Who was Dictys of Crete and what did he claim to be?
Dictys of Crete, a man from Knossos, claimed to be the companion of Idomeneus during the Trojan War. He wrote a diary that used some of the same materials Homer worked up for the Iliad.
Dictys of Crete, a man from Knossos, claimed to be the companion of Idomeneus during the Trojan War. He wrote a diary that used some of the same materials Homer worked up for the Iliad.
An earthquake burst open the sepulchre in the thirteenth year of Nero's reign where Shepherds found the coffer but discovered no treasure inside. They gave it to their master Eupraxis who presented both the casket and himself to Rutilius Rufus, the Roman governor. Rufus sent everything to Emperor Nero, who summoned men skilled in Phoenician language so the whole text was translated into Greek and deposited in one of the public libraries.
Septimius brought out the Latin version called Ephemeris belli Trojani in six books during the 4th century AD. This work professed to be a translation from an original Greek version before knowledge of Greek waned and disappeared in Western Europe over time.
Byzantine historians treated Dictys as an unquestionable primary source for Homeric legends throughout the Middle Ages because they considered him an author of the highest authority during their era. Writers like Joannes Malelas, Constantinus Porphyrogenitus, Georgius Cedrenus, and others quoted largely from this Dictys while Medieval readers accepted the fictional diary as genuine historical record without question.
Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt found a fragment in Greek among the Tebtunis papyri between 1899 and 1900 which had been reused for revenue returns in 206 CE. The discovery removed all doubt about the existence of an underlying Greek text by revealing that the Latin version was indeed a close translation of the original.