Homer & history.(The Trojan War: A New History)(Book review)

Barry Strauss The Trojan War: A New History. Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $26

Somewhere around 1200 B.C. a group of Greek raiders attacked a prominent Hittite town in northern Asia Minor. After a prolonged siege, they sacked Troy and left. Shortly after returning to the Greek mainland, the victors saw their own cities suffer a similarly catastrophic destruction.

That's about all we surmise with any certainty about the great Trojan War and its aftermath--the most famous but least known of ancient Greek conflicts, one that predated the well-recorded Persian and Peloponnesian Wars of the city-states by over 700 years.

Each generation of classical scholars has a different take on the historicity of the shadowy Trojan saga, always reinterpreting our various sources of information in light of new evidence. There nevertheless remain still three complementary branches of knowledge. First, are the Homeric poems of the Iliad and Odyssey (composed orally in dactylic hexameters around 700 B.C.), along with scattered fragments from a largely contemporaneous but lost ancillary epic cycle. Second, this literary evidence is sometimes enhanced by the ongoing archaeological excavations of both Troy and the Mycenaean citadels in Greece. Third, these literary and physical records are further augmented by the difficult translation of both Linear B (the surviving inventory scripts of Mycenaean civilization) and Hittite texts, a corpus of clay records that is occasionally enlarged by new discoveries.

Until recently, it was popular to believe that there never was much of a war at all. M. I. Finley, the late distinguished ancient historian, had long argued that Homer's fictive world was largely drawn from the so-called Dark Ages (1100-800 B.C.). The small kernel of truth about a great war that had survived the end of the Mycenaean world was hopelessly embedded in centuries of oral transmission, exaggeration, and fabrication. So a small raid of a distant past had then been transmogrified by the oral bards of an impoverished society into a never-never-land fable of the aristocratic clans, gift-giving, and tribal blood-feuds of a much later impoverished and depopulated Greece. Trying to pick and choose what might have survived from 1200 B.C. within the thousands of lines from Homer's epics was about as fruitful as reconstructing the little-known court of King Arthur from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, similarly composed centuries after the existence of the early British kings.

Given the unreliability of the flamboyant Heinrich Schliemann and the sober reexamination of his extravagant claims of finding Priam's city, classicists long ago concluded that Troy VIIa was actually a sort of backwater--hardly the windy Ilium of Homer's hexameters. And while the once dramatic decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris, which proved the Mycenaeans were Greek-speakers, did not quite bring to life with any detail Mycenaean lords with Homeric names like Odysseus and Ajax as much as pedestrian palatial inventories of sheep and wine.

The skepticism supposedly confirmed that Homer was to be seen simply as the last bard in a long line of oral poets--fortunate that his version of the Trojan War was codified, since it was contemporaneous with the rediscovery of writing and the rise of the new Greek polis. In short, he offered a hopeless mishmash of Mycenaean, Dark Age, and polis-era artifacts, elaborated upon by the poet's own genius.