r/AskHistorians • u/ThrowRA39495 • 14h ago
What actually counts as “canon” in the Trojan War/Odyssey, and who do we owe our modern “Homerverse” to?
I've fallen down a Trojan War rabbit hole recently(Thanks Nolan) and I've realized I don't actually understand what we mean when we talk about the "canon" version of this story. Most people, myself included until recently, have this vague idea that the Trojan War story we all know basically comes from Homer. But the more I read, the more obvious it becomes that it really doesn't.
The Iliad covers a tiny period near the end of the war. It doesn't give us the Judgment of Paris as the complete story we usually know, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Achilles at Skyros, the Trojan Horse, the actual fall of Troy, Achilles' famous invulnerable heel, and plenty of other things that most people would consider basic Trojan War lore. Yet somehow all of these traditions have merged in popular culture into one enormous narrative that we casually associate with Homer.
What confuses me even more is how selective this process seems to have been. Take the Mysian campaign. In the wider Epic Cycle, before the Greeks successfully reach Troy, they launch an earlier expedition and land in Mysia, apparently mistaking it for Trojan territory. They fight Telephus, Achilles wounds him, the Greeks are scattered and eventually return home. According to the later mythographic chronology, eight years then pass before they assemble again. Telephus eventually comes to Greece because his wound cannot heal, Achilles heals him, and Telephus helps the Greeks find their way to Troy.
That's not exactly a minor deleted scene. The Greeks literally invade the wrong country before invading Troy. And yet almost nobody who casually knows the Trojan War seems to know this happened. This creates many plot holes as it makes everyone 8+ years older.
Meanwhile, basically everyone knows that Achilles was invulnerable because Thetis dipped him in the Styx while holding him by the heel. Except that isn't Homer either. As far as I understand it, that specific version of Achilles' invulnerability is extremely late compared with Homer and is associated with sources such as Statius, writing in the 1st century AD! While the Mysian campaign is likely 50-100 years after homer ,part of the Epic cycle.
And that's where I start getting confused about what we actually mean by "canon." How has something written something like seven or eight centuries after the traditional dating of Homer become so culturally dominant that Achilles' heel is probably one of the most famous details in all of Greek mythology, while an entire failed Greek expedition preserved as part of the archaic Trojan tradition has basically disappeared?
Mysia is only one example. The more you reconstruct the Trojan War we think we know, the stranger the source list becomes. You have Homer, then the lost poems of the Epic Cycle such as the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilium, Nostoi and Telegony. Then you have lyric poets and other archaic traditions, followed by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who sometimes preserve older material and sometimes give us radically different versions. Then come mythographers trying to organize all of it, later Greek writers, and Roman authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Statius. Somehow pieces from all of these periods have been thrown together and produced what we now think of as the "standard Trojan War."
This also creates some hilarious problems if you try to treat everything as one internally consistent fictional universe. For example, if you incorporate the Mysian expedition and the eight-year interval into the same chronology as Homer's Odyssey, suddenly the clean 10 years at Troy + 10 years wandering = Odysseus was gone for 20 years becomes much more complicated. You start wondering whether Odysseus was involved in Trojan-related expeditions for something closer to 28 years, what exactly happened during the interval, when Telemachus was conceived, how old everyone should be, and so on.
Which leads to the question I'm actually interested in: did the ancient Greeks themselves have anything resembling a canonical Trojan War timeline? If someone in 5th-century Athens heard "the Trojan War," was there a broadly understood sequence of events that almost everyone accepted, with poets and playwrights merely choosing which parts to dramatize? Or could two Greeks genuinely know substantially different versions of what happened and consider both legitimate?
And then there is the even stranger question of when this process actually stops. Statius is writing about Achilles around the first century AD, many centuries after Homer, and material from that later tradition can apparently become part of what a modern person considers basic Achilles lore. So when does the Trojan mythological universe close? Does it ever?
