Talk:Odysseus

From the real world

I'm sorry, did I miss the memo where Odysseus was discovered in the historical record? Or have I been misunderstanding our category system? Since this is also going on at Menelaus and Agamemnon and SOTO added these categories, (albeit >5 years ago) I figured it would be a good idea for me to check before I remove these categories from these pages. Najawin ☎ 08:49, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Hmm. This is tricky. Most historians today would agree that there is no evidence of the historicity of these individuals — but it seems to me that TV: The Myth Makers seems to be rooted in the Heinrich Schliemann notion that Homer's poems are mythologicised dramatisations of historical events that didn't actually involve any Gods. I'm unsure how our category tree deals with things which writers erroneously believed were from the real world at the time that they included them in Who stories. Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 14:35, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm not that we know whether the writers believed this. Here's a more obvious example, King Arthur. It's far from obvious that any of those stories intended us to regard them as historical, yet he is in the "Royalty from the Real World" category. Najawin ☎ 17:13, 15 March 2021 (UTC)