It sure is. I'm almost sorry I don't work in that area myself... almost. I doubt I'd cope well with the nutcases though:-) BTW, as regards John: I was sure that the last time I looked the Rylands fragment was dated to ca. 190 CE -- they're now quoting the 1st half of the 2nd century. I hope it's the date that's changed, and not my memory...
There's a lack of evidence to support that claim. There's no good reason to believe than any of the New Testament books were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70.
There may be a lack of evidence, but surely that doesn't mean there's no good reason to believe that -- at least in some cases? I should have thought that, e.g., the heavy influence of neo-Platonist thought (and language) on John would be, if not hard evidence, at least a good reason to suspect it was later; or Revelation's references to persecution of Christians that didn't occur on a large scale until at least the time of Domitian (and I've always suspected the numerological references to Nero, if they're genuine, must date it to the time of one of the "Nero redivivus" uprisings, though admittedly one of those was before 70 IIRC).
Actually it is both in Latin and in Greek, and arameic, and hebrew, and... The versions that were accepted as bible were initally spread with greek and latin versions of the same text on facing pages, or only the latin text.
I have no idea why you think this, because it's not true. I especially wonder why you think it when even the WP article that you cite in a nephew post contradicts this statement. All Latin versions of the New Testament are translations from Greek. The AC was absolutely correct.
It is of course arguable that some texts in the NT were translated from another language -- Aramaic (not Arameic) -- but no such original MSS survive. (Speaking personally I find the style in all of the first three gospels to be so un-Greek that I have always supposed that they were all translations from Aramaic, but from the WP article it seems that biblical scholars regard only Matthew as a candidate for a translation, so I'll bow to their greater knowledge... assuming the WP article is accurate.)
Well in my experience, pretty much all biblical scholars -- that is to say palaeographers and philologists who work with Judaeo-Christian texts -- use BCE/CE as the standard (at least in the last few decades).
That's presumably at least in part because not all of them are Christian. There's more to the bible than the New Testament.
But based on the production clips it seems like the director is really trying to be true to the story and look of the comic, so as long as they don't change the ending I don't see that it could be THAT horrible, no matter if Alan Moore has already disowned it (he disowns like ALL his movie adaptations, doesn't he?)
... Sure, there have been changes. The catastrophic climax is different. Provocative bits, like a timely subplot about alternative fuels, have been added....
Well now, that's kind of news to me. The copy I use on one machine did in fact recently update itself, about five days ago... to version 2.0.0.16. Certainly the extensions get updated very frequently (NoScript updates seem to come every five minutes). But nothing more. When I try "Help - Check for updates" manually, the message I get back is
There are no new updates available. Firefox may check periodically for new updates.
I don't particularly care -- not to the extent of installing Ff 3 manually, anyway -- but it does make me wonder in a mildly bemused fashion what the hell the Mozilla people are doing.
Yeah, but the age of Pericles was much shorter than the Roman Empire
I quote your own words: "we have far more stuff from one city over a fifty year period than the entire Roman empire over hundreds of years"
and Athens was much smaller than the Roman empire.
"we have far more stuff from one city over a fifty year period than the entire Roman empire over hundreds of years"
Talking about surviving plays is misleading too, since lots didn't.
"we have far more stuff from one city over a fifty year period than the entire Roman empire over hundreds of years"
In addition I point out that in any arbitrarily chosen fifty year range from about 60 BCE to 120 CE or thereabouts, the text output of Rome in that period exceeds that of Athens in the time of Pericles by a factor of anywhere between 3 and 20 depending on which dates you choose. And lest you move the goalposts once again, I'll point out in advance that I confine myself to texts written by people in Rome, which had a population hovering around 1 million in that period, i.e. about 5 times that of Periclean Athens; I'll let you do the maths.
Democratic Athens was earlier and we have far more stuff from one city over a fifty year period than the entire Roman empire over hundreds of years
That is a false claim. From the time of Pericles, who died in 431 BCE, the sum total of all writings that survive is: eleven tragic plays. (It's possible, but unlikely, that a couple of Sophocles' other ones may date to Pericles' time.) That's it.
From Rome we have about 10 major historical works and numerous minor ones; 40-odd plays; a bunch of courtroom speeches; ten epics (two of them incomplete); enormous quantities of published letters and treatises on politics, biology, geography, architecture, philosophy, and agriculture; vast quantities of lyric poetry; thousands upon thousands of bureaucratic and commercial documents and unpublished letters; enormous quantities of inscriptions; and doubtless a lot more that I'm forgetting.
