When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre

The scriptwriter behind Troy, Brad Pitt’s new muscle and breastplate epic, sounds like an alpha-plus idiot. Commenting on his decision to leave the gods out of the film because he thought they wouldn’t impress audiences, David Benioff said, ‘I think that, if Homer was looking down on us, he would smile and say, “Take the gods out.” ’

More likely, the gods would say, ‘Ouch, what a rubbish film.’ But they couldn’t attack Mr Benioff for playing around with the plot. That’s been going on ever since the Iliad was written in around 700 BC. Even a century later, Solon, the tyrant ruler of Athens, one of the few poets to achieve high political office, was still forging lines in Book II, inventing new ships for the Greek fleet going to Troy in order to enforce Athens’s much-disputed claim to the island of Salamis.

Michael Schmidt, the Mexican-born publisher behind the Manchester poetry imprint, Carcanet Press, has an engagingly knockabout approach to the poets of ancient Greece, constantly reminding us that we know practically nothing about them, and that their works are often a reconstituted mish-mash of something one bard misheard from another 2,500 years ago.

It’s mad, then, to worry about anachronisms — like the fact that the iron used in the weapons described in the Iliad was unknown in 1200 BC, when the Trojan war is supposed to have happened.

And it’s impossible to read too much of the poets’ biographical details into or out of their poetry. Sappho, it turns out, may well not have been a lesbian in either sense: yes, she wrote affectionate poems to women, but she also got married and had a child; and she might just as well have come from Syracuse as Lesbos.