2005
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Franco Montanari, « Les poèmes homériques entre réalité et fiction », GAIA. Revue interdisciplinaire sur la Grèce ancienne, ID : 10.3406/gaia.2005.1470
The article presents further reflection on the eternal problem of the relation between the contents of the Homeric poems and historical-archeological evidence (the city of Troy, the war, the geo-political context, the Mycenean world). The ongoing archeological dig (led by M. Korfmann) has repro- posed the problem and has once more aroused sharp debate and furious polemics. But the perspectives of poetry, with its right to free invention and imagination, are different from the dimension of history and archaeology : the value of poetry does not depend on its degree of faithfulness to the real world. Even in the thought of the ancient writers (historians, philosophers, philologists), Homer and poetry in general were recognized as endowed with a legitimate blend of reproduction of various aspects of reality and fantasy-inspired deformation at a number of levels. The limits of this blend are, for the most part, difficult to define precisely, and this is what constitutes the problematic framework that shapes - and blurs - any position of (excessively) trusting identification or (hyper) critical skepticism.