Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature

Abstract

Did Homer tell the 'truth' about the Trojan War? If so, how much, and if not, why not? The issue was hardly academic to the Greeks living under the Roman Empire, given the centrality of both Homer, the father of Greek culture, and the Trojan War, the event that inaugurated Greek history, to conceptions of Imperial Hellenism. This book examines four Greek texts of the Imperial period that address the topic - Strabo's Geography, Dio of Prusa's Trojan Oration, Lucian's novella True Stories, and Philostratus' fictional dialogue Heroicus - and shows how their imaginative explorations of Homer and his relationship to history raise important questions about the nature of poetry and fiction, the identity and intentions of Homer himself, and the significance of the heroic past and Homeric authority in Imperial Greek culture.

SEEING DEMONS: AUTOPSY IN MAXIMUS OF TYRE'SORATION9 AND ITS ABSENCE IN APULEIUS’ON THE GOD OF SOCRATES

“…I hesitate to subscribe to the strong version of Jones's hypothesis and, instead, believe that Lucian takes aim at a specific argumentative practice in The Lover of Lies, namely making a claim of autopsy in a philosophical argument. The reason for my hesitancy is that one of Lucian's favorite comic ploys is to create incongruous scenarios, whether it be by 'juxtaposing famous figures either from vastly different time periods, cultural spheres, or both', as occurs on the Island of the Blessed in True Stories (see Kim [2010], 157), or by portraying a character type behaving completely out of character. In The Lover of Lies, Lucian seems to invent a scenario where philosophers tell the same kinds of stories that professional aretalogoi told at first-and second-century dinner parties; see Ogden (2007), 5f.…”

Anécdotas del deporte antiguo en la Καινὴ ἱστορία del mitógrafo Tolomeo Queno (Phot. Bibl. 190)

“…13 Homero siempre es el referente de la tradición clásica, también en época imperial, cf. Kim (2010) o Hunter (2018.…”

STATUE FEVER IN THEHEROICUS

“…1; Webb (1999); Elsner (2002); Bartsch and Elsner (2007); Webb (2009); de Jong (2011); Squire (2015); Squire and Elsner (2016). Kim (2010) ch. 6 and Whitmarsh (2013) are the two best recent discussions of the Heroicus .…”