Homer and The Trojan War

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as far away as Crete) just to avenge a stolen wife!
Homer wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey from stories handed down in the bardic tradition some 600 years after the war is supposed to have taken place. That is about the time that separates us from the beginning of the Renaissance, and how accurate are our impressions of life then? How accurately do we know the political intrigues among the city-states of that time? We have a considerable literature to let us know how life was, and what happened then. Homer had none. He had only a heroic bardic tradition, and moreover, a tradition that had been handed down through a period known as "the Aegean Dark Ages".
A better analogy to what Homer knew of the time of the Trojan War would be what Chaucer might have known of the Roman Empire, or of the warrior-chief we call "King Arthur" who we know from stories written following an oral history. What Homer knew had come down to him in precise verses. The verse form and the redundancies of ...

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