If it was visual arts and architecture you were thinking of, perhaps you should compare the size of the Athenian acropolis with that of Rome, and also remember that most "Greek" statuary that survives is actually Roman.
Now, if you count in the rest of Greece as well, and include the whole of the period up to the Middle Ages, then the amount of surviving Greek texts outweighs the Roman output by a factor of about 10, maybe as much as 15.
Hi there, very good to hear from you. I'm sorry I didn't get this until now! -- I've actually posted a letter-to-the-editor to PNAS already. But maybe it's meet and proper that such letters be written without contact with the authors. I'm afraid I really don't know what is customary in the natural sciences.
Be warned: while I am very appreciative of interdisciplinary interest in my personal favourite topic of study, my letter is not a delicate one. This article was clearly meant seriously (that's not always the case with scientific research on arcane ancient topics; there were a couple of articles about the biology of dragons in a biology journal some years ago), so I've not stinted on taking the assumptions to task.
Of course they may not print my letter; quite aside from its being quite blunt (the 250-word limit doesn't make it easy to be delicate!!), someone else may have beaten me to the punch -- there's been a fair amount of attention in the CLASSICS-L mailing list.
Anyway, I'll just mention that there's a bit more to the Zielinski's Law thing than just the simultaneity of T.'s and Od.'s voyages. It's been hypothesised for a long time that their two voyages begin simultaneously (i.e. that the two councils of the gods in books 1 and 5 should be regarded as simultaneous). The problem with that has always been that T.'s voyage (books 1-5 and 15-16) is much much briefer than Od.'s. But that's primarily because of the days occupied by the building of the raft, and the voyage to Scheria. A book published in 1994 (you'll see the reference in my letter, if it gets that far) made a serious case for the first time that that could actually be the case -- if the days occupied by Od. building his raft and travelling to Scheria in book 5 are a late interpolation. Now, if they're late, of course, that means they're not traditional; and if they're not traditional,.... Anyway, that's the most serious reservation I have. There are others, though, some of which another classicist might regard as even more serious; probably the big one would be the imitative character of the star description in Od. 5; there's a very similar passage in Iliad 18. (Again, if it's imitative, that means it's not the sole property of Od.'s wanderings; if it's not purely Odyssean, that means it's a bad, bad idea to make it the foundation for an Odyssean chronology.)
Actually, IIRC, there are Hittite records of a town called "steep Wilusa", which was supposed to be in western Anatolia, sounding strangely similar to "steep Ilios" from Homer's Iliad. On top of that, one recorded ruler of Wilusa had a name suprisingly similar to "Priam", and another one called "Alaksandu", which "by coincidence" nicely matches "Alexander", another name of Paris.
As I seem to be on a roll elsewhere in this discussion, I hope you'll forgive me for stepping in and confirming these statements. For more detail: it's widely accepted that Alaksandu is indeed a Hittite transliteration of the Greek name Alexandros, but not that he is the Homeric Paris. In fact, it would be seriously inconvenient for Trojan War literalists if he were the Homeric Paris, as he's about 100 years too early.
The conspicuous similarities actually go a bit beyond this: there's one mention of a god associated with Wilusa called Appaliunas, whose name is suspiciously reminiscent of Apollo (Greek Apollon), who is the chief god on the Trojans' side in the Iliad. For more goodies, see Latacz J (2004) Troy and Homer.
I'll add two cautionary notes, though, that (1) Latacz is very much biased; (2) there's no particular reason to build filled-in historical models based on fragmentary coincidences of this kind.
There's not much reason for associating the name Attarisiyas mentioned in a sibling post (sorry, I haven't double-checked the spelling) with the Greek Atreus, though.
Having actually read the article (not just the brief and somewhat inept summary from MSNBC that this thread is actually linked to), I think I'm in a position to say: hogwash. This is actually a carefully researched piece, and it makes a credible, if not conclusive, case that there's a trace record of a specific solar eclipse scattered through the Odyssey in references to Odysseus' return home.
