In Search of the Trojan War (4 page)

At daybreak the Trojans found the horse and the ashes of the camp, and they pulled the horse into the city. That night, exhausted by feasting and revelry, the Trojans slept while the Greek fleet came in close to shore, waiting the signal. ‘It was midnight,’ says a fragment from the epic known as the
Little Iliad
, ‘and full the moon was rising.’ The heroes jumped down from the horse, killed the sentries and opened the gates. The Greeks poured through the streets, broke into the houses and slaughtered the Trojans wherever they found them, sparing none of the male sex. Up to the Pergamos they went, to the palace on top of the hill, and there Neoptolemus killed old Priam on the threshold of his royal house, Priam whose life spanned the four generations from the sack by Herakles, and who had witnessed the death of all his sons. Deiphobos, whom Helen had married after Paris’ death, was cut down and mutilated. As for Helen herself, the
object of the whole of the expedition, Arktinos of Miletus, author of the
Kypria
, told in his
Sack of Ilios
how Menelaos had determined to kill her, but he confronted her with her breasts bared in the chaos of the night, and, overwhelmed by her beauty, cast away his sword. The male children of all the Trojan heroes were slaughtered (Hector’s little boy Astyanax was thrown from the walls), the women were enslaved and taken back to Greece, to be concubines in their conqueror’s beds, or to card flax and draw water at the spring below the palace of Sparta.

After the massacre Agamemnon’s army plundered and burned Troy, and razed its walls, ‘the dying ashes spreading on the air the fat savour of wealth’, as Aeschylus says. As a last act, Polyxena, the daughter of Priam, was sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles. The house of Priam was extinct. Having divided up the booty and allotted the women as chattels between the victorious chiefs, the Greeks left the Troad. The story of their various returns is told in many stories, especially the
Odyssey
. In fact their brutal victory and their lack of respect to the Trojan gods brought the victors only more suffering. They were split up by storms; our sources tell us of wanderings in the Aegean, Crete, Egypt and elsewhere; some, like Menelaos and Odysseus, took as long as ten years to find their way home; some, like the minor leader Mopsus, wandered into Anatolia and settled there; some took to piracy and attacked places in the Mediterranean; others, like Agamemnon himself, returned to political upheaval, palace coups and assassination. Agamemnon was murdered by his wife and a rival from another branch of his family; Philoktetes was expelled from Thessaly by rebels; only old Nestor died happy, a last link with the Golden Age, the heroic world shattered by the Trojan War. Greek tradition dates the collapse of the Age of Heroes to within a generation or two of the war (eighty years, thought the historian Thucydides), and tells of ‘constant resettlements’, party strife and large-scale migrations, of heroes like Diomedes, Philoktetes and Idomeneus finding new lands in Italy, Sicily and western Anatolia. Finally, into Greece came an influx of Greek-speaking peasantry from the north, the Dorians, and their coming marked the end
of Agamemnon’s world. At the end of the so-called Dark Age which followed, the poet Hesiod, farming in misery under Mount Helicon in Boeotia, looked back on the great struggles which had broken apart the heroic age, and destroyed ‘that godlike race of hero-men’ who lived between the Bronze Age and his own dismal Age of Iron: ‘foul war and the dreadful din of battle destroyed them … when war brought them over the great gulf of the sea to Troy for the sake of richly tressed Helen.’

The grip that this legend continued to have on the Greek imagination is shown by an extraordinary tailpiece. A lesser hero, Ajax of Lokris, was said to have defiled Athena’s altar at Troy during the sack, and hence to have incurred her everlasting enmity. Belief in this story was so strong among the people of Lokris that from about 700 BC they sent each year, to serve the goddess in her temple at Troy, selected daughters who suffered indignities and even risked death in order to expiate the sin of their ancestor. Some, perhaps originally all, of the maidens stayed there until old age, cleaning the precinct, with shorn hair and bare feet, and as late as the fourth century BC the Trojans had the right – and exercised it – to kill those maidens they caught being secretly conducted to the sanctuary by their Lokrian guides. Those who got there lived out their days like slaves, in confinement and extreme poverty. This custom continued into the first century AD – an amazing testimony to the enduring potency of the legend in Hellenic society.

