Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature

The Greek culture of the Roman Empire offers a rich field of study. Extraordinary
insights can be gained into processes of multicultural contact and exchange, political
and ideological conflict, and the creativity of a changing, polyglot empire. During this
period, many fundamental elements of Western society were being set in place: from
the rise of Christianity, to an influential system of education, to long-lived artistic
canons. This series is the first to focus on the response of Greek culture to its Roman
imperial setting as a significant phenomenon in its own right. To this end, it will
publish original and innovative research in the art, archaeology, epigraphy, history,
philosophy, religion, and literature of the empire, with an emphasis on Greek material.
Did Homer tell the ‘truth' about the Trojan War? If so, how much, and if not, why not? The issue was hardly academic to the Greeks living under the Roman Empire, given the centrality of both Homer, the father of Greek culture, and the Trojan War, the event that inaugurated Greek history, to conceptions of Imperial Hellenism. This book examines four Greek texts of the Imperial period that address the topic – Strabo's Geography, Dio of Prusa's Trojan Oration, Lucian's novella True Stories, and Philostratus' fictional dialogue Heroicus – and shows how their imaginative explorations of Homer and his relationship to history raise important questions about the nature of poetry and fiction, the identity and intentions of Homer himself, and the significance of the heroic past and Homeric authority in Imperial Greek culture.