Dictys Cretensis of
Knossus was the legendary companion of
Idomeneus during the
Trojan War, and the purported author of a diary of its events, that deployed some of the same materials worked up by
Homer for the
Iliad. With the rise in credulity in
Late Antiquity, the story of his journal, an amusing fiction addressed to a knowledgeable and sophisticated
Alexandrian audience, came to be taken literally.