In Search of the Trojan War (7 page)

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Turkish and Christian worlds were opposed, and travel was dangerous and difficult. But from the late sixteenth century a change is noticeable, with new commercial relations developing between east and west. At this time the visits of a number of western visitors, starting with the naturalist Pierre Belon (who mistook Alexandria Troas for Troy), rekindled interest in Troy, aided by the spread of printing which enabled the dissemination of Homer in translation for the first time, and also of the accounts of the travellers themselves. From the 1580s, indeed, there is a continuous record of western visitors to Troy, the bulk of them English.

When William Shakespeare sat in London in 1602 writing
Troilus and Cressida
, and imagined the ‘Dardan plains’ and the ‘strong immures’ of Troy, ‘Priam’s six-gated city’, he was not reflecting topographical knowledge about Troy and its environs; merely using the book on his desk, Caxton’s
Recuyell
. But it was in his lifetime that English travellers first made their mark in the search for Troy on the ground. From the sixteenth century English and French merchants replaced Venetians and Genoese in the courts of Ottoman Turkey, and the first commercial treaty and diplomatic exchanges between England and Turkey were established in 1580. Elizabeth’s ambassador, John Sanderson, twice ‘put into Troy’, in 1584 and 1591, and Richard Wragg, taking the queen’s second present, saw the two big mounds on Cape Yenisehir in 1594: ‘not unlikely the tombs of Achilles and Ajax,’ he thought. Others followed: Thomas Dallam, the organ-builder, taking an elaborate hydraulic organ to the Sultan, put into the same place and saw ruins which he took to be Troy (probably the foundations of Constantine’s abortive city on the
Sigeum ridge); and in the winter of 1609–10 William Lithgow was shown round a ruined site in the Troad by a Greek guide. Some, like William Biddulph in 1600 and Thomas Coryate in 1603, published their accounts, the latter being the first detailed modern description of the plain. Most of these early visitors, however, were misled into thinking that Alexandria Troas, or the Sigeum ruins, were the site of Homeric Troy, though even in the early seventeenth century, as George Sandys said, the problem of the location of Ilium, the ‘glory of Asia’, had ‘afforded to rarest wits so plentiful an argument’. Sandys, in 1627, was the first to identify the rivers Scamander and Simois with the Menderes and Dumrek Su. By this time it is clear that little trace remained of the site of New Ilium, for it was ignored by all early travellers.

It was not until the eighteenth century that the first scholarly attempts were made to pin down the exact location of the city of Homer and the events of the
Iliad
. On two visits in 1742 and 1750, at a time when travel in bandit-ridden Asia Minor was still a dangerous business, Robert Wood laid the foundations for the modern topographical study of the Trojan problem. Wood has claims to be considered the first ‘pilgrim’ to Greece. His book
Essay … on the original genius of Homer
, published in 1769, came to no conclusion about the exact site of the city (he thought it had been utterly obliterated) but made some excellent deductions about the topography of the plain which he thought very different from Homer’s day. Wood reckoned that ‘a great part’ of the plain had been formed of river silt since antiquity (he compared it with the mouth of the river Maeander at Miletus, formerly a great port which is now high and dry), that there had been a wide bay in front of Troy at the time of the war, ‘some miles’ nearer the city than at present, and that the courses of the rivers had moved considerably over the intervening centuries. These conclusions were abandoned by most other scholars right up to the present, but we now know they were correct (
see here
; another important assertion of Wood’s was that Homer’s account had not been composed in writing, but ‘sung and retained by memory’). Wood’s basic premise, that the location of
Troy and the historicity of the Trojan War could be determined by patient field research, set the tone for future treatment of the theme, and his book marks the start of a famous controversy which shows no sign of abating: it went through five editions and was translated into four languages.

It was with Wood’s book in his hand – along with the
Iliad
, of course – that the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Lechevalier went to the Troad in 1785, and with him modern topographical exploration of the Troad began. Over three visits he walked the whole area from Ida to the Dardanelles and rapidly became convinced that the Troad exactly accorded with the description in Homer. The city itself, Lechevalier thought, had lain not near the sea, but up the valley of the river Scamander (Menderes) at a place called Bunarbashi where there was a prominent, acropolis-like hill above a well-known local landmark, the ‘Forty Eyes’ springs, which Lechevalier identified with Homer’s hot and cold springs at Troy.

