Chapter 20

Blending Myth and History: Troy, Homer, and Heroes

In This Chapter

● Reliving the glories of the Trojan War

● Searching for facts about Troy

● Appreciating Homer’s epic poems

● Taking stock of other heroes and their adventures

The myth of the Trojan War is very famous. For generations people have enjoyed plays, stories, novels, and films about the exploits of Achilles, Odysseus, Helen, and many other fascinating Greek characters.

You may have seen the film Troy (2004). It was great fun and gave the impression of an epic struggle between huge armies led by handsome, physically well-developed heroes who fought over a fantastical city for possession of one beautiful woman. When the film was released a lot of people quibbled over whether the events shown were a ‘true’ version of what had gone on. They were missing the point. The story shown in the film - recounted in the poetic source material, Homer’s The lliad - never really took place; it is a myth.

For the ancient Greeks, however, the Trojan War was hugely important. Their versions of the war were massively influential on the way in which they lived their lives.

This chapter is all about the Trojan myth: understanding the stories, getting to grips with its impact on ancient and subsequent Greek life, and looking at the archaeological evidence now available. It’s also about introducing Homer and The lliad - the man and the poem that dominated intellectual life in the Greek world.

Separating Myth and History

As I mention in Chapter 3, early Greek history is very difficult to separate from mythology. The Trojan War is a perfect example of this combining of fact and fiction.

The Greeks readily accepted the idea of what they called the Trojan Cycle (see the following section ‘Mining the myth of the Trojan War’) although there were various versions of it. The ancient Greeks considered the stories true and did not require any evidence. Modern minds, however, find Troy more difficult to accept unquestioningly. Historians try to balance the evidence of archaeology (see ‘Seeking out the facts of Troy’) with information in the original literary works, including Homer’s epic poems (see ‘Preserving - and Pumping Up - the Story of Troy: Homer’).

Mining the myth of the Trojan War

The myth of the Trojan War encompasses a huge number of characters and incidents set vaguely around the time of the Mycenaean period (see Chapter 2), probably about 1300-1200 BC. The Greeks referred to the whole collection of stories as the Trojan Cycle.

Highlights of the story include the following key players and events:

● A war spurred by love: While on a diplomatic mission to the court of the Spartan king Menelaus, Paris, one of the sons of the Trojan king Priam, falls in love with Menelaus’s beautiful wife Helen and elopes with her back to Troy. (For more on Troy’s assumed geographic location, see the following section ‘Figuring out the facts of Troy’.) This causes a major international incident as Menelaus’s brother is Agamemnon, Mycenaean king, and the most powerful and influential of all the Greek leaders.

● The personal becomes political: Menelaus calls on all the other Greek nobles who owe him allegiance to join in an assault on Troy in an effort to avenge the insult to him. Agamemnon assembles a mighty fleet that sets sail from Aulis on the eastern coast of Greece, landing on the shore outside Troy (modern-day western Turkey; see the Cheat Sheet map). And thus, Helen becomes ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’.

● Larger than life warriors: Both the Greeks and Trojans assemble armies full of the leading heroes of the age. The Greeks’ superstar is Achilles, whose goddess mother bathed him in the river Styx in Hades to make him (almost) invulnerable. The Trojans’ greatest warrior is Hector, King Priam’s eldest son.

● A brutal battle: War rages between the two sides for ten years. The gods and goddesses both help and hinder each side; each deity chooses individually which army to support (see Chapter 19). Many heroes on both sides lose their lives, including Hector who is killed by Achilles. Paris then shoots Achilles in the heel (his one vulnerable spot) with an arrow, and he dies.

● One tricky pony: Eventually, the end to the war comes with a cunning plot devised by Odysseus, the Greek king of Ithaca. The Greeks construct an enormous horse, leave it outside the gates of Troy, and then appear to depart for home. Thinking that they’ve won, the Trojans take the horse inside the city and begin to celebrate. Shortly afterwards some Greeks who are concealed inside the horse slip out and open the gates for their comrades. In the bloodshed that follows, Troy is utterly destroyed, never to recover.

But the Trojan Cycle doesn’t end with the war. The stories about the various characters continue. Most notably:

● Menelaus is reunited with Helen.

● Agamemnon returns home and is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. Aeschylus’s trilogy of tragic plays, known as The Oresteia, dramatises this veritable soap opera of deception and power.

● Odysseus spends a further ten years wandering the Mediterranean before returning home to his wife Penelope in Ithaca. See the section ‘Returning home: The Odyssey’ for more on Odysseus’s outrageous journey.

