Information about Homer (from the Oddyssey & and The iliad)?
Your question is rather vague. You can obviously get an enormous amount of information about "Homer" from an encyclopedia or the Internet. Briefly, two books are accredited as having been written by Homer who may or may not have lived thousands of years ago even though the stories have been circulating for this amount of time. The Illiad is an epic about the Trojan War in which Greek city states under their own respective kings unite and deploy troops to Troy because Paris of Troy had eloped with the beautiful Helen of Macedonia who was already married. The two stories are similar in the fact that one was written as a war novel and the Odyssey was written about the aftermath of the war and how one warrior mentioned also in the Illiad, Odysseus or Ulysses as he is sometimes called makes his way back home. The styles of the books are totally different. The Odyssey is more readable in the sense that it is not inundated by characters and facts but is a story of one man on his journey to get back home to his wife after being in a war that he did not want to partake in and has a horrible time returning due to the gods who seem to play with his life and create obstacles toward the peaceful return that he seeks as retribution for him not having given proper respect toward them and taking them for granted. In all probability there never was a Homer and the two books which deviate so much in style were ever written or spoken by one author/story teller. In all probability these were two stories that had some similar roots but were told, retold, and retold, for centuries before finally being put down in to writing
Is there any actual historical basis to the Trojan Horse, or is it pure mythology?
Assuming that the digs of Schliemann have proved that there could have been a city (one of several he found) that was destroyed by siege at the Asian coast of the Dardanelles sometime before the time of Homer... then the relevant Wikipedia article cites 3 hypothetical explanations, made by modern researchers:It was a battering ram; and it was turned into the horse by poetic license.It was an earthquake, that brought down the walls of Troy: the horse is a symbol of the god Poseidon, god of the sea (and of earthquakes too).It was a Greek cavalry unit, disguised as Trojan cavalry that caught the city garrison off guard.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tro...
Why do so many see their creator as a "Him" when all of us were birthed from a "Her?"
Most believers defer to secondary indicators — mostly holy books and prophets — as the basis for their characterization of the creator they imagine. These secondary indicators sometimes explicitly depict the creator as male. Others think of the creation as more of an engineering or manufacturing feat rather than a birth/biological creation, and stereotype manufacturing as a masculine pursuit. When people believe in male creators, these are the most common reasons why.Of course, many others do not believe in a male creator. Some believe in a female creator on the basis you've described (mother earth, the womb of creation). Others believe that the creator does not have any sex or gender, that these are traits of creations and not of creators. The Quran specifically describes God as utterly unlike humanity in much this way. Old universalist ideology depicts god as the sum of all the universe, and thus containing both male and female aspects. Others reject personification of creation entirely, and stick to mechanical processes like the big bang and biogenesis as the creative processes.It's a belief that always relies on other beliefs about the creator's creation becides the assumption of creation alone.
Which Greek god shoots arrows?
Many, many, many Greek gods shot arrows.Gods:Artemis: daughter of Leto and goddess of the wild things, the moon and the huntApollo: son of Leto and god of archery, the sun, medicine, prophecy Eros: son of Aphrodite and god of love--- his Roman counterpart is CupidOther Myths:Actaeon: a hunter who supposedly saw Artemis bathing, he was killed by her houndsAtalanta: a virgin huntressHippolytus: a male devotee of Artemis, a hunterOrion: one of the few male to every join Artemis on the hunt. Some stories say that Artemis and Orion were in love and she killed him by accident, tricked by her brother Apollo. Other stories say that Orion raped on of her maidens, and she killed him (or sent a giant scorpion after him) in revenge.Paris: the prince of Troy, lover of Helen. Stories say that Paris killed Achilles by shooting an arrow into his heel.Philoctetes: follower of Heracles, and a famed archer. He received the bow of Heracles upon Heracles's ascension to Olympus. It was his bow that shot the arrow that killed Achilles.Poeas: An archer on the Argo and a friend of HeraclesTeucher: the brother of Ajax the Great, an archer in the Trojan war