In Search of the Trojan War (6 page)

The place of the tale of Troy in the Tudor myth perhaps helps account for the number of translations of the
Iliad
in sixteenth-century England, as the original text was increasingly studied in early manuscripts. Hall’s version of ten books appeared in 1581, Chapman’s famous rendering in 1598. But it is interesting that Caxton’s
Recuyell
was still popular, running through five editions before 1600: it was used by Shakespeare as a source for
Troilus and Cressida
and was still in demand until Pope’s time. Chapman’s and Pope’s works have always been regarded as the greatest English translations of Homer; Pope’s in particular is still a classic (‘a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal,’ said Samuel Johnson, though as the scholar Richard Bentley said, ‘It is a pretty poem Mr Pope but you must not call it Homer’).

But it was in the nineteenth century that Homer came into his own as a popular ‘classic’, the most influential of all the attempts being William Morris’s
Odyssey
(1887), part Norse saga, part Tennyson, and Andrew Lang’s strangely effective late Victorian
Iliad
, which was reprinted eighteen times between 1882 and 1914. It was in the minds of the ruling class that Homer was pre-eminent. Typically, on the Albert Memorial itself it is Homer who is enthroned in the place of honour among the great artists of the world at Albert’s feet.

The unrivalled popularity of Homer in the late Victorian and Edwardian imagination perhaps reflects the role of the
Iliad
in the English public-school system. At the height of the British Empire Homer was perhaps the poet who spoke most feelingly
to the British imperialists, for his ‘gentlemanliness’ and his ‘stiff upper lip’ in the face of death (not forgetting his emphasis on athletics and hardiness) as much as for his glorification of courage in war. Whether it was on the South African veld, in the trenches of Flanders or even in the skies above Picardy, Homer evoked the most powerful images in those brought up to see themselves as the new Athenians. During the First World War, Maurice Baring wrote of:

Such fighting as blind Homer never sung,

No Hector nor Achilles never knew;

High in the empty blue.

But inevitably it was at Gallipoli that Homer most struck home, for Troy and Cape Helles face each other across the Dardanelles. There it was impossible for the young poets and writers of the British Empire – John Masefield, A. P. Herbert, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Compton Mackenzie – not to think of the
Iliad
. For the young Frenchman Jean Giraudoux, too, seeing his friends die in the trenches at Suvla, himself badly wounded, the trauma gave terrible inspiration for his art (
The Trojan War will not take place
): ‘Why against us?’ says Hector. ‘Troy is famous for her arts, her justice, her humanity.’ Rupert Brooke died before he heard the guns, but as he sailed to his fate he promised to recite Homer through the Cyclades and ‘the winds of history will follow us all the way’. Fragments scribbled on that last voyage show how Brooke imagined it:

They say Achilles in the darkness stirred. …

And Priam and his fifty sons

Wake all amazed, and hear the guns.

And shake for Troy again.

Patrick Shaw-Stewart, who reread the
Iliad
on the way to Gallipoli, felt a dreadful sense of
déjà vu
at the sight of Imbros, of Troy and these ‘association-saturated spots’:

O hell of ships and cities

Hell of men like me,

Fatal second Helen,

Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland

And I to Chersonese:

He turned from wrath to battle,

And I from three days’ peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,

So very hard to die?

Thou knowest and I know not –

So much the happier I.

I will go back this morning

From Imbros over the sea;

Stand in the trench, Achilles,

Flame-capped, and fight for me.