The preceding is just one version of the myth. For the ancient Greeks, myths changed depending on who you were and where you lived. Another version of the Trojan story has Helen spending the whole war hiding in Egypt with only a ghost version of herself at Troy!

The film Troy (2004) was criticised because in it Paris and Helen leave Troy together and Achilles is present at the fall of the city. Critics missed the point. Many Greeks believed and told varying versions of the Trojan cycle so why shouldn’t Hollywood?

Figuring out the facts of Troy

So what do historians actually know of the city of Troy? Unfortunately, facts are difficult to come by. What historians now know is based on a mixture of archaeological evidence and educated speculation. Despite some debate, historians generally contend the following:

● When: The ancient Greeks believed the Trojan War took place during The Age of Heroes, a period before the Greeks began recording history when they believed the great escapades of heroes like Heracles, Theseus, and the fighters at Troy to have taken place. The historian Herodotus thought that the war took place about 800 years before his time, or around 1200 BC.

● Where: The site historians now regard as Troy had been an important fortress throughout the Minoan and Mycenaean periods. The city was built on a low hill about eight kilometres west of the Aegean coast and just a little farther south of the Hellespont (see the Cheat Sheet map). Troy was in a superb position for trading at two coastal points and with the whole of Asia Minor and the east. Consequently, the city must have been very wealthy.

As I explain in Chapter 2, historians rely on archaeology for almost all their knowledge of the Minoan and Mycenaean periods. During the 19th century a German archaeologist called Heinrich Schliemann carried out a huge amount of excavation at sites around both Troy and Mycenae.

When Schliemann excavated at the spot that historians now think was the site of Troy, he discovered the ruins of an ancient town that was built on seven different levels.

● The earliest of these levels contained a huge amount of gold and other precious finds.

● The more recent levels were farther away from the centre, as you’d expect from a city that grew and expanded.

● Twentieth-century excavations found that these most recent levels showed evidence of having been destroyed through some cataclysmic event around the time of 1300 BC.

Schliemann was convinced that his site was Troy of the Trojan Cycle and that the treasure that he found belonged to the mythical king Priam. He announced to the world that he had found the site of Troy and proof that the Trojan War had taken place.

However, Schliemann’s discoveries were problematic. Further excavations have shown that an earthquake, rather than an invading army, damaged the more recent areas. Signs also indicated that people lived in the recent levels once more very soon after the damage - not the hallmarks of a city razed to the ground by Agamemnon’s army.

Other evidence for the Trojan War is literary (see the next section) and in the form of Greek art where the stories from the Trojan cycle were always a popular subject for sculptors and vase painters (Chapter 17 has a good example of a black-figure vase with a Trojan theme). However, these artefacts can’t really be taken as proof of the war itself, rather as evidence of a continued interest in the Trojan cycle during later Greek history.

Ultimately, the general consensus is that the city found by Schliemann is the most likely site of ancient Troy. You can visit the site today although the fairly nondescript ruins are very difficult to relate to the story of the war. However, historians are no nearer to an answer about whether the Trojan War truly took place.

Passing On - and Pumping Up - the Story of Troy: Homer

The poet Homer and his poems The Iliad and The Odyssey had a huge impact on almost every aspect of Greek life. Modern folks often have difficulty appreciating quite why this was the case because the attitude to poetry today is very different. In ancient Greece The lliad and The Odyssey were the first works of Western literature.

What makes the poems even more amazing is that they are huge, complicated, and lengthy works. Every succeeding historical period has acknowledged the poems as masterpieces, and people still consider them to be astounding examples of literary construction and story telling

The ancient Greeks presumed that the author of the two poems was one man - an author of genius called Homer. For centuries scholars have loudly debated his identity, despite the lack of any real evidence. One popular theory is that Homer was blind and ancient portrait busts of him (made hundreds of years after his death) often show him in this way. The most likely reason for this is the character of Demodocus the bard who appears in The Odyssey and performs a song about the Fall of Troy. Because he is blind some people have suggested that Homer put himself in the poem. It’s a good theory anyway!

Sharing stories: The oral tradition

Part of the problem in identifying who Homer was comes from the fact that nothing Homer himself wrote actually exists!

Writing didn’t develop in Greece until around the eighth century BC (see Chapter 1). Early Greeks composed and delivered poetry orally, and Homer was probably part of this tradition. (This tradition has continued around the world even to modern times, in places as far apart as Serbia and the Congo.)

Oral poets lived an itinerant life travelling around from town to town and performing their work. Ancient sources mention other epic poems such as one about the myths associated with the city of Thebes, but none of these poems survive and none of them had the influence of Homer’s epics.

