Question

The Greeks believed Homer's

Answer 1

Answer: today´s historiography does not consider Homer a historian (Herodotus is considered a founding father of historiography). Until 19th century history was considered a literary gendre and not a science. It was in the 19th century when historians decided to become scientists. Homer was a poet and did not consider himself an author but only a poet and singer who translates what mother memory (goddess Mnemosyne and her daughters, Muses, ...one of them, Clio, is a muse of history) tells him. Homer lived in oral culture in which memory was extremely important, these proto-historians did imaginative "leap" into deeper levels of unconscious. As Freud and Jung said "there are two royal roads to unconscious ...dream and memory"

Explanation: today´s historiography has a lot of "border-disciplines" like psychohistory (founded by DeMausse) or "memory studies" where subjectivity of historian/author is taken into consideration. Writing history is highly subjective process requiring "imaginative leap". In this respect Homer (who always at the beginning of his epics conjures divinites and muses) is an example ....close connection of history, psychology, unconscious.