My letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (on Raoul Schrott “Homers Geheimnis ist gelüftet” of 22 December 2007), published in the issue of 5 February 2008:

The Iliad of Homer cannot be understood in the history of literature without the older Gilgamesh epic. Likewise, the Gospel of Mark cannot be understood without the Iliad of Homer.

Raoul Schrott has again made me aware of the important mediating role Homer plays between the ancient oriental culture, whose myths he takes up, and the Hellenistic and Roman world, which celebrates him as a role model.

Homer was also a natural part of the culture and literary forms of expression surrounding the early Christians. An important aspect, which Schrott does not consider, is the integration of the Iliad into the tradition and the literary representation of the ancient astral myth, which in the book Daniel classically describes as a sequence of world ages, Daniel 7.

For the ancient peoples, the constant starry sky established the divinely guaranteed stable order of the world. The hallmark of this order was the spring constellation, which had been the same for generations and announced the imminent sunrise at the beginning of spring in the morning sky.