4 - Homer the liar: Dio Chrysostom's Trojan Oration

Summary

Only two generations or so separate Strabo from Dio of Prusa, also known as Chrysostom (‘Golden-Mouth’), the itinerant orator and moralist of the late first century ce. It is therefore striking to encounter Dio demolishing Homer's authority and historical credentials as vigorously as Strabo had tried to establish them. The work in question is one of Dio's longest and most celebrated speeches, the Trojan Oration (Τρωϊκός, Or. 11): an anti-Homeric tour de force addressed to the citizens of the Roman Ilium of his own day (ἄνδρες Ἰλιεῖς: 4) that sets the record straight about the Trojan War. Among other things, Dio insists, on the alleged testimony of an Egyptian priest, that Helen was rightfully married to Paris, Hector killed Achilles, and Troy actually won the war. But the speech is not only an alternate history obtained from a more reliable source. Dio paradoxically proves these theses through a close analysis of the Homeric poems themselves, in a forceful attack on the improbabilities and contradictions of the Iliad and (to a lesser extent) the Odyssey. As he says, his objective is to expose Homer's lies (ψευδῆ), “refuting him from no other place than his own poetry” (οὐκ ἄλλοθέν ποθεν, ἀλλ᾿ ἐξ αὐτῆς τῆς ποιήσεως ἐλέγχων: 11) – a joking allusion to the interpretative maxim attributed to Aristarchus, ‘to elucidate Homer from Homer’ (῞Ομηρον ἐξ̣ ῾Ομήρου σαϕηνίζειν).