In Search of the Trojan War Read Free

city of New Ilium, situated in one corner of a small provincial town in the Roman Empire. It was never a great success, a boom town; its theatre was only built to accommodate 6000 spectators, and its population may perhaps be more accurately gauged by an inscription (third or second century BC?) which says that 3000 people had to be fed at one of the city’s public feasts. That at least gives us some idea of the scale of the real city which existed on this site.
    The numbers Troy I–IX are broken down into forty-seven subdivisions. These phases of human habitation one above the other were formed by the constant rebuilding which is still practised in Anatolia (in fact the arrival of modern furniture has proved so destructive that compacted earth floors are now relaid every couple of years), by human destruction (the usual fate of cities in the ancient Mediterranean world), by an earthquake, or simply by abandonment. The survivors or successors cleared up and rebuilt on top, levelling the debris, covering the refuse, the food and animal bones, the ashes or whatever with a fresh layer of earth, building new mudbrick walls, and starting again. In thisway the hill of Hisarlik spread and grew, accumulating 50 feet of debris in places on the side of the hill. London, in comparison, in its 1900 years or so, has managed 20 feet of strata, in which modern archaeologists have been able to distinguish not only its general historical development but also the great events which have marked it – for instance the sack of London in AD 61 during Boudicca’s revolt, the great fires of 764, 1077 and 1666, the Blitz in 1940, and so on.
    A mound like Troy, then, is a paradigm of human history: end and beginning of new races and civilisations, witness to destructions and rebuildings, testimony to the sheer antlike resilience of humankind. This is ‘civilisation’ not in the terms of The Last Supper or The Art of Fugue , but in terms of mudbrick, bone pins, handmade pots: the long-term, slow ascent (if such it is) of Man.
    Today the visitor can walk at one level over the great walls of the city contemporary with the Mycenaean Age in Greece, which was excavated by Dörpfeld in 1893–4 and whose violent end he took for the death of Homer’s Troy. Across it lie walls and a theatre from Roman Ilium (Troy IX), the town which the Apostles knew. Up the street from the main gate you pass the footings of the shanties of Troy VIIa; you can still see signs of the fire which overwhelmed them and which Blegen thought marked the sack of Homer’s Troy. From the top of the street you can walk over to the walls of Troy II (2500 BC) and stand at the ramp where in 1873 Schliemann found his controversial treasure, the ‘Jewels of Helen’, under a mass of fire debris: the fire which he thought was the sack of Troy. So in two or three minutes’ walk you have gone from the time of the kings of Mycenae to the time of Jesus, to that of Alexander the Great, to the time when the Great Pyramid was built: different Troys and different sieges.
    Standing in the tremendous trench which Schliemann drove through the north of the mound, steep-sided and desolate, with smashed ends of walls hanging out of what is left of the hill, it is difficult for the visitor to make the epic tale come alive in the mind’s eye. Was this indeed the place of which the ancient poetsang? If so, it has been ‘dug out by the mattock of Zeus’, as Aeschylus says in the Agamemnon , consumed by a ‘whirlwind of doom’; a city ‘ground to dust’.
    And yet Troy is a place whose memory will far outlive the last trace of its physical existence. On an unromantic reading of the evidence it was merely a small city in the Mediterranean, one of thousands of centres of human society which lived and died between the Stone Age and modern times: one city, but one which has come to stand for all cities. In western culture, in the languages and memory of what we call the Indo-European races, it is