My name is Homer the aed. You take me for a great poet, but I am only a street singer. They call me honkytonky hobo. My role is to make people laugh and I owe it to the truth to say that I am not the author of the Odyssey. Nor that of the Illiad, besides. These tales are both adaptations, pastiches. I imitated a glorious model, well known in my time, but forgotten of yours …
Some may complain to me for having claimed its paternity. I did no such thing. The works that I signed are indeed mine. At the time, everyone knew the original version, which was subsequently lost. And you, poor ignorant, you took the pastiche for the original and you hold Homer to be a great poet. By Jove! I was a singer, a jester, and I roamed around with my lyre to gather a little audience. At the time, I was mostly famous for my appetite and my guests were thinking twice before inviting me to their table.
Certainly I was blind, but I knew how they put dishes away from me. “Homer, they bawled, sing your Odyssey, the prince of Ithaca who makes us laugh so much!” The adventures of Ulysses the clown, I copied them after a famous model, not funny at all, that even the children knew by heart.
Not funny, the terrible Odyssey of Ram the Aries, because it was fatal for many people. At the head of his terrible armada, destroying and burning everything in his path, he commanded the navy of the Peoples of the Sea. It was for Ram an Odyssey, and for the peoples he fought on his way, it was as many frightful Illiades. Ram was a fearsome warlord, for sure, thanks to his very large size his strength was unparalleled. For the Sea Peoples were an army of giants.
In addition to their great strength, they had destructive weapons, and their troops were advancing in the gloom of lightnings and the crash of thunder. For all the peoples of the Mediterranean, Ram the Atlantean Aries, sower of death and desolation, opened the gates of hell. In some countries, he stayed longer, and his military occupation was certainly worse than conquest. The Hebrews have particularly suffered of it, so they have told this terrible episode in their holy book, to withdraw some of its drama.
They made like me, they changed some of the history, Ram became a prophet, they made him a Jew like themselves. They called him Moses. His Odyssey in the sands of the Golan is not very credible, forty years to pass one hundred and eighty miles, that Moses was a sacred slowpoke. Killer Rama, all my contemporaries remember him. All peoples have made pastiches to undemonize him. The Empire of Rama! Fortunately for us, he founded it quite far away from Greece. This damned Ram has almost annexed us. Without the cunning of our leaders, and the beauty of Priam’s daughter, the blonde Sita, we were fucked.
Winner by arms, he succumbed to the charms of the beautiful Hellene. Yes, with two l, meaning simply the Greek woman. I turned this episode in a humorous way: the Greeks managed to get the beautiful Hellene out of Ram’s claws, whom I make a besieged. Relief in the audience, they laugh too loud every time. Catharsis, cleaning an old engram, that is the role of the itinerant singer, that is the vocation of the Celtlike bard!
The Gaels have taken up this episode which they attribute to their hero Cuchulainn. While the giant was besieging the Castle of the Sins to destroy it, he was seduced by a beautiful blonde naked, which distracted him from his desire for destruction.
So the besieged city was saved by love. This is what happened to our ancestors, thanks to Sita daughter of Priam, whom I called Helen in my pastiche, to remind that she was Greek and that it was Greece that has ribbed you all of Ram the scourge.
Listen my dear friends, listen the continuing odyssey of Rama told by his imitator, the Greek bard Homer, as he kindly entrusted to me in a private room of the Akashic records.
Homer mentions two brothers heirs of Atlantis, first Ram who became Ra then Rama, Emperor of Eurasia and second Setanta who became Cuchulainn then Kukulkan, Emperor of Central America. For reasons of his own, the illustrious Greek poet omits the third brother, Enki, who became Tiki Viracocha, emperor of South America.
“Setanta and Rama were brothers, the two crown princes of the new Atlantis that, after the sinking of the first, was established in the lowlands of northwestern Europe, land rich and fat that today form the submarine plateau of Dogger Bank. The second Atlantis was really the missing link between the civilization of preflood giants, the famous Civilization of Pyramids, and our civilization of Lilliputians of the Iron Age. Setanta fought against the invaders, driven out of their land by the rising waters.
He became Cuchulainn the Dog of Ulster. Then he had to fall back on Dogger Bank, which in turn was swallowed by the sea. Cuchulainn and his brother Ram the Aries have then shared the world: the Dog moved westward and settled in Mexico, where he founded an empire under the name of Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl. Ram moved to the east. He sowed desolation in Spain by destroying the first Tartessos. He then submitted the Libyans, the Carthaginians, the Maltese, the Cypriots and the Egyptians.
But he spared Greece thanks to the beautiful Helen. He went with her and his troops to invade the Medes and Persians. In the Odyssey, Ulysses lingers often in the stopovers, victim of a spell of magic and love. This fine allusion caused much laughter among my contemporaries, like the case of the Cyclops. In Greece, it was said that the love of the beautiful Sita had made Ram blind. I reversed the roles by making small Ulysses the winner of a giant.
The Hebrews did the same by making small David the winner of a Philistine giant: David, nephew of Moses, was a giant as their model to both of them, the great Rama. The Odyssey of Aries did not stop in Persia. He conquered many other peoples and founded an empire of glory and magic in present India. The oldest known novel, Gilgamesh, Mesopotamian giant, is also a pleasant adaptation of the Odyssey of Ram. The giant goes in a long wandering on the death of his friend Enkiddu.
In the character of Enkiddu, it is easy to recognize Setanta Cuchulainn, Ram’s own brother. Gilgamesh goes in search of immortality. He will continue his quest to the underworld where the gods live. This is what made Rama by founding his distant empire where he became a god himself. He gained immortality there as you still honor him by singing his praises “Hare Rama”. Stopin French, “stop” is said “arrêt”, which looks like “Hare” Rama? Everyone has tried, only our ancestors have succeeded, the wise Plato pointed out very appropriately.
As for me, I contented myself with making Ulysses evolve in the Mediterranean, to the delight of my audience. I gotta make a living. All places and scenes I described are transparent allusions to political events or public events of my time. It is the job of the bard, make people laugh with known events that he disguises.
I have not done anything else, and if I get from you such praise fifteen centuries after my death, I think that this is a deserved honor anyway: since you forgotten the Odyssey of Rama, since you have never been traumatized by angry Aries, the only Odyssey you know is mine, that of Ulysses.
It is much lighter than the original version. You liked it so much that your authors have made many versions, until that cartoon, Ulysses 31, which is so called because it is the 31st version of my Odyssey. Not to mention the forgotten versions. And since Ulysses 31, other remakes have emerged, many, in all languages. Fabulous success story for a funny pastiche.”
identical copy: Homer the bard
Homer deserved to be driven from the contests with a stick, and similarly Archilochus.