The skill of the poet

The oral tradition involves techniques such as using formulas or repeated phrases. You can see these techniques in the works of Homer. Characters are given epithets (words that describe their innate qualities or abilities) such as ‘swift-footed Achilles’ or Hector ‘tamer of horses’ and these are repeated throughout.

Some key scenes are repeated wholesale. A particularly good example is the description of heroes making a sacrifice and eating the meal that followed. This whole passage is repeated many times throughout both The lliad and The Odyssey. You can find a quotation from this scene in Chapter 15.

Part of the reason for these techniques is that ancient Greek poets designed their work to be performed rather than read. The formulas and repetition enabled poets to keep the ideas and stories in their heads in order to present the works to audiences.

Fascinating rhythm

Equally important to the poems is the rhythm in which they were originally composed and that translators work hard to maintain in their modern versions. The original Greek rhythm is dactylic hexameter, a form virtually impossible to reproduce in English. Bearing this in mind helps you to remember that these works are poems, despite the many prose translations available today.

The lliad, for example, is a very long poem of around 17,000 lines. Scholars estimate that the entire work would require roughly 24 hours to read aloud. When it was performed to the ancient Greeks, the poem was most likely presented in sections rather than as a whole.

The length and complexity of the poems have led most people to conclude that they were probably composed some time in the late eighth century BC and then written down around 650 BC. The written versions were more than likely the work of a group of poets but based on a tradition that started with one man, Homer.

Doing battle: The Iliad

I mention The lliad a lot throughout this book, and that’s because it’s probably the most important work of literature that the Greeks ever produced. The ancient Greeks considered The lliad to be more than just a huge poem about a mythical war. Rather, it was the closest that the Greeks had to a historical record and moral guide. It was a kind of bible; something they turned to for advice on all sorts of issues.

What about the Trojan horse?

One thing that isn't in The Iliad - or any of Homer's works for that matter - is the story of the Trojan horse. Although this clever ruse was well established as part of the Trojan myth, it doesn't feature in the poem which comes to an end before the fall of Troy. The incident is frequently mentioned in The Odyssey but isn't discussed in any real detail.

By far the best ancient version of the story of the Trojan horse is told in The Aeneid, a much later poem by the Roman poet Virgil (first century BC). The Aeneid details the story of the Trojan prince Aeneas and his travels after the war.

Historians have no idea if a Trojan horse ever actually existed but the version in The Aeneid is very affecting in its description of the tragedies that occurred as Troy fell.

Getting down to details

The Trojan War lasted for about ten years (see the section ‘Mining the myth of the Trojan War’ for an overview), but the story of The lliad covers only about two weeks of battle.

The central character is the great Greek warrior Achilles, who withdraws from the fighting after an argument with Agamemnon, his commander. While Achilles is out of action, the Trojans get on top in the fighting. The Trojan prince Hector kills Achilles’s great male friend (and possibly lover) Patroclus. Grief-stricken, Achilles returns to the fighting and eventually kills Hector before the poem ends with the funeral of Patroclus and the athletic competitions that followed it (a tradition following the death of a warrior).

Heroism, handicrafts, and history

Of course, The lliad is about much more than Achilles seeking vengeance for Patroclus’s death. The ancient Greeks considered the poem to be a source of information on:

● The concept of the hero and the way that heroes behave: To modern eyes, the characters in The lliad seem unusual and probably quite petulant, but the Greeks loved the way these heroes were totally devoted to their sense of honour. In the world of The Iliad a man can preserve his honour only by fighting and killing enemies, and collecting the enemy’s armour after battle serves as a visible sign of the hero’s honour and skill.

● Practical procedures: Several scenes in the poem describe sacrifices and ceremonies that were heavily influenced the way that later Greeks conducted them. (See Chapter 21 for more on ancient Greek religious practices.)

Another good example of how The Iliad details everyday life comes when the god Hephaestus makes an incredible shield for Achilles to use during his return to the fighting.

At first Hephaestus makes a great and massive shield, blazoning well-wrought emblems all across its surface, raising a rim around it, glittering, triple-ply with a silver shield-strap run from edge to edge and five layers of metal to build the shield itself.

To modern readers, this passage (and the dozens of lines that follow it) may seem an over-elaborate description. But The Iliad and The Odyssey are full of details like this and that is why the Greeks regarded the poems as something like compendiums of knowledge.

● Historical figures: Homer also includes lines and lines of verse devoted to charting the histories of all the characters he introduces. Book 2 of The Iliad is often called the Catalogue of Ships; it’s basically a long list of virtually all the fighters that were involved in the war. Many ancient Greeks would have regarded this book as the most impressive of the entire poem because of the knowledge that it contains.

