rent author, but Rieu contends (xii) that the consistency of character and diction between the Iliad and Odyssey argues that one poet, not two or more, constructed the works: "I feel sure, on general literary grounds, that a fresh author taking [the characters] over could not have helped revealing his hand."
What is far more important than the Iliad's date of creation, of course, is its frame of cultural reference. The Mycenaean culture flourished in the same geographic territory as golden-age Greece. Homer could create characters "out of his own experience of life" rather than "summon them from the legendary past" (Rieu xvi). Additionally, assuming that Homer wrote in 750 BC, he would have been only some 325 years beyond the events of the Iliad, which would have made the lie of the land in and around the Mediterranean literally familiar territory. Many of the accidentals of life experience would have been completely and equally recognizable to Paris and to Homer.
Aristotle understands the importance of epic resonance in helping to define the priorities of the culture from which it proceeds, and his apotheosis of Homer is one aspect of this. As to the pattern of ideas and the literary techniques of the poem itself, Aristotle is in a position to analyze various kinds of epic poetry: simple, complex, epics based on character, and epics that focus on suffering. Some epics, he explains, focus on one man, others on a single period of time, "or a single action made up of many separate incidents" (Aristotle 66). What Aristotle refers to as the "marvellous"--i.e., the uncanny, absurd, miraculous, or inexplicable--is also an element of epic poetry, a comment that has the effect of lending literary verisimilitude to the presence (not always welcome) of gods and goddesses in the experience of the Greeks and Trojans. In that regard, Aristotle insists that the marvellous be incorporated into the narrative in a "probable" way. The "special adva...