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   Homer's Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Skies Decoded

by Kenneth Wood (Hardcover - Sept. 1999)
   Used & New from: $56.12

   Thomas D. Worthen (tucson, az United States) - See all my reviews
   (REAL NAME)
   This review is from: Homer's Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Skies
   Decoded (Hardcover)
   The redactors/editors/authors of this book have done a pitiful job
   converting the notes of their deceased relative into a readable book.
   Her basic insight is that the archaic texts we call Homer's Iliad may
   embrace a terrestrial geography whose conception takes its formal
   aspects from the highly visible celestial geography which every
   contemporary Greek knew like the palm of his well-calloused hand. The
   particular instantiation of this geography as found in the Iliad
   repeats, she thinks, the land masses and sea lanes depicted in the
   story and that some of these stand in a one-to-one relationship with
   the various ancestral heroes of those lands who fought at Troy. Hence
   Odysseus and his home of Ithaca may be represented by the
   constellation and para-constellar stars we know as Bootes. Some other
   story may have required a different instantiation of the same
   celestial geography. While this may seem fantastical to our modern way
   of thinking, it is prima facie plausible given the archaic Greek way
   of thinking. All one has to do is read the description of Hephaestus's
   geography which he forged into the fabric of the shield he fashioned
   for Achilles (Iliad, 17).
   But moving from plausibility to believability (let alone conviction)
   requires argument; and the editors into whose hands these ideas have
   come, do not know in the least how to fashion an argument. The book as
   written is just one concatenation of question begging after the next.
   It was simply beyond their powers to undertake this project. Their
   mentor knew the Iliad intimately; they do not. They take general
   conclusions that likely took multiple examples to establish and state
   them as fact without producing the examples. Sorry, but even this
   reviewer, who is sympathetic to the whole idea, ran out of patience
   trying to see behind the mish mash as presented to the insights that
   inspired them.


Nicely written but wrong., September 4, 2000
   By
   Marc-Olivier (London UK) - See all my reviews
   This review is from: Homer's Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Skies
   Decoded (Hardcover)
   I really enjoyed the reading untill I find that: Hector(Rigel)is
   killed in "the fleshy part of the neck"(p.76). This stars is actually
   located in the left knee(p132-231). The stars presented in the neck is
   Heka. It is really unfortunated that the "arche-type" is so confuselly
   handled.