HISTORY OR FICTION? THE VIEW OF THE ANCIENTS

It is often said that the Greeks were the first people to deal with the events of the past in anything like a scientific manner, but it is clear that history has been far better preserved by the so-called barbarians than by the Greeks themselves. … Egyptians, Babylonians and Phoenicians by general admission have preserved the memorials of the most ancient and lasting traditions of mankind.

JOSEPHUS
,
Antiquities of Judaea

In the ancient world it was the almost uniform belief that the Trojan War was an historical event: the philosopher Anaxagoras was one of only a handful known to have doubted it, on the good grounds that there was no
proof
. But then, as now, everyone knew there was no primary source for the war; equally they
knew
that it had happened! It is a paradox unique in historiography. When the ‘Father of History’, Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BC, asked Egyptian priests whether the Greek story of the war was true, he was simply asking whether they had any alternative record of it, for there were no
written
sources before the epics of Homer were committed to writing, perhaps as late as the sixth century BC, hence there were no documentary sources at all available to the historians of the fifth century BC. It is interesting to see then that those historians were prepared to give total credence to the basis of the tradition in Homer. Out of Homer Thucydides (
c
.400 BC) constructed a brilliant résumé of ‘prehistoric’ Greece which remains one of the most balanced and plausible accounts of how the war
might
have come about, though we cannot be certain how much is his own intuition from observable remains (‘archaeological’ sites) and deductions from the Homeric tale, or how much he derived from sources we do not now have – most experts would rule out this last possibility. At any rate, Thucydides thought the story of Troy was true and the ‘imperial’ power of Mycenae a reality:

We have no record of any action taken by Hellas as a whole before the Trojan War. Indeed, my view is that at this time the whole country was not even called Hellas. … The best evidence for this can be found in Homer, who, though he was born much later than the time of the Trojan War, nowhere uses the name ‘Hellenic’ for the whole force.

Thucydides then considers increased knowledge of seafaring in the Aegean, ‘capital reserves’ coming into existence, and the gradual construction of walled cities with acquired wealth and a more settled life. All these facts he saw as prerequisites for a united expedition such as Homer describes:

Some on the strength of their new riches built walls for their cities, the weaker put up with being governed by the stronger, and those who won superior power by acquiring capital resources brought the smaller cities under their control. Hellas had already developed some way along these lines when the expedition to Troy took place. Agamemnon it seems must have been the most powerful of the rulers of his day: this was why he was able to raise the force against Troy … at that time he had the strongest navy; thus in my opinion fear played a greater part than loyalty in raising the expedition against Troy. Mycenae certainly was a small place, and many of the towns of that period do not seem to us today to be particularly imposing: yet that is not good evidence for rejecting what the poets and what
general tradition
have to say about the size of the expedition … we have no right therefore to judge cities by their appearances rather than by their actual power and there is no reason why we should not believe that the Trojan expedition was the greatest that ever took place.

Thus wrote Thucydides in the fifth century BC, that is, at as long a remove from the traditional date of the sack of Troy (of which more in a moment) as the signing of Magna Carta is from the present day. The lack of anything beyond the words of the poets and ‘general tradition’ is noteworthy; it should be said, though, that nothing in this interpretation has been rebutted by modern archaeology or textual criticism. It still remains a
plausible
model, despite the fact that many scholars today doubt the existence of the Mycenaean ‘empire’, the Trojan War, and even Troy itself: plausible, but as yet incapable of proof.