Exiled by the French Revolution, Lechevalier first announced his theory in a lecture in French to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in February 1791, and it was published there in English the same year with a preface testifying to the ‘vivacity of his conversation and the agreeableness of his manners’. In the light of his researches, Lechevalier also gave his opinion on the vexed question of the historicity of the Trojan War: it was, he thought,

not poetical fiction but historical fact. … For the space of ten years the Greeks were employed in laying waste the coast of Asia, together with adjacent islands. The capital of the Trojan territory was not always the immediate subject of their disputes … they do not appear to have attacked it in full force till the tenth year of the war. Whether it was really taken or … baffled all the efforts of the Greeks I cannot take it upon me to decide.

Now the controversy really took off, with some, like Jacob Bryant, not only denying that the war had taken place but vehemently asserting that Troy itself had never existed. Armchair critics fired off scholarly brickbats, arguing hotly over the minutest problem of
the disposition of the Greek ships (or even the likely number of babies born to the camp whores over ten years!).

It was in the midst of this famous and heated dispute that Lord Byron spent seventeen days at anchor off the Troad in 1810 and walked the plain, which he found ‘a fine field for conjecture and snipe hunting’. The romantic associations of the place, however, were too much even for Byron and he roundly dismissed the ‘unbelievers’ for their pedantry. Later, in
Don Juan
, he would make fun of Bryant and his supporters and wax eloquent on both the intense sense of the past he had felt there, and on its irretrievable distance from him:

High barrows without marble or a name,

A vast, untilled and mountain-skirted plain,

And Ida in the distance, still the same,

And old Scamander (if ’tis he) remain:

The situation seems still formed for fame –

A hundred thousand men might fight again

With ease; but where I sought for Ilion’s walls,

The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls.

Canto IV, 77

‘It is one thing to read the
Iliad
with Mount Ida above you,’ he wrote (with a touch of smugness – he actually spent more time on the plain than most scholars before or since!), ‘another to trim your taper over it in a snug library – this I
know
.’ Byron’s parting shot in
Don Juan
takes on the religious fervour of a true Homerist:

… I’ve stood upon Achilles’ tomb,

And heard Troy doubted; time will doubt of Rome.

Years after his visit to the Troad, and not long before he died fighting for that same romantic Hellenism, Byron returned to the great theme in 1821, in his diary: ‘We
do
care about the authenticity of the tale of Troy … I venerate the grand original as
the truth of history
… and of place; otherwise it would have given me no
delight.’ Byron’s remark is, characteristically, central to the whole search: why
should
it matter to us whether Troy really existed?

FRANK CALVERT: DISCOVERER OF TROY?

It mattered to someone else: Frank Calvert, who has claims to be regarded as the discoverer of Troy. In fact the Troy mystery was something of a family fascination. The Calvert family were English, but had been in the Troad since Byron’s day and did not leave until the onset of the Second World War (they are still remembered in those parts). Three Calvert brothers are concerned with the story of Troy: Frederick was British consul in the Dardanelles in 1846–62 (he appears in Russell’s
Despatches from the Crimea
), while James was American consul, a job he handed on to Frank who lived at Erenköy (Intepe). The family wheeler-dealed in commerce and local business in a rather seigneurial way, but they were continually helpful to outsiders, giving advice, medicine and loans to travellers. Frank’s work as American consul has left only a handful of records, but he went out of his way to help people. All the brothers were interested in antiquities, and all were intrigued by the Trojan question. Frederick (who conceived the plan of forming a museum of the Troad) thought Homer’s Troy was about 5 miles up the Scamander valley from the site of New Ilium, at a place called Akça Köy, where until 1939 the family had a farm, and later he discussed this with Schliemann. James Calvert, too, offered Schliemann his theories on Troy. But Frank was the moving force; he knew the Troad better than anyone, before or since; he identified many of the ancient sites there, reported on them laconically in learned journals, and formed a collection the bulk of which is in the new museum at Çanakkale. Frank had explored from an early age. Schliemann mentions that Frank pointed out a site to the British cartographer Spratt in 1839, when young Calvert was in his teens; one wonders whether Schliemann, who turned his own life into an inextricable tangle of fantasy and truth, appropriated Frank’s childhood fascination
with the Troy story? (
see here
)

