THE CUNNING HOMER

THE CUNNING HOMER

Ulysses, Nobody, Philoctetes and the ingenious deception of the Odyssey

a book by Alberto Majrani

with a preface  by Giulio Giorello

428 pages, 280 images

THE CUNNING HOMER

Written by Alberto Majrani, Contributing Writer, Classical Wisdom 

This English translation of the introduction of L'ASTUTO OMERO has been published on the prestigious Classical Wisdom website https://classicalwisdom.com/mythology/homer/the-cunning-homer-a-new-look-at-the-odyssey/

Who really killed the suitors in Homer’s Odyssey? A careful reading of the epic poem reveals a myriad of clues left by Homer with a surprising conclusion: Ulysses was not…really Ulysses. He was the expert Achaean archer Philoctetes in disguise!

With this key, the Homeric poem suddenly assumes a logic and coherence hitherto unsuspected. This explains why Homer continues to praise the art of deception: it is he who has deceived us for three thousand years! And the surprises do not end there: all the apparent inconsistencies of the Iliad and the Odyssey that have plagued students and teachers for generations, known as the "Homeric Question", now fall effortlessly in place. The ancient texts finally agree with historical and archaeological data, fully revealing the genius of their author.

It’s a strange story, that of Ulysses. Is it possible that the king of Ithaca stay away for twenty years, missing his homeland, abandoning a beautiful nymph who would make him immortal, only to return to a wife no longer young after a dangerous solo crossing?

And when he does return, nobody recognizes him, not even his father or his own wife, so he kills all the pretenders threatening to provoke a bloody revolution, and finally, when he would have every right to a little peace and quiet, he decides to sail away in secret, leaving everyone baffled! All right, yes, it is a mythological tale, but it is not very ... logical!

And what if Ulysses was not actually... Ulysses? Let's examine the hypothesis that the son of Ulysses, Telemachus, had hired a mercenary to interpret Ulysses and to slaughter of the suitors asking the hand of his mother Penelope: the same Telemachus would then cast a poet to tell a fantastic story that could justify all the years of his father's absence. All this in order to free the royal palace of all the suitors who were eating them out of house and home , not to mention is someone had married his mother, Telemachus would have lost his right of succession to the kingdom.

In fact, Penelope was of noble birth, being the daughter of the powerful King Ikarios, while Ulysses was an "upstart" tradesman familiar with piracy and looting, activities which, at that time, were not clearly defined. The claimants themselves were plotting to get rid of him, and he had to anticipate them as soon as possible.

Who was this mercenary? Can you imagine? Think about it … it is suggested to us by Ulysses himself ... when he is in the land of the Phaeacians. Ulysses claims to be the best of the Achaeans in archery, immediately after Philoctetes!

As for Philoctetes, who was he? Maybe someone remembers him thanks to the amusing cartoon "Hercules", produced by Disney in 1997 in which the script writers got a bit too carried away by the need to invent a fun story. They changed the events and roles of various mythological characters. It’s best, then,to refer to Classical sources.

The Iliad tells us that Philoctetes was the head of a contingent of the Achaeans headed to the Trojan War. However, he was bitten in the foot by a snake, a serious wound that became infected and forced his teammates to abandon him on the island of Lemnos. As Sophocles recounts in his play, according to a prophecy, Troy would fall only with the help of Hercules’ weapons. Philoctetes had been a pupil of Hercules and had inherited his bow and arrows, so after being cured by the Achaean doctor Machaon, Philoctetes kills Paris, decisively contributing to the defeat of the Trojans.

Of course! The mercenary was Philoctetes! That explains a lot: he had known Ulysses for some time—that lent itself well to interpret him-- he also was a "family friend" and therefore may be willing to risk his life in such a dangerous undertaking. He was an extremely skilled archer, requiring a level of training that Ulysses could not have maintained after so many years at sea.

Assuming, then, that Ulysses was really equipped with this skill: as the Iliad recounts, Ulysses never uses the bow, even during the games in honor of Patroclus, in which he won wrestling and running competitions. And when he finally does have a bow in hand—borrowed from the young warrior Meriones—all he does with it is whip horses!   Note also that Homer does not say that Philoctetes was abandoned on Lemnos on Ulysses’ orders: this is the work of subsequent mythographers and repeated by Sophocles, who reworked the old myths to build on his story--not very different from the authors of Disney! So there is no reason to think that Philoctetes was harboring resentment against Ulysses or his family members.

