The boar’s tusk helmet is the only one, in a tacked-on bit that was inserted into the epic. That’s why it’s well known. There’s tons of material that doesn’t match contemporary Greece, such as the extreme rarity of iron and the lack of writing, but it can all be read as false archaism. False archaism…

Jeffrey P. Emanuel from Harvard University thinks so. To start with, the sea peoples were a purported confederacy of naval raiders who wreaked havoc in the Mediterranean around the time of the bronze age collapse that saw the major civilisations of the bronze age Mediterranean crumble. Many historians assume that the sea peoples had a…

Odyssey 11 is by far the earliest extant example of this tale-type. There was a poem dating to some decades after the Odyssey which may have told a form of the story, but we’ll come back to that at the end. Other exemplars of the tale-type are modern, but they’re widespread enough and independent enough…

There may have been multiple ‘epic cycles’; the Trojan one is the best attested one, starting with the Kypria and ending with the Telegony. Eumelos’ Titanomachy may have been part of a cycle, but the presence of a Titanomachy in the Trojan cycle is not well attested — and if it is, then there are…

‘Men who eat bread’ isn’t a restrictive clause, ‘she avoided men who eat bread (but not other men).’ In the original language it’s an attributive epithet: ‘she avoided men, and BTW men eat bread.’ Epithets of this kind are a little misleadingly called formulaic in early Greek hexameter: misleading because it isn’t a matter of…

No, they were just never very popular. Hexameter wasn’t a very prestigious genre of poetry until the late 500s BCE: if you think of poets who were invited to take up residence at a tyrant’s court, they’re always choral, melic, and elegiac poets, never epic poets.Homer’s name was known prior to the late 500s, but…