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"Dictys of Crete", Homer, and the History of the "Canon" of "Western Civilisation"

While preparing to discuss "Dictys of Crete" with students last night, I came across a fact that has made me reconsider how I view the creation of the canon of what we consider the standard texts we think of when we consider "Western Civilisation".¹ The fact came as almost a blow when I read the opening passage of N. K. Yavuz' "Late Antique Account of the Trojan War":

The story of Troy — its date, its location, the peoples involved, and its war with the Greeks — is certainly best known to modern generations through Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Even though it is difficult to imagine Western literature or history without these two canonical works today, they did not circulate during the Latin Middle Ages, and it may even be argued that an anti-Homeric spirit dominated the European world especially during the late antique and early medieval periods. 

This left me flabbergasted when it ought not to have. I have just completed a paper which discusses the re-introduction of Greek scientific texts to the medieval Latin west through the translation movements of the 11th and 12th Centuries, so by rights I ought to have known this, but I hadn't taken that knowledge of scientific writings and expanded it to all literature. 

The Iliad and Odyssey are lauded as the first great literary works of "Western Civilisation" (they are the first texts included in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World), yet here I am now questioning that position more than ever. In fact, the majority of the works from antiquity included in this collection were written in Greek. I will only include the authors, as the list of titles is far too long:

  1. Homer 
  2. Aeschylus 
  3. Sophocles 
  4. Euripides 
  5. Aristophanes
  6. Herodotus
  7. Thucydides
  8. Plato
  9. Aristotle
  10. Hippocrates
  11. Galen
  12. Euclid
  13. Archimedes
  14. Apollonius of Perga
  15. Nicomachus of Gerasa
  16. Marcus Aurelius
  17. Plutarch
  18. Ptolemy
  19. Plotinus

These 19 authors are a stark contrast with the Latin authors whose works have since been labelled "Great": 

  1. Lucretius
  2. Epictetus
  3. Virgil
  4. Tacitus
  5. Augustine of Hippo

A photograph of the first shelf which holds my copy of The Great Books of the Western World
(Yes, I need to dust. No, I was not going to do so for this picture. No, I am not embarrassed by this.)

I have written previously about the manner in which the term "Western Civilisation" has been co-opted for white supremacist purposes (University of Queensland and the Ramsay Centre: the submission I couldn't make because of word limits on submissions), but with the current American administration, we are seeing this supercharged, so I would like to point out something ironic about this. 

Pete Hegseth, the United States of America's Secretary of Defense, wrote in his 2020 book that those who benefit from western civilisation should "thank a crusader" (please note that I have taken this quote from The Guardian as I have no desire to look up this drunken' sot's racist ramblings). Curiously, he seems to idolise the period in which the Crusades took place (1095-1291 CE); a period in which the crusaders would never have read the Iliad and Odyssey. Why is that? Because the ancient Roman translations of them were lost, to quote Yavuz an "anti-Homeric spirit" might have dominated, and new translations would not be made until they were commissioned by Petrarch (1304-1371 CE).

This is not to say the crusaders didn't know the story. The Journal of the Trojan War (Ephemeris) written under the name "Dictys of Crete" was one of the major sources which made the story known. This is a work that modern scholars rubbish as rather boring and uses inelegant, simple Latin, and does not normally feature in undergraduate syllabi let alone among The Great Books of the Western World. 

Because I have led a discussion on "Dictys" back in 2018, I already have written a blog outlining the nature of the text: The Blurred Line Between Fiction and Non-Fiction in Antiquity. Much of my contribution last night echoed what I discuss in that previous blog. I have also just discovered that the paper given at UQ which introduced me to "Dictys of Crete" is available as a voice recording online; I thoroughly recommend giving it a listen (Antonis Kotsonas, 'Homer and the Archaeology of Crete', Audio Recording Only, Seminar Series, Discipline of Classics and Ancient History, The University of Queensland (Australia)). 

What I did different last night was I showed the four Greek papyri:

At the time of writing this blog, the papyri.info pages were tagging me as a bot, so I do hope that these become accessible and that they were just having a malfunction.

Because I have done a lot more research on medieval manuscripts since 2018, I also included images of the two examples I could find of digitised manuscripts of "Dictys of Crete":

I have started showing people what our sources look like in the form in which they have survived, be they inscriptions, papyri, or literary works we have from manuscripts. While I was shown papyri and inscriptions in honours year for the course on documentary evidence, I cannot recall once in my undergraduate studies being shown any of these. As for manuscripts, I saw my first manuscript around 2015 (I am guessing), when I followed up on a reference relating to a charm to treat malaria. People rarely ever consider where our texts actually come from, and I am doing my level best to fix that in some small way.

I also showed this rather humorous depiction of the Trojan War. I am disappointed in myself that I hadn't fully looked into the manuscript and the work it came from.

British Library, Royal 18 D. II. folio 75 circa 1455-62

This is an illustration of John Lydgate's poem, Troy Book which was finished in 1420 CE. His main source is identified as Guido delle Colonne's 13th Century Historia destructionis Troiae (History of the destruction of Troy), whose main source was Le Roman de Troie (The Romance of Troy) by Benoît de Sainte-Maure (c. 1155-60). This highly influential work used "Dictys of Crete" as one of its sources. 

My primary purpose in showing it other than it being brilliant was to point out that it is possible that this was how readers were imagining the Trojan War. Even today, when we say "knight", our minds immediately conjure a medieval knight in armour. Interest in Greek pots from antiquity were not of great interest, even as late as the Renaissance, so imagining Greek warriors in Greek armour was not really possible to medieval readers of "Dictys". It was also noted that while the dog looks ridiculous, it still bore a striking resemblance to someone's mother's dog; a fact that made me start to reconsider the talents of medieval miniaturists.

So to conclude, "Dictys" made me properly appreciate how much the modern construct of "Western Civilisation" is a relatively late invention, and for all the talk of "crusaders for Western Civilisation", the real crusaders were introduced to the stories we associate with the birth of "Western Civilisation" through books which are today seen as poorly written and anything but "great". For all my disgust for what the term "Western Civilisation" has been manipulated by some members of today's society to mean, the concepts of "western" and "civilisation" have changed numerous times over the centuries. One millennium ago the people of western Europe did not consider the works attributed to Homer as "great", even though they engaged frequently with the work of "Dictys" and the works it helped to inspire.

Bibliography


¹ I don't know about you, but I now flinch whenever I hear the phrase "Western Civilisation". If you don't understand why, google 'Donald Trump administration "Western Civilization"'. 


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