How then did the ancients work out a chronology for their ‘prehistoric’ past? For instance, how did they date the Trojan War? In classical Greece detailed chronology went back to the first Olympiad in 776 BC. This date, we know, corresponds fairly closely to the adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks later in the eighth century, so, as we would expect, the adoption of a proper historical chronology came at about the time that written records start to exist. Hence George Grote’s great
History of Greece
, written as late as the 1840s and 1850s, begins with the first Olympiad; what lay before was for him unusable, for archaeology had not yet opened a window into prehistory. As Grote recognised, however, the ancient Greeks had a vast mass of legends, stories, genealogies and so on relating to this preclassical world and which they
thought
referred to real events just as much as Homer did: these were the ‘general traditions’ Thucydides mentions, and they had clearly been preserved orally. They often included detailed chronological relations – everyone for instance ‘knew’ that the sack of Thebes took place before the Trojan War, that the Trojan War preceded the Dorian invasion of Greece, and so on. Even from before Herodotus’ time historians had tried to construct a chronology for this and rationalise it as history, difficult as that was. Later on, Diodorus Siculus says how troublesome it was to write an account of ‘prehistory’ because he could not find a reliable collection of dates for the period before the Trojan War. Thucydides too limited himself to the broad conjecture that, before the time of the dominance of Mycenae, Cretans from Knossos had exerted a hegemony over the Aegean. As for the date of the war itself, most calculations varied between around 1250 BC in Herodotus and 1135 BC in Ephorus; the earliest was 1334 BC in Doulis of Samos, the most influential the date arrived at by the librarian of Alexandria, Eratosthenes (1184–1183 BC). Such dates – expressed as ‘so long before the First Olympiad’ – were usually computed from genealogies, with estimates of the length of generations, especially of the old Dorian royal families of Sparta. A remarkable example of how accurate such records could be survives in a little country church in Chios, where a family memorial stone names fourteen generations which take us back from the fifth century BC to the tenth century BC: it is thus
possible
, at least, that such material can be accurately preserved over centuries.

The most precise ancient dating of the Trojan War is to be found on the Parian marble, a chronicle of notable events, imaginary or real, computed off the legendary genealogies of the kings of Athens coming down to the mid-third century BC.
Carved on a great slab of marble from the island of Páros, it was bought in Smyrna by an English ambassador of Charles I to the Ottoman court, who brought it to England where it became part of the Earl of Arundel’s collection. The marble was damaged in the Civil War when the prehistoric portion was destroyed, but luckily it had been copied by the antiquarian John Selden; thus we know that it dated the origin of the cult at Eleusis to the early fourteenth century BC, the sack of Thebes to 1251, the foundation of Salamis in Cyprus to 1202, the first Greek settlements in Ionia to 1087, Homer’s
floruit
as 907 – and the sack of Troy to 5 June 1209 BC! Unfortunately the intriguing precision of the month and day is an astronomical computation derived from a misunderstanding of a line in the
Little Iliad
– ‘it was midnight and a bright moon was rising’ – which was interpreted as meaning a full moon: the nearest one to midnight occurs on the last lunation before the summer solstice!

It will be immediately apparent from such material that the Jewish historian Josephus’ remarks about Greek historiography, written in the first century AD and quoted
here
, were accurate: the classical Greeks had no good source for their prehistoric past. Oral tradition, especially in the shape of Homer, was all they had to rely on, because, as Josephus points out in his preface to the
Jewish War
, ‘it was late, and with difficulty, that they came to the letters they now use.’ In terms of ‘archaeology’ the Greeks also had little sense of the ancient past: ‘as for the places they inhabit, ten thousand destructions have overtaken them and blotted out the memory of former deeds so that they were ever beginning a new way of living.’ There were of course ‘archaeological’ digs in the ancient world; people were always finding remains, and knew the names of the cities which Homer says sent troops to Troy (remember Thucydides’ remarks (
see here
) on the ruins of Mycenae in his day, which he had clearly visited). In such places many Mycenaean tombs were found in the seventh and eighth centuries BC, and were associated with Homer’s heroic age, for offerings to the heroes were left in them, a practice which continued into classical times. But the way such
finds were interpreted shows that the ancients had no concept of what we now call Bronze-Age history; oral transmission was their only vehicle. In one sense, then, the problem of the historicity of the Trojan War is no different today from what it was for Thucydides: Homer and the myths tell the story; the places they name were and are still visible, some clearly once powerful, some clearly utterly insignificant; similarly other myths centre on what were demonstrably Bronze-Age places – Nemea, Iolkos, Thebes and so on. If the myths of Greece actually contain a kernel of real history from the Bronze Age, as Thucydides believed, how do we prove it? In the last 100 years the new science of archaeology has attempted to provide answers. But before we turn to this attempt, we need to understand
why
the tale of Troy should have captured the imagination of our culture, for archaeology itself has not escaped that seduction. The story was clearly already the great national myth in Thucydides’ Greece, but that was nothing compared to what has happened to it in the two and a half millennia which followed him. To the afterlife of the myth I now turn.