In Search of the Trojan War (5 page)

‘PILGRIMS’ IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Such was the potency of the myth that a whole parade of conquerors felt drawn to stand and gaze on the plain where Achilles and Hector had fought it out. By then a small Greek colony had been founded on the overgrown ruins on Hisarlik. This was where tradition said the Trojan War had taken place, and in that belief the colonists of around 700 BC called it Ilion. When the Persian king Xerxes was poised to cross the Hellespont from Asia to Europe in 480 BC, Herodotus tells us:

He had a strong desire to see Troy. Accordingly he went up into the citadel [i.e. of the city of Ilion] and when he had seen what he wanted to see and heard the story of the place from the people there, he sacrificed a thousand oxen to the Trojan Athena and the Magi made libations of wine to the great men of old.

One hundred and fifty years later the crossing of the Dardanelles the other way, from Europe to Asia, was associated with the Trojan War in the suggestible mind of Alexander the Great. Alexander was intoxicated by the world of the gods and heroes, as they had been portrayed by his favourite poet Homer (he carried the
Iliad
with him and slept with it under his pillow). Leading his flotilla of ships to the Troad, Alexander sacrificed in mid-channel to Poseidon (so hostile to the Greeks in the Trojan War) and was the first to spring ashore on Trojan soil, throwing his spear into the ground to reinforce his claim that Asia was his, ‘won by the spear’ and ‘given by the gods’. Then, going into the walls of Ilion itself, he dedicated his armour to the Trojan Athena and took from her shrine ancient arms and a shield which (so it was claimed) had been preserved from the Trojan War. Leaving Troy he laid a wreath at Achilles’ tomb in the plain, as Arrian (
c
.AD 150) recounts, ‘calling him a lucky man, in that he had Homer to proclaim his deeds and preserve his memory’.

Alexander’s successors dignified little Ilion with a city wall, though it would never compete with a new city founded before 300 BC on the coast, Alexandria Troas. By Roman times the town, now known as Ilium, was semi-derelict. But once more, fired by the legend, a rich patron came along who believed in Homer’s ‘sacred Ilios’. Just as Alexander had claimed ancestry from the Greek hero Achilles, so Julius Caesar called the Trojan Aeneas his ancestor, and in 48 BC, according to Lucan in the
Pharsalia
, written in the first century AD, he visited the Sigeum promontory and the river Simois ‘where so many heroes had died’, and where now ‘no stone is nameless’: ‘He walked around what had once been Troy, now only a name, and looked for traces of the great wall which the god Apollo had built. But he found the hill clothed with thorny scrub and decaying trees, whose aged roots were embedded in the foundations.’ (‘Be careful, lest you tread on Hector’s ghost,’ a local enjoined him.) But ‘even the ruins had been destroyed’. Caesar’s disappointment would be echoed by many searchers who came after him! Lucan uses the
occasion to meditate on the immortality conferred by poets on egomaniac militarists: ‘Yet Caesar need not have felt jealous of the heroes commemorated by Homer, because if Latin poetry has any future at all, this poem will be remembered as long as Homer’s.’ Posterity, thankfully, has not thought so highly of Lucan’s poem as he did, but his account contains Caesar’s interesting promise to rebuild Troy as the Roman capital, a story which Horace had told in his
Odes
: ‘reroofing their ancestral home.’

The Roman love affair with Troy reached its consummation in the epic of the Roman state, Virgil’s
Aeneid
, written in 30–19 BC, which enshrined the story of Roman descent from Aeneas and the Trojans. The affair was to experience a strange afterglow in the fourth century AD when Constantine the Great first tried to build his new capital of the Roman Empire on the Sigeum ridge at Troy before turning his attention to Constantinople. At a place still called Yenisehir (‘New City’) the gates were said to have been visible to seafarers approaching the Dardanelles over a century after Constantine’s day, and parts of the walls were still seen by Elizabethan and eighteenth-century travellers. Today a walk along the ridge reveals not a trace remaining. The situation would have offered as much natural beauty as that of Constantinople, and been more convenient. But the reason why it was abandoned after the erection of great buildings is obvious: by then, the great bay which had been the reason for Troy’s existence for over 3000 years had silted up and ceased to exist – Troy no longer had a harbour.

