ABSTRACT
The most significant reason was that Homer’s subject matter, the Trojan War and the return of Odysseus to Ithaca, was almost universally believed to concern events that really happened and persons who really existed. Homer, in short, was history: it did not need to be invented. What he said about events, men, the gods and most other matters was for a long time accepted as part of the traditional beliefs of the early Greeks, sometimes called the inherited conglomerate. Homer was the most important part of this inheritance, but it included Greek myths other than those he told, such as those concerning Jason, Oedipus and Minos, and poets other than Homer, such as Hesiod and the authors of the Cyclic Epics. It was only when the Greeks began to look upon their world and their cultural inheritance in a critical spirit, beginning roughly a century before Herodotus was born, that the way was open for the birth of history.
