Tea at Trianon: Dictys of Crete’s Trojan War

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, August 5, 2023

Dictys of Crete’s Trojan War

From Historic Mysteries:

According to later Byzantine scholars, Dictys of Crete was one of the leading authorities on Troy. They largely based this assumption on his authorship of a diary in which all of the events of the Trojan war were recorded. The diary was apparently recovered from his grave: Dictys chose to be buried with his work. The text that the Byzantine scholar had was in Latin, a translation of an earlier Greek text. The Latin prologue contained details on how the text came to be preserved, claiming that it had been found by chance during the 1st century AD. The original according to this introduction was in fact in Phoenician, and was translated into Greek by the command of Nero, the Roman emperor. During the 4th century, the text was translated by a man named Septimius, who published Dictys of Crete’s chronicles as the Ephemeris Belli Trojani. This translation became the main source for what was considered the true account of the Trojan war, to be read and understood alongside Homer.

According to Dictys of Crete, war was declared not by Mycenaean Greece seeking revenge for the kidnapping of Helen, queen of Sparta, but instead by Troy. The war was said to have lasted for 10 years, 6 months, and 12 days. The notion that in reality it was the Greeks who found themselves threatened by an aggressor seems to contradict Homer’s version of events. Dictys had the Greek responding by attacking the coastal towns present in the northwest region of Asia Minor, with Ajax, the Greek hero, attacking settlements friendly to Troy. (Read more.)