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Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

People didn't use to think Troy was fictional, where did you get that idea?

Edit: to be clear there is no evidence that the Trojan war happened as described, but that doesn't mean Troy is a fiction anymore then Sparta or Ithaca are.

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I had to look it up. My memory of this is from my childhood, and I doubt I ever had sources. But yes, it seems that there were scholars who thought Troy to be fictional:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Iliad?utm_s...

| In the early modern era, attitudes towards the legends grew more skeptical. Blaise Pascal characterized the story as merely a "romance", commenting that "nobody supposes that Troy and Agamemnon existed any more than the apples of the Hesperides. [Homer] had no intention to write history, but only to amuse us."[6] During the 19th century the stories of Troy were devalued as fables by George Grote.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Bryant?utm_source=chatgp...

| In his books on Troy, Bryant endeavoured to show that the existence of Troy and the Greek expedition were purely mythological, with no basis in real history. In 1791, Andrew Dalzel translated a work of Jean Baptiste LeChevalier as Description of the Plain of Troy.[8] It provoked Bryant's Observations upon a Treatise ... (on) the Plain of Troy (1795) and A Dissertation concerning the War of Troy (1796?). A fierce controversy resulted, with Bryant attacked by Thomas Falconer, John Morritt, William Vincent, and Gilbert Wakefield.[5]

I think you are conflating people calling the Trojan war fiction with thinking the city was. While there were a few people like Bryant who thought Troy was totally fictional it was always a very fringe position.

What are you talking about? Here is the Blaise Pascal quote in the first link:

> "nobody supposes that Troy and Agamemnon existed any more than the apples of the Hesperides. [Homer] had no intention to write history, but only to amuse us."

I would need to see that in more context but even if Pascal didn't believe in the existence of Troy that would represent him having a weird conspiracy theory then a widespread belief, like pointing to flat earthers today. As I said it was an inhabited city until just a few hundred years before his life, there is no meaningful comparison to Atlantis.

I think you are confusing people debating the historicity of the Trojan war and the debate on the exact location of the ancient city with people thinking Troy was thought to be fictional and rediscovered. The latter never happened and people using it to imply Atlantis might exist are using the debunking of one conspiracy theory to prove another one. This is like using the Moon Landing being real to prove Roswell.

Edit: Troy, generally being referred to as Ilium (where we get the Iliad), or Troas is in the Acts of the Apostles as a place Paul went, it had a bishop who attended Church councils, it was part of the Roman empire, you can buy coins from there today https://www.coinarchives.com/a/results.php?search=ilium this is not at all comparable to Atlantis.

There were people before 1870, some cranks, sure, some not, who thought Troy itself was fictional. I was told as much as a child (that it had been thought that Troy was fictional). I linked to a specific quote by someone you did not name as a crank saying that both the stories and the city were fictional.

I believe you that many others did think Troy had existed, and that there were many good reasons to think as much.

The comparison of Atlantis to Troy is somewhat apt in my opinion, and completely inapt in yours.

I did not say that Atlantis must exist, or that the experience with Troy implies as much. On the contrary, I said Atlantis can't ever be found, either because it never existed or because if it did the cataclysm supposed by some to have destroyed it must have left no evidence of it behind. (Unless of course Atlantis was the Americas, in which case it was found in some sense, but not another, and again, if destroyed fully then it never will be found, and since it hasn't been found on the Americas yet it's safe to say it never will be.)

Many European scholars did consider Troy fictional. For example, Jacob Bryant's "A Dissertation concerning the War of Troy" (1796) explicitly argued that Troy never existed as a real city and that the Trojan War was purely mythological. He thought Homer's place names derived from Egyptian and Phoenician religious vocabulary, so the entire Trojan War narrative should be interpreted as imported solar allegory without any historical basis.

That’s like quoting harry turtledove on ww2. Bryant was writing fictional pseudo history.

Bryant was a pseudo historian who came up with an elaborate alternate history. He doesn't represent the mainstream view anymore then flat earthera do today.

Edit: as I said, Troy was inhabited until around 1300 and left behind many artifacts like coins. While conspiracy theorists might doubt it occasionally, it was never a mainstream view that the person I was responding to presented it as. Saying that we used to doubt Troy so therefore maybe Atlantis is real is basically saying that if we reject one conspiracy theory we should accept a separate one.

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