Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War

by Naoise Mac Sweeney,Jan Haywood

  What is especially striking about Petersen’s comments is the director’s belief that the ancient-modern connection between Agamemnon and Bush is axiomatic, something that elides the need for interpretation. For Petersen, the contiguity between these two individuals, ‘became evident … during filming’, at which point he and his team came to ‘realize’ the significance of Homer even for a twenty-first-century audience. The effect of Petersen’s comments for our understanding of his engagement with Homer is twofold: first, his ideas amplify the conception of Homer as an artistic genius, creating a poem that still resonates with audiences and reveals important truths that speak to power after 3,000 years; secondly, his comments further reinforce the ‘historical’ quality of Troy, by distancing the film from any charge of anachronism or inapposite deployment of modern ideas to ancient material.76 The director’s rhetoric insinuates that these connections between the ancient and modern material are self-evident, and came into being of their own volition once the film was in production. Agamemnon’s/Bush’s ‘power politics’ are the destructive forces that the Iliad/Troy magnify.

  Various scenes in the film reinforce the film’s emphasis on hegemonic ambitions and cynical realpolitik as vital causal factors to explain the Trojan War.77 Prior to setting out for Troy, Agamemnon smirks to his comrade king Nestor that, by fleeing with Paris, ‘[Helen has] proved to be very useful’. Having been advised of the Trojans’ great military strength, Agamemnon angrily retorts that ‘if Troy falls … I control the Aegean’, before announcing that ‘I build the future, Nestor … Me!’ In a heated exchange with his naïve brother, Hector reminds Paris of Priam’s protracted efforts to achieve peace, underscoring both the martial conditions under which these men operate, but also the interstices between the Trojans and Greeks, the latter led by an unrepentant imperialist. Indeed, later in the film, prior to the uncanonical death of Menelaus at the hands of Hector, Agamemnon declares to his brother that ‘I didn’t come here for your pretty wife. I came here for Troy’. And another, further instance worth noting is Agamemnon’s bilious reaction to Achilles’ temporary pact with the Trojans, following the return of Hector’s corpse to Troy; his irate response to such a suggestion (‘Peace. Peace!’) firmly underscores what redounds throughout the picture: Agamemnon’s unrelenting imperial agenda.78

  Given the film-makers’ presentation of Agamemnon as an unremittingly sleazy, loathsome individual, his final comeuppance at the hands of Briseis is less surprising than this most un-Homeric event might have otherwise suggested.79 Barbara Weinlich has recently explored the way that Briseis’ killing of Agamemnon subscribes to the Western cultural trope of good overcoming evil, for the Homeric princess stabs the king with a ceremonial dagger in what is clearly a sacerdotal context.80 This moralizing interpretation accords well with our reading of the film’s negative approach to Agamemnon’s imperial programme. Agamemnon might well have routed Troy, but his subsequent murder shines a light on the futility of the Greeks’ ‘victory’. Moreover, the execution of Agamemnon is a clear turning point in the narrative, enabling the film-makers initially to focus on Paris’ somewhat improbable evolution from an immature naïf to a fully fledged heroic warrior by killing Achilles and, ultimately, allowing the film-makers to navigate away from the film’s martial politics towards a poetics of hope, by placing strong visual emphasis on the Trojans’ survival as they march away from their smouldering city.

  Alongside foul Agamemnon, the film’s contrasting presentation of the Greek and Trojan protagonists further underscores the moral superiority of the latter and clearly indicates where audience sympathies should lie. For instance, in a pair of scenes that offer perhaps the starkest indication of the differences between the Greeks and the Trojans, the film contrasts Agamemnon’s autocratic form of rule with the Trojans’ much more egalitarian system. In the first scene, several Greek kings congratulate Agamemnon for ‘his’ successful capture of the Trojan plain, furnishing him with a number of lavish gift offerings. Agamemnon then proceeds to sneer at Achilles, reminding the Myrmidon king that the Greeks’ victory on the shores of Troy will be remembered as Agamemnon’s victory. He also seizes the booty that Achilles and his men had plundered from Apollo’s sanctuary, as well as the temple servant Briseis (the very dishonourable action that of course precipitated Achilles’ anger in Book 1 of the Iliad). Throughout this scene, the lighting is gloomy and the atmosphere is febrile and debilitating; the lack of effective communication between the Greek leaders serves as a marked signifier of their future demise.81 Immediately following this scene, the camera swoops to the palace of Troy, where counsellors are found seated in the round, advising Priam on their chances of success against the Greeks. Whilst each individual encourages Priam to attack, the nature of the discussion is calm and measured. The style of seating utilized by the Trojans, in which the council are sat in an oval formation at equal height, is a striking contrast with the subservient postures adopted by Agamemnon’s ‘allies’ in the former scene, all of which suggests that it is in fact the Trojans that practice freedom of speech. Indeed, Priam’s son Hector is not afraid to rally against the consensus, questioning the use of augury as an effective tool for military decision-making. The respectful nature of the Trojans’ dialogue further throws into sharp relief the toxicity of the Greeks’ interactions; in particular, the devastating effects of the elite’s unswerving allegiance to their corrupt king Agamemnon. This in turn brings us back to Wolfgang Petersen’s remarks on Bush/Agamemnon’s monochromatic world view, and their shared desire for global domination; Troy indicates that the Iliad’s Achilles offers a useful vehicle through which one can discern the dissenting voices of Bush’s powerless allies.82

