Month: March 2026

The myths created in the wake of the Bronze Age collapse celebrating the lost civilization of Mycenean culture circulated for centuries before Homer crafted songs of such artistic value that they laid a foundation for western literature.

Both the Torah and the Illiad were improvised with performers taking turns. In Athens, a singer might be expected to go for many hours before needing a substitution who would pick up the story from that point. The Torah is the second pillar of western literature next to Homer. By 560 BC, copies of Homer were all over the ancient world. Thirty years later, Cyrus freed the Jews and the Torah was codified. 

Homer’s Illiad was sung in pentatonic dactylic hexameter (six metrical feet per line) with nearly 16,000 lines divided into 24 chapters. Modern day performances last 24 hours, but the original performances covered three days for the Illiad and three weeks for the festival. Pericles was the one who codified the music festival, creating the first Greek Woodstock, but an annual competition for poets had been well established for centuries and was even referenced in the Illiad. Around 600 BC is when a standard text for Homer was being established that ended all improvisation. The oldest examples of ancient Greek date to 750 BC, which is around the same time Homer was writing his poems. Some historians think the alphabet was created to preserve Homer’s work for future generations.

The same thing happened after Cyrus freed the Jews and told them to write down the Torah to prevent further alterations, although Zoroastrian elements likely entered Judaism even earlier, while the Jews had to disguise their hatred for their Babylonian masters by making them Egyptians. . Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Hebrew derive from the Phoenician alphabet, and all three cultures lived under pantheons in ancient times. The Zoroastrian element is what drove cultures toward monotheism and a rejection of paganism. Cyrus, Moses and Paris were all abandoned and ordered killed at birth and survived through miraculous happenstance. Paris may be the original template the others imitated.

It is doubtful Homer was blind from birth because the descriptions are so visually vivid. The gods and goddesses who drive the story and play crucial and devious roles are easily interpreted as emanations from the Greek collective unconscious involving people grappling with inner demons and compulsions.

The psychological complexity of the Illiad has never been successfully captured on film (not even close) because the directors want to make a battle film when Homer was writing an elegy for the second greatest Greek hero (after Heracles).

Particularly disappointing in Brad’s version is Achilles inside the horse, dying during the massacre of Troy. In fact, his death so demoralized the Greeks that it prompted Odysseus to come up with the idea of feigning a mass retreat to fool the Trojans into thinking they’d won the war. You can’t scramble the basic chronology and keep the psychological complexities intact.

Many have the misperception the Illiad and the Torah were memorized as they existed as oral traditions for centuries before being written down. Not so. They were improvisational performances involving teams. In Greece, the singers always accompanied themselves on a four-string lyre. What was memorized was the outline of the stories, openings to the chapters, and certain phrases, some of which were repeated allowing performers time to catch a break. Not unlike, “yes, yes, y’all, to the beat y’all” used in early rap.

Playing a minor pentatonic on a four-string lyre with psychologically descriptive poetry is very close to what Robert Johnson was doing at the crossroads of Highway 61.

Homer was incredibly prolific while he lived, but only two works survived. Alexander the Great had established a great library in Egypt to house the entire history of culture and science, but it caught fire in 48 BC after Julius Ceasar burned his fleet to prevent his troops from fleeing. The library fell into gradual ruin and decay, and countless works of Homer disappeared like snow devils in a winter blizzard. Alexander was obsessed with Homer, and traveled with his copy of the Illiad. When he arrived at the Temple of Athena near Troy, he seized the armor of Achilles on display and wore it during his quest to takeover the world. He seized Egypt without a fight and declared a god upon arrival.

It was a strange twist of fate considering Alexander’s father had been murdered during a ceremony designed to anoint himself as the 13th god of the Greek pantheon. And later that week, a whole lot of Alexander’s relatives got stabbed to death as well.