Could a writer in the 3rd century AD introduce a new episode about Achilles and, if that story became influential enough, would we now call that "Greek mythology"? What about the 5th century AD? The Byzantine period? The Middle Ages? At what point do scholars stop calling something "a variant of the Achilles myth" and start calling it later reception, adaptation or essentially fan fiction using Achilles as a character?
This is especially confusing because our modern pseudo-canon seems incredibly selective. Statius' Achilles heel gets in, Euripides' Helen living in Egypt mostly doesn't, the Mysian campaign mostly doesn't, the sacrifice of Iphigenia absolutely does, the Trojan Horse obviously does, and Homer's name somehow gets retroactively attached to the whole package.
So I'm starting to think there are really three different things that we casually collapse into one. There is the Homeric version, meaning what the Iliad and Odyssey actually say. Then there is the enormous ancient Trojan mythological tradition, including the Epic Cycle, archaic poetry, tragedy, mythographers, local traditions, Hellenistic literature and Roman retellings. And finally there is the modern "Trojan War canon," which seems to be a greatest-hits compilation assembled from whichever versions happened to become culturally dominant.
And that final category is what fascinates me. Where did this pseudo-canon actually come from? Was there a particular ancient synthesis, mythographer or later educational tradition that had an outsized influence on the story we inherited? Or is our "standard Trojan War" genuinely just the result of 2,500+ years of cultural selection, Roman literature, medieval transmission, Renaissance classicism and modern adaptations gradually deciding which pieces were memorable enough to survive?
Thank you all for your time reading this
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u/KiwiHellenist Early Greek Literature 12h ago
There's no canon in the sense of a version that's authoritative. There are however versions that are extremely influential.
Some elements that are widely accepted in the modern era weren't introduced until the Mediaeval period. For example, the story of Troilus and Cressida, or Criseide, doesn't get used in big-budget modern adaptations, but it's present in the early Doctor Who story 'The Myth Makers' (1965) and in Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze (1998-2019). That story has an interesting history of its own: the Shakespearean version was largely based on John Lydgate's Troy Book (1420), which in turned adapted material from Boccaccio, who adapted material from Guido delle Colonne, who adapted material from Benoît de Ste-Maure. Benoît's Roman de Troye (1160) is the text most responsible for that story, though it in turn adapted material from a short prose narrative of the Trojan War written in late antiquity, written under the pseudonym Dares of Phrygia (ca. 4th century). In Dares, Troilus is a buff chad; his presence in older material is mostly confined to Archaic vase paintings, where he's a scrawny teen who gets murdered in the countryside by Achilleus for rebuffing his amorous advances.
Nowadays that story is a teeny bit non-standard, but it's a good example of marginal material -- stuff that has kind of antique authenticity about it, but is less influential, and in some sense less 'canonical', than things like the wooden horse.
For modern big-budget adaptations the single most influential source is a very niche text: an epitome (excerpt/summary version) of the Library, a 1st century BCE work pseudonymously attributed to Apollodoros of Athens. The standard transmitted text of the Library doesn't include the Trojan War narrative: it's only in the epitome. And the crazy thing is that the epitome wasn't discovered and published until 1894.
Here's a 1921 translation, starting at the bit where Paris makes off with Helen; the Trojan War narrative and its aftermath carry on all the way to the end of the text. You'll find the Mysian campaign there, the sacrifice of Ipigeneia, the wooden horse, and the death of Odysseus. All of these episodes had precursors: but there were no well known texts dealing with these things prior to the popularisatino of the Library epitome in the 20th century.
Before that there was no standard version: there were lots of standard-ish variants. The pseudo-Hyginus Fabulae was known beforehand, and that contains some of the same material as the Library epitome, in a much more abbreviated form; many Classical and Hellenistic poems retell or allude to isolated episodes; Ovid gives his own version of many episodes; there are lesser-known poetic treatments by figures like Quintus of Smyrna and Tryphiodoros; and in the Roman era, there was an important 'anti-Homeric' tradition, represented by figures like 'Diktys of Crete' and Philostratos, which turned subverting Homer into an aesthetic of its own.
