ABSTRACT
The debt of the ancient historians to Homer was enormous. For one thing, the Trojan War was regarded as a historical event, and Homer’s telling of it was believed to be historically accurate-or not far off it, requiring only a certain amount of rationalisation in order to be converted into history.1 Everyone accepted the epic tradition as grounded on hard fact,2 and the Homeric heroes were believed in some sense to be the forebears of the Greeks of later times. The speeches too, which play such a large part in ancient historiography, go back to Homer; so does the conversation, and likewise the story-telling. Of course, since the Greeks included a number of sceptics, not everybody believed in the essential historicity of Homer.3 Yet, by and large, Greek historiography remained firmly grounded on Homer and the epic.4