For a travelling oral poet the Catalogue of Ships would also be a good way of impressing the audience: the sheer number of heroes mentioned in Book 2 meant that somebody relevant to the town that he was visiting would get a plug. This was a great way of getting the audience onside early in a performance!

Returning home: The Odyssey

In addition to The Iliad, the other great work that historians attribute to Homer is The Odyssey, which tells the story of what happened to Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, when he tried to return home after the Trojan War. Most scholars believe The Iliad was the first of the two poems, with The Odyssey being something of a sequel.

Getting down to details

Odysseus’s journey takes a very long time because the gods punish him for allowing his men to kill and eat the sacred cattle of the sun god. His ship destroyed and his crew lost, Odysseus ends up stranded on the island of the sea-nymph Calypso for seven years. Along the way, Odysseus has loads of adventures with giants, clashing rocks, sea monsters, and a sorceress called Circe.

Arriving back in Ithaca, Odysseus finds that the local nobles presumed that he was dead and moved into his palace in the hope of wooing his wife Penelope. Teaming up with his son Telemachus, he kills many of the nobles and drives them from the house, finally reuniting with Penelope after 20 years away from home!

Rhapsodes. A load of know-it-alls!

Knowledge of Homer was considered to be vital to a person's education in ancient Greece (see Chapter 14), but some people went even further than that.

Rhapsodes were professional reciters of poetry, most commonly The Iliad and The Odyssey. Unlike Homer they weren't actually poets themselves but performed other people's work for a fee and often competed in games and competitions. Due to the fact that Homer's poems contained so much knowledge of the world, the Greeks saw the rhapsodes as authorities on almost any given subject. A little bit like a kind of walking Internet!

The Odyssey is a fantastic story and reads much more like a modern novel than The lliad.

Despite the drama of the tale, the poem hasn’t ever really been successfully turned into a film. The most modern effort was a mini-series from 1997 that starred Armand Assante and Greta Scacchi. It’s a good effort with some great Mediterranean scenery and a particularly unpleasant set of suitors led by Eric Roberts. Otherwise try O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2001) starring George Clooney. Although set in the deep south of America it’s a loose reworking of the story and it can be fun to try and work out the references to Homer’s poem. John Goodman’s character is the cyclops Polyphemus!

The rules of friendship

One lesson that the ancient Greeks took from The Odyssey is the concept of xenia. Xenia means ‘guest-friendship’, and it’s the regulated system of greeting guests followed by virtually all the characters in The Odyssey. In short, xenia means you let people relax, eat, and refresh themselves when they arrive at your house before asking them any questions about who they are or what they want.

Here’s a great example of the rules of xenia in action. In Book 4 of the poem, Menelaus welcomes Odysseus’s son Telemachus and a warrior called Mentes (who’s actually the goddess Athena in disguise!) into his house without knowing who they are, saying:

‘Help yourselves to food, and welcome! Once you’ve dined we ’ll ask who you are. . . .’ With those words he passed them a fat rich loin with his own hands, the choicest part, that he’d been served himself.

Nearly all the characters in the poem follow these rules - and all who don’t (like the suitors in Odysseus’s house) suffer violent punishments as a result. Consequently, the poem almost sets a moral code for the ancient Greeks. The idea of hospitality and offering guests food and drink was a key part of the ancient Greek mindset. As a regular visitor to Greece I’ve found this to be a tradition that continues to this day.

Meeting Other, Earlier Heroes

Although the Trojan Cycle that The lliad and The Odyssey describe dominated Greek literature and mythology, hundreds of other heroes and stories are associated with the Age of Heroes. In many cases, these individuals were part of an earlier time than the age of Troy. In The lliad the old warrior Nestor of Pylos says that none of the men fighting at Troy can compare with the earlier generation of heroes like Theseus (see the later section ‘Theseus: Founder of Athens’). So these earlier heroes must have been pretty impressive! (See Chapter 19 for more on the ancient Greek’s conceptualisation of the history of man.)

When ancient Greek literature talks about a hero, it doesn’t mean somebody who does amazing things to help others like Superman or Spiderman. The ancient Greek concept of a hero is somebody who achieves amazing feats or shows incredible strength and endurance. Most of the time, these heroes aren’t very nice and they do a lot of unpleasant things - very different to the modern version of a hero.

The following sections serve as a short guide to some of the other major heroes in ancient Greek mythology and literature, and what they did.

Heracles: A hard worker!

