What Homer Didn’t Say: Byzantine Narratives of the Trojan War and Their Reception in the Renaissance

What is it about?

This article offers an overview of the Byzantine re-elaborations of the Trojan War legend and explores their reception in early modern Greek literature, with particular emphasis on the cultural milieu in which Nikolaos Loukanes composed his Iliad (1526). Although the Homeric epics had long occupied a privileged place in the Byzantine scholarly tradition, popular engagement with the Trojan narrative often drew upon alternative traditions. Foremost among these stood the purported eyewitness testimony of Dictys of Crete. Offering what many regarded as a more trustworthy account of the toils of the Achaeans at Troy from the perspective of someone who had borne the brunt of the war, Dictys’ Diary increasingly eclipsed the “fabricated” story of Homer and, through Malalas’ Chronographia, became foundational for later Byzantine retellings.  These retellings took on exuberantly novelistic forms in works such as the Achilleid and the Byzantine Iliad—narratives devoid of any association with the world of the Homeric heroes. While the Achilleid transforms its hero into a profoundly sentimental figure, the Byzantine Iliad offers an inventive reimagining of the Trojan narrative and provides Helen with remarkable emotional agency. How enduring was the popularity of these inventive reworkings in the Renaissance? Did they continue to inform the way the Trojan past was envisioned, or did they recede in significance as humanist scholarship intensified its focus on the Homeric text itself and on what Homer actually said? This article seeks to shed light on these questions, tracing the fortunes of Byzantine Trojan narratives in a cultural landscape increasingly oriented toward philological authenticity.

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Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash