In Search of the Trojan War (22 page)

As we saw in
Chapter 1
, the earliest travellers to the Troad were convinced that the poet had sung from personal observation – that he had actually been there. From Cyriac of Ancona to Alexander Kinglake visitors had seen, for instance, that it is indeed possible to see Samothrace from the top of Hisarlik, peeping over the heights of Imbros 50 miles away: ‘So Homer appointed it, and it was,’ as Kinglake said. There was certainly no disputing the general lie of the land – the islands, the Dardanelles, Mount Ida and so on – but other aspects of Homeric topography caused (and still cause) controversy; for instance the double spring of hot and cold water below the western wall – perhaps the most precise topographical feature that Homer mentions – could not be found and led as acute an investigator as Lechevalier astray, to the ‘Forty Eyes’ springs at Bunarbashi. Schliemann did in fact find remains of
a spring, 200 yards from the west wall at Hisarlik, which had been blocked long ago by an earthquake, though it seems likely that the poet merged the Bunarbashi springs with the Hisarlik one for poetic effect. The problem is not so much Homer’s ‘accuracy’ as a topographer, which is strictly a nonsensical idea, but the powerful effect his largely generic descriptions have had on everyone who reads him – but then that is what good poets do! On any reading of the evidence it would be expecting too much to expect all these epithets and details to cohere on the ground, but is it possible that, as Bronze-Age elements have certainly survived elsewhere in the poem, something has been preserved of Troy itself?

The general epithets Homer uses for Troy are of course not inapposite for the citadel on Hisarlik – ‘well-built, beetling, steep, horse breeding’, and so on – but none is linguistically early; horse breeding, for instance, has attracted the attention of archaeologists because their finds of numerous horse bones suggest that horse breeding was a feature of the Bronze-Age Trojan plain (as it was later); but the phrase itself is not of Mycenaean date, though the memory is conceivably early. Well-built walls, strong towers and wide streets – which impressed Dörpfeld so much in Troy VI – are certainly applicable to Late-Bronze-Age Hisarlik more than to any other fortress in the Aegean, but they are applied to other places by Homer. ‘Windy’ is interesting; it is used of only one other place, Enispe, as we have already seen, and it is certainly applicable to Hisarlik, as anyone knows who has stood on it and felt the north wind which sweeps all year long round what was once a higher promontory. But such a description does not mean we have touched the Bronze Age. The description of Ilios as ‘holy’ is notable and raises a special linguistic problem: the word used comes from Aeolia, the north-western Aegean, and not Ionia, and may well be from an early linguistic stratum of the story, though probably not of the Mycenaean Age; nevertheless the finds of cult idols around the gates of Troy VI on Hisarlik, including six at the southern gate alone, could suggest that the place was remembered as having been uniquely sacred.

It is a pity that Homer is not more precise about the
relationship of the citadel to the sea for new discoveries show that in the Bronze Age Hisarlik was actually a sea-girt headland. At the time of Troy II the ramp found by Schliemann went down to a narrow plain and the sea, a wide bay which was entered between two headlands. By the time of Troy VI the sea was probably a mile from the hill. Troy, then, was a major port at the mouth of the Dardanelles which, like Miletus and Ephesus, eventually silted up and lost its
raison d’être
. This crucial discovery makes sense of the whole history of Troy–Hisarlik in a way impossible before (though the existence of the bay was assumed by ancient writers and by early modern writers such as Wood). Homer’s topographical indications, however, do not in this case describe what he must have seen, though two phrases
may
reflect it, where he has the eddying Scamander coming down to the ‘broad bay of the sea’ and when he describes a ship turning aside from the main channel of the Hellespont to come ‘within Ilios’. We cannot, it would seem, say that Homer’s topography is more like the Late Bronze Age than his own time, though some geomorphologists who have studied the new evidence think that it might be.

The poetic diction surrounding Troy and Ilios is not, of course, restricted to noun-epithet phrases like ‘windy Troy’ and so on. It contains certain archaic features which are not closely datable, such as the strange preposition
proti
and the regular observance of the digamma (the ‘W’, which does not exist in later Greek) in
W
ilios, the original form of Ilios. The broad impression gained by linguistics from this kind of material is that the story and its phraseology have been gradually refined and reduced to achieve extraordinary flexibility and utility with a very small vocabulary – an important proof that the tale of Troy had been told many times before it reached the form it takes in the
Iliad
. But what linguists cannot say is whether those many tellings spanned one, ten or twenty generations of epic singers.