Heracles (or Hercules as the Romans called him) is pretty much the ultimate Greek hero. He was the son of Zeus (see Chapter 19) and a mortal woman called Alcmene.

Virtually from birth, Heracles was famed for having extraordinary courage and strength - as well as a terrific appetite and a terrible temper! A huge number of myths are associated with him, most famously ‘The Twelve Labours’. Eurystheus, the king of Tiryns (whom the Delphic Oracle told Heracles to serve), sets up 12 near-impossible tasks for Heracles. There’s never been a really satisfying explanation as to why he was given this much to do. Some scholars believe that it was just a clever way of bringing together some of the many stories about Heracles into one big tale.

Table 20-1 outlines and explains the 12 labours.

Table 20-1	The 12 Labours of Hercules
Labour	Explanation
The Nemean Lion	Kill the famous lion and bring back his skin.
The Lemaean Hydra	Kill the many-headed serpent.
The Ceryneian Hind	Capture a deer that was sacred to Artemis (see Chapter 19).
The Erymanthian Boar	Capture a savage wild boar.
The Augean Stables	Muck out stables full of years' worth of dung! Nasty!
The Stymphalian Birds	Rid a town of a plague of vicious birds.
The Cretan Bull	Capture a wild bull.
The Mares of Diomedes	Capture some man-eating horses.
The Girdle of Hippolyte	Steal the belt from the queen of the Amazons.
The Cattle of Geryon	Journey into the unknown to capture some cattle.
The Apples of the Hesperides	Steal the golden apples that grew at the end of the earth.
Cerberus	Journey to Hades and capture the triple-headed dog that guarded its entrance.

After all these labours, Heracles still isn’t done. Many more stories tell of his exploits. When he finally dies, he is taken up to Olympus where he lives with the gods as one of them. That alone makes him the greatest of Greek heroes.

Theseus: Founder of Athens

As I mention in Chapter 4, many ancient Greeks believed that Theseus was:

The son of Poseidon (covered in Chapter 19)

The founder of many of the institutions of the city of Athens The hero who went to Crete and defeated the Minotaur

Of course, loads of other stories are associated with Theseus; not least journeying to fight the Amazons alongside Heracles. By the fifth century BC the Greeks thought of Theseus as the founding figure of justice, and he appears in several tragic plays as a very noble figure.

Perseus: Medusa slayer

Perseus was the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Danae. (Zeus turned himself into a shower of gold to impregnate this lovely lady!)

Perseus’s most famous feat was killing the snake-haired Gorgon called Medusa who turned men to stone with one look. He also saved Andromeda from being eaten by a sea-monster. These adventures and more feature in the film Clash of the Titans (1980).

Jason: Leader of the Argonauts

Jason is famous for one really big feat. His wicked uncle Pelias denied Jason the throne of Iolcus, and set him the task of travelling far to the city of Colchis to steal the Golden Fleece, the skin of a ram with magical powers. On his ship called the Argo, Jason was joined by a famous crew of heroes, the Argonauts.

The most complete version of the myth is the Voyage of Argo by Apollonius of Rhodes, written in the third century BC.

Bellerophon: Mystery man

Historians and scholars often consider Bellerophon to be the forgotten man of Greek myths whose stories haven’t survived as well as some of the others. A son of Poseidon, Bellerophon is sent on various impossible tasks, rather like Heracles. These tasks include fighting the terrifying Chimaera monster and battling single-handed against the Amazons. The flying horse Pegasus aids him in these tasks.

Where heroes go to die

Given that these heroes all achieved such amazing things in their lifetimes it’s no surprise that myths suggested that they were equally special in death. Mortals just went to the grim underworld of Hades (see Chapter 21) but the fate of heroes was rather different.

According to mythology heroes went to a place called Elysium, also known as the ‘Elysian Fields’ or ‘Elysian Plain.’ This was a special section of Hades where heroes could spend all eternity feasting and hunting in a beautiful paradise. So it was worth carrying out all those heroic tasks after all!

Building them up - to knock them down

Just like historical figures and the Olympian gods (see Chapter 19), the early heroes of Greek mythology are very open to interpretation. Later Greek writers reinterpreted them in quite different ways. For example, Heracles is often shown in comedies as a drunkard and a glutton. The phrase 'a Heracles supper' evolved to describe an event that goes on long after it should have finished.

The tragic playwrights took heroes and portrayed elements of their character from very different viewpoints:

● In Sophocles's play Philoctetes, Odysseus is something of a villain, using his cunning to hurt others.

● In Euripides's Medea, Jason is proud, selfish, and arrogant.