In Search of the Trojan War (20 page)

But how are we to judge the Bronze-Age substratum in
Homer? First there are descriptions of actual Mycenaean objects in Homer. The tower-shaped body shield usually associated with Ajax and represented on the Thera frescoes was already obsolete by the thirteenth century BC. The figure-of-eight shield occurs on thirteenth-century frescoes from Mycenae, Tiryns and probably Knossos. The ‘silver-studded sword’ is known from sixteenth- and fifteenth-century finds. The leg greaves indicated in Homer’s epithet about the ‘well-greaved Achaians’ likewise have been found in Bronze-Age tombs and not in the succeeding Iron Age. The boar’s-tusk helmet, perhaps the most famous of all (carefully described in
Iliad
, X, 261) has been found on numerous representations, with a full example from Knossos; Homer even notes how the tusks are laid in rows with the curves alternating. Nestor’s cup, decorated with doves (
Iliad
, XI, 632 ff) and with two handles, sounds something like the cup found by Schliemann in Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae. The technique of metalwork inlay described in the making of Achilles’ shield is exemplified in the shaft grave daggers (on which the tower shields are well pictured). There is also the question of Homer’s references to a thorax, or suit of body armour, made of bronze plates: such a suit has now been found at Dendra. Add to these examples the almost universal assumption in Homer that bronze is the metal for swords and tools, and you have an impressive collection of detail in the military sphere which suggests that Homer is preserving descriptions from long before his time, though our knowledge of the intervening Dark Age is too imperfect for us to say with absolute certainty that some of these artefacts could not have been used after the collapse of Mycenaean power. The only sure way of showing that the Homeric tradition had roots in the heroic poetry of the Mycenaean Age would be by demonstrating survivals of specifically Mycenaean poetic language in Homer. Unfortunately this is difficult to do. The language of Homer is a mixture of many dialects and periods, predominantly Ionic (reflecting Homer’s background in the Smyrna region and that of his successors, the Chiot Homeridae?), but it also contains a number
of words in the more ancient Arcado-Cypriot dialect, spoken in the isolated areas of Arcadia and Cyprus, both of which go back to the Mycenaean period. Such words then can indicate a survival of more ancient forms; so too can some of the rarer Linear B words. Unfortunately in all of Homer only one phrase looks to be certainly Mycenaean, namely the
phasganon arguroelon
, ‘silver-studded sword’, with its variant,
ksiphos arguroelon
.
Phasganon
and
ksiphos
(‘sword’) are Mycenaean words, as is
arguros
(‘silver’) and perhaps
alos
(‘stud’). Such swords have not so far been found between the later Mycenaean period and around 700 BC, which suggests that the epithet became attached to swords in the Bronze Age. But such a poor harvest suggests that direct verbal survivals coming down to the Ionian bards were very rare indeed.

It will also be clear that there are areas where Homer diverges completely from what we know of the Bronze Age. Most obviously, Homer has no idea of the complex bureaucratic world of the palaces with their accounting and rationings, their penny-pinching control over every sheep: evidently this world passed right out of the tradition, leaving instead the nostalgic ‘heroic’ Golden Age idealised retrospectively in the eighth century BC by the immigrant society of Ionia. An interesting sidelight on this is Homer’s idea of the use of chariots. In the Bronze Age they were actually used for fighting – at least they were among the Hittites and Egyptians, and both Linear B and Hittite tablets suggest that the Greeks used them in this way too, as we shall see. In the
Iliad
, however, chariots are only used for transport, apart from odd phrases which suggest a dim memory of the real state of affairs, as in Nestor’s orders to the Pylian troops: arraying chariots and cavalry in front, infantry behind: ‘When a man from his own car encounters the enemy chariots, let him stab with his spear. … So the men before your time sacked tower and city’ (
Iliad
, IV, 308). So the poetic tradition only vaguely remembered the details of true ‘heroic’ warfare, and obviously very little Mycenaean poetry about warfare and palace life passed into later epic tradition.

