Antihomerica
Dares and Dictys
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23446396 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ken Dowden (0000-0002-5831-6900, University of Birmingham, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Pages | 134-141 |
| Publication date | 2022-10-20 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Mythography (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190648312.013.8 |
| OpenAlex | W4307698906 |
| ISBN | 9780190648312 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
What is the point of Dictys’s Diary of the Trojan War or of Dares’s little book? They are not novels (despite their embrace by cognoscenti of the Ancient Novel), and they are not history (despite their embrace by Byzantine chroniclers). Their whole point is that Homer Was Wrong. And readers could enjoy bravura reconstruction of What Really Happened as though it were Thucydides in the archaeologia. Others played this game too (e.g., Dio Chrysostom and the enfant terrible, Ptolemy Chennus)—it is so characteristic of the end of the 1st century ce, though not without a revival in Philostratus’s Heroicus. And stylistically so innocent: just the plain facts of the case, the names, the places, and what caused what in what sequence. If only Laomedon had treated the Argonauts properly, none of this would have happened!
Art · Byzantine architecture · Literature · Point (geometry) · Ptolemy's table of chords · Sequence (biology) · Trojan · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Computer Science · History
| Highly cited | No |
|---|