Why do you think that the stories that Homer wrote were so different from what actually happened?

Answer 1

Homer's stories - the Iliad and the Odyssey - were written down at best 400 years after he was supposed to have lived (it is doubted by most historians today whether he did actually ever exist at all). The stories came out of a number of very early Greek epic poems, verbally transmitted over the generations and very probably embellished a bit eacht time.

We know today for a fact that in the time the Iliad supposedly played out, Greece in reality still was a fairly primitive society; and of all those great kings and heroes - including Odysseus - never a shred of hard archeaological evidence has turned up.

The same goes for Troy itself. Only one man - Heinrich Schliemann - was absolutely convinced that not only Troy had existed, but that he had also figured out where exactly it had been. He started digging in that area and (finally) not one, but seven cities were dug up on top of each other, the stones of the old city always being used to build the new one.

Only one of these seven cities showed traces of ever having been in flames, but the period in which that city existed does not match the period in which the Iliad played out. Schliemann also found a lot of golden artifacts that he dubbed 'the treasures of Troy', but those came out of ruins that certainly could not have been ancient Troy.

So basically, the existence of Troy never has been proven. We also know that Greece in the Troy period had no great kings and heroes, only small and primitive communities with village elders. And we know that the Iliad and Odyssey started out as collections of poems that have changed much over the centuries before finally being written down.

Answer 2

i don’t know