Some time around five thousand years ago, human beings established a settlement on a low hill in north-west Asia Minor. In about 1250 BC – nearly two thousand years later – the Trojan War was fought. Some five hundred years after that, a man known as Homer recorded in detail an episode towards the end of that remote and legendary conflict. In 334 BC, at the shrine of Achilles at Troy, Alexander the Great dedicated himself to the overthrow of the Persian Empire. According to Lucian, in 48 BC Julius Caesar visited the site, which was revered by Romans as the place from whence came Aeneas, the legendary Trojan founder of Rome – a place ‘now only a famous name … where the very ruins have been destroyed … but where a legend still clings to every stone’. Caesar promised that a Roman Troy should arise. It did. Four hundred years later, the future emperor Julianus Augustus (Julian) discreetly travelled to the place to discover if the ancient rites were still being observed, in a world of new and alien beliefs. They were. Another fifteen hundred years passed, and in 1865 Frank Calvert, an Englishman whose family had long held lands in the Troad, followed a conjecture about the hill called Hisarlik and discovered the walls of Hellenistic Troy. Heinrich Schliemann then followed, with German money and Teutonic dedication, to tear open the hill, with the results that can be seen today: ‘the ruin of a ruin’.
No one who visits Troy (usually called ‘Ilium’ in Homer) does so because it is the certain birthplace of any real person whose ideas changed the world. But it is, beyond reasonable doubt, the location for the most powerfully told, most influential and most enduring legend the Western world knows: a legend that structured the attitudes and ideals of a civilization for a thousand years.
The Greeks had no Bible or Koran. They had no orthodox, codified religion enforced by state or priest. But they had Homer’s Iliad, and in a slightly less exalted position the Odyssey.
The 15,693 verse lines of the Iliad are not a quick read. But they provide an awesome and profoundly moving narrative that opens the door to the whole Classical world. The Iliad and the Odyssey are the foundation stones of European literature. They are the works that underpin the values of the Classical world in its noonday brightness – a world that lingered to an end in the 4th century of the Christian era. In strange and distorted ways they existed in medieval Europe. Today their commentary on war and death, and on the destructiveness of human nature, is less known but more needed than ever.
So what are the historical and literary origins of the legend? What is the story? How real are its characters? What are the ideals it contains, which inspired Hellenism and opened the way to the philosophers’ questions about life, death and society? It is a long tale: not trivial, not easy, but worth hearing above most others.
Start by forgetting modern Turkey and modern Greece, with their precise boundaries (established in 1922) and their populations far removed from ancient peoples. There were no Turks in Asia Minor (meaning the geographical area, not the smaller, western part of it that became the Roman province of that name) until after 1016, and none in Constantinople (Istanbul) until 1453. The three ancient areas of influence that need to be understood are Ionia, Anatolia, and the cultural area derived from the place name Mycenae.
Ionia is the eastern coast of the Aegean, the eastern islands – Tenedos, Lesbos, Kos, and the rest – spilling over into the Sea of Marmara (ancient name Propontis) and the coast of south-west Asia Minor. These latter areas are where Greek Ionian settlements or ‘colonies’ – i.e. towns and cities established by overflow settlers from the older, mother cities – were established from the 7th century BC onwards. The Ionian cities wax and wane (mostly wax until the 4th century AD) while other influences come and go: Persians, Athenian Greeks, Macedonian Greeks under Alexander the Great and his successors, Romans, the decreasingly Roman Byzantines, and finally the Ottoman Turks.
Anatolia is the hinterland of Asia Minor, the vast interior without easy access to coastal trade and influence, and until the nominal control of Alexander, and the more thorough and organized control of the Romans, not Greek at all. The area is of extraordinary antiquity as far as human development is concerned. The archaeologists tell us that there is evidence of human occupation 100,000 years ago. It is the area where wild grasses were first domesticated for use as grain, and emmer, an ancient bearded wheat (not barley), can still be seen growing there. Here, too, goats and sheep were domesticated. But that was time out of mind or record, and what the present visitor can in some measure discern on the ground appeared in about the middle of the second millennium BC, with the Hittite Empire centred on its capital Hattusas, about 130 km (80 miles) east of modern Ankara.