I've managed to read it now as well, and I agree. However, it is very much dependent on the assumption that the internal chronology of the Odyssey is even slightly reliable. Unfortunately, there are plenty of reasons -- both obvious (it's just a poem, dammit!) and less obvious (they've ignored a technicality called "Zielinski's Law") -- why you can't make that assumption.
While I believe you, can you tell us what this overwhelming evidence is? I'm actually curious where we get evidence of social and commercial interaction that doesn't leave a physical by-product from 3,000 years ago.
Sure. Social, yes (or at least linguistic); commercial, not so much.
The actual discovery was kickstarted by comparison with a living oral tradition that shared many characteristics with the Homeric evidence, viz. Yugoslavian (or if you prefer, Bosnian-and-Montenegran-and-Serbian-and-Albanian) epic poetry in the 1930s and 1950s, though it's not really dependent on that any longer. Albert Lord (citation in the gpp) gives an approachable outline of the comparative evidence. For more detail, see Parry M (1971 posth.), Collected Papers of Milman Parry. There's a whole kaboodle of more recent studies; Bakker E (1997) Poetry in Speech is a highlight. Parry and Lord between them basically invented the sub-field of oral traditions in anthropology.
In a nutshell, the evidence comes down to the kinds of formulae used in speech and the economy of those formulae. (Parry and Lord operated in a structuralist framework, though I think it would work pretty much just as well if you think of it as yet another manifestation of a Chomskyan generative grammar; I don't think anyone's ever put that into practice, and no one's ever likely to, as there aren't many Chomskyans left nowadays). The structuration of Homeric poetry in metrically regular formulae follows pretty much the economising strategies you'd expect in a natural language, just with a couple of extra constraints. That by itself wouldn't be proof, though it's damned striking (and was enough to get people listening to Parry); but the sheer weight of comparative evidence, combined with the continual discovery of more natural-language-strategies and parallels in early Greek poetry beyond Homer, just mounts from there.
It extends to larger-scale narrative structures as well, such as story episodes (cf. the comment above about the "woman at the well", on which I can provide [technical] bibliography if desired), but it's a relatively new idea to see that as part of the cognitive functioning of a bard and I think it's pretty debatable.
I've managed to get my hands on the actual article now, and their argument is actually pretty persuasive -- if you accept the premise that the internal chronology of the Odyssey isn't a complete dog's breakfast. Unfortunately, it is. (As an approachable example, consider the age of Telemachos. He's supposed to be an adolescent. He's characterised as about 15, just getting face fuzz. Now... how long has it been since the start of the Trojan War?...)
While Plato was certainly prone to pulling things out of his ass, doesn't it seem more plausible that he was just writing down a popular legend?
If you accept that, you have to give equal credence to the myth of Ur in book 10 of the Republic. (For reference, it's kind of like Edwin Abbott's Flatland, only in 3 dimensions.) If you don't accept the myth of Ur, you have no grounds for accepting the Atlantis story.
No, not really. Solar eclipses ALWAYS happen at the same time as the new moon.
That's useful to know, thank you. I am currently composing a reply to the article, which I've now managed to actually read, and that removes the last support for the theory.
However, the fact that Mercury went retrograde 34 days before, [etc. etc.]
One basic point that the authors have missed is that the argument is wholly and solely dependent on accepting the reliability of the internal chronology of the poem. It has long been known that this internal chronology is an absolute mess, and several studies (the most important dating to 1994) have shown exactly why and how. Specifically, the number of days mentioned in the parts of the poem picked up on in this theory are demonstrably not representative of an old tradition. (The reference is Olson, SD (1994), Blood and Iron: Stories and Storytelling in the Odyssey, ch. 5.)
It's not the default position, though. Schliemann was laughed at, and people didn't give the idea of a historical Trojan War serious credence until the independent evidence from the Hittite tablets. Only then did scholars start looking for serious correlating evidence from other Mycenaean sites.
There was still a lot of scepticism around until relatively recently, yes -- heck, there's still a lot even now (among historians; not so much scepticism among archaeologists). Plenty of people accepted Schliemann's discovery as the finding of Troy, mind you. But it's worth remembering that Schliemann thought Troy II was "Homeric" Troy -- it's now known that that archaeological layer is about 2000 years too early. That doesn't diminish the importance of the find, but it does show that Schliemann himself was a bit over-eager with his own agenda. The question of burden of proof can be a tricky one sometimes, though.