So for the young public-school chaps who sailed to Gallipoli – ‘the youth whom to the spot their schoolboy feelings bear’ as Byron had so keenly put it – associations of the place produced overwhelming nostalgia: the islands, the plain, the hill of ‘holy Ilios’. Perhaps the experience of the war destroyed all that. After 1915 memories of a more terrible war took their place, of the
common
heroes who died, from ‘wide-wayed Liverpool’ and ‘hundred-gated Leeds’. (Homer’s world is predominantly aristocratic, it must be remembered.) And now, ninety years on, the intense identification of the English ruling class with the stern morality of Homer strikes us as oddly obsessional. In the proletarian world of the early twenty-first century, there is, however, no denying the spell still worked by the story over generations of Britons, Americans, Germans, Greeks and the rest, brought up on such ideas, and paradoxically this is especially true of the professional scholars and archaeologists who still interpret these ideas today for the general audience. Difficult as this makes objective discussion of the evidence, the myth (or legend) has
become a fact; it is precisely its power as a myth which has excited belief in its historicity – the story moves us so much that it must be true. Many archaeologists, professed scientists, have nevertheless been able to encompass this within their scientific ‘truth’!

I have tried briefly to summarise the history of Homer in English culture. It would take a whole book – and a long one – even to outline its effect in other languages and cultures, but to conclude let me mention one last version, a Gaelic one by John McHale, Primate of all Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. This striking assimilation of the Trojan tale into the ancient heroic traditions of Celtic epic (Agamemnon is
ard-ri
, and the Achaians
Feanna
) reminds us that Homer’s epics are the first great works of European literature, composed in a language whose roots are shared by the languages of the Celtic and Germanic peoples who moved westwards towards their present homes after the Indo-European peoples came into Europe in the early second millennium BC, at which time the Greeks moved southwards into the Balkans. Homer’s texts are a dim reverberation of those events, written in a language which has a continuity going back to the second millennium BC. The Greek you hear today in the tavernas of Corfu or Crete was written in the Bronze Age in palaces like Mycenae and Knossos. No other European language can say that and none has written texts going back so far. In that sense Homer’s epics constitute the root text of all western culture.

THE SEARCHERS

While the story of the Trojan War was cultivated so obsessively in medieval Europe, the general site of Troy itself was never forgotten. Many travellers’ accounts survive from the Middle Ages and early modern times which show that the locality of the classical cities of New Ilium and Alexandria Troas was still pointed out as the site of Homer’s city. Some Greeks on board the boat which bore the Anglo-Saxon pilgrim Saewulf from Chios to Constantinople, a generation or so after the Norman Conquest, pointed out the ‘very ancient and famous city of Troy’
on the coast near Tenedos where ‘you can still see the ruins extended over many miles’ (probably Alexandria Troas?). Others were interested enough to go ashore and try to piece together the events of the
Iliad
on the ground. A Spanish ambassador on his way to meet Tamerlane the Great in October 1403, Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo, saw the ruins and the plain extending as far as the foothills of Ida and commented that ‘the circuit of Troy appeared to extend over many miles of country, and at one point above the ancient city rose a high steep hill on the summit of which, it is said, stood the castle known of old as Ilion’. At Kumkale on the Dardanelles, Clavijo wrote, ‘the Greek camp was set. Here too they had dug great trenches to lie between them and Troy, to prevent the Trojans in their attack coming to destroy the Greek ships. These trenches are seen to be three in number and lie one behind the other.’ Such stories came from Greeks in Tenedos, who even then acted as guides to the site, and from people in the still Greek-speaking villages of the Troad. In the journal of his adventures a more sceptical traveller, the Spaniard Pero Tafur, speaks of Greeks of Tenedos who could give account of Troy; having survived a shipwreck in Chios harbour at Christmas 1435 he was stuck for three weeks with nothing to do, so, obtaining a lift to the mainland, he hired a guide and horses and rode north to Troy. Tafur’s trip (like that of many who came after) was disappointing:

So many ruined buildings, so many marbles and stones, that shore and the harbour of Tenedos over against it, and a great hill which seemed to have been made by the fall of some huge building. But I could learn nothing further and returned to Chios.

It is very likely that Tafur only saw the remains of Alexandria Troas.

Tafur’s visit only just preceded one by the most remarkable of all early travellers and antiquarians, Cyriac of Ancona. Archetype of the peripatetic early Renaissance antiquary, and one of the most influential – perhaps more than anyone he
deserves the title of the first archaeologist, though the word would not be coined for another 400 years.