  Heroic ambivalence

  In drawing this section to a close, it has become clear that Homer’s Iliad is a crucial context for understanding Troy, a film that of course acknowledges other receptions of the Trojan War narrative, which range from other ancient world epic films to Virgil’s Aeneid.83 As emphasized at the outset of this section, the film is not straightforwardly an adaptation of the Iliad, yet it nonetheless constitutes a valuable reception of the Trojan War tradition, which is, as we have sought to demonstrate throughout this study, inextricably bound up with the Homeric poems. Petersen-Benioff radically transform major elements of Homer’s Trojan War narrative, not least Agamemnon and Menelaus’ early deaths, and the successful flight of multiple Trojans (as well as the non-Trojan Helen).84 As many others have noted, Troy’s story is also an obsessively secular one, almost entirely eradicating the gods from the action, and presenting an uncompromisingly human vision of the conflict, its causes and its effects.85 The lack of a divine architecture, and the story’s grounding within a strictly human sphere were clearly of paramount importance to Petersen (the director says as much in a recent interview with the classicist Martin Winkler).86 These revisions will no doubt have appealed to the film’s production company Warner Bros. Pictures, who were no doubt buoyed by the phenomenal fiscal success of recent epic ‘historical’ films like Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, not to mention Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.87

  The fissures that exist between Troy and Iliad are nonetheless provocative. I have argued here that alongside the need to develop an aesthetic appreciation of Troy as a film whose narrative is not heavily indebted to the ancient texts, the film must be situated within its broader historical, political, cultural, and commercial context. While Troy should not to be understood as an explicit commentary on any one war, this analysis has shown how the film participates in a wider dialogue on the moral underpinnings of George Bush’s so-called ‘War on Terror’.88 Didactic appeals to the classical past were made immediately following the attack on the Twin Towers; the escalating military response of the United States went hand in hand with a widening public discourse on the lessons to be learnt from, amongst others, the fall of Priam’s Troy, or even Athens’ tyrannical treatment of its allies during the Peloponnesian War. Most notably, this American production migh
t well have challenged many amongst its initial audience. In some ways conventional – Achilles kills Hector, Troy burns to smithereens – the film also rewrites the character and fortunes of its “Western” protagonists, the Greeks – and clearly for the worse. They are the invading force, blindly following a leader who induces either silent acquiescence or moral indolence amongst the majority of the Greek leaders. And given the film’s heavy-handed emphasis on Agamemnon’s hegemonic agenda, what audience would accept the idea that the Greeks’ campaign was an honourable attempt to recover Helen, a woman who freely chooses to abscond with her insipid lover Paris (a prettified Orlando Bloom) and one who is patently miserable in her hometown of Sparta, where her bellicose husband takes visible delight in multiple paramours.89 The Greek leaders also suffer a fate worse than that of the Trojans; while a good number of the latter flee, marching on to found a new home, many amongst the Greeks’ chief leaders (Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, and Ajax) are killed by Trojans.90 It is only the wily Odysseus who is left to perorate about the great deeds at Troy, wistfully hoping that later generations will sing of ‘Hector, breaker of horses’, as well as glorious Achilles. The phrase ‘Hector, breaker of horses’ is of course a Homeric one and is found repeatedly throughout the Iliad. And, strikingly, ἱπποδάμοιο (‘breaker of horses’) is the final word of the poem (Il. 24.884), just as the phrase occupies a central place in Odysseus’ closing sentiments in the film Troy.

  Troy demands that we ask ourselves some hard questions. What was the point of the Greeks’ (or the US) invasion? And why did the Greeks (or the Americans) so unswervingly follow boastful Agamemnon (or Bush/Rumsfeld) – a bona fide ‘baddie’ in film parlance? These ominous lines of enquiry are particularly redolent in a post-Chilcot age,91 more than a decade after the film’s release, when western intervention in the Middle East looks to be increasingly feeble and new actors in the theatre of war (especially Trump, Russia, and ISIS) have both reinvigorated the rhetoric of an East-versus-West conflict whilst simultaneously destabilizing political realities of conflict on the ground. As the twenty-first century progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw clear lines of equivalence between modern actors and the Trojan War myth, and the sense of cultural heritage and legacy is even more difficult to pin down. The seeds of this process – the deconstruction of the ‘clash of civilizations’ model – can be seen in Troy.