The youth of Ithaca would not recognize Philoctetes, but some elderly people might, so it was necessary to leave the island as soon as his mission against the suitors was accomplished. He had been seriously wounded in the foot by a snake, which would have left him with some obvious lameness. In fact, Homer, without saying so openly, does everything to make us understand that the mysterious stranger limps: he walks slowly, leaning on a cane, is likened to the god Hephaestus, who is lame too. There are many strange references to "feet", for example the old nurse who recognizes "Ulysses" by his knee injury caused by a wild boar (which is never mentioned either in the Iliad or the rest of the Odyssey, in which the legs of the runner Ulysses are absolutely perfect), a recognition that comes just as she washes his feet. Perhaps it had more to do with the foot than the knee!

But Philoctetes was not content with his substantial reward— i.e., all the preciuos objects Telemachus loads on his ship when he sailed off—he aspired to eternal glory! And since he could not reveal the deception, he was lauded as one of "the best of the archers Achaean" by the great ‘Ulysses’ himself. That same ‘Ulysses’, even alludes in the poem dedicated to him, that there was someone better than him in the art of archery. His words are something of a Freudian slip, a kind of "Message in a Bottle" launched to posterity, as if to say: "he who has ears to hear, let him hear!". Homer has left a host of similar messages throughout the poem that guide us through the actual course of the action.

As for the real Ulysses, he had probably died long before, killed in battle or drowned at sea. This can be deduced from the fact that, throughout the Odyssey, the idea that the hero is now deceased is repeated several times. What about the fact that at some point Ulysses descends into the underworld? Or the episode in which his name is Nobody, so the cyclops Polyphemus will repeat that Nobody blinds him, No one kills him? Other messages in bottles, which.. no one, so far, had taken literally! And again, does it not appear very suspect the extraordinary coincidence in time, that Ulysses would return to Ithaca after two decades, and within hours his son is landing on the same beach, located on the opposite side to the main port? Also, what should we infer from traditional biographies which say Homer was blind? It could be that the poet was looking for a justification for not recognizing he who passed himself off as Ulysses?

Let's reconstruct the affair, let’s imagine how could it have taken place in reality. There is a power vacuum in Ithaca; the king left for decades and never came back. The suitors are plotting to eliminate Telemachus and take over the kingdom, so he sets sail with a ship full of precious objects to hire a mercenary (Philoctetes already means "the one who loves to possess"). Philoctetes comes and performs the massacre with the help of the most faithful servants, whom, as the swineherd Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius take the trouble of informing us, will be adequately rewarded

The fake Ulysses cannot stay there pretending nothing had happened, because sooner or later someone will recognize him. So he sails off again, leaving Telemachus the kingdom... and they all lived happily ever after.

The Odyssey is not just a fairy tale for overgrown children, but an intricate maze filled with ingenious references that will inevitably escape those who do not study it closely. "Quandoque dormitat bonus Homerus"--"Even good old Homer nods” Horace proclaimed-- but maybe Homer was a lot more awake than we thought! 

 

This article is based off a new book by Alberto Majrani titled “L’ASTUTO OMERO e il geniale inganno dell’Odissea” ( "The CUNNING HOMER - Ulysses, Nobody, Philoctetes and the ingenious deception of the Odyssey") which addresses Homeric question. As of April 2021, the paper book is available only in Italian .To request the complete 428-page pdf ebook, which includes 280 images at the price of Euro 6,28, send an email to alberto.majrani@tiscali.it . Publishers, journalists, University professors are provided a FREE copy of ebook. The paper book costs 28 euros + shipping (weight 1300 grams). More info on Internet https://cunninghomer.blogspot.com/ (in english) or https://astutoomero.blogspot.com/ (in italian)

 

The e-book THE CUNNING HOMER in English (translated by the author) is now ready  (may 2023) . I thank now who can provide me with useful corrections for my not perfect English. If you are a publisher and you want to publish the book you can contact me! If you are a professional translator and you think you can propose it to a publisher, contact me!

To buy the ebook it is sufficient that you send an email to alberto.majrani@tiscali.it with your commitment. University professors, museum directors and journalists will receive the ebook for free on a simple request.

The price of the ebook it is now € 6.28 (like two pi Greeks!). You can pay with paypal paypal.me/Majrani

If you want to read the book L'ASTUTO OMERO in Italian you can click here https://astutoomero.blogspot.com/

And if you have any doubts, ask alberto.majrani@tiscali.it !!!