I don't doubt that you know much more about this than me, but isn't it different with poetry? Poems can't be easily changed in the retelling except by a poet, without damaging the meter.
Question of the century -- literally. Actually it turns out that narrative poems are particularly prone to certain types of changes, because -- at least in pre-classical Greece -- they're not recited by rote. There's overwhelming evidence that early Greek epics were re-told using an enormous set of conventions (formulaic language, typical scenes, typical plot elements); so stories were driven partly by how the story is known to go, partly by the individual storyteller's creative imagination, and partly by these conventions. Basically, what we now refer to as "poetry" was for an early Greek poet "the special kind of language that you use for telling certain stories and which happens to come out in good meter almost automatically". This was one of the big discoveries of the 20th century about Homer, though a lot of people are still bewildered at the implications.
One implication, though, is that there are at least two forces at work that are actively pressuring changes in each re-telling of a story. One is the poet's creative imagination. Another is the very conventions of the poetic language. Suppose Odysseus meets a young woman on his way to someone's house; well, it so happens that that's an element in one kind of conventional story episode. That puts a tiny amount of temptation in the storyteller's way to put in the next conventional element, which happens to be encountering a dog or dogs at the entrance of the house. The pressure may be minuscule, but if you've got centuries of iterations...
If you're interested in finding out more I recommend Albert Lord's book The Singer of Tales. A good fictional spin on the subject is a novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare called The File on H. They're both good reads.
(Before I sign off I'd better correct something I put in my earlier post -- memorising Homer could have been part of Athenian education as early as 550 BCE.)
The main issue with the Atlantis story is that (a) Plato invented it himself, and (b) he dates it to about 9400 BCE if I recall correctly -- which would be around about the same time that we first see Neolithic humans in Greece. (I'm sure there's a standard excuse Atlantis-hunters use to explain the latter point, though.)
Oh, come on, that's not fair. The Mycenaean and Hellenic peoples were two ends of the same culture, and the Greek Dark Age was only, what, four or five centuries long? It's really not that implausible that the story could have been preserved that long (at the most, remember - no telling when in the dark age Homer composed),
It's possible, but it can't be the default position. Present-day oral traditions observed (and recorded) "in the wild" show that retellings of stories change drastically from generation to generation, not just from century to century. It's possible for isolated historical references to survive that kind of dilution, to be sure, and there are plenty of cases in Homer (though almost all in the Iliad); but they tend to get overwhelmed by the changes introduced by storytellers desire to (a) innovate, (b) keep their audiences in suspense, (c) cater to a specific audience (if you're a bard in an Athenian court, you're not going to tell stories that reflect badly on Theseus), and (d) several other factors which slip my mind right now but which you can read about in e.g. the anthropologist Walter Ong's book Orality and Literacy (not very up-to-date, but a popular one).
The upshot of that is that you don't scour literary texts with an agenda. As with any scientific enterprise, you keep your eyes open for out-of-the-ordinary correlations and then investigate. Solar eclipses in conjunction with a new moon are possibly enough to make it worth investigating this one, as I've admitted in a post above.
especially given that it was regularly memorized in its entirety by students in the Hellenic period.
(I'd better interrupt to state for the record that it is known for certain that memorising Homer could only have become part of aristocratic Athenian education around 500 BCE at the earliest.)
Atlantis is a random children's story that got lost, then blown out of proportion. Not the same thing.
Not really. The Atlantis story is one told by a late-Classical-Period author (Plato), with explicit claims that it is derived from a millennia-old tradition preserved by Egyptian texts. If anything, the Atlantis story has more extrinsic plausibility than this one!
In view of the conjunction with a new moon I'll retract some of my earlier scorn, but I'll still side with Eratosthenes when it comes to euhemerising myths. Which is really what these folks are doing: they're modern-day euhemerists.
That is true; I had seen another article earlier today, which didn't mention the bit about the fact that it was a new moon. So that part of the story is new to me, and it does mitigate my annoyance quite a bit.
I'm not very convinced, though. The other references they draw on are much more problematic: it has been known for a loooong time that the internal chronology of the Odyssey is a complete mess. For that reason I wouldn't put any stock in the bit about
Odysseus is told to watch the Pleiades and late-setting Bootes and keep the Great Bear to his left. Next, five days before the supposed eclipse, Odysseus arrives in Ithaca as the Star of Dawn -- that is, Venus -- rises ahead of the sun.
