Yoink!
I suppose, if I’m going to do this right, I should probably tell you all what really happened.
Some of you may be familiar with a certain goddess who likes to hang out at forums and tell stories, no? You can probably see where this is going.
Maybe this is just nostalgia speaking, but the Greeks had the best forums. The didn’t call it that at the time, of course; it was an “agora”… but it was the same thing.
So, historians have been debating for ages who Homer was and whether he even existed… and with good reason. But why is he so mysterious?
Anyone? … Anyone? … Bueller?
That’s right — because I made him up. Well, sort of. I did actually get a conspirator to help out with an occasional appearance in the forum, to lend credibility, but he wasn’t a blind poet, he was just a guy who appreciated a good joke. He’d pretend to be blind and recite the scripts I made for him, and then we’d LOL over drinks after the crowds left for the night.
Now, this was back in my early days, but I still consider it one of the best pranks of all time. See, one of the perks of living so long is the jokes. I can’t even explain how hilarious things get when an inside joke keeps snowballing for centuries or millenia and still nobody sees the punchline. I mean, sure, it’s fun trolling people on the internet once in a while… but you really haven’t lived until you’ve trolled historians.
So I took a bunch of old myths and legends and a bit of recent news and wove them together into a big epic story with Homer at the center, told in a way which suggested I was just passing along what he told me, or passing along a story I had heard third-hand from another fan or a scholar. I’d go out to entertain the people in the forums with this story, some of whom were gullible enough to take it seriously… and then they would go off and re-tell it back in their home towns. They’d even memorize it word for word to make sure they got it right.
And nobody suspected what I was doing, even after I started adding obvious hints like “Selene of Toy Helen of Troy”. They all just assumed I was doing the same thing they were doing — sending information down the grape vine.
It wasn’t until pretty recently that anyone of note started to seriously suspect that Homer himself was part of the myth, that the whole blind poet thing wasn’t real, that his works were actually a story within a story. Nobody even had a concept of “meta” at the time.
And so it went on… and on… and it became history. After a while it really took on a life of its own. And I still giggle every time I check in on the historians, every time a teacher assigns a Serious Essay Due Next Monday on the meaning of Homer’s tales. And I cringe when they make movies about Helen, completely missing the point by actually showing her face. :person_facepalming:
But the historians are finally catching on, so I guess I can finally spoil the joke. And I must say… Good job guys! Maybe next time it won’t take you twenty-eight centuries.
As I said though, the fun part is in the incredulity, letting the audience decide. Douglas Adams understood this well:
He wasn’t the only one though. Others also have sometimes appreciated this concept:
So, ask yourself… do you believe?