Consequently the epic tradition itself is unlikely to have formed around the remains of already existing Mycenaean epics on the tale of Troy, as has been assumed –
even if
the tale of Troy was a theme for Bronze-Age poets. It was in the Dark Age which followed the Mycenaean world that the creative part of the pre-Homeric epic tradition began to work. This has been confirmed by much modern work on Homer; it was popular singers of the Dark Age who spun their nostalgic tales about the great days of the Mycenaean past, and we can point to parallel developments in epic tradition in many cultures, Celtic, Germanic and African.

Such conclusions may be depressing for those who would wish to see the Mycenaean world faithfully reflected in the Homeric stories, but of course they do not rule out the idea that the basic story of the siege of Troy – and even some of the characters – still goes back to the Bronze Age, for an epic tradition can still accurately preserve events without ever using Mycenaean language. What about the basic tale, then?

THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPS

As Schliemann was the first to demonstrate, the places mentioned by Homer as having been the chief centre of his story were indeed the chief places in Mycenaean Greece. Mycenae
was
the greatest citadel and the most powerful; Tiryns, Pylos and Orchomenos were of a similar rank. Where Linear B archives give names, they confirm many of the Homeric names – Pylos, Knossos, Amnisos, Phaestos and Cydonia, to name only the best known; that Mycenae was called by its Homeric and classical name is shown by an Egyptian inscription of the fourteenth century BC. This was perhaps only to be expected, especially once it was discovered that Linear B was Greek and that there was thus linguistic continuity between Homer and the Late Bronze Age. But in the Second Book of the
Iliad
there is a remarkable list of 164 places said to have sent troops to Troy, the so-called catalogue of ships:

They who held Argos and Tiryns of the huge walls,

Hermione and Asine lying down the deep gulf,

Troizen and Eionai and Epidauros of the vineyards,

They who held Aigina and Mases, sons of the Achaians,

Of these the leader was Diomedes of the great war cry. …

Translated by R. Lattimore

The catalogue was originally constructed independently of the
Iliad
; indeed it is generally accepted that it is earlier than the
Iliad
, and was created separately as a list of names though its language is as purely Homeric as the rest of the poem. This independence is shown not merely by the differences and discrepancies between it and the
Iliad
proper, but by its placing, for it was not designed to occupy its place in the
Iliad
, purporting to be a record of the assembly of the Greek forces at the start of the war. At what stage it was placed in the
Iliad
has been argued fruitlessly for a long time. Nevertheless many critics have seen it as embodying Mycenaean tradition in a purer form than the
Iliad
as a whole. Indeed some have gone so far as to accept it for what it claims to be, the actual muster list of the Greek forces which sacked the historical Troy. This theory indeed has gained some support from a number of Linear B tablets from Pylos (
see here
), which record military dispositions and troop numbers. The late Denys Page, in one of the most stimulating studies on this subject, boldly concluded not only that the catalogue was substantially from the Mycenaean period, but that it was an actual order of battle and its connection with an overseas expedition ‘must be historically true’. He thought the list was preserved independently of the poetical tradition which culminated in the
Iliad
and was incorporated at a late stage, because it differs so much from the
Iliad
over points of fact. Lastly, Page thought the list of peoples and places ‘not much altered’, though the numbers might be a late invention. This dramatic conclusion, so seductive in its appeal – that we possess an authentic record of the Greek army which went to Troy – must be treated with caution. Is it true to say that this list – even
if it is from the Bronze Age – ‘must be’ a battle order? Why do early societies construct such lists? What
is
the catalogue?

WHAT’S IN A LIST?