To summarise: it is thought that narrative poetry of some kind existed in the Mycenaean Age and that some fragments of it exist in Homer, but very few in number; a very large part of Homeric formulaic vocabulary is more recent. But of course
fragments of the hypothetical Mycenaean saga may exist in the Homeric epic quite independently of vocabulary and diction. The most striking example is the famous boar’s-tusk helmet, manifestly a Mycenaean object though there is nothing in the diction of Homer’s description which is ancient in itself. This reminds us that archaic diction can drop out of a text transmitted in this way even when an accurate description remains. In this light let us finally look at three points in Homer’s physical description of Troy which can be considered as going back to the Bronze Age and which a singer of Homer’s day may perhaps not have known. In none is there any linguistic feature which
must
be old; in all there are rare authentic details which could derive from an actual siege description of Bronze-Age Hisarlik.

1. The ‘batter’ or ‘angle’ of the walls of Troy: ‘three times Patroclus climbed up the angle of the lofty wall’ (
Iliad
, XVI, 702). Is this a description of the characteristic feature of the architecture of Troy VI? Blegen notes in his report that there were sections where the blocks were not close-fitting which his workmen could easily scale in just this fashion. (Only the top courses of the walls of Troy VI were visible in the eighth century BC, ‘so weathered that they could hardly be recognised as the once splendid masonry’, said Dörpfeld.)

2. ‘The great tower of Ilios’ (
Iliad
, VI, 386). This was a beautifully built tower flanking the main gate of Troy, and there is an implication that it could be a place of propitiation – Andromache goes there instead of to the temple of Athena. The south gate of Troy VI was certainly the main gate of the Late-Bronze-Age city, the ‘Scaean Gate’ if any (now that we know the plain was a bay it makes sense that the main gate faced inland, and there is no archaeological evidence for a major gate facing the bay). The south gate of Troy VI vas flanked by a great tower of finely jointed limestone blocks; moreover it was built round a major altar, and outside were six pedestals (for cult idols?) and a cult house for burnt sacrifices. All in all there seems a case that the ‘great tower of Ilios’ preserves a memory of Troy VI.

3. Perhaps the most precise memory of all is the stretch of wall
that was
epidromos
‘by the fig tree where the city is openest to attack and where the wall may be mounted’ (
Iliad
, VI, 434). This tradition of a weak wall, apparently on the west, received extraordinary archaeological confirmation when Dörpfeld, as we saw in
Chapter 2
, found that the circuit wall had been modernised except in one short stretch of inferior construction on the western side. Again, this suggests an authentic detail from Troy VI.

It seems fair to conclude that the tale of Troy antedates the
Iliad
by at
least
the length of time needed for Ionian oral singers to create the extensive and elaborate but refined and economised range of epithets and formulas for Ilios, Troy and the Trojans. There is good reason to think, as Martin Nilsson did in his classic study
Homer and Mycenae
(1933), that the expedition against Troy is the fundamental fact and central point of the myth and must go back to the Bronze Age. Non-Homeric, mainland, versions of the saga existed too, suggesting that the story antedated at least part of the migration period. These pointers carry the theme well before the Aeolian Greek settlement of the Troad and the refounding of Greek Ilion, whose earliest possible date is
c
.750 BC. Only the strange story of the Lokrian maidens (
see here
) suggests any Greek connection with, or interest in, the Troad in the Dark Ages, and there seems no historical or archaeological peg to explain the creation of a tale of Troy between the end of the Bronze Age and the eighth century BC. This is one of the arguments which in my opinion defeat the attempts of some scholars to deny any connection between the story and the site of Hisarlik. A deserted, ruined and overgrown site in a sparsely populated area of northwest Anatolia, with no visible links with Greece, surely cannot have been selected as the setting for the Greek national epic unless it had at some time in the past been the focus of warlike deeds memorable enough to have been celebrated in song. The simplest explanation is that the tale of Troy owed its central place in later epic tradition to the fact that it was the
last
such exploit before the disintegration of the Mycenaean world – bards in all cultures must have in their repertoire the most up-to-date songs as well as the traditional ones, and Troy was the last.

FIVE

AGAMEMNON’S EMPIRE

… Powerful Agamemnon

Stood up holding the sceptre Hephaistos had wrought him carefully
.