In October 1444, having walked the Trojan plain, Cyriac set sail for Imbros and saw Samothrace peeping over the top just as Homer says. So the famous nineteenth-century travel writer Alexander Kinglake was not the first to note from personal observation (in
Eothen
) that Homer spoke truly: ‘Aloft over Imbros – aloft in a far-away heaven – Samothrace, the watchtower of Neptune – so Homer had appointed it, and so it was.’ Cyriac’s note is scribbled into his copy of the works of the ancient geographer Strabo (now in Eton College Library). Coming from the region of Troy, from where the towering outline of Samothrace can be seen hovering in the distance, Cyriac recalled the passage in the
Iliad
where Poseidon watches the battle between Greeks and Trojans from the ‘top of the highest summit of timbered Samothrace’. Homer had told the truth!

A former shipping clerk, glorified commercial traveller and unofficial political consultant, Cyriac wandered the eastern Mediterranean for fifty years, clambering over ruins, sketching monuments, copying inscriptions, haranguing the citizens of sleepy Mediterranean towns to save their ‘half buried glories’. For Cyriac, the ruins of antiquity were living voices crying out for the torn fabric of that ancient world to be reknit, by both the ‘sons of Greece’ and the ‘sons of Troy’ – the Turks.

Cyriac’s hopes for the ‘sons of Greece and Troy’ and the rebirth of the ancient world remind us how peculiarly the story of archaeology in Greece is bound up with the rebirth of Hellenism and the idea of Greek nationhood. The Byzantines who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire until the fall of Constantinople did not call themselves Hellenes, the word Greeks use today to describe themselves (as did Thucydides). They were ‘Roman’, and moreover throughout their history as a Christian empire they were generally hostile to what became known as Hellenism – the philosophical, moral and religious conceptions of ancient Greece. To them it was pagan and polytheistic: in the eleventh century, Michael Psellus relates,
Greek monks habitually crossed themselves at Plato’s name, that ‘Hellenic Satan’.

The Hellenising movement came to a head in the first half of the fifteenth century in the years immediately preceding the fall of Constantinople. The idea now emerged that the inhabitants of the Peloponnese and the adjacent mainland and islands were the direct descendants of the ancient Greeks, and should re-establish the national state in the lands once occupied by the Hellenes of old. This was the climate in which men like Cyriac of Ancona made their pioneering attempts to gather and record the archaeological evidence for Hellenistic civilisation, and in this the Trojan War had special significance for, as Thucydides had said, it was the first recorded action by a
united
Hellenic power. But in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks under Mehmet II and Greece soon followed – Athens in 1456, the Morea in 1460. The dream – for the moment – was dissipated.

There is an ironic tailpiece to Cyriac’s mystical mingling of ancient and modern, his desire somehow to make the Trojan tale serve contemporary political ends. In 1462 his friend Mehmet II visited the site of ‘Troy’. The scene is described by the Greek Critoboulos of Imbros who, like many Greeks, favoured Mehmet out of hatred of ‘the Latins’, the Catholic Church. Mehmet walked the circuit of the city,

inspected its ruins, saw its topographical advantages, and its favourable position close to the sea and the opposite continent. Then he asked to be shown the tombs of the heroes Achilles, Hector and Ajax, and like other great conquerors before him he made offerings at the tomb of Achilles, congratulated him on his fame and his great deeds, and on having found the poet Homer (whom Cyriac had read to Mehmet) to celebrate them. Then, it is said, he pronounced these words: ‘It is to me that Allah has given to avenge this city and its people: I have overcome their enemies, ravaged their cities and made a Mysian prey of
their
riches. Indeed it was the Greeks who before devastated this city, and it is their descendants who after so many years have paid me the debt which their boundless pride [
hubris
] had
contracted – and often afterwards – towards us, the peoples of Asia.’

So in sacking Constantinople Mehmet had avenged the Fall of Troy! It was a pilgrimage which re-enacted other pilgrimages by world conquerors at great moments of confrontation; it is clearly modelled on that of Alexander. The wheel had come full circle: even if Mehmet never said those words, one feels he ought to have!