My last story of Troy from the classical period comes from a wonderfully vivid letter from the Emperor Julian, written before his reign in the winter of AD 354–5. As is well known, Julian worshipped the ‘old gods’, that is the pagan pantheon to which classical man had sacrificed since before Homer, and this despite the fact that his uncle Constantine had adopted Christianity as the official ‘state’ religion in the early years of the century. Julian entertained hopes that the hated ‘Galilean’ (as he called Jesus) would not in the end conquer – indeed Julian
would try to do something practical about it when he became emperor.

That winter Julian’s ship put into Alexandria Troas opposite Tenedos, and being an ardent Hellenist, not to say besotted with Homer, Julian took the opportunity to walk up to Troy, the city of Ilium Novum, though his friends gloomily predicted that he would find the shrine desecrated by the Christians, and the tomb of Achilles vandalised. First on the tour was the shrine to Hector, and there to his astonishment Julian found a fire still burning on the altar and the cult statue still glistening with offering-oil. ‘What is this? Do the people of Ilium still give sacrifices?’ he asked the Christian bishop, who replied: ‘Are you surprised that they should show respect for their distinguished fellow citizen, just as we show ours for the martyrs?’ They walked up to the temple of Athena and again Julian saw that offerings had been made; nor, he noticed, did the bishop make the sign of the cross as Christians did ‘on their impious foreheads’, or hiss between his teeth to ward off the evil spirits which were thought to inhabit such places. The tomb of Achilles, too, was intact. Julian soon realised that it was the bishop himself who was keeping the flame burning. The two men walked around the city and discoursed on its antiquities and ancient glories, swapping (one imagines) Homeric tags. When Julian returned to his ship that evening it was with a sense of deep relief and barely suppressed joy: the old world was, if momentarily, still intact, the memory maintained, the correct observances performed.

Of course the old world, the world which had invented the tale of Troy and the Homeric heroes, and which made them a precipitate of its own beliefs, was about to end, at least in terms of the classical tradition of education and culture (though not, perhaps, in those deeper structures of Mediterranean life which – as we shall see – changed imperceptibly only over centuries). The Roman Empire in the west was about to disintegrate, and its new breed of witnesses did not find any moral succour for such cataclysms in the works of Homer:
their
Bible was Christian. The young Augustine of Hippo, the future saint, born in the year
of Julian’s journey to Ilium, was taught the classics as part of his education in North Africa, but admits to being bored to distraction by Homer (in fact he never bothered to learn Greek): evidently Hellenism was on the way out in fourth-century Christian (North African) Thagaste. Augustine and his like would soon inherit the earth, or at least its western part. The Christian father Basil, an older contemporary of Augustine (he had briefly been a fellow student with Julian at Athens), made a point of denying that the Trojan War ever happened: what was it, after all, but a mere pagan tale? It was a sign of the times. There were of course still Homeric scholars in fifth-century Byzantium, but their Greek studies were directed to a new end: the Empress Eudoxia, wife of Theodosius II, for instance, wrote a
Life of Jesus
in Homeric verse!

Our last glimpse into the extraordinary hold which Homer maintained on the classical imagination for 1000 years is provided by a remarkable last testament of civilised Hellenism, the
Saturnalia
of Macrobius (early fifth century AD) which portrays literate and civilised Roman gentlemen, who still do know their Attic Greek, spending a dinner party making the most elaborate parallels between Homer’s and Virgil’s treatment of the story of Troy. To the very end the intelligentsia and political élite of the ancient world lived by Homer: Macrobius’ diners clearly knew huge chunks off by heart.

But when the table had been cleared from that particular banquet, the early Middle Ages would be left more austere fare, a diet of Christian exegesis which usually rejected such stuff as Homer and called it devil’s entertainment. In the orthodox east, Byzantium (as a Christian empire) was an enemy of Hellenism and equated Homer and the rest with paganism and polytheism. In the west knowledge of Greek nearly vanished altogether, and not until the nineteenth century did the kind of obsessive cultivation of Homer reappear of which Julian and Macrobius would have approved. But that, as it were, is another story: in the west the
story
of Troy, in whatever form it came, never ceased to be told.

