334. Bronze Age Apocalypse: Did Homer Write History? (Ep 3)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Drumple. And we are back in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. And we are heading inevitably towards a spectacular collapse. So as we discussed briefly with Stephen Fryer in the last episode, the legendary Greek author Homer is one of the key voices who has taught us all about the Bronze Age collapse, writing epics like The Odyssey, the Iliad, 500 years after the event.

But how much truth from that era is passed down to Homer through oral myths, through the Greek. dark ages and how much does he actually, you know, passed down to us. So to dig deep into Homer and the many debates that are going on in circles of historians today, we have the best in the business, may I say, Simon Goldhill, I mean a legendary author himself, professor in Greek literature and culture at King's College, Cambridge. Thank you very much for being with us. And as we saw at the Jaipur Literature Festival, he is also a spectacularly dynamic lecturer.

Simon, the reason we've got you on, apart from the fact that you are, I mean, hilarious and also uh very knowledgeable, is that there's this huge argument going on at the moment about Homer, believe it or not, those of you who aren't sort of rooted in in this kind of literature, It's heated. So, you know, this argument is about whether he was a historian. Was he a preserver of memories of the real world? Was he a chronicler?

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