Horst Steinke
282
but overall, Troy and the Trojan War are right where they should be, in
northwestern Anatolia and firmly ensconced in the world of the Late Bronze
Age, as we now know from archaeology and Hittite records, in addition to the
Greek literary evidence from both Homer and the
Epic Cycle
» (Id.,
The Trojan
War
, cit., pp. 45, 49, 68, 104, 110).
For more detailed historical studies, see the following contributions in
A
New Companion to Homer
, cit.: I. Morris,
Homer and the Iron Age,
pp. 535-559; S.
Morris,
Homer and the Near East
, pp. 599-623; W. Donlan,
The Homeric Economy
,
pp. 649-667; A. W. H. Adkins,
Homeric Ethics
, pp. 694-713; the following con-
tributions in
The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (ca. 3000 - 1000 BC)
,
ed. by E. H. Cline, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 2010: D.
Nakassis - M. L. Galaty - W. A. Parkinson,
State and Society
, pp. 239-250; S.
Lupack,
Minoan Religion
, pp. 251-262; id.,
Mycenaean Religion
, pp. 263-276; Ch.
Mee,
Death and Burial
, pp. 277-290; B. E. Burns,
Trade
, pp. 291-304; T. Bryce,
The Trojan War,
pp. 475-482; as well as R. Osborne,
Homer’s society
, in
The Cam-
bridge Companion to Homer
, ed. by R. Fowler, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2004, pp. 206-219.
570
Lollini points out the contentious issue surrounding connections be-
tween “myth” and “history”: «La corruzione dei miti rende estremamente ar-
duo il tentativo di stabilire una linea diretta di continuità tra mito e storia (The
corruption of the myths makes it extremely arduous to try to establish a direct
link between myth and history)» (Id.,
Il mito come precomprensione storica aperta
nella Scienza nuova di Giambattista Vico
, cit., p. 45).
571
Morrison came to similar conclusions: «[…] while Spinoza emphatically
denies that historical knowledge is necessary for either understanding or judg-
ing scientific or philosophical books, Vico asserts that historical knowledge is
essential for understanding and judging
all
books. […] Spinoza’s history of
Scripture shows that it is only confused and inconsistent opinion produced by
the imagination. […] For Vico, historical knowledge about the products of the
human mind is the only possible knowledge for man» (Id.,
Vico and Spinoza
,
cit., pp. 67, 68; italics original).
572
In this light, the historical assessment by Israel would therefore seem to
be overstating matters: «Even those modern commentators who insist that
Vico was a philosophical opponent of Naturalism and Spinozism are obliged
to concede that Spinoza exerted a significant influence on many of Vico’s key
formulations, on his critical philological method […], on his ethical philoso-
phy, and finally, especially on his approach to the interaction of religion and
society. For the evidence for this is unanswerable» (Id.,
Radical Enlightenment:
Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750
, cit., p. 668).