The Hittites were a powerful kingdom of peoples from about 1680 BC. They became more highly organized as an empire, covering all of central Anatolia and northern Syria, from about 1420 BC. They had, and made extensive use of, a written language in cuneiform script. Thousands of tablets have been found in the ruins of Hattusas – international correspondence, word lexicons between different languages, treatises on horse-breeding, instructions for temple rituals and military regulations – and none of them are Greek in any way. Powerful, long-enduring, monarchical, well organized, and highly literate for administrative purposes, the whole Hittite Empire abruptly, and without any known explanation, disappeared in about 1200 BC, within about fifty years of the presumed date of the Trojan War.
Mycenae was a massive and sophisticated citadel or fortress on the crossing point of a number of ancient trade routes on the Greek mainland. It is situated more or less mid-way between Tiryns, at the north end of the Gulf of Argos, and Corinth. It throve between about 1600 and 1200 BC, and gives its name to a characteristic and widely spread culture in which a form of the Greek language – known as Linear B when written – was uniformly used. Bronze was the dominant metal, and the social structure gave rise to the modern label the ‘Palace Period’. Places showed a similarity of burial customs, and produced architecture and high-quality artefacts of a similar type. This Mycenaean civilization is evident from sites in the southern half of mainland Greece, and in many of the Aegean islands, including Crete, Rhodes, Samos and Chios. But the Mycenaean culture was not an organized empire in the sense in which Rome and Britain were to have empires. Rather, it was a pattern of life in which the predominant political structure appears to have been a lord or king in a large fortified palace supported by, regulating, and giving protection to people living within his area of influence. Such organized groupings are best preserved at Mycenae itself, Tiryns, Pylos and Thebes. It is reasonable to suppose that such similar but independent groups would have cooperated for defensive and offensive purposes, as they undoubtedly did for trade and communications.
If the Trojan War was a real event that happened about 1250 BC – and, legend apart, there is some archaeological and some literary evidence that it was a real event and that it happened about this time – it could have been a protracted war of attrition between, on the one hand, a non-Greek power centered at Troy (Ilium, as Homer almost always calls it), which controlled the surrounding area (the Troad) and was an outpost of, or associated with, the Hittite Empire to the east; and, on the other hand, a Mycenaean federation of lords of the Palace Period from mainland Greece.
By a coincidence that has a vaguely sinister feel, something went very wrong with the Mycenaean Greek civilization in the west at about the same time as the disappearance of the Hittite Empire to the east. Whether the collapse in the west was a combination of local Greek civil wars, earthquakes, external (northern?) aggression by ‘Dorian’ Greeks, or invasion and pillage by the ‘boat people’ who are mentioned with fear in Egyptian and other records remains unclear. But the outcome was decisive. The palace settlements became villages, the written language disappeared, communications largely ceased, and architecture and crafts degenerated to subsistence levels. It is, however, from this lost land of palaces, great lords and wealth that the Greek lords Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus and the rest may well have come. But they reappear after the lapse of five hundred years of unlettered oral transmission, and they are seen through the eyes and language of a new, incipient Greek civilization. Archaic Greece, as it is called to distinguish it from the Classical Greece of the 5th century BC, had a recognizable alphabet drawn from the Phoenician, and produced the literature of Homer and Hesiod, and other, mostly lost, records of legends and stories concerning gods and the Trojan War.
In the epic narratives of Homer and others, and in the legends of Troy, we are peering into historical uncertainties of mystifying antiquity and fascination. Two questions are always asked.
The first is how the narratives – particularly the Iliad and the Trojan Horse story – relate to real places and real events. Was there a Trojan War? Was Troy finally taken by means of the famous stratagem?
The second question is whether a single man, Homer, wrote the Iliad and then the Odyssey some time between 750 and 675 BC; whether there were two Homers, one for the Iliad and one for the Odyssey; or whether these works result from the stitching together at that period of various traditional recitations that were tidied up and edited by later Greek scholars. Did Homer ever exist?