Still, the new moon thing is of interest. Not enough to convince me, but enough to get me to actually pay attention to their findings if I ever manage to find out where they're publishing them.
Ummm, you know, Mount Olympos is a real mountain. It's right here...
As for Circe, in Italian myth (by which I guess I mean Etruscan myth) she was thought to live on a cape on the west coast of Italy, about halfway between Rome and Naples, which is still called Monte Circeo. I think Circe may have left by now, though.
Slashdot Mirror
It sure is. I'm almost sorry I don't work in that area myself ... almost. I doubt I'd cope well with the nutcases though :-) BTW, as regards John: I was sure that the last time I looked the Rylands fragment was dated to ca. 190 CE -- they're now quoting the 1st half of the 2nd century. I hope it's the date that's changed, and not my memory ...
This text is NOT the same text as what was compiled during the Council of Nicaea in 325. Nor is it the same as the Vatican bible.
No text was compiled at Nicaea; that formality had to wait until the council of Trent in the early 16th century.
There's a lack of evidence to support that claim. There's no good reason to believe than any of the New Testament books were written after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70.
There may be a lack of evidence, but surely that doesn't mean there's no good reason to believe that -- at least in some cases? I should have thought that, e.g., the heavy influence of neo-Platonist thought (and language) on John would be, if not hard evidence, at least a good reason to suspect it was later; or Revelation's references to persecution of Christians that didn't occur on a large scale until at least the time of Domitian (and I've always suspected the numerological references to Nero, if they're genuine, must date it to the time of one of the "Nero redivivus" uprisings, though admittedly one of those was before 70 IIRC).
Actually it is both in Latin and in Greek, and arameic, and hebrew, and ... The versions that were accepted as bible were initally spread with greek and latin versions of the same text on facing pages, or only the latin text.
I have no idea why you think this, because it's not true. I especially wonder why you think it when even the WP article that you cite in a nephew post contradicts this statement. All Latin versions of the New Testament are translations from Greek. The AC was absolutely correct.
It is of course arguable that some texts in the NT were translated from another language -- Aramaic (not Arameic) -- but no such original MSS survive. (Speaking personally I find the style in all of the first three gospels to be so un-Greek that I have always supposed that they were all translations from Aramaic, but from the WP article it seems that biblical scholars regard only Matthew as a candidate for a translation, so I'll bow to their greater knowledge ... assuming the WP article is accurate.)
Well in my experience, pretty much all biblical scholars -- that is to say palaeographers and philologists who work with Judaeo-Christian texts -- use BCE/CE as the standard (at least in the last few decades).
That's presumably at least in part because not all of them are Christian. There's more to the bible than the New Testament.
But based on the production clips it seems like the director is really trying to be true to the story and look of the comic, so as long as they don't change the ending I don't see that it could be THAT horrible, no matter if Alan Moore has already disowned it (he disowns like ALL his movie adaptations, doesn't he?)
From page 5 of the EW article that someone else on this page linked:
... Sure, there have been changes. The catastrophic climax is different. Provocative bits, like a timely subplot about alternative fuels, have been added. ...
Firefox already automatically updates.
Well now, that's kind of news to me. The copy I use on one machine did in fact recently update itself, about five days ago ... to version 2.0.0.16. Certainly the extensions get updated very frequently (NoScript updates seem to come every five minutes). But nothing more. When I try "Help - Check for updates" manually, the message I get back is
There are no new updates available. Firefox may check periodically for new updates.
I don't particularly care -- not to the extent of installing Ff 3 manually, anyway -- but it does make me wonder in a mildly bemused fashion what the hell the Mozilla people are doing.
Yeah, but the age of Pericles was much shorter than the Roman Empire
I quote your own words: "we have far more stuff from one city over a fifty year period than the entire Roman empire over hundreds of years"
and Athens was much smaller than the Roman empire.
"we have far more stuff from one city over a fifty year period than the entire Roman empire over hundreds of years"
Talking about surviving plays is misleading too, since lots didn't.
"we have far more stuff from one city over a fifty year period than the entire Roman empire over hundreds of years"
In addition I point out that in any arbitrarily chosen fifty year range from about 60 BCE to 120 CE or thereabouts, the text output of Rome in that period exceeds that of Athens in the time of Pericles by a factor of anywhere between 3 and 20 depending on which dates you choose. And lest you move the goalposts once again, I'll point out in advance that I confine myself to texts written by people in Rome, which had a population hovering around 1 million in that period, i.e. about 5 times that of Periclean Athens; I'll let you do the maths.
