Tomorrow I will go to the Odyssey. Remember the Trojan Horse, the snakes, Laocoön, and “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”? So, it turns out that the most famous episode of the Trojan War isn’t in the “Iliad”—the main poem about this very war, and things with the Odyssey are also tricky. In the Iliad, Homer ends the story earlier: the “Iliad” covers only fifty days of the last year of the siege and ends with the funeral of Hector—there’s no horse, no death of Achilles, nor fall of the city in it. In the “Odyssey,” the horse appears a couple of times but only in passing: the bard Demodocus sings about it at a feast, Menelaus recalls how Helen walked around the horse and mocked the voices of the Greeks hidden inside. That’s it. There is no elaborate scene of assault and fire in Homer’s works at all. And that canonical story—with the spy Sinon, Laocoön strangled by the snakes, and burning Troy—is from the Roman Virgil, the second book of the “Aeneid,” written in the 20s of the 1st century BC, almost seven hundred years after Homer. It is precisely from there that the plot leaked into pop culture.
But Virgil did not invent the horse out of nowhere. Between him and Homer, there was an entire “epic cycle”—a series of poems that covered the entire war from beginning to end: “Cypria” (prehistory: the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen), then “Iliad”, then “Aethiopis” (the death of Achilles), then “Little Iliad”—here’s where they finally build the horse,—then “The Sack of Ilium”, where they roll it into the city and the massacre begins, and then “The Returns”, “Odyssey”, and a somewhat odd “Telegony” for dessert. Out of the eight poems of the cycle, only two Homeric ones fully survived. The other six—including both with all the salt about the horse—have disappeared and are known only from a later synopsis-summary and scattered quotations, totaling about a hundred lines. That means we have the middle and epilogue of the story at hand, while the beginning and the climax in the original are lost.
Turns out, we’ve been retelling a scene for centuries, the authentic text of which we don’t have.
P.S. A separate story about whether Homer was blind. And whether there was a Homer. It’s all very complicated 🙂 But that’s a story for another time.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 