A short answer to this question is that there are certain details in the Iliad – mainly in Book II – that suggest a Mycenaean or pre-Dark Age origin to the story. Such an origin is arguably consistent with the surviving appearance, and apparent destruction in about 1250 BC, of the walls and towers of what is usually called Troy VI. Indeed, if you stand at the excavated eastern gate of Troy VI, you are probably as close to the death of Hector as time and knowledge will ever permit. The details in the Iliad that take us far back in time, perhaps beyond the Dorian Dark Age, include the social structure of kingly leaders and their homes; place names of cities unknown in Classical antiquity but rediscovered by modern archaeologists; the high value always put upon bronze (not the later iron) armour; the descriptions of certain artefacts that match archaeological finds (such as the famous boar-tusk helmet found at Knossos and exactly described in the Iliad, X.260–65); and the topography of the Troad.
The Troad comprises the large area of land south of Troy, including the range of hills centred on Mount Ida and the river system of the Scamander and the Simoeis, and the plain of Troy to the north and north-west of the city. But to make sense of the position of the Greek fleet and fighting as described by Homer, it has to be understood that a large part of what is now flat agricultural land to the north was then a bay of the sea accessible from the Hellespont and separated from the Aegean by the Sigeum Ridge. Once we understand this, much of Homer’s narrative fits the topography.
But in tracing the source of the Trojan War legends to a real conflict in about 1250 BC between (maybe) Mycenaean Greeks and (maybe) a powerful outpost of the Hittite Empire, it cannot be emphasized strongly enough that the eventual written narrative was constructed after the vagaries of about five hundred years of oral, bardic transmission and elaboration, during which time the stability of written records did not exist. In the Iliad there is only one reference to writing, and the reference makes it clear that writing is suspect, if not as a black art, then certainly as a means of causing secret mischief. King Proteus, wishing to kill Bellerophon but lacking confidence to do so himself, sent him into Lycia and gave him ‘fatal tokens, scratching in a folded tablet signs many and deadly, and ordered him to show them to his father-in-law, so that he might perish’.
So was there some real, if remote, historical conflict in which the Trojan War legends had their origin? Very probably, yes. Was the transmission of these legends over a period of five hundred years written or oral? Oral. How, then, did the vast and wonderful works of literature always attributed to Homer come into being?
It has sometimes been asked whether there was ever a single man called ‘Homer’ who put the two epics together. Perhaps there were two Homers: a younger and more vigorous man, acutely aware of human passions and conflicts, who wrote the Iliad; and another man, older, more world-weary and in search of a domestic resolution of conflict at the end of life, who wrote the Odyssey.
Apart from the near absence of any such ‘two Homers’ tradition in antiquity, it seems to be stretching literary credulity beyond even its imaginative limits to suppose that, at the very beginning of European writing – out of nothing, as it were – not just one but two writers of the highest genius suddenly appeared. If one has to account for the different linguistic and emotional tone of the two books and the more ‘archaic’ feel of the Iliad, why not say that the Iliad was constructed by a man in the fullness of life and the Odyssey by the same man many years later, reflecting on life’s journey?
Another suggestion is that ‘Homer’ was merely a scribe, or chief of a group of scribes, who exercised their collective efforts to gather together various orally transmitted stories and to make them into a continuous tale – a late grubbing together of two sets of traditional narratives. The trouble here – apart, again, from the general ancient attribution of the stories to a single man – is that it beggars belief that anything so vast, so closely knit, so well ordered, complex, emotionally profound and consistent, could have been just cobbled together. It is certainly true that both texts have been tidied up – initially for recitation in Athens in the period 550–530 BC, and more thoroughly by scholars in the library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC – but even the most fastidious editing does not create works of genius any more than textual annotation can make the plays of Shakespeare great.
So the most plausible answer to the questions about authorship is that the two epics were constructed by one man: the earlier and longer Iliad (15,693 lines of verse; compare Milton’s Paradise Lost, which has a mere 10,365 lines) perhaps in Homer’s early manhood; and the Odyssey (at 12,110 lines) in his old age, both works drawing upon oral tradition.
