So, I see a novel inquiry ... I guess I'll just post here what I otherwise intended to drop on the Odyssey thread...
However I'm generally curious as to what brought about this blade of inquiry?
With or without that, I'll offer my thoughts as to why I'm looking at a completely overlooked, or unnoticed perspective on these things, perhaps? That perspective being esoteric in origin, purpose, and destination.
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Fundamentally, there are three issues which deride the basis of any
superficial investigation into this matter:
Fore-mostly, there is the basis of historiography, or in plain English -- where is all the supporting documentation and evidence, i.e: letters, tax bills, censuses, economic and industrial paraphernalia, and generally all of the dead bodies that were either left on a field, or in some shallow grave? The surviving literature on not only this matter, but around the general period, was essentially lost for "a thousand years", and only made its way back into the miserly cognition of western awareness through the scholarly efforts of the Byzantines and Islamics, via al-Andalus, in the early medieval period, and subsequently through the learned patronage that funded many treatises and translations of whatever else managed to survive, through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment+ . For the most part it is honestly difficult to take tangibly, as scant literature/records, ruins, and other issues, make the entire tradition more dead than alive, if it ever were.
Axiomatically, there is the issue of lexicography, or -- what do the terms in the original documents actually convey, not only in meaning, but also of location, of personage, of character and especially of virtue or vice? Does the term Gaul confer to the general confines of Western Europe, to the tribe of courageous and oftentimes barbaric Keltoi, to a materialistic disposition, if not predilection, of one's behavior, or should I even dare say, to graven spiritual failures inherent not only individually, but also generally to the point of the whole term being typified into polemic usage? What of the nature of Rome, or a Roman, perhaps?
And Principally, there is the notion of interpretation.
Gurdjieff noted the three strata of human awareness, as noted by
P.D. Ouspensky in his book
In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching...
You have the exoteric, who interpret things literally -- cataclysms, journeys, wars, plagues are exactly that, in every instance of iteration, from the mythical, to the news-worthy. Then you have the mesoteric, who intuit fractal and cascading relationships between such things, and others. Finally you have the esoteric, who utilize the same language and terminologies, but for different things. At times, you may find very good writers and translators of such things, who may impart to you the exact meaning of some interesting concept, with which those accurate definitions/translations transcend all three levels of awareness. But you won't exactly know what you're reading, or what is being conveyed, esoterically, since this last piece involves a different sort of appreciation...
Beyond these three issues of superficial investigation, when in consideration of the three layers of human strata, a curious individual may find that you,
@palestine, may be standing on extremely firm bedrock, if you would only slightly reconsider your current understanding of the mythos of the C's Experiment. I will point you in the direction of a few readings.
The first is within the bounds of that classicist known as
Thomas Taylor [
Thomas Taylor (Tr. & Comm.). The Wanderings of Ulysses. Appendix in: Select Works of Porphyry. (1st ed. 1823); Frome: The Prometheus Trust, 1999 (2nd ed.), Vol. II of “The Thomas Taylor Series,” pp. 201-24]. His elucidation of the Odyssey, in light of Greek mythological and linguistic tradition, is something to consider, in my opinion.
The second is within the bounds of another, yet un-renown, classicist known as
James Pryse. His interpretation(s) of the whole Christianity thing, in relation to the above, is not to be avoided, particularly his magnum opus,
The Apocalypse unsealed : being an esoteric interpretation of the initiation of Iôannês (Apokalypsis Iōannou) commonly called the Revelation of (St.) John.
Somewhere between those two noted works,
thematically, likely lies the fable, which was likely inspired by something, somewhere, in the forgotten annals of whatever happened long ago. While Pryse may offer a
compendium of errata, regarding the peculiarities of what he writes in his extant works, whatever is still yet intangible to the modern reader, may be discernible through a related author who was around that era, who was somewhat knowledgeable on such matters and who was able to put it into a modern English for general readership -- that being
Dion Fortune, and her work of
Sane Occultism.
If there's other questions, then you might be able to find what you're looking for, with the items listed in my signature below -- if not fully, then eventually, I suppose.
