T.K said:
well actually i was thinking of doing kind of "extensions of Homers epics throughout history" kinda thing, as you should know there are many elements of the evidence about alexanders life that have similarities to elements in the illiad, same with the story of arthur and alexander, i was considering discussing why the arthur legend was dismissed as myth, whilst alexander was adopted as "the great". incase you did not know there is next to no primary evidence that has survived about alexander, most information we have comes from sources written something like 800 years after alexanders death, pseudo-calisthenes and the like.
so do u still recommend steering away from the arthur scene? my apologies for not eleborating furthur about my topic in the first post. i appreciate your imput.
Firstly, whilst Homer acts as a canonical text, he did not create any form of any genre. He didn't create the epic journey.
Secondly, Alexander tried to emulate Homeric tradition in his life -- Arrian says that he slept with a version of the
Illiad under his bed.
Thirdly, there is a lot of primary evidence from the time of Alexander; Macquarie Uni has a few papyrii from Hellenistic Egypt.
Forthly, Arthur is dismissed as a myth because of basic intrinsic differences. Arthur's historical setting meant that nothing was written about him, because people did not write. There is so little evidence about him as a historicital figure, let alone a historical one, that society has simply branded heroic status on him. Alexander is totally different. I don't know where you got the 'we have no primary evidence' bit. Maybe you mean 'we have no surviving original copies'? Because, like many time periods (for example, Imperial Rome), many large texts have only survived from Monastic copies made from the 900s to the 1700s. Just because we haven't got 'original' copies means jack shit. Yes, there are confusions, like the 'Letter of Cornelia', but they are in the minority. Arrian's writings do have issues, but the fact that he based most of his narrative on Ptolemy and Aristobulus' work resonates in his reliability.
Arrian is not 'something like 800 years after alexander's death', he is a little under 500 years after.
Nobody has emulated Arthur, whereas you'll find that people still emulate the image of Alexander. It's a basic question with a basic answer lying in our preference and ethnocentricism -- medaeval history is neglected. End of story. The question of ethnocentricism is not a historiographical issue; it's a cultural one -- people prefer Classical history over medaeval history for a number of (valid and invalid) reasons.