First let us make a general point. While we may be rightly sceptical of the idea that the catalogue may go back to a
written
list on Linear B tablets, it is nevertheless the
kind
of list which appears time and again on those tablets: lists of names, lists of produce, lists of military gear and armed forces (scholars have even claimed to have found an authentic Mycenaean ‘ship catalogue’ in the Pylos tablets). Linear B was not flexible enough for the Greek language; it was a highly conventionalised and purely syllabic system of writing which could cope with administrative notations but not with complicated historical and literary composition. We can see the same principle in the development of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing: three-quarters of all extant inscriptions (there are around 150,000 of them) are administrative documents – in essence, lists. Even the Ugaritic tablets (fourteenth to thirteenth centuries BC), though they include literary texts, are mainly (two-thirds of the 500) lists, including lists of people and geographical names. Indeed in Egyptian texts contemporary with the palaces of Mycenae and Ugarit we find scribal manuals where the whole structure of the cosmos can be broken down into enormous lists to be learned as part of a scribe’s training, including the ninety-six towns of Egypt, expressions for mankind, and names of foreign people and places ‘drawing up Keftiu names and of the foreign places in the islands’. Schoolboys of the XVIII dynasty also had to list the names and typical produce of countries, using ‘as many foreign words and names as possible’. Such lists, if we had them complete with descriptive epithets, would form a counterpart to the Homeric catalogues, as a thirteenth-century papyrus suggests: ‘Have you been to the land of the Hittites? Do you know what Khedem is like? Have you trodden the road to Meger with its many cypresses … Byblos, Beirut, Sidon … Nezen by the river,
Tyre of the port, richer in fish than sand.’ The Egyptian ambassadors of the fourteenth century BC who recorded with phonetic accuracy lists of Syrian, Near Eastern and Aegean cities, including Amnisos, Knossos and Mycenae (
see here
), were only performing in a small way a feat educated people did all the time. (The practice, incidentally, did not stop in the Bronze Age: Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey could ‘deliver himself with fair accuracy, of a page or so of Homer’s Catalogue of the Ships’ when he wanted to declaim something solemn and impressive, and at least one elderly civil servant would recite it as a cure for insomnia, according to
The Times
of 12 November 1964!)

Such lists, then, have been seen by anthropologists as characteristic of societies making a transition from illiteracy to literacy (Homer’s age), or when literacy is only a limited and cumbersome medium and the preserve of a very small number of people (as was the case with the Late Mycenaean bureaucracy). Egyptian and other parallels could suggest that lists like the catalogue were more likely to have been learned as ‘interesting lists’ rather than to have begun life on clay tablets before being transferred to the oral tradition (if such a thing is even conceivable).

The fact is that as yet we know too little about the nature and extent of literacy in Mycenaean kingdoms – and next to nothing about the poetry which was recited by Mycenaean bards in their royal halls – to be able to suggest how and why the catalogue first came into being. We also need to be wary of the tendency on the part of societies to invent tradition: just because it may be roughly contemporary does not necessarily mean it is ‘true’. With that in mind, let us look at what the list has to tell us.

A number of clues suggest that the catalogue reflects Mycenaean Greece. Most important is that several places are named, and can be securely located, which were inhabited in Mycenaean times but not subsequently lived in until after the eighth century BC, when the catalogue is assumed to have reached its present form. Eutresis in Boeotia is the best example, abandoned around 1200 BC and not resettled until 600 years later; others include Krisa, the spectacular site overlooking the gorge below
Delphi, Pylos and Dorion (Malthi in the Soulima valley) in Messenia, and Hyrie (Dramesi) in Boeotia. It was at Hyrie that a ship stele was discovered which Blegen thought was a monument to an overseas expedition, such as that against Troy. That the catalogue preserves
any
such places suggests that it goes back at least to Mycenaean traditions of the twelfth century BC. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that none of the identifiable places named in the catalogue can be shown
not
to have been inhabited in Mycenaean times; of the eighty or ninety so far located, three-quarters have shown signs of Mycenaean occupation. Moreover,
all
those excavated have revealed Mycenaean occupation, and of these about a third have failed to produce evidence of subsequent Iron-Age occupation. These facts can be said to
prove
a Mycenaean origin for at least part of the catalogue (though of course they do not necessarily prove that it has anything to do with the Trojan War). The only argument against it would be if we could show that some places in it did not exist then, and, as we have seen, this is not so. Let us look at one example in more detail.