Troija

Homer and the background of the epics

Felice Vinci’s theory about the location of Odysseus’s journey being in the Baltic Sea instead of the Mediterranean has its origins in his study of the two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Usually, these two epics are attributed to Homer, although very little is actually known about him.

According to the legend, Homer was a blind poet from the island of Chios, but little evidence exists to support this. Several theories about the alternative sources of these epics exist; some maintain that they were written by two different poets while others contend that both had several authors. The fact that these poems lived for several centuries as oral tradition seems to be agreed upon by most scholars.

Though there may have been several more stories about the Trojan war, only two written accounts have survived. They are the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The Iliad tells about a short period of the end of the war, describing the death of Achilles and Hector, whereas the Odyssey is an account of the ten year long wanderings of the king of Ithaca and his return to his home island. It is with these ‘maps’ related by Homer that Vinci has traveled in the Baltic Sea and northern Atlantic to check how their geography corresponds to that of the epics.

The story of the horse of Troy is actually from Virgil, a Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid. King Menelaus, who fought the Trojans in the ar, won the war thanks to the plot of hiding warriors inside a wooden horse. Modifying the epics started in 700 B.C. and the earliest complete manuscript of the Iliad is from 900 A.D.

All of the 131 manuscripts found in various cities of Greece were destroyed in the Alexandrian library fire in Egypt in ca. 48 B.C. when Julius Caesar attacked the city.

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