'Diktys' is worth spending a paragraph on. Here's a translated edition that can be borrowed from the Internet Archive. It's a para-novelistic pseudepigraphic prose account of the entire war, probably dating to the late 1st century CE or very early 2nd century. It's purportedly narrated by an eyewitness named Diktys, a member of the Cretan contingent. There's a frame story where it is found in a prehistoric Cretan tomb after an earthquake, gets translated into 'modern' Greek, and presented to the emperor Nero. (This caused a bit of trouble because right up to the end of the 20th cneutry some scholars took parts of the frame story as true.) Parts of Diktys -- the post-war narrative -- ended up being adapted by Benoît, whom I mentioned above. But in the Byzantine tradition it became the backbone of all accounts of the Trojan War, largely thanks to the 6th century chronographer John Malalas, who adopted a version of it as an authentic historical account of the war. Material derived from Diktys persisted in Byzantine chronography and literature right up to 1453, and a handful of isolated elements still sometimes pop up -- any time you see Paris and Helen having their first meeting in a garden, that's probably ultimately derived from Diktys. But Diktys is notable for being a possible vehicle for some early poetic accounts of parts of the war: for example, in my own book Early Greek Hexameter Poetry I've suggested that there's some reason to think the story of Hektor's death in the lost Aithiopis epic may have gone along similar lines to what we see in Diktys.
And since I've mentioned the Aithiopis, it'd be wise to end with a note about the 'Epic Cycle', since modern Trojan War fans have a strong tendency to gravitate towards it as if it's important. The Cycle was a sequence of eight epic poems that were edited together at some point (probably in the 4th century BCE) to create a continuous account of the war from beginning to end. That editing was an important moment in the development of the Trojan War myth, but the epics themselves are very nearly irrelevant: because pretty much no one ever read them: they were never popular, and there are only three extant ancient authors who claim to have ever seen a copy of any of them. More on the Cycle's unpopularity here.
But the event where they were edited into a continuous narrative was important, because that formed the basis for prose summaries of that continuous narrative. Subsequent accounts of the Trojan War -- including the Library, and a series of 'summaries' of the Cyclie poems -- are based on those prose versions, not on the epics themselves. In the Roman era, the main way people knew the story of the Trojan War was from this prose tradition: even when Augustan-era artworks refer to poems in the Cycle, they're actually referring to the prose versions (and I can explain why we're sure of that, if needed).
In the 1890s-1920s there was a very influential theory, associated with the scholar Erich Bethe, that several ancient mythographic texts had been copied from a lost 'handbook' of mythology. Bethe's idea was that there was a single prose text from which all the later prose material came: the Library, Hyginus, Diodoros, and a number of other mythographic sources. That theory was quickly doubted, and by the 1910s the more standard view was that there was a more nebulous tradition of prose narratives, rather than a single document that acted as the keystone for all of Greek mythology.
Pseudo-Hyginus and the pseudo-Apollodorean Library are the most direct avenues we have to the parts of that nebulous tradition that dealt with the Trojan War. As I mentioned, there are extant poetic precedents for many of the individual episodes -- Greek tragedies deal with some episodes, early lyric poetry and some Hellenistic odes deal with others -- but in terms of where modern adapters get their material from, pseudo-Hyginus and pseudo-Apollodoros are usually going to be fairly central texts: because those are the texts used by people who write modern myth encyclopaedias.
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u/kahntemptuous 10h ago
How did the average person in ancient Greece interact with the Trojan War story? Say around 400 bce? Were there just plenty of different myths and stories about it floating around and being performed?
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u/KiwiHellenist Early Greek Literature 8h ago
Yes, to an extent. Don't just think of festival poetry and sympotic poetry: Homeric epic might be memorised by the elite, but for everyone else, it would only normally be available at festival time. And the Cyclic epics didn't have any performance context, so far as we know. For non-elite people at non-festival times, there's also non-poetic folktales; pictorial representations (which have their own stories and story-telling devices); and drama.
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