The Odyssey is fictional story.
Does he think magic and giants and gods are historically accurate?
What about a historically accurate version of Harry ~~Potter~~ Dresden?
I do think it’s still fair to consider the very likely possibility that there’s a fair amount of truth contained within the story though (obviously not all the supernatural stuff, but still). That’s definitely the case with the Iliad; Troy was literally discovered in modern-day Türkiye in the 1800s.
All the crazy stuff in it is probably at least in part a result of its origin as an oral tradition instead of written text. The story being passed down across generations of memorizers without any hard reference to go off of tends to make for a really long game of telephone.
None of this is to humour Musk by the way. I just think this topic is interesting in general.
New York City is a real place that exists, but that doesn’t make the Avengers films any less fictional.
I’m going off of what real historians have hypothesized, not just baseless rhetoric. Nor am I claiming that the legends themselves are wholly factual (though as I’ve said it’s definitely possible to be partly the case). Feel free to read the Wikipedia article on it and draw your own conclusions.
Personally, I think it would be absurd if it were the case that in Late Bronze Age Greece — in or around the Bronze Age Collapse — they chose Troy (evidently not even a Greek setting) specifically to be the setting of an oral war story without there being a material reason for it, however minor. But that’s just me obviously.
Addendum (This is somewhat unrelated but still important to bring up): I think it's honestly quite offensive to compare an entire cultural heritage's creation to relatively simple blockbuster films made not even a couple decades ago. You're comparing a cultural creation brought about in the midst of an entire mythos, through countless generations, to a few simple narratives; the origins of which can be found not even a century ago. Not only is it a false equivalence, it's downright ignorant if not explicitly ill-intended. One was made through the contributions of several minds over hundreds of years through the sole intent of participating in a rich communion of ideas; the others were made, fundamentally, with the intention of turning a profit. It's belittling and ethnocentric to pretend that they're equivalent in any form.
The theories are that its a mythic retelling of a legend that's an embellished version of something that basically 'kind of' happened, around the time of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, between the 13th and 12th centuries BCE.
The original date of it being first written down is somewhere in the 8th century BCE, so, yeah roughly 500 years of oral tradition untill then.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Is-the-Odyssey-a-True-Story
Schliemann’s findings and the continuing work of later archeologists seriously fueled theories of the historicity of the Trojan War, dated by later Greek authors to the 12th or 13th century bce. While the mere existence of Troy is not proof that the war was real, the discovery of arrowheads, signs of fire, and unburied bodies found in a layer corresponding to the 13th century bce indicates the possibility of battles having occurred.
Supporting evidence includes Hittite records mentioning warfare with Wilusa, their name for Troy. Some historians believe that a kingdom the Hittites called Ahhiyawa was really Achaea, or ancient Greece. Records suggest that sometime in the 13th century, Ahhiyawan forces were involved in a war against Wilusa, whose ruler, Aleksandu (very similar to Alexandros, a name for the Trojan prince Paris), requested military aid from the Hittites. Experts believe that a real conflict or a series of conflicts of some scale—either a struggle for political or commercial supremacy—inspired embellished accounts of the Trojan War.
So... taken in whole... the Odyssey is maybe roughly as actually historically accurate as... the Old Testament.
If your lense is 'is this legitimate history?'...
There are kernels of events that basically actually happened, and some important people who did something vaguely similar to what's described in the stories... around which is erected a grand mythic narrative featuring a great amount of totally fantastic and impossible nonsense, and many wholly fabricated characters and 'plot points'.
Schliemann dug straight through the actual Troy that he was looking for, destroying a huge chunk of it to get to an even earlier settlement in the strata beneath that he decided to call Troy. His "method" was essentially do dig a trench all the way to the bottom, assuming that the oldest level would be Troy. (Yes...he was that stupid).
It was only afterwards that other, actual archaeologists placed the proper stratum that the homeric Troy would have existed in. And by then, much of it was already obliterated.
I majored in Near Eastern Classical Archaeology with a focus on the Bronze age (Hittites, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Babylonians, etc...), and lesson one may as as well have been titled "Why Heinrich Schliemenn was an asshole."
JK Rowling is a bigoted cunt, and her content doesn't deserve even a sliver of acknowledgement.
Does he think magic and giants and gods are historically accurate?
Would you put it past him? The guy is so high most of the day he probably thinks the sparkle fairy brings him a coffee every morning.
With historically accurate cyclops, scylla, charybdis, sirens and ghost of Agamemnon...
Athena and Poseidon have dialogue
Um, the Odyssey is fiction. It literally can't be "historically accurate".
Grok probably told him it's a true story, and he believed it
Elon Musk says
ok
Thank GOD! I HOPE he can do the Same with Avengers so we can FINALLY get a HISTORICALLY Accurate version of THAT too!
he should buy memphis the water treatment plant he promised so grok can stop using AQUIFER DRINKING WATER for cooling.
fuck elon i hope he gets pancreatic cancer and 4 flat tires on his ride home.
I can’t wait to see what a historically accurate cyclops looks like.
John Goodman
Came here looking for a reference to Oh Brother. I call this a win for the day.
Elon will run his mouth for a while, then forget about this.
He will never follow through.
This is not oniony, this is just yet another "Elon musk says"
Elon's breath reeks of onion, though
Why are we okay with every robin hood movie being an interpretation, but all the sudden the oddesy needs to be historically perfect?
Because racism
The Odyssey is a work of fiction. It's a heroic epic, not a history. How do you make a historically accurate version of fictional oral poetry?
Well you see he's stupid and can't tell the difference between fiction and reality
what next ? historically accurate Star Wars ?
Is this because they made Helen of Troy black
Yes
Not enough gay sex, I'm guessing?
I have a feeling he wouldn't wanna hear about Caeneus
The Lapith Caeneus was originally a young woman named Caenis and the favorite of Poseidon, who changed her into a man at her request, and made Caeneus into an invulnerable warrior
You don't need to make en entire fantasy film to show us that historically accurate cyclops, Elon!
And he wants to do it all with AI, of course, because he has even less talent and creativity than a rotting dog turd.
Melting shit candle makes plopping noises that sound like words
Bring back Troy McClure and his cologne, Smellin of Troy.
You may remember him from such classics like "Lead Paint: Delicious But Deadly".
I'm going to pray to Jah every night that he follows through on this train wreck of a movie.
This would be a real triumph of the will.
Maybe he actually meant Biblically accurate? The two are quite easily confused, after all.
Also, remember DeepDream?
Like that.
He couldn't do a worse job tbh. They are wearing pants in that movie, the Greeks thought only effeminate barbarians wore those.
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