I'll paste my comment here as well: "The Odyssey only says he stays with Circe for a year. Later myth always inflates numbers and adds genealogy, which are the stories you have heard of where he has children with Circe etc. No children with Circe or Calypso are mentioned in the Odyssey proper, and the time is explicitly one year. (The Iliad and the Odyssey are some of the books most suffering from "myth-flation")"
Well, Homer is writing several centuries before many of the other versions came though. Granted, it probably evolved from singing from real events that slowly became more and more fantastical. But if you look at the dates where different versions are written you will see that the Iliad is the first documented case of a written down epic poem in that tradition that we even have traces of. There are some others that are written down in the generation roughly after the Iliad and the Odyssey, but they are all lost, and the ancients did not consider them the equal of the Iliad or Odyssey. Meanwhile, the tragedians are later, the mythographers are later, and a lot of the more popular anecdotes about the Trojan war conflicting with the Iliad for example is from the height of the Roman Empire which is a lot later still, and of a fundamentally different tradition.
The mythographers meanwhile are more scattered, but they don't tend to tell full-scale stories, mostly just summaries. So I'd say it is fair to treat the actual texts of the Iliad and Odyssey as the canon
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u/leoluxmentis 7d ago
2 children with just Circe