(2 of 2)
Like Arthurian Legends. Just as they do not accept the Arthurian legends or the Chanson de Roland as historic fact, many classicists agree with Berve's thesis that Homer's poems are far from literal truth. But few are quite so willing to reject Homer entirely. Simply because Troy seems to have been much smaller than Homer's description of it in the Iliad, says British Archaeologist James Mellaart, does not preclude the possibility that Homer may have patterned his story on an actual event. Because Homer wrote 400 years after the war, adds U.S. Archaeologist Rhys Carpenter, he probably could be forgiven lapses on particulars. Berve does not think that Homer should be treated so charitably as a historian, but he concedes that, while the Trojan War is probably the "figment of the poet's imagination," that should not detract from the literary value of Homer's epic. When he ends his lectures, Berve quotes Schiller's poem, "To My Friends":
Only fantasy has eternal youth. What happened nowhere and never Can never age.