In Search of the Trojan War Read Free Page A

perhaps the most famous of all cities; and all because of one story, the story of its siege and destruction, the death of its heroes, including Hector, at the hands of Agamemnon, Achilles and the Achaian Greeks – all for the sake of Helen, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’. The tale is in the bedrock of western culture. From Homer to Virgil, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Berlioz, Yeats and the rest, it has become a metaphor. Trojan horses, Achilles’ heels and Odysseys have become figures of speech in many languages; ‘working like a Trojan’ is still worthy of praise. From Xerxes and Alexander the Great to Mehmet the Turk it has been a political and racial exemplar, the root, as Herodotus believed, of ‘the enmity between Europe and Asia’. It is a story so universal that it was used by French playwrights to evade censorship, while conveying their message, in Nazi-occupied Paris. Similarly, in exile in 1942, the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch would affirm that ‘it was the fantasy of the Nazis to become the new Achaians, demolishing an old civilisation’, comparing Hitler with Achilles. Inevitably the universality of the theme has lent itself to Hollywood epic movie-makers, in films like Ulysses and Helen of Troy ; so too it has been amusingly satirised on television in the ‘non-interventionism’ of Star Trek (where Captain Kirk regretfully left the Trojans to their fate) and in the ‘interventionism’ of Dr Who (in which the good Doctor, who had no such scruples, was the one who gave the Greeks the idea of building the wooden horse!).
    So: ‘In Troy there lies the scene,’ as Shakespeare said. The enduring fascination of that theme, the tale of Achilles, Hector, Helen and the rest, has led a stream of pilgrims to the Troad, the region of Troy, over three millennia; from Alexander the Great to Lord Byron they have stood and gawped on the site of the great deeds of the heroes. But did the Trojan War ever really happen? If so, where was Troy? Was it really on the site we call Troy today? Who were Homer’s Achaians and Trojans, and why did they fight each other? Did Helen of Troy exist? And was there a real wooden horse? Also, why has the site been sought so assiduously for so long? Why the obsession with this story? And why did Schliemann, Dörpfeld and the rest come to the conclusions they did? (The search for Troy is inextricably bound up with the development of archaeology itself.) This book is aptly entitled a search, for I started it with no answers to any of these questions; indeed, if anything, I thought the whole story a myth, not a subject for serious historical inquiry. But I was convinced that the search itself was well worth undertaking, and that, if it would be a long road, as Constantine Cavafy says in his poem ‘Ithaca’, it would still be one ‘full of adventure and instruction’. I hope some of the excitement of both comes over to the reader.

ONE
    THE SEARCH FOR TROY
    Of the true and famous Troy there have been no traces for ages: not a stone is left, to certify, where it stood. It was looked for to little purpose as long back as the time of Strabo: and Lucan having mentioned, that it had been in vain searched for in the time of Julius Caesar, concludes his narrative with this melancholy observation upon the fate of this celebrated city , that its very ruins were annihilated.
    ROBERT WOOD, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1769)
    HOMER’S STORY
    FIRST, THE TALE . Homer of course is the starting point, with the Iliad and the Odyssey . But it is as well to make clear at the start that he was drawing on a vast cycle of stories which dealt with the Trojan War. The Iliad in fact deals with only one episode covering a few weeks in the tenth year of the war. In classical times a great series of epics, now lost or in fragments, told those parts of the story ignored by the earlier Homeric poems, and some of these, like the epics known as the Kypria and the Sack of