In Search of the Trojan War (3 page)

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 Ilios
, were evidently of great scope and power. They were composed soon after Homer: if he lived in the late eighth century BC (see
Chapter 4
) then his successors were probably working around 700 BC or soon after, by which time writing was becoming widespread in Greece. These successors to Homer may have written down their epics, but it is clear from the surviving fragments that they, like Homer, were drawing heavily on a long oral tradition.

According to Greek tradition, Troy stood near the Dardanelles. Of its general location in the story there has never been any dispute. The topographical landmarks are all familiar and easily placed: the Dardanelles themselves, the islands of Imbros, Samothrace and little Tenedos, Mount Ida to the south-east, the plain itself and the river Scamander which flowed down
through the foothills of Ida. It was an ancient city whose inhabitants were known as Teucrians or Dardanians (after legendary founders back in the mists of time) but also as Trojans or Ilians: the legends invent eponymous heroes, Tros and his uncle Ilus, to account for these two names but other accounts say with some probability that originally Troy and Ilios were two separate places (and indeed Homer’s insistence on using the two names for Troy has never otherwise been satisfactorily explained). Ilus was the father of Laomedon, an important figure in the legends of Troy, for he it was who built the great walls of Troy mentioned in the tradition. In this he was helped by Apollo and Poseidon, but he tried to cheat the gods of their reward and this led to the first sack of Troy. It may be a surprise to learn of an earlier sack of Troy, but Greek legend is insistent on it. We need not go into the antecedents here – suffice it to say that Laomedon would not give up the immortal snow-white horses which were owed to Herakles (Hercules) who had helped Laomedon by destroying a sea monster sent by Poseidon. Herakles then recruited a small army in the Peloponnese – only six ships according to Homer – sailed to the Troad and attacked the city, breaching it at a place destined to be famous in the later siege, the weak spot in the western wall where the beautiful walls had not replaced the older circuit. In the sack Laomedon and his sons were killed; only the youngest, Podarces, survived, for he alone had maintained that Herakles should be given his rightful reward. Podarces was released and took a new name, Priam, meaning ‘redeemed’: a fateful name indeed. Herakles left Priam as a young king, and Troy was restored within the same walls.

Over a very long and successful reign, spanning three generations, Priam restored Troy to the height of its former power. He himself had fifty sons and twelve daughters; his eldest son was the great warrior Hector, the next Paris, whose other name was Alexandros – and Paris was to be the instrument of destiny in the events that followed.

For the ancients Troy was a real place, and in the Homeric epic there are a number of indications as to what the tradition
thought it looked like in its heyday under Priam. Most of the descriptive epithets in Homer are stock phrases, and should not be taken too seriously, but some are at least worth remembering. Homer’s Troy is ‘well-walled’; it is a ‘broad city’, with ‘lofty gates’ and ‘fine towers’; it has ‘wide streets’. Some are applied only to Ilios, which is ‘holy’, ‘sacred’, ‘steep’, ‘sheer’, ‘lovely’, but ‘very windy’. Like Troy it is ‘well-built’ but also has ‘good horses’ – indeed the people of Troy are several times called ‘horse tamers’ or ‘having fine foals’ (uniquely among all the people mentioned by Homer – perhaps tradition remembered that horse breeding was a characteristic of their people?). As for the layout of the town, Homer describes a great city with beautiful, strong walls, extensive enough to hold a large population. On the top of the acropolis was the palace of Priam with halls of state, a royal throne-room, fifty marble chambers for the king’s sons, and royal halls for Hector and Paris; there was, says Homer, an agora where the people of the city met, a temple to Athena in the higher city, and a temple to Apollo in the citadel, the ‘Pergamos’ of Priam. The city seems to have had at least four gates, including the Scaean and the Dardanian gates, and at one was ‘the great tower of Ilios’. Of course such descriptions cannot be taken too seriously – in some ways this is obviously a fairy-tale city, a place of the imagination, for it bears little relation to excavated towns of Homer’s day – but for what it is worth, it seems reasonable to think that Homer was imagining a city far bigger than the later Aeolian colony of Ilion of his own day, 200 yards across; even the great eighth-century Ionian city of Smyrna was only 300 yards by 150. The Troy of Homer’s mind’s eye evidently had a sizeable acropolis and a lower walled town with a population of several thousands. This then was the great city of Troy which was the stage for the tale.

On the mainland of Greece in the time of Priam’s old age the most powerful king was Agamemnon, whose residence was at Mycenae. At this time the inhabitants of Greece called themselves not Greeks or Hellenes, but Achaians, Danaans or Argives. Agamemnon’s family, the Atreids, were from Lydia in
western Turkey; they had married into the Perseid dynasty at Mycenae, and they controlled the Argolid with its chief fortresses at Tiryns and Midea. Their influence extended throughout southern Greece, particularly by advantageous dynastic marriages. Agamemnon himself had married Clytemnestra, daughter of Tyndareus of Sparta and sister to Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. When Helen grew to womanhood all the princes of Greece wanted her hand, but she went to Agamemnon’s brother Menelaos, the richest and most eligible bachelor in Greece, who thus became king in Lakonia; so the two brothers from Mycenae now had a position of overwhelming power in southern Greece.

Why
the Trojan War happened the legends and Homer do not agree, but a famous myth tells
how
. Eris – strife – had thrown down a golden apple ‘for the fairest’ at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, and Zeus, king of the gods, could not bring himself to adjudicate in the ensuing dispute between his queen, Hera, Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Aphrodite, goddess of love. The goddesses were led to the Trojan Mount Ida where Priam’s beautiful son Paris was to act as arbiter. Hera offered him the lordship of all Asia, and untold riches; Athena, victory in war and wisdom beyond any other man; Aphrodite promised the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta, and of course men being men, and stories being stories, Paris gave the apple to her.