Democratic Athens was earlier and we have far more stuff from one city over a fifty year period than the entire Roman empire over hundreds of years
That is a false claim. From the time of Pericles, who died in 431 BCE, the sum total of all writings that survive is: eleven tragic plays. (It's possible, but unlikely, that a couple of Sophocles' other ones may date to Pericles' time.) That's it.
From Rome we have about 10 major historical works and numerous minor ones; 40-odd plays; a bunch of courtroom speeches; ten epics (two of them incomplete); enormous quantities of published letters and treatises on politics, biology, geography, architecture, philosophy, and agriculture; vast quantities of lyric poetry; thousands upon thousands of bureaucratic and commercial documents and unpublished letters; enormous quantities of inscriptions; and doubtless a lot more that I'm forgetting.
If it was visual arts and architecture you were thinking of, perhaps you should compare the size of the Athenian acropolis with that of Rome, and also remember that most "Greek" statuary that survives is actually Roman.
Now, if you count in the rest of Greece as well, and include the whole of the period up to the Middle Ages, then the amount of surviving Greek texts outweighs the Roman output by a factor of about 10, maybe as much as 15.
Hi there, very good to hear from you. I'm sorry I didn't get this until now! -- I've actually posted a letter-to-the-editor to PNAS already. But maybe it's meet and proper that such letters be written without contact with the authors. I'm afraid I really don't know what is customary in the natural sciences.
Be warned: while I am very appreciative of interdisciplinary interest in my personal favourite topic of study, my letter is not a delicate one. This article was clearly meant seriously (that's not always the case with scientific research on arcane ancient topics; there were a couple of articles about the biology of dragons in a biology journal some years ago), so I've not stinted on taking the assumptions to task.
Of course they may not print my letter; quite aside from its being quite blunt (the 250-word limit doesn't make it easy to be delicate!!), someone else may have beaten me to the punch -- there's been a fair amount of attention in the CLASSICS-L mailing list.
Anyway, I'll just mention that there's a bit more to the Zielinski's Law thing than just the simultaneity of T.'s and Od.'s voyages. It's been hypothesised for a long time that their two voyages begin simultaneously (i.e. that the two councils of the gods in books 1 and 5 should be regarded as simultaneous). The problem with that has always been that T.'s voyage (books 1-5 and 15-16) is much much briefer than Od.'s. But that's primarily because of the days occupied by the building of the raft, and the voyage to Scheria. A book published in 1994 (you'll see the reference in my letter, if it gets that far) made a serious case for the first time that that could actually be the case -- if the days occupied by Od. building his raft and travelling to Scheria in book 5 are a late interpolation. Now, if they're late, of course, that means they're not traditional; and if they're not traditional, .... Anyway, that's the most serious reservation I have. There are others, though, some of which another classicist might regard as even more serious; probably the big one would be the imitative character of the star description in Od. 5; there's a very similar passage in Iliad 18. (Again, if it's imitative, that means it's not the sole property of Od.'s wanderings; if it's not purely Odyssean, that means it's a bad, bad idea to make it the foundation for an Odyssean chronology.)
s/theory/hypothesis/g dammit!!! ....)
(I'm a classicist, I shouldn't need to use scientific terminology consistently
Thanks, I've read it now!
No no, it's a euhemerism.
As I seem to be on a roll elsewhere in this discussion, I hope you'll forgive me for stepping in and confirming these statements. For more detail: it's widely accepted that Alaksandu is indeed a Hittite transliteration of the Greek name Alexandros, but not that he is the Homeric Paris. In fact, it would be seriously inconvenient for Trojan War literalists if he were the Homeric Paris, as he's about 100 years too early.
The conspicuous similarities actually go a bit beyond this: there's one mention of a god associated with Wilusa called Appaliunas, whose name is suspiciously reminiscent of Apollo (Greek Apollon), who is the chief god on the Trojans' side in the Iliad. For more goodies, see Latacz J (2004) Troy and Homer.
I'll add two cautionary notes, though, that (1) Latacz is very much biased; (2) there's no particular reason to build filled-in historical models based on fragmentary coincidences of this kind.
