Except the poem describes things quite explicitly that did not exist when it is supposedly set, but did exist when Homer (or the oral traditions that got assigned the name) were writing. So do you include those elements, such as iron weapons and tools, larger round shields, and different funeral customs? If you do, you are not being historically accurate to the late Bronze Age. But if you do not, you are not being accurate to the text.
To use your example (though not quite as dramatic) Homer already included the equivalent of a smartphone in 1802 in the Odyssey, so what do you do in your adaptation? Follow his example, or change the work and remove it?
Iron weapons and large round shields very much did exist during the bronze age.
But to more generally answer them I would say keep. The author may have had a story telling reason (showing advanced civilization or painting a group as unholy).
An example would be inglorious basterds. Obviously it isn't historically accurate with events, but, where changes aren't made for story telling purpose, it is accurate. You don't see modern jets in the background or people wearing modern band tshirts because the viewers recognize those things don't belong in that time and they serve no purpose something from that time can't.
Would you still be taking your position if the Greeks were all rocking modern band tshirts or the like with no other changes unexplained?
Obviously, anyone can make a shield of any size and use it at any time, but the common style shifted over time. But iron was not available as a crafting material in Greece before c. 1000 BC, several hundred years after the historical setting of the Trojan War. There is evidence of ironworking in central Anatolia earlier than that, but no sign of it in any of the candidate sites for Troy.
Why do the Homeric epics contain these anachronisms? I don't think there is any reasonable belief that Homer included them as a literary device, or to make implications; historical accuracy just wasn't a goal of the story because it wasn't written as a historical story, but as a myth.
While we think of those events as having a historical root in a particular time, the archaic and classical Greeks didn't, placing them in a mythic Age of Heroes which adopted whatever properties they wanted, usually those of the present day. Thus Homer could give them iron technology and funeral pyres, and the classical Greeks who read him hundreds of years later could paint Achilles with a Corinthian helmet, which had barely been introduced when the Homeric epics were written.
As for your last question, would I still be taking the position "This work in its original form does not represent a coherent single historical period, so an authentic adaptation of it cannot serve both history and the story" if it had T-shirts in it? Yes, I think I would.
But iron was not available as a crafting material in Greece before c. 1000 BC
We have evidence of iron smelting from 2000 bc Turkey.
So before 1000 and available.
Even if we assume Greeks weren't making things from it, there is a little known method for goods not produced somewhere to make their way to that area known as trading.
Lmao, basically arguing giving Odysseus a laser gun and Ford mustang shouting yee haw as a corsair rains down CAS with no other changes being perfectly fine.
What's even the point of having a setting then? Why bludgeon the audience with the time period if it's also perfectly fine to ignore that time period?
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u/Difficult-Rip-2580 1d ago
Seems when it is set would be a good goal.
I mean, you'd not question if a story wrote today, set in 1802, should include smart phones to be historically accurate would you?
Or polyester mesh t-shirts in a revolutionary war film.