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE TALE, FROM SAXON STORIES AND TUDOR MYTHS TO FIRST-WORLD-WAR POETS

Four hundred and thirty winters before Rome was founded [i.e. 1183 BC] it happened that Alexander son of Priam the king of the
burh
of Troy abducted Helen, the wife of king Menelaus of Lacedaemonia, a Greek city. Over her was fought that great and famous war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The Greeks had a thousand ships of what we call the big longship type, and they swore an oath to each other that they would never return to their native land until they had avenged their wrongs. And for ten years they besieged that town and fought around it. Who can say how many men were killed on either side, of which the bard Homer has told! There is no need for me to tell it, says Orosius, for it is a long story and in any case everybody knows it. Nevertheless whoever wishes to know it can read in his books what evils took place, and what victims by manslaughter, by hunger, by shipwreck and by various misdeeds, as is told in the stories. For full ten years the war was waged between these people. Think then on those times, and on our own, which are the best to live in!

An Anglo-Saxon account of the Trojan War, from a translation of Orosius made
c
.AD 895 in the circle of Alfred the Great

The story of Troy never lost its appeal in the millennium between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. It fascinated the thegns of Alfred the Great around the firesides of Viking-Age Wessex, and with an added dash of love interest it was a hit in the courtly societies of twelfth-century Europe; indeed it was at this time that a most influential vernacular poetic version was made by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, an Anglo-Norman trouvère at the court of Henry II (
Roman de Troie
,
c
.1160). The tale translated well to the world of chivalry, of
vaillants chevaliers
and
bons vassaus
. It was, incidentally, Benoît’s fickle Briseida (
trop est mes cuers muable et fel
) who provided Shakespeare with his model for ‘false Cressid’ through that landmark in English translation, Caxton’s
Recuyell
of the Historyes of Troye
(
c
.1475), a prose version from Benoît via the French of Raoul le Fèvre. In framing his account Benoît in his turn had used the late Roman stories of Dares and Dictys, the former allegedly a translation of the
Iliad
story older than Homer, the latter supposed to have been unearthed at Knossos in Nero’s time. It is one of the curiosities of historiography that during this period these two worthless pieces of fiction had pride of place as authorities for the Trojan War, which they were thought to have actually witnessed. This was especially pertinent as several western nations followed the Virgilian idea of tracing their ancestry back to Aeneas and those Trojans who were thought to have escaped the sack and emigrated to Italy and further west. Strangely enough, it was in Britain that the Trojan theme was particularly tenacious.

Back in the declining days of the late Roman Empire we first find evidence of the Troy tale being appropriated by the invading barbarians as a way of getting themselves more closely identified with the ancient and superior Roman culture they were to inherit. Not long before the fall of Rome the historian Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that fugitive Trojans had settled in Gaul (now France), and soon enough the story was made to serve political ends. In about AD 550 Cassiodorus’
History of the Goths
claimed Trojan descent for Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king of Italy. The Franks next appropriated the tale, inventing their mythical eponymous ancestor, Francus the Trojan. It was a good story, and from France it soon came to Britain. In Dark-Age Wales, as related by Nennius, it was told that the founder of Britain was one Brutus, who was descended from ‘Ilius’ who ‘first founded Ilium, that is Troy’. This story was popularised by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his famous story of Brutus’ founding of London as Troynovant, or New Troy. Though dismissed by the historian Polydore Vergil, this story was accepted by most Elizabethan poets as part of the Tudor myth, and it became a commonplace of Elizabethan thought. The Tudors, it was argued, were of Welsh or ancient British descent, and therefore, when they ascended the throne of England after the battle of Bosworth
in 1485, so ran the myth, the ancient Trojan–British race of monarchs once more assumed imperial power and would usher in the Golden Age. Hence in Armada year Elizabeth could be greeted at Gray’s Inn as ‘that sweet remain of Priam’s state: that hope of springing Troy’, and in the famous painting of 1569 in Hampton Court she, not Athena, Aphrodite or Hera, receives the golden apple in the judgement of Paris! So when in
Henry V
Shakespeare’s Pistol says to the Welshman Fluellen, ‘Base Trojan, thou shalt die’, he was assuming in his audience familiarity with an old story: one more curious reverberation of the tale of Troy!