In Search of the Trojan War (21 page)

‘WINDY ENISPE’

It is difficult to find these places today, and you would be no better off if you did, because no one lives there.

STRABO
,
Geography

My example from the catalogue is chosen to illustrate an important point: that many of the catalogue sites could not be located by the Greeks themselves in classical times. Homer might have known about Mycenae and Tiryns from visible remains and folk-tales, but how did he come to select numerous other places for which the geographers in historical times looked high and low before giving up in disgust: ‘cannot be found anywhere’, ‘does not exist’, ‘disappeared’? How did Homer even know that such places existed? How did he know their names? How did he know that Messe had pigeons or that Enispe was windy? In particular, how did he know about places which, as we have seen,
were abandoned at the end of the Mycenaean era and were never lived in again?

By common consent among catalogue buffs the most hopeless case for modern identification was the triad of obscure little places in Arcadia: ‘Ripe, Stratie and windy Enispe’. Even Lazenby and Hope-Simpson, the doyens of footsloggers-after-Homer, admitted defeat without a fight, not even knowing whether to steer their legendary battered Morris towards western or central Arcadia!

However, a Greek archaeologist, C.T. Syriopoulos, following up unpublished clues unearthed in a road cutting in 1939, has located a prehistoric site in north-western Arcadia near Dimitra in Gortynia, which was intensively inhabited from Neolithic times to the twelfth century BC, when it was deserted for ever. The site is on a rocky hill on the southern slopes of Mount Aphrodision (it is accessible from the Tripolis–Olympia road) and dominates one of the crossings of the river Ladon. The Ladon flows down into the Alpheios and its steep wooded valley is one of the loveliest and most untouched areas of the Peloponnese. West of the habitation site on the commanding peak of Agios Elias are fortification walls which may be of the thirteenth century BC. The pottery is ‘provincial’, which is what we would expect of an apparent backwater. Pausanias says that ‘some people think Enispe, Stratie and Ripe were once inhabited islands in the Ladon’, to which he replies, ‘anyone who believes that should realise it is nonsense: the Ladon could never make an island the size of a ferry boat!’ But if the word for island (
nesos
) is interpreted (as it can be) as a piece of land made between a river and its tributary, then Dimitra could indeed be called an island in the Ladon, between the main river and two tributaries. And if this is accepted, then neighbouring Stratie could also be an ‘island’ in the Ladon, the place called Stratos by the second-century-BC historian Polybius, which might plausibly be placed (on Polybius’ evidence) at a place called Stavri, three hours’ walk from Dimitra along the course of the Ladon to the south-west. As for ‘windy’ Enispe, the name could hardly be more
appropriate: the Dimitra site is buffeted by strong winds which scour up the valley of the Ladon and its tributary the Kako-Lagadi: the present-day threshing floor on top of the prehistoric site – using the constant wind for grain-winnowing – underlines the point. And if the fortifications on Agios Elias are indeed Bronze Age, and were the refuge of the inhabitants of thirteenth-to twelfth-century-BC Enispe, then so much the better for wind!

If the identification of these sites is right, and if Pausanias’ informants were correct, then the third lost site, Ripe, should be at the confluence of another tributary of the Ladon. Indeed there is a site further down the Ladon, an hour and a half’s journey on foot from Stratie at a place called Agios Georgios, on another ‘island’ of the Ladon, where tombs of the later Mycenaean period are alleged to exist.

Homer’s account, then, describes in a plausible order the three main settlements of this mountainous area of north-west Arcadia, and they fall into place intelligibly in the sequence and direction of his list of all the Arcadian sites. An enigma which defeated no less than Strabo and Pausanias may be solved.

The cumulative effect of the discoveries of modern archaeology is to show that for all its strangeness, and accepting its later accretions, the catalogue goes back to a genuine list from the Bronze Age. Homer says there were pigeons at Messe and Thisbe, wind at Enispe, coast at Helos (and horses and wind at Troy, for that matter), because it was true. How else could Eutresis, uninhabited since around 1200 BC, appear in the list?

