Never exsisted?!

I always assumed that since they "supposively" found Agamemnons tomb that all the famous characters were infact, real historical people.

But it seems that the "Mask of Agamemnon" is up for debate if its a real artifact or not...

Menalaus isnt even listed as one of the Kings of Sparta!

I thought that achillies and Patriclus had tombs near the site of Troy... But they werent real people?

Sorry for my misjointed and badly spelled post... but this really came as a shock to me.

[edit on 23-6-2007 by donk_316]

There probably is no definitive was to show these people existed as historical individuals. There may have been actual people who inspired the stories and myths we associate with these figures, but I doubt we can point to an artifact and say that Achilles or any of them actually existed as a real person.

taking a run through the jstor archive you can find that historians have been screaming for over a thousand years that Troy is not THE Troy. all is not lost, just superficially obscured.

well to be fair to Homer
he never claimed to be a historian
just a poet

in all fairness to homer, i think he was as accurate as you might hope he would be. like oliver stone sort of. you just have to know where texas was.

The artifact is real and is from a shaft grave, but the timeframe is not what he thought it was. In fact, he dug through the Hellenistic Troy and ended up in a much older layer when he discovered Troy.

That was in the infancy of modern archaeology, and his results leave a lot to be desired.

This was of much debate in a Greek Civ class I took this spring when it came to the debate whether that the Heroe's existed. In all reality, most probably did, but they probably where not like what they where portrayed in Homer's works.