The Iliad is a detailed account of certain events towards the end of a ten-year war in which a confederation of Greeks, or ‘Argives’ or ‘Achaeans’, attack Troy/Ilium and its allies, the ‘Danaans’. It tells of the folly of anger and pride, and of the pity of war. Agamemnon, the Greek leader, angers Achilles, the Greeks’ most ferocious fighter, by unjustly claiming from him a prize of war. In anger, Achilles withdraws from the fighting, taking his followers – the Myrmidons – with him. The Trojan prince Hector leads an attack on the Greek ships drawn up on the shore, and the Greeks, badly led by Agamemnon, are all but overwhelmed. Achilles refuses to assist but sends his closest friend, Patroclus, to fight in his stead. Patroclus is killed by Hector. Achilles is consumed with grief and anger over what has happened, and sets out to kill Hector. Hector, warned that he cannot win, fails to make any convincing effort to escape Achilles and is killed, whereupon Achilles dishonours the body by dragging it around Troy behind his chariot. All this takes place in just two days of fighting separated by two days of truce, and is recounted in the first twenty-two books of the Iliad. The last events are narrated in Books XXIII and XXIV, and cover a period of about thirteen days. They record the strange meeting in the Greek camp at night between Achilles and Priam, the aged king of Troy and Hector’s father, and the giving back of Hector’s body to Priam for performance of the funeral rites – the gods having been so offended by Achilles’ unseemly behaviour that they have kept the body undecayed and beautiful. ‘Thus they performed the funeral rites of Hector, tamer of horses’, are the final words of the epic.
The Odyssey has a much more complex literary structure, with time shifts and a narrative spread over many years. It contains the famous stories of the Cyclops, the Sirens, the Lotus-Eaters, the descent into the House of Hades, the first recorded reference to Troy captured through the device of the Wooden Horse, and much more – all embedded within the story of Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, setting out from Ithaca to find his father as his mother’s suitors prepare to kill him. The second half of the story recounts Odysseus’ secret return to Ithaca and his reunion with Penelope after the killing of the rapacious suitors. The epic ends: ‘“Odysseus of many devices, now hold your hand, now halt the strife of endless war lest Zeus be offended.” So spoke Athene, and he obeyed, and was glad at heart.’
From the same period (c. 750–675 BC) there survive a number of fragmentary or summary items known as the ‘Epic Cycle’, which give some account of events that took place before the war, such as the Judgment of Paris, and of events that happened between the death of Hector and the final dispersal of the Greek forces. They include the story of the death of Achilles, shot in the heel by Paris, Hector’s brother, and the universally known stratagem of the Wooden Horse – later retold by Virgil, greatest of Roman poets, in Book II of the Aeneid. There were other very ancient accounts of the war, or parts of it, but they appear to have perished even before the 5th century BC.
Not only the few school children who still battle with the original Greek, but also the mature reader confronting the best translations will find difficulties in getting through the Iliad. Why? To appreciate in advance the obstacles is in part to overcome them; to overcome them is to enter into the world of perhaps the greatest book ever written. In no particular order, but from my own experience, some of the difficulties are these:
The medium of verse narrative is strange to us, who seldom read Milton, and Sir Walter Scott scarcely at all. When combined with the difficulties of rendering ancient Greek into English, it tends to result in a lumpy and uncomfortable word order that no translator who tries to keep close to the original meaning can ever entirely overcome, although some, notably Robert Fitzgerald (in the Oxford World’s Classics series), do very well.
There are a number of bardic repeats in the text – descriptive choruses or reiterated messages that served to give the oral narrator a rest. These are omitted in some translations. But other idiosyncrasies cannot be brushed out without altering the whole feel of the work. These include the recurring epithet: ‘the resourceful Odysseus’, ‘the ruffian god’ (Ares), ‘the black ships’, and so on. In addition there are the names or epithets that vary according to the scansion of the verse, but not according to the needs of the story: ‘Pallas’ is often swapped with ‘Athene’, for example, and we read of ‘the swift ships’ even when the ships in question are beached. But if these consequences of the verse form make our reading more difficult, why did they not cause problems for the original hearers? To explain briefly: in almost all early storytelling, the medium was verse – it ‘sings’ better than prose; it is easier to remember; and its familiar refrains and established word repeats help to carry both bard and audience over what to us, exhausted by more than a few minutes of concentrated listening would be intolerable periods. Thus it was that, for the purpose of storytelling, verse came before prose in almost all societies.
Another difficulty is the intrusion into the story of other beings – the gods – in whom we simply do not believe, and whose activity looks like a cheat in the narrative. But when a god is said to intrude upon human affairs, what happens can very often be seen as unexpected good or bad luck, and undoubtedly some of Homer’s Classical readers read it in this way, (More of this anon.)
