Not to get into a religious debate, but if you look at depictions of the Devil (with pitchfork and hooves), that's an amalgam of Poseidon's trident and the physical appearance of Pan.  Also, the flood story is very common in many cultures.  There was a flood around 4000 B.C.E. in the midEast and parts of the Mediterranean where some of the Greek Isles were.

I know what you mean Ed, about the bowlderizing. Patroclus was sometimes portrayed as Achilles' cousin or "companion" but never really depicted him as potentially more.  Not that it mattered to me, I liked the stories of the battles and of the conflict with the gods.

Jeremiah: I hated "Troy", but  even my friends who had never read the Illiad saw all the plot holes and errors in that movie.

"300" had a lot of freedom, maybe too many historical licenses but I didn't get the feeling that they weren't trying to sell it like a completely true story. 

Talking about Greek there was quite a heated debate in my class today. Greek as a language has singular, dual and plural forms, unlike our languages in which anything that is not a single object instantly turns into plural.

So there was a sentence about Orestes and Pylades kind of hard to translate especially because of the dual aspect and the fact it literally said Orestes and and Pylades (kai tes). So the teacher spent like 10 minutes explaining that in the mind of the writer this couple functioned as a unity, and that it was unthinkable to imagine one without the other (thus the use of the dual form instead of a normal plural form), so as you can imagine some guy asked if they were a gay couple...

Sorry, if this was a boring anecdote. I feel like everyone is asleep now...