Homer does not deal with the judgement of Paris, theme of so much later art. His tale is simple and quite realistic. Paris goes on a visit to Sparta and is feasted by Menelaos in his richly adorned palace at Amyklai. On the tenth day of the celebrations, Menelaos has to leave for Crete to see Idomeneus, king of Knossos. As Aphrodite had promised, Helen immediately eloped with Paris. Their first night in each other’s arms was spent on the little isle of Kranai near Githeon. Then they sailed for Troy. There are other versions of this tale which might be borne in mind. Some said that Paris carried off Helen by force, that the seizure was really a Trojan raid on Lakonia to seize treasure and women, and indeed Homer agrees that Helen left with palace treasures;
some say that other royal women and slaves were taken too, and that Paris plundered elsewhere in the Aegean before returning to Troy.

When the bad news was brought to Menelaos in Crete he hurried to Mycenae and begged his brother Agamemnon to lead an army to Troy to take revenge. This the king agreed to do, though he first sent off envoys to Troy demanding Helen’s restitution, with compensation. When the envoys came back empty-handed, Menelaos and his ally, old King Nestor of Pylos, travelled over Greece, asking the independent kings of Greece to join them in the expedition. The Achaian–Greek army met at Aulis, a protected bay in the straits between Euboea and the mainland, ‘where the tides come together’ (as they still do). In the story the great heroes in the army were Achilles, Odysseus (Ulysses) and Ajax, but their kingdoms were insignificant: the biggest contingents were from the Peloponnese (Pylos, Sparta, Tiryns and Mycenae) and Crete (Knossos). In Homer’s
Iliad
there is preserved an ancient and strange catalogue of 164 places in Greece which is said to be a list of those who sent troops to Troy. As Agamemnon was the strongest king in Greece the others acknowledged him as overlord.

At Aulis the army seer read the signs and prophesied that Troy would fall in the tenth year (that is, from this first assembly). The Greeks then set sail for Asia Minor and in error launched an attack on Teuthrania in Mysia, opposite Lesbos, devastating the land, which they had mistaken for Trojan territory. In a battle in the plain at the mouth of the Caïcus river they were driven back to their ships by Telephus, king of Mysia, and beaten into a ‘shameful retreat’: they retired to Greece. Tradition is uncertain over how long a time elapsed between this abortive attack and the second and famous assembly at Aulis, though some thought it was eight years; the legend does not insist on the Greeks actually spending ten years under the walls of Troy.

When the Greeks assembled again at Aulis they were windbound and unable to sail. Famine struck and still they waited. Aeschylus writes in the
Agamemnon
that ‘the winds that
blew from the Strymon bringing delay, hunger, evil harbourage, crazing men, rotting ships and cables … were shredding into nothing the flower of Argos’. The army prophet Calchas then revealed that Agamemnon had offended Artemis and would never sail unless he sacrificed his most beautiful daughter to appease the goddess and change the wind. Although later tradition let her escape, early sources agree that Iphigenia (or Iphianassa as Homer calls her) was sacrificed by the generals.

So the wind veered and the fleet at last set sail. Their first landfall was in Lesbos, then Tenedos, which was visible from Troy and ruled by a dynasty related to the Trojans: here they plundered and ravaged. Now the Greeks beached their ships on the shore of Asia in a wide bay between two headlands, and here they made their camp, protecting the landward side with a wall of earth, timber and stones; here, according to Homer, they spent the years of war that followed. The Trojans also had allies, from several places in Asia Minor and Thrace, and the struggle swayed back and forth, with both sides using chariots but also fighting hand to hand on foot with bronze swords, shields and spears and wearing bronze body armour. Some elements of the story suggest that Troy was perhaps not the only objective for the Greeks; Achilles, for instance, led a great foray southwards, sacking several cities on the mainland and on the islands of Lesbos, Skyros and Tenedos. According to Homer, he brought back not only booty but ‘women of skill’; some he gave to Agamemnon, but he kept the most beautiful for himself. Ajax too plundered in Teuthrania, taking women, cattle and treasure and seizing the king’s daughter for his concubine.

In the tenth year of the war (the year in which it had been prophesied Troy would fall) the Greeks ceased raiding Asia Minor and attacked Troy in earnest, and the Trojans were reinforced by allies from south-west Anatolia. The Trojan hero Hector now fell in single combat with Achilles, the best Greek warrior (this incident alone is the subject of Homer’s
Iliad
); this happened after the death of Achilles’ friend Patroclus, in revenge for which Achilles sacrificed twelve noble Trojan captives over Hector’s
funeral pyre. The end was now near, though not an end to the sufferings of the Greeks, the ‘pains thousandfold upon the Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades’ of which Homer sang. After the death of the Trojan ally Memnon in battle at the Scaean gate, Paris dealt Achilles a fatal blow with a bowshot, striking him in the heel, the only place where he was vulnerable (hence we talk today of an ‘Achilles’ heel’). And so the greatest of all Greek heroes was burned and his ashes buried on a headland overlooking the Hellespont. Worse was to follow for the Greeks. Maddened by a dispute over his right to Achilles’ arms, Ajax committed suicide with the silver-studded sword which had been given to him by Hector as a mark of respect. At this point Priam’s son Paris – the cause of it all – was killed by Philoktetes, but the Trojans still refused to give Helen up. It was then that the plan was hatched to build a wooden horse to gain access to the city by stealth and trickery. The horse had a hollow belly in which armed men were hidden, among them Odysseus of Ithaca and Menelaos himself. The horse was to be left as a thank-offering to Athena, and the Greeks were to burn their camp and put to sea as if they had given up. Off Tenedos they would wait until a fire signal summoned them back.