Mason’s conceit is that before the Homeric crystallization there once existed an immense body of alternative tellings of the Trojan War legends with the familiar characters such as Odysseus, Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen, Penelope, Athena, and so forth, but with wildly different plots in which the classic personalities make different (but not implausible) choices, and that he is presenting a new translation of a (fictitious) palimpsest of 44 short fragments. One of my favorite works of fiction of the 21st Century is Silicon Valley computer scientist Zachary Mason’s 2010 collection of short stories, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Surviving poets such as Virgil rewrote the story of Troy.Īnd more modern writers such as Christopher Marlow, have tried their hand at fleshing out the outlines: For example, many of the most famous incidents of the Trojan War are not in Homer, such as the Trojan Horse, which apparently was spread across the fourth and fifth books, The Little Iliad and The Sack of Troy, of which we have a total of 40 lines of the originals.
#The bards tale manual full#
Then again, maybe the lost epics were just as good as Homer’s and it’s only bad luck that we possess only one-fourth of the full epic cycle. This theory that the other poets of the Trojan War weren’t as good as Homer would cast doubt on the theory that Homer wasn’t a real individual but instead serves as the fictional personification of the collective genius of Greek bards.
![the bards tale manual the bards tale manual](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/OaMAAOSwxlxcYhuO/s-l960.jpg)
Presumably they weren’t as supremely skilled as Homer, which could explain why they are lost: they weren’t as worth recopying down through the ages. The six lost epics are attributed to other poets. Interestingly, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are thought to be only two of the eight epics of the Trojan War, with the Iliad as the second and the Odyssey as the seventh.