There's not much reason for associating the name Attarisiyas mentioned in a sibling post (sorry, I haven't double-checked the spelling) with the Greek Atreus, though.
(At last, an easy question!) The answer is: no.
I've managed to read it now as well, and I agree. However, it is very much dependent on the assumption that the internal chronology of the Odyssey is even slightly reliable. Unfortunately, there are plenty of reasons -- both obvious (it's just a poem, dammit!) and less obvious (they've ignored a technicality called "Zielinski's Law") -- why you can't make that assumption.
Sure. Social, yes (or at least linguistic); commercial, not so much.
The actual discovery was kickstarted by comparison with a living oral tradition that shared many characteristics with the Homeric evidence, viz. Yugoslavian (or if you prefer, Bosnian-and-Montenegran-and-Serbian-and-Albanian) epic poetry in the 1930s and 1950s, though it's not really dependent on that any longer. Albert Lord (citation in the gpp) gives an approachable outline of the comparative evidence. For more detail, see Parry M (1971 posth.), Collected Papers of Milman Parry. There's a whole kaboodle of more recent studies; Bakker E (1997) Poetry in Speech is a highlight. Parry and Lord between them basically invented the sub-field of oral traditions in anthropology.
In a nutshell, the evidence comes down to the kinds of formulae used in speech and the economy of those formulae. (Parry and Lord operated in a structuralist framework, though I think it would work pretty much just as well if you think of it as yet another manifestation of a Chomskyan generative grammar; I don't think anyone's ever put that into practice, and no one's ever likely to, as there aren't many Chomskyans left nowadays). The structuration of Homeric poetry in metrically regular formulae follows pretty much the economising strategies you'd expect in a natural language, just with a couple of extra constraints. That by itself wouldn't be proof, though it's damned striking (and was enough to get people listening to Parry); but the sheer weight of comparative evidence, combined with the continual discovery of more natural-language-strategies and parallels in early Greek poetry beyond Homer, just mounts from there.
It extends to larger-scale narrative structures as well, such as story episodes (cf. the comment above about the "woman at the well", on which I can provide [technical] bibliography if desired), but it's a relatively new idea to see that as part of the cognitive functioning of a bard and I think it's pretty debatable.
I've managed to get my hands on the actual article now, and their argument is actually pretty persuasive -- if you accept the premise that the internal chronology of the Odyssey isn't a complete dog's breakfast. Unfortunately, it is. (As an approachable example, consider the age of Telemachos. He's supposed to be an adolescent. He's characterised as about 15, just getting face fuzz. Now ... how long has it been since the start of the Trojan War? ...)
If you accept that, you have to give equal credence to the myth of Ur in book 10 of the Republic. (For reference, it's kind of like Edwin Abbott's Flatland, only in 3 dimensions.) If you don't accept the myth of Ur, you have no grounds for accepting the Atlantis story.
That's useful to know, thank you. I am currently composing a reply to the article, which I've now managed to actually read, and that removes the last support for the theory.
However, the fact that Mercury went retrograde 34 days before, [etc. etc.]One basic point that the authors have missed is that the argument is wholly and solely dependent on accepting the reliability of the internal chronology of the poem. It has long been known that this internal chronology is an absolute mess, and several studies (the most important dating to 1994) have shown exactly why and how. Specifically, the number of days mentioned in the parts of the poem picked up on in this theory are demonstrably not representative of an old tradition. (The reference is Olson, SD (1994), Blood and Iron: Stories and Storytelling in the Odyssey, ch. 5.)
There was still a lot of scepticism around until relatively recently, yes -- heck, there's still a lot even now (among historians; not so much scepticism among archaeologists). Plenty of people accepted Schliemann's discovery as the finding of Troy, mind you. But it's worth remembering that Schliemann thought Troy II was "Homeric" Troy -- it's now known that that archaeological layer is about 2000 years too early. That doesn't diminish the importance of the find, but it does show that Schliemann himself was a bit over-eager with his own agenda. The question of burden of proof can be a tricky one sometimes, though.
