Troy: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology #3)

by Stephen Fry

Over the millennia, and the last two centuries especially, so much dissent and disagreement, factionalism, and feuding has enlivened and inflamed the world of Homeric scholarship that the field has taken on some of the characteristics of a kind of religious war. We have seen the Separatists versus the Analysts versus the Unitarians versus the Neoanalysts. A similar schism has obtained (right up to the time of my writing this) in the fevered world of Trojan studies. German antiquarians, classicists, and archaeologists have dominated both realms, with American scholars coming a close second. Academics can get heated and intemperate about the most esoteric and obscure matters, as is well known, but in the case of Homer the stakes have always been high: proving or disproving his existence, definitively describing his modes of creation, and settling the question of how much of what he wrote is fact or fable . . . These can almost be regarded as the secular equivalent of establishing the historical existence of Christ and his crucifixion. So much of who and how we are flows from the idea of Homer. Our culture may be Judeo-Christian in its religious and moral grounding, but it is Greco-Roman to at least an equal degree in these and other domains. If the Greeks and Romans looked back to Homer as the author and founder of so much of their identity—and they did—then it is unsurprising that settling the Homeric Question has long been something of a scholastic Holy Grail for our civil...