However, when we turn to the political arrangements of the kingdoms described by Homer, the groupings of all the obscure places, we encounter grave difficulties in making the catalogue fit what we know of thirteenth-century-BC Greece. Here our only real control is information from the palace archives. The Linear B tablets give us detailed records of two Mycenaean kingdoms named in the catalogues, Knossos and Pylos, which can be compared with Homer’s catalogue. The Knossos problem is a thorny one, as we have seen, but if the revised dating of the tablets is accepted, then the archive dates to around 1200 BC,
roughly the same time as the catalogue purports to be. However, only three of Homer’s seven Cretan towns are named in the tablets (Knossos, Lyktos and Phaestos), though the tablets agree with Homer that Idomeneus’ kingdom was restricted to the central area, and many places named in the tablets still await elucidation (another town in the catalogue, Milatos, has now produced important Late-Bronze-Age remains). Pylos presents even more difficulty, for though Homer and the tablets both give Messenia nine towns (an interesting coincidence in itself), only Pylos and Kyparissia are present in both lists, though Homer’s Amphigeneia and Helos may also be identifiable on other fragments among the Pylos tablets. But the remaining seven names of the chief Pylian towns on the tablets cannot be squared with Homer, and thus a leading authority on Linear B now believes Homer to be ‘almost worthless’ in any attempt to reconstruct the geography of Mycenaean Greece. Homer does, however, seem to be speaking of real places in his lists, and though the discrepancy with the tablets is disturbing, it is worth asking whether the political divisions in the catalogue – bizarre as they are in some cases – reflect a real situation which once pertained,
but at another time
. For instance could Homer’s Pylian kingdom reflect a situation
after
the destruction of Pylos? If, say, a bard were reconstructing a list of famous places in the twelfth century BC, he would surely have known that Pylos had been the centre of Messenia, even though it was destroyed before his day? There may even have been some Dorian petty dynast who claimed to be Nestor’s inheritor, rather like the Celts in the sub-Roman twilight in Britain. In any case, Pylian refugees who had emigrated to Athens would have kept alive the memory of ‘sandy Pylos’. Elsewhere there was still a recognisably Mycenaean life in kingdoms like Mycenae, Tiryns and Athens in the twelfth century BC; in Lakonia, too, some sort of occupation continued on the Menelaion, and there was evidently a kind of continuity at certain sites like Amyklai: indeed Homer’s list of places in Lakonia fits very well with the archaeology.

The catalogue is full of strange political divisions. It ignores
the
Iliad
by giving the chief heroes, Achilles and Odysseus, insignificant kingdoms; it relegates Ajax to tiny Salamis; it divides the plain of Argos, with Agamemnon – that is, Mycenae – ruling only the northern plain and the Isthmus area, and Diomedes of Tiryns in control of the lower plain, Argos and Asine. Perversely, most experts have thought that these divisions are so unlikely that they must reflect a real situation which once obtained in Greece; but trying to make them work for the thirteenth-century heyday has proved difficult. Nevertheless, as the evidence of the sites themselves strongly suggests that the core of the list of sites itself comes from the Bronze Age, it seems at least conceivable that some of the political divisions in it could be Bronze Age. The answer may be that the kingdoms reflect the century or so
after
the heyday of Mycenae; that originally, stripped of its later accretions, the catalogue is actually the creation of the twelfth or eleventh centuries BC, after the decay of Mycenaean civilisation, when some of the kingdoms had declined and when some palaces had been destroyed, but when Mycenaean civilisation hung on in some places. For example, in the case of Mycenae the catalogue suggests a time when a larger state comprising the north-west of the Peloponnese had split into two: for Mycenae and Tiryns the catalogue is inexplicable as a document from the thirteenth century (LH III B), when Mycenae was the centre of the Argolid with a network of roads from it (see
Chapter 5
), but it
is
plausible as relating to the situation after 1200 when, if anything, Tiryns grew in power and population (
see here
). Again – as we shall see – the evidence for Orchomenos suggests the same, confined to one small corner of Lake Copais (
see here
). Here too the catalogue’s emphasis on the Boeotians – dominating it, but playing no role in the story – is explained: in fact tradition in Thucydides’ day had it that they did not arrive in Boeotia until sixty years
after
the Trojan War. The catalogue then betrays traces of the Mycenaean decline, and originally must date from the (late?) twelfth century BC. That it refers to places destroyed around 1200 BC is no argument against this: oral traditions of the Mycenaean world were presumably still
strong enough in the succeeding three or four generations for their names and even their distinguishing epithets to be remembered. We may suspect that the catalogue was composed in the declining years of the late Mycenaean world for the edification of the petty dynasts who ruled in the shoes of the Atreids in an ever-diminishing Mycenae. That it had anything to do with a possible Trojan War is unprovable; even if it came from the Mycenaean world this is no guarantee that it is not simply a list of ‘interesting places’ associated with the war in an ‘invention of tradition’ of a kind which often happens in the aftermath of golden ages: sub-heroic audiences are the most avid consumers of such fictions. The catalogue, then, with its visions of a united Greece in its last great overseas venture, harks back to the ‘good old days’ when Achaia was great and had strong and glorious kings – ‘leaders of men’ and ‘kings of many islands’ who knew what to do when foreigners came and plundered their treasures or carried off their women.

