(5) Heroes and Stars:
Back to Schrott’s thesis about Homer as a cultural accountant:
Schrott is correct in his view that the Greeks of the 7th century are not yet a cultural nation that only want to enjoy Homer’s battle descriptions. That’s why he rightly mistrusts the idea of Homer as a poet of the spirit of beauty.
The question is: Why did the Greeks still love their Homer so hot and intimately from the very beginning? Only because of the prophecy of future Greek greatness?
My letter to the editor from 5 February 2008 (2nd continuation):
The change from one spring constellation to the next meant a collapse of the old order and the beginning of a new era for ancient man.
Like a good historical novel, Homer’s Iliad describes the collapse of an old city-state system of rule and the beginning of a new age of natural and enterprising aristocratic warriors. It shows how the earthly order around the rich city state of Troy, which had been firmly established for a long time, came to an end with the inevitability of a clockwork.
My letter to the editor from April 9, 2001 (continued):
Since Aratos created a more modern star map in a new astronomical teaching poem in the third century B.C., Homer was understood above all as the poet of two heroic epics, but Lucian still knew in the second century A.D. that the love adventure of Aphrodite and Ares (Odyssey 8, 266 – 366) referred to the conjunction of the planets Venus and Mars in the starry sky (Lucian, Astrology 22).