Turns out that I regard the Bible as Homeric. Maybe, with this late-in-life realisation, I can come to terms with what the Bible is saying. Or, rather, given my now limited exposure, what it was trying to say to me all those years ago.
Exactly what might be the benefit of this Sinner come to Jesus epiphany I cannot say. I was wont to say that all confession was good for the soul; that was back in the days when my superiors expected me to come back with one but the conviction is there.
I’ll keep you posted of any discernable benefits!
If the Greeks regarded the Trojan War as the defining moment of their culture, they did so because of the poetry of Homer. It would not be unfair to regard the Homeric poems as the single most important texts in Greek culture. While the Greeks all gained their collective identity from the Trojan War, that collective identity was concentrated in the values, ethics, and narrative of Homer's epic poems. Just as the Greeks were obsessed about the Trojan War, they were equally obsessed about the Homeric poems, returning to them over and over again, particularly in times of cultural crisis.
The Greeks didn't believe that the Homeric poems were sacred in any way, or even flawless history. For most of Greek history, Homer comes under fire for his unflattering portrayal of Greek gods. The Greeks understood that the poems were poetry, and in the Hellenistic period came to the understanding that the poems had been deeply corrupted over the ages. So unlike most ancient cultures which rooted collective identity in religious texts of some sort, the Greeks turned to literature. As the Trojan War was the product of Mycenean culture, the Homeric poems were the product of the Greek Dark Ages.
Whatever happened at Troy, the events were probably so captivating, that the Greeks continued to narrate the stories long after they had abandoned their cities and abandoned writing. The history of the war was preserved from mouth to mouth, from person to person; it may be that the stories of the Trojan War were the dominant cultural artifact of the Greek Dark Ages.
These stories probably began as short tales of isolated events and heroes; eventually a profession of story-telling was established—classical scholars call this new professional a "bard." This new professional began combining the stories into larger narratives; as the narratives grew, the technique of story-telling changed as well. Whereas early bards probably memorized their stories with great exactitude, the later bards, telling much longer stories, probably improvised much of their lines following sophisticated rules. Maybe. We have evidence from the classical age in Greece of people memorizing the complete poetry of Homer word for word (over 25,000 lines of poetry); it may be possible that the Homeric poems were memorized with more exactitude than scholars believe.
No matter what the case, by the end of the Greek Dark Ages, these bards or story-tellers were probably the cultural center of Greek society; their status improved greatly as Greeks began to slowly urbanize. On an average night in the late Greek Dark Ages, a community, probably the wealthiest people, would settle in for an evening's entertainment. The professional story-teller would sing the stories of the Trojan War and its Greek heroes; these songs would be the Greek equivalent of a mini-series, for the stories were so long that they would take days to complete. The Greeks believed that the greatest of these story-tellers was a blind man named Homer, and that he sung ten epic poems about the Trojan War, of which only two survived (although the Greeks seem to have known them).
As a group these poems told the entire history of the Trojan War; each poem, however, only covered a small part of that history. Many classicists believe that the two surviving Homeric epics (probably the only Homeric epics) were in fact composed by several individuals; in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, most classicists accept the overall Greek idea of a single author.
Whatever the compositional history of the poems, they were set down into writing within a few decades of their composition; the growing urbanization of Greek society led to the rediscovery of writing (learned from the Phoenicians this time), and the Homeric poems were committed to writing very quickly. Time and transmission added much extraneous material to the poems, but in their basic character and outline they seem to be the original compositions.
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