An early block to reading the Iliad is the second half of Book II. Having got off to a splendid start with the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, and the resulting council held by the Greek chiefs, the story halts for what feels like an interminable list of participants in the war – Greek and Trojan – and the places they come from. The archaeologist and scholar will linger; the reader will probably want to resume at Book III. If the funeral rites of Patroclus produce a similar response, a similar solution is at hand!
There is an enormous and exhausting proliferation of largely unfamiliar person and place names in the Iliad: about 750 in all. Just read over them. The story depends on about eighteen named humans and about twelve gods. Get to know them and their relationships. The effort will be no greater than that required by a newcomer to a radio or television soap opera, and just possibly of more enduring value.
The immortals in the Iliad obviously have individual characters, but are the mortals any more than heroic cyphers to whom are attributed deeds of valour, cowardice, anger, folly, honour or dishonour? If sometimes they are heroic cyphers, they are also, I believe, distinct and realistic human individuals. Look at some of the Greeks:
Agamemnon, commander-in-chief, is domineering, arrogant, and a bad judge of men and of himself. Note how, at the start, when attempting to shame the Greeks into fighting by saying that they had better pack up and go home, he is all but taken at his word. He is too easily wrong-footed by situations. He is proud, dictatorial and, under pressure, indecisive.
Ajax, son of Telemon (there are two Ajaxes), is an impetuous, muscle-bound thug, insensitive, brave, brutal and stupid – the perfect archetype of the action-movie ‘hero’.
Achilles is a passionate man, too easily moved to destructive anger. His row with Agamemnon indirectly causes the death of his beloved friend Patroclus. He over-reacts to this misfortune, not only killing Hector but dishonouring his body – and therefore himself – in the process. Achilles is darkly resigned to his own death. He is portrayed as a great but flawed human being: violent, brave, proud, and in the end redeemed by sorrow shared with the man whose son he has killed – a frightening and complex man.
Nestor is old, experienced, wise, garrulous and opinionated, whether circumstances are appropriate or not – the very epitome of the semi-retired leader who commands deference and sometimes earns it.
Patroclus is young, gentle to women and to his friends, brave, but in the end too brave to survive.
However, it is the three main Trojan characters who seem to stand out most clearly as human personalities:
Priam, king of Troy, is old and weary of war, suffering endless loss and an ever increasing ruin that he half knows will lead to the destruction of everything that is his – the death of his sons, the enslavement of his daughter Cassandra and of his family, and his own death. He is a man of sorrows fated to failure, left pleading for the body of his dead son.
Paris (also called Alexandros) – the human cause of the whole mess – is ‘vivid and beautiful’, elegant, a delightful lover, brave and effective up to a point, and clever. He eventually kills Achilles by means of a trick, but he is never quite where he should be at the crucial moment. At one stage Hector finds him ‘cheering on his company’. Reprimanded, Paris replies:
We are behind you, we are fresh
And lack no spirit in attack, I promise,
Up to the limit of our strength.
Beyond that no man fights though he may wish it.
(XIII.784–87)
Earlier in the fighting Paris had been ‘slow to leave the place where he had discoursed with his lady’, and when he eventually turns up, he says to his brother Hector, ‘Dear fellow, have I kept you waiting? Have I not come at the right time as you asked?’ Hector’s reply is worth quoting for its humanity and for its implied longing for the cessation of war – a longing that permeates this most war-centred of all stories:
And Hector in his shimmering helm replied:
‘My strange brother! No man with justice in him
Would underrate your handiwork in battle;
You have a powerful arm. But you give way
Too easily and lose interest, lose your will.
My heart aches in me when I hear our men,
Who have such toil of battle on your account,
Talk of you with contempt. Well, come along.
Some day we’ll make amends for that, if ever
We drive the Achaeans from the land of Troy –
If ever Zeus permit us, in our hall,
To set before the gods of heaven, undying
And ever young, our wine bowl of deliverance. (VI.520–end)
But of course they never will. Within two days Hector will be dead. The proud counterpart of Achilles, who is portrayed without the vice of anger, and, at home in Troy, as loving to his wife and tender to his baby son, binds himself to fight against the impossible odds of Achilles. Of his character it is best you form your own opinion. You may even conclude that he is the real hero of the Iliad.