Hephaistos gave it to Zeus the king, the son of Kronos
,

And Zeus in turn gave it to the courier Argeiphontes
,

And lord Hermes gave it to Pelops, driver of horses
,

And Pelops again gave it to Atreus, the shepherd of the people
.

Atreus dying left it to Thyestes of the rich flocks
,

And Thyestes left it in turn to Agamemnon to carry

And to be lord of many islands and over all Argos
.

HOMER,
Iliad
, II, 101–8 (translated by R. Lattimore)

IN HOMER’S VERSION
of the tale of Troy, despite the anachronisms, one basic fact is clear and consistent in his picture of Greece – that Agamemnon of Mycenae was the most powerful king in Greece, and that he wielded some sort of loose overlordship over the other independent kings of mainland Greece, of Crete, and some of the islands. In Homer’s eyes, then, mainland Greece and the islands are one world, in which it is quite feasible for local rulers to acknowledge the leadership of a ‘high king’, at least in time of war. If we are to accept Homer’s tale, this situation is basic to it. We might note at the outset that such overlordships are a common feature of this kind of society in many historical epochs, for instance in the European Dark Ages, and are frequently encountered in Bronze-Age kingship in the Near East, so Homer’s picture of Greece is in itself by no means impossible or implausible. But is it correct? Is it really conceivable that an Achaian Greek coalition under a Mycenaean overlord could have attacked north-western Asia Minor and sacked a city there? In the previous four chapters I have tried to
trace the background to, and the assumptions behind, the search for Troy and the Trojan War. It is now time to start piecing together an interpretation.

First I want to make a general observation on the trailblazing efforts of Schliemann, Tsountas, Evans, Wace, Blegen and the rest. Archaeology
has
been able to show that the most prosperous and populous age of the mainland Greek states, the ‘palace’ or ‘empire’ period when Mycenaean expansion in the Aegean was at its height, was the fourteenth and early thirteenth centuries BC, in other words in the period leading up to the time to which ancient tradition unanimously placed the ‘imperial’ venture of the Trojan expedition. The first great buildings of Cyclopean walls at Mycenae, Tiryns and Gla are no earlier than the fourteenth century BC; the really massive final achievement – walls, gates, the immense tholos tombs at Mycenae and Orchomenos – is mid-thirteenth century. The time and the scale of the achievement are right.

Mycenae was undoubtedly the greatest palace-fortress in Greece. Tiryns may have been subsidiary to it, though recent finds of Linear B tablets there have suggested a measure of independence. Pylos, Iolkos, Thebes and Orchomenos were clearly also major regional ‘capitals’ with richly adorned palaces. Lakonia (Sparta) has not yet produced for certain the palace site which Schliemann sought, but two possible major centres are known, at Vaphio and the Menelaion, and the latter is of very large extent, reoccupied in the mid-thirteenth century. So in Sparta too – the other great Homeric palace of the mainland – we may well have a major dynastic centre to match that in the epic; conceivably we may even have reoccupation of an old Lakonian royal site by the newcomer, the foreign, Atreid King Menelaos whom legend says married into the Spartan royal family and became their king at this time. The other key site in Lakonia is the cult (and palace?) site at Amyklai, again mentioned by Homer (it is where Paris first meets Helen); here recent research has indicated some kind of continuity of worship into classical times. All these places were closely linked in their
culture, so far as we can judge by the archaeological remains. Mycenae, Pylos and the Menelaion are indistinguishable in their pottery; the frescoes of Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos speak of the same royal and noble civilisation, the same artistic traditions and tastes; the Linear B archives now known also from Thebes and Tiryns show that the main kingdoms all shared the same organisation and bureaucratic method; their stone and stucco ornament is so similar in design and execution that it has suggested to many (including Arthur Evans) that the same artists and sculptors may have travelled from kingdom to kingdom (just as Homer asserts in the
Odyssey
, though the same was true of his own time). The great tholos tombs at Orchomenos and Mycenae are so close in measurement and technique that they have been attributed to the same architect. This swift, impressionistic survey shows that there is a powerful argument for the homogeneity of Mycenaean culture, and, over 100 years on from Schliemann’s dig at Tiryns, I can only emphasise how correct this extraordinary ‘amateur’ was in his basic hunch: this was indeed one world, it shared a common culture and (we now know) a common language; hence it seems entirely justifiable to speculate that the rulers of this world had a sense of their ‘Greekness’ and had a common word to describe themselves, perhaps something like Homer’s
Achaiwoi
, ‘Achaians’.