In the 1850s Frank had supported the theory that Troy had been at Bunarbashi, but a series of unpublished letters in the British Museum show that before 1864 he had turned to Hisarlik, the site of Ilion and the acropolis of New Ilium. Others had thought the same. Frank was aware, for example, of
A Dissertation on the Topography of the Plain of Troy
by Charles Maclaren (founder of
The Scotsman
and prophet of the railways) which argued that Troy must lie at New Ilium, but Maclaren had written from his desk in Edinburgh without seeing the plain, and his theory went unnoticed for many years. Maclaren deserves first credit for the identification, and it may be that he met the Calverts on his first visit there in 1847.

Another of the visitors to the Calverts’ farm was Charles Newton, who later became one of the British Museum’s greatest keepers. Newton was seconded to the consular service for the furtherance of the Museum’s interests in Asia Minor, and came to the Troad in 1853, where he consulted Calvert over local sites. At this time Calvert took him to Bunarbashi which they rejected as Troy on the grounds that there were no surface potsherds such as littered the surface at Mycenae and Tiryns. At Hisarlik, however, Calvert showed Newton that extensive ruins lay hidden under the soil. Calvert and Newton corresponded fairly regularly after this (‘I have been following up the ancient geography of the Troad and identified many sites,’ Calvert wrote in 1863). By 1863, supported by Newton, Calvert had formulated plans to excavate New Ilium for the British Museum, and Newton recommended that £100 should be sent to Calvert for preliminary work. The Museum committee, however, dithered and asked for more information. Calvert was disappointed: ‘I am anxiously waiting to learn the result,’ he wrote to Newton. ‘I will be sorry if my proposal be not fortunately received, for such another favourable opportunity of carrying on excavations at Ilium Novum could be found only with difficulty.’ In fact so anxious was Calvert that, on hearing Newton was on a French boat in the Dardanelles on the night of 11 December 1863, he rowed out and climbed
aboard, only to be rebuffed by an unhelpful captain who did not wish to wake his passengers.

Thus I was prevented from having the pleasure of a talk with you on archaeological subjects and discuss my proposals to the British Museum for excavating at Ilium Novum. You would much oblige me by letting me know the decision of the British Museum on this subject of excavations so as to enable me to make my plans accordingly.

Believe me dear Sir very truly yours

Frank Calvert

And so the chance passed. Meanwhile German excavations at Bunarbashi in 1864 confirmed Calvert and Newton in their belief that Homer’s Troy had not been there. Calvert now bought the northern part of Hisarlik, and in the following year, 1865, conducted trial excavations in four places. On the north his trenches located the remains of the classical temple of Athena and the Hellenistic city wall erected by Lysimachus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals; he came within yards of the great north-eastern bastion of what we now call Troy VI, and on the south, part of the city wall, which he probably thought classical. It is also certain that he exposed Bronze-Age levels on the north, immediately below the Athena temple, though the classical builders had cut away the walls of the ancient cities below them except for the massive underpinnings of the prehistoric walls, which were not recognised for what they were until the 1930s. Still, the dig had been a notable success. Calvert had seen enough to know that the mound was deeply stratified and that an excavation on the scale necessary to do it carefully would require the kind of money he did not possess. Nevertheless Calvert felt sure that Hisarlik was the site of the epic story and that an archaeological dig could ‘settle the ground question “
ubi Troja fuit
”. … All the ancient authors (subsequent to Homer) place the site of Troy at Ilium Novum until Strabo’s time,’he wrote in 1868. It was left to another to gain the glory: Heinrich Schliemann.