That said, did the bards, who originally conceived the idea of recording in song the names and deeds of the heroes who took part in the ‘Trojan War’, actually know something about the leaders and forces of a real war, or did they concoct the great list of places from Mycenaean Greece? Did they invent heroes from the stock names, like Ajax, whose tower shield perhaps betrays him as a hero of an earlier stratum of epic? Or Achilles, with his sea goddess mother and his magical attributes? Also, if there
was
Mycenaean epic poetry, then the tale of Troy would not have been the first siege to be the subject of song. We find a siege portrayed on the sixteenth-century ‘siege rhyton’ (vase) found by Schliemann; an attack on a town was depicted on a wall-painting in the megaron at Mycenae; the story of the expedition against Thebes may already have been the subject of story and song, and a suitable model. Are there, in fact, any specific elements in the tale of Troy which suggest that the epic which has come down to us accurately remembered details and incidents of a real Bronze-Age event?

HOMER’S STORY

I take it that certain central facts in Homer’s story must be correct if we are to accept even the basic
likelihood
of the tale of Troy. If we cannot yet prove that a city called Troy was sacked by Greeks, we can at least show that in other significant details Homeric tradition was right. For instance, Hittite and Egyptian evidence suggests that Homer was correct in names he called the peoples: Achaians and Danaans, in the case of the Greeks, and Dardanians in the case of the Trojans. But was Troy actually called Troy?

As we have seen, nothing has ever been found on the site of Hisarlik which indicates its name in the Bronze Age. Even if diplomatic tablets did exist there, they were destroyed long ago. Linear B could give us a Trojan woman (
Toroja
) but we cannot be certain. In a Hittite document of
c
.1420 BC the western Anatolian state of Wilusa or (Wilusiya) appears next to a place called Taruisa, which – tantalisingly – appears only this once in the Hittite archive. If we could postulate an alternative form, Taruiya, for this name then we might have similar forms to Homer’s Troia and Wilios in north-western Anatolia at the right time. However the present state of research into Hittite geography means that this seductive hypothesis cannot be pressed too far. The knotty problems surrounding the possible appearance of Greeks in Hittite sources are discussed in
Chapter 6
, but we can at least say that, as our evidence for Late-Bronze-Age geography grows, Homer has not yet been proved wrong and in some new instances we can corroborate his story. But it is to Hisarlik itself that we must go to have any hope of answering the question, did the story centre on Hisarlik–Troy from the Late Bronze Age:
was
Hisarlik always the focus of the Greek epic of Troy?

‘SACRED ILIOS’: HOMER ON THE TOPOGRAPHY OF TROY

How long had Troy featured in the tale? In other words, was the story always about a city which stood near the Dardanelles in the
region since called the Troad? We need to ask this question, for it has often been claimed that the bards grafted the Trojan location on to an older model, for instance a poem about the Mycenaean sack of Thebes, or even an Achaian attack on Egypt such as that mentioned in the
Odyssey
. In a sense it does not matter what date we assign to Homer, whether the tale was composed in Ionia in 730 BC or was written down from a Chiot bard in around 550 BC. Whichever date we choose, we are concerned with the period of the Aeolian Greek colony founded on Hisarlik in the eighth century BC. We have seen evidence in the tale of the Lokrian maidens in
Chapter 1
that this place was already associated with the tale of a Greek expedition to Troy before around 700. Even if we assume, as many do, that a bard called Homer actually visited the Aeolian colony of Ilion soon after its foundation in
c
.750 BC, we have to explain why obscure little Ilion became the centrepiece for the Greek national epic. It is a question which those who flatly deny the historicity of the Trojan War have found difficult to answer. What we cannot know for certain is whether, around 730 BC, architectural features of Bronze-Age Hisarlik (Troy VI–VII) were still visible. But if an epic tale which goes back to the end of the Bronze Age told of an attack on a real citadel of that time, should there not be surviving traces in Homer’s description?