 

 

 

 

  Another article in good english about this on  https://www.ilionproject.com/history-s-first-documented-mass-mur

  For now (march 2021) is available only in Italian as paper book (28 euro + shipping) and in ePub format, kindle azw3, or pdf. To request the complete ebook with 280 images and  428 pages of text, at the price of Euro 6,28,  just send an email to alberto.majrani@tiscali.it . Publishers, journalists, University professors will have a FREE copy of ebook.Thank you.

More information on https://astutoomero.blogspot.com/  (in italian, but you can click on google translator and select INGLESE as language) 

 

 

 

Il nuovo libro di Alberto Majrani si intitola "L'ASTUTO OMERO - Ulisse, Nessuno, Filottete e il geniale inganno dell'Odissea" e risolve TUTTI (o quasi) i problemi della questione omerica e molti altri sull'origine delle mitologie. Per ora (marzo 2021)  è disponibile solo in italiano a 28 euro più le spese di spedizione e in formato epub, kindle azw3, o pdf. Per spedizioni in Italia il costo totale è solo di 28 euro. Per richiedere  l'ebook completo, con 280 immagini e 428 pagine di testo, al prezzo di euro 6,28, basta inviare una mail ad alberto.majrani@tiscali.it . Editori, giornalisti, professori universitari riceveranno una copia gratuita. Grazie.

Altre informazioni su   https://astutoomero.blogspot.com/

ACHILLES AND THE METEORITE

 

The episode of the massacre of the Suitors (Odyssey,book XXI and following) is the only one in which mention is made of iron weapons, and Ulysses reproaches the suitors for the serious fault of not

fear the gods, who possess the wide sky (XXII, 39)

repeating the phrase used the night before by Telemachus. As Homer himself makes us understand through the mouth of Eumaeus (Od. XV, 328), for the ancients the sky was the seat of the gods and was made of iron, an idea perhaps born from the observation of the fall of some large iron meteorite; and it is interesting to note that the Greek name for iron, sideros, is practically the same as the Latin name for the stars, sidera. It seems absurd, but until two centuries ago many scientists did not believe that meteorites fell from the sky, and scornfully attributed the countless testimonies to hallucinations and deceptions of various kinds. Oddly, during a battle in the Iliad it is said in reverse that

In this way they fought, and iron turmoil

reached the sky of bronze (Il. XVII 424-425)

this may perhaps indicate that we are in a transitional period between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Homer often uses the expression "heart of iron" to indicate a particularly strong and hard soul, which shows that he knew this metal well. In the funeral games in honor of Patroclus, a large disc (or boulder, or globe, depending on how the word σόλον, solon, is translated) of raw iron is used for a throwing contest and then awarded as a prize to the winner, saying that it would have been enough for five years for a shepherd and a plowman (Il., XXIII, 826-850). So iron was still a precious metal, but its value was beginning to decrease and it was no longer an absolutely elitist product, even if it is possible that that strange "disk" was just a ferrous meteorite. I therefore came to the point of checking also several foreign translations: in the English one by Robert Fitzgerald of 1974 (Oxford University Press) the term σόλον is translated directly with "meteorite", without problems, but this indication, as far as I know, it has always been beautifully ignored by all the other translators. And to say that this meaning is also reported in the Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, by Pierre Chantraine (Paris, Klincksieck, 1968); immediately after solon, the dictionary examines the name of the Greek legislator Solon, Σόλων, saying that its etymology is not known, but we could assume that it had a meaning relating to an "iron man, who came from the sky" or something similar.

 

The e-book THE CUNNING HOMER in English (translated by the author) is now ready. I thank now who can provide me with useful corrections for my not perfect English. If you are a publisher and you want to publish the book you can contact me! If you are a professional translator and you think you can propose it to a publisher, contact me!

To buy the ebook it is sufficient that you send an email to alberto.majrani@tiscali.it with your commitment. University professors, museum directors and journalists will receive the ebook for free on a simple request.

The price of the ebook it is € 6.28 (like two pi Greeks!). You can pay with paypal  https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/Majrani 

If you want to read the book L'ASTUTO OMERO in Italian you can click here https://astutoomero.blogspot.com/

And if you have any doubts, ask alberto.majrani@tiscali.it !!!

Homer told of Nordic sagas?

