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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.