I don't doubt that you know much more about this than me, but isn't it different with poetry? Poems can't be easily changed in the retelling except by a poet, without damaging the meter.Question of the century -- literally. Actually it turns out that narrative poems are particularly prone to certain types of changes, because -- at least in pre-classical Greece -- they're not recited by rote. There's overwhelming evidence that early Greek epics were re-told using an enormous set of conventions (formulaic language, typical scenes, typical plot elements); so stories were driven partly by how the story is known to go, partly by the individual storyteller's creative imagination, and partly by these conventions. Basically, what we now refer to as "poetry" was for an early Greek poet "the special kind of language that you use for telling certain stories and which happens to come out in good meter almost automatically". This was one of the big discoveries of the 20th century about Homer, though a lot of people are still bewildered at the implications.
One implication, though, is that there are at least two forces at work that are actively pressuring changes in each re-telling of a story. One is the poet's creative imagination. Another is the very conventions of the poetic language. Suppose Odysseus meets a young woman on his way to someone's house; well, it so happens that that's an element in one kind of conventional story episode. That puts a tiny amount of temptation in the storyteller's way to put in the next conventional element, which happens to be encountering a dog or dogs at the entrance of the house. The pressure may be minuscule, but if you've got centuries of iterations ...
If you're interested in finding out more I recommend Albert Lord's book The Singer of Tales. A good fictional spin on the subject is a novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare called The File on H. They're both good reads.
(Before I sign off I'd better correct something I put in my earlier post -- memorising Homer could have been part of Athenian education as early as 550 BCE.)
The main issue with the Atlantis story is that (a) Plato invented it himself, and (b) he dates it to about 9400 BCE if I recall correctly -- which would be around about the same time that we first see Neolithic humans in Greece. (I'm sure there's a standard excuse Atlantis-hunters use to explain the latter point, though.)
It's possible, but it can't be the default position. Present-day oral traditions observed (and recorded) "in the wild" show that retellings of stories change drastically from generation to generation, not just from century to century. It's possible for isolated historical references to survive that kind of dilution, to be sure, and there are plenty of cases in Homer (though almost all in the Iliad); but they tend to get overwhelmed by the changes introduced by storytellers desire to (a) innovate, (b) keep their audiences in suspense, (c) cater to a specific audience (if you're a bard in an Athenian court, you're not going to tell stories that reflect badly on Theseus), and (d) several other factors which slip my mind right now but which you can read about in e.g. the anthropologist Walter Ong's book Orality and Literacy (not very up-to-date, but a popular one).
The upshot of that is that you don't scour literary texts with an agenda. As with any scientific enterprise, you keep your eyes open for out-of-the-ordinary correlations and then investigate. Solar eclipses in conjunction with a new moon are possibly enough to make it worth investigating this one, as I've admitted in a post above.
especially given that it was regularly memorized in its entirety by students in the Hellenic period.(I'd better interrupt to state for the record that it is known for certain that memorising Homer could only have become part of aristocratic Athenian education around 500 BCE at the earliest.)
Atlantis is a random children's story that got lost, then blown out of proportion. Not the same thing.Not really. The Atlantis story is one told by a late-Classical-Period author (Plato), with explicit claims that it is derived from a millennia-old tradition preserved by Egyptian texts. If anything, the Atlantis story has more extrinsic plausibility than this one!
In view of the conjunction with a new moon I'll retract some of my earlier scorn, but I'll still side with Eratosthenes when it comes to euhemerising myths. Which is really what these folks are doing: they're modern-day euhemerists.
That is true; I had seen another article earlier today, which didn't mention the bit about the fact that it was a new moon. So that part of the story is new to me, and it does mitigate my annoyance quite a bit.
I'm not very convinced, though. The other references they draw on are much more problematic: it has been known for a loooong time that the internal chronology of the Odyssey is a complete mess. For that reason I wouldn't put any stock in the bit about
Odysseus is told to watch the Pleiades and late-setting Bootes and keep the Great Bear to his left. Next, five days before the supposed eclipse, Odysseus arrives in Ithaca as the Star of Dawn -- that is, Venus -- rises ahead of the sun.Still, the new moon thing is of interest. Not enough to convince me, but enough to get me to actually pay attention to their findings if I ever manage to find out where they're publishing them.
Ummm, you know, Mount Olympos is a real mountain. It's right here ...
As for Circe, in Italian myth (by which I guess I mean Etruscan myth) she was thought to live on a cape on the west coast of Italy, about halfway between Rome and Naples, which is still called Monte Circeo. I think Circe may have left by now, though.