimated to have been composed around the middle of the 8th century BC.
The destruction of Troy is estimated to have happened around the beginning of the 12th century BC.
Some passages of the Iliad may refer to stories inherited from earlier times of the Mycenaean Greeks, e.g. from the 14th century BC.
It is unlikely that anything in the Iliad can be traced to specific events that have happened 800 years earlier, i.e. in the 16th century BC, even if some of the kinds of poetic formulae employed by Homer are much older and they may have been inherited from the common Proto-Indo-European language.
The "horse" part of the siege tower idea was that the towers would be protected against fire etc. by horse hides.
Most of what we know of it appeared in non-Homeric stories and most famously (nowadays) in Virgil.
[0] https://qntm.org/responsibilit
But just reasoning 'rationally', I assume the argument is that the Iliad / Oddysey were told in cultures of predominantly oral tradition? So likely, just as with the game of telephone, the story got told and retold, and distorted, many times until someone ("Homer") decided to write it down?
So the argument being that Homer is not the 'creator' of the stories, and might just be someone who wrote it down?
Or perhaps the argument is that no single person wrote it down?
For instance I find very plausible the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by a man and the Odyssey was composed by a woman.
The main reason is the striking resemblance of the Iliad with an action movie, in contrast with the Odyssey that looks exactly like a chick flick.
More seriously, the Iliad focuses on a lot of things of great interest for the men of those times, like gory details about the best methods to kill or maim opponents in combat, or athletic competitions, while the Odyssey focuses on many things of interest for females, like clothes, food, gardens, romance, and it even has several passages that look quite feminist, despite being written millennia ago, by complaining about the discrimination unjustly enforced by men against women. The Odyssey also has a lot of strong female characters that are more important than the men, e.g. Calypso, Circe, Aurora, Nausicaa, Penelope.
The text of the Odyssey also contains evidence of being composed later than the Iliad, perhaps by several decades (due to some evolution of the language). So it has been hypothesized that the Odyssey was composed by a female relative of Homer, e.g. by his daughter or niece.
In any case, the author of the Odyssey mastered perfectly the same kind of language and poetic structures that were used in the Iliad, so he or she must have studied for many years the older poems in the same tradition, like the Iliad and the many others that have been lost.
A very large number of verses and short sequences of verses from the Iliad and the Odyssey are much older than the complete poems. However, someone, i.e. "Homer" alone, or with his assistants or relatives, had integrated all the older inherited poetic fragments into big coherent epic poems, before they were recorded in writing.
Its just poetic fiction in what is a long form poem.
With that said, it always in turn felt like the serpents' presence undermined Odysseus' claim of being clever, since from that perspective the Trojans didn't have much choice but to bring it in, or risk the ire of the gods. It's hardly a ruse if the enemy knows it's a trap but is compelled by supernatural forces to take it anyway.