Iliad and Odyssey. Homer told of  Nordic sagas?
by Alberto Majrani

Who was Homer? And who was Ulysses? Is there a hidden truth behind the immortal verses of the Iliad and the Odyssey?
For three millennia, these questions have intrigued generations of scholars from all over the world. Giambattista Vico used the term "Homeric question" to define the infinite series of puzzles created by the two poems: an authentic indigestible brick for the poor students and the equally poor teachers.
And again: is the Trojan war a truly historic event, or is it only the invention of one or more poets, lived in different ages?
And do the archaeological remains found in the Turkish village of Hissarlik really belong to the city of Priam and Hector, or is this identification only the fruit of the lucid madness of Heinrich Schliemann, an amateur archaeologist, as fortunate as incompetent?
In reality nothing is sure, or scientifically proven. It is a long series of more or less plausible theories and assumptions that have given rise to endless polemics among scholars. At the beginning of the 1990s, two books were published that definitely place the environment where Ulysses and his companions operate in the north. The first is by journalist Iman Wilkens, entitled Where once Troy stood, which locates the ancient Troy in England, recently re-launched thanks to the quote of the novelist Clive Cussler in his Trojan Odyssey. The other, more convincing, albeit with some minor errors that we will examine, is the result of the careful research of a nuclear engineer fond of ancient literature, Felice Vinci, published in an essay titled Omero nel Baltico, published in seven Italian editions and recently translated into English with the title The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales. The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Migration of Myth; the book is also translated  in Russian, Swedish, Estonian, Danish, Lithuanian. and German;  you can read three articles:  

 

http://www.atiner.gr/papers/MDT2017-2194.pdf   (or https://www.academia.edu/36609377/Abstract_Athens_10_April_2017_doc )
https://www.centrostudilaruna.it/homer-in-the-baltic-summary.html

http://www.cartesio-episteme.net/episteme/epi2/ep2vinc2.htm

The two books have undermined one of the few certainties, namely the Greek origin of  poetry and classical mythology, because although it is true that the poems are written in Greek (but the Homeric Greek is quite different from the classical), the location of the places described by Homer cannot be reconciled with the homonymous localities of the Mediterranean, so much to have generated the rumor according to which "Homer is a poet and not a geographer". I don't know if there is a union of poets that can organize a protest demonstration against the idea that a poet must necessarily be incompetent in geography! And then Homer was a fussy who described everything with a meticulous accuracy, he would hardly always and systematically be wrong right on the core of his stories, that is the life of heroes and navigating peoples. Moreover, is it possible that no one, while he was declaiming his verses in the courts, among warriors, merchants, sailors and other singers, had ever pointed this out to him?
Vinci explains how the Homeric poems are likely to be some Nordic sagas that reached the Mediterranean along the way of amber. This justifies the geographical and climatic incongruities of the stories, such as the cold, often stormy and foggy weather (and the sailing season, and war season, was summer), the absurd travel routes, the descriptions that do not square, the blond hair of many protagonists, and so on. According to our engineer, the Nordic navigators, went down to Greece to found in the XVI B.C. the Mycenaean civilization (soon we will see how to change this data), they would begin to rename the Mediterranean places based on their places of origin, handed down by mythologies and religions, in the same way as in America or Australia the European colonizers would have made centuries later . We know from the historical testimonies that the ancient geographers renamed the Mediterranean localities; the only substantial novelty introduced by Vinci is that this work was a little wider than previously believed. After a long period of oral transmission, the dark centuries of the so-called Hellenic Middle Ages, the poems would have been put in writing around VIII B.C., when the first written traces and the first representations are found. Synthesizing the myriad of cues of Vinci's volume is impossible; It is amazing that many insiders still ignore it, perhaps for having superficially branded the thesis as absurd without having examined it with the accuracy it requires. We can only add that the preface of the book was written by Professor Rosa Calzecchi Onesti, one of Homer's leading translators, and that prestigious scientific journals have published long essays.


Several Etruscan urns represent Ulysses and the sirens, with a double prows ship, with square sail and shields on the edges, just like the Viking ships.

