ABSTRACT
A study of Homer's influence on post-classical artists might be thought properly to begin in fourteenth-century Italy, when, thanks to Petrarch's and Boccaccio's insistence, the Iliad and Odyssey were born again in the Latin translation of Calabrian monk Leonzio Pilato. The "History" of Trojan Dares and the "Journal" of Greek Dictys, supposed participants in the Trojan War, claimed and achieved an authority superior to that of Homer, for, as the letter appended to the Latin translation of Dares says, the translation was done "so that readers may know how the events happened: either they may judge to be truer what Dares the Phrygian committed to memory, he who lived and was a soldier during the time the Greeks besieged Troy, or they may decide that Homer is to be believed, he who was born many years after this war was waged.".