At the end of 2013, the academic world finally moved: a special issue of the prestigious (and expensive) magazine of Classical and Medieval Culture was published http://www.libraweb.net/sommari.php?chiave=65   entirely dedicated to "Scandinavia and the Homeric poems". The Vincian theory is appreciated by many scholars, opposed by bitter detractors, and totally ignored by others. In the appendix of my essay "Ulysses, Nobody, Philoctetes" (Logisma editore http://www.logisma.it/ulisse.htm) and now in the new "L'ASTUTO OMERO" (which you can buy here https://astutoomero.blogspot.com ), translate in English as The Cunning Homer https://cunninghomer.blogspot.com/ I took the trouble to make some corrections, both from a geographical point of view and, even more important, from the historical and archaeological one. With the traditional Mediterranean localization of the events, since in the 800 BC the world described by Homer no longer existed for about 400 years, we were forced to hypothesize a long period of oral transmission of the poems, before someone put them in writing. Even Vinci supports the idea of ​​oral transmission, starting even from the sixteenth century. But changing its origin in the Nordic seas everything changes! For example, the Iron Age in Northern Europe began in full force only around VI B.C., so it is not surprising that the weapons described by Homer are made of bronze. The poems could have arrived in the Hellenic world even shortly before the end of the eighth century and immediately transcribed. In this way there is no longer even the need to imagine a long period of orality, moreover with a warlike Middle Ages in the middle, before the poems were put in writing: everything may have happened a few years after the arrival of the storyteller Homer, or someone from his school, in Greece. According to some authors, the Iliad and the Odyssey were officially put in writing for the first time around the VI B.C., at the time of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus (but this news is not entirely certain). The scholars of the time would have collected and merged into two organic stories the different versions of the poems that were going around in Greece at that time, which could justify some dialectal variations that are found. As for the language, the Greek has much more affinity with the Germanic and Scandinavian languages ​​than with the Mediterranean ones; Greece and some other areas of the Mediterranean have undergone several invasions from the north during the protohistory, and therefore the poems may have come along with one of these migrations, while other invasions in different times and places have brought different languages ​​and dialectal variations in the islands and in the localities of our sea. Tacitus and Plutarch told of people greek speaking in the north Europe. Or, it can also be hypothesized that the Homeric Greek represented a kind of lingua franca in use along the street of amber, spoken and understood by all the peoples who traded the precious gem. Or we may think that the wandering storytellers, who were in a certain sense the intellectual elite of the time, knew the use of writing, unlike the vast majority of other ancient men. With this new temporal location, the Nordic origin becomes even more plausible, and justifies the absence of archaeological evidence prior to the eighth century. They seem to me to be much more logical hypotheses than that of an oral tradition that lasted centuries, of which there is no trace (not only writings, but not even graffiti, vases, statues), and which gives rise to infinite contradictions. In any case, all these hypotheses, of which each does not automatically exclude the others, but rather can add its effect in various ways, do not undermine the theory, but greatly expand the range of possible dates of the event. However, I would like to recommend to all the scholars of archeology, philology, mythology and simple enthusiasts the book of Felice Vinci, because the amount of suggestions worthy of attention is truly impressive. In other interventions on this site we can see another key , perhaps even more surprising, allows us to identify the origin of certain mythologies of which so far has never been understood much, as well as to clarify further obscure points to which we have mentioned, highlighting the extraordinary coherence of Homer's works and revaluing fully the mastery of their author https://cunninghomer.blogspot.it/2016/08/the-cunning-homer.html . Replicating, however, the interpretations that are still taught in schools and universities of the world, the Homeric poems would seem to be a practically unique case, out of all the schemes and all the logic. Without a purpose, without an author, without a client, and that tell stories never happened of characters never existed in places unobtainable, if not at the cost of continuous forcing interpretative. Maybe there's something wrong.

 

The floating island of Aeolus?

 

 An important italian academic journal of geology has just published on pages 353-363 my article summarizing L'ASTUTO OMERO entitled:
"But was Homer a geographer? And where were the Pillars of Hercules? And while we're at it, where was Atlantis?"
(NISIO S. (Eds) (2023) - Geology & History Days. Descriptive Memoirs of the Geological Map of Italy, Department for the Geological Survey of Italy, ISPRA, 110: pp. 508) https://www.isprambiente.gov.it/public_files/geologia_storia_II.pdf

The e-book THE CUNNING HOMER in English (translated by the author) is now ready (may 2023). I thank now who can provide me with useful corrections for my not perfect English. If you are a publisher and you want to publish the book you can contact me! If you are a professional translator and you think you can propose it to a publisher, contact me!

To buy the ebook it is sufficient that you send an email to alberto.majrani@tiscali.it with your commitment. University professors, museum directors and journalists will receive the ebook for free on a simple request.

The price of the ebook it is now € 6.28 (like two pi Greeks!). You can pay with paypal paypal.me/Majrani

If you want to read the book L'ASTUTO OMERO in Italian you can click here https://astutoomero.blogspot.com/

And if you have any doubts, ask alberto.majrani@tiscali.it !!!