  1 For this phenomenon, see above p.113 and especially n.24.

  2 The Latin text of the Speculum quoted in this chapter is that of Waitz 1872.

  3 From this point onwards, when dates are given in this chapter, CE is assumed unless otherwise specified.

  4 Godfrey’s position at court and his relationship with both Frederick and his son Henry are topics of debate; see Hering 2015, 55–57 and Freed 2016, 109–10. See Hausmann 1992 for the argument that Godfrey was close to the Emperor and Weber 1994 for the arguments against.

  5 By the end of the twelfth century, as one contemporary British chronicler put it, most of the peoples of Europe claimed descent from Troy (Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum 7.38). British: Nennius, Historia Britonnum 2.10; Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae 1. Normans: Dudo of St Quentin, Historia Normannorum 130; Guillaume de Jumièges, Gesta Numannorum ducum 1.14–6. Franks: Fredegar, Chronica 2.4-6. Saxons: Widukind: Res gestae saxonicae sive annalium libri tres 1.2. Teutons: see n.13 below. Italian cities but especially Venice: Origo vicitatum italie seu venetiarum 1.1 and Brown 1996, 13. Norse gods: Snorri Sturlusen, Prose Edda, Prologue 3.

  6 As Boeck puts it, there was ‘a pan-European fashion for the wildly popular and ideologically powerful bestsellers with a Trojan theme’ (Boeck 2015, 264). Perhaps the best known of these was Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, written in the French vernacular around 1160. The popularity of this work was such that translations rapidly appeared in Latin, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and modern Greek. These works were so common that the literary theme was given its own moniker – the ‘Matter of Troy’. See Desmond 2016 for the ‘Matter of Troy’ in the medieval period. The simultaneous circulation of politically motivated Trojan genealogies meant that such works, although ostensibly popular and romantic, were necessarily also political (Eley 1991, Bruckner 2015).

  7 For studies of the medieval Trojan genealogies, see especially Waswo 1995 and Wolf 2008; but also Eisenhut 1983, Beaune 1991, Bouet 1995, Ewig 1998, Shawcross 2003, Plassmann 2006, and Clark 2010 (for the practice of medieval genealogy more generally, see Speigel 1999, 99–110). Similar claims to Trojan ancestry can be found in later periods of European history: see p.96 above and especially nn.76–80 for the Tudors and Early Modern England; and Tanner 1993 for the Habsburgs and the Early Modern Period in continental Europe. For wider medieval literary traditions of Trojan-themed poetry and stories, see the summaries in Jung 1996 and Desmond 2016. For the popularity of Troy in the visual art of the medieval period, see Buchthal 1971, Stones 2005, and Boeck 2015, 256–67.

  8 Beaune 1991, 237 and Shawcross 2003.

  9 For the Hohenstaufen appropriation of Charlemagne, see Latowsky 2013, 183–214. Charlemagne became most enthusiastically adopted into Hohenstaufen imperial ideology following Frederick’s break with the Pope in 1160. For a Holy Roman Emperor estranged from the Church at Rome, celebrating Charlemagne was a means of promoting a non-papal vision of the Empire’s past.

  10 See Hallam and Everard 2013, 176 and 242 for the increasing need by 1150 for the Capetians to connect themselves to the Carolingians.

  11 Roman claims to a Trojan heritage have been extensively discussed; see especially Erskine 2003 with references. For the Trojan claims made by medieval Italian cities, see n.5 above.

  12 For a biography of Frederick I, see Freed 2016.

  13 The Trojan genealogy in the Speculum is known to have drawn on earlier works, chief amongst which was the Chronica of Frutolf of Michelsberg, composed in the eleventh century but revised and expanded by Ekkehard of Aura in the early twelfth century (for an edition of which see Pertz 1844, 155–56). Godfrey took many details of his genealogy from that of Frutolf-Ekkehard, but seems to have written this final section on the ‘true’ Franks in unusually scathing style. See Innes 2000 for earlier versions of the Trojan-German genealogy, and n.25 below for Godfrey’s sources.

  14 For the Speculum and its Trojan genealogy as elements partaking of Hohenstaufen imperial ideology: Tanner 1993, 88–90 and Hering 2015, 58–62.

  15 For kinship diplomacy in antiquity, see Jones 1999 and Patterson 2010.

  16 As one scholar has put it, there was an ‘explosive rush of ruling houses and cities to claim Trojan ancestry, to invent genealogies linking the ruler’s family or the place to the sons of Priam or of Dardanus’ (Waswo 1995, 286).

  17 Clark 2010, 205–6 and Mueller 2013, 24 n.18 with references. As claims of Trojan origins for both the British and Normans appear as early as the ninth century CE (see n.5 above), there was political mileage to be gained by arguing (in a way similar to Godfrey in the Speculum) that the two strands of Trojan blood were now united in the realm and person of the Plantagenet king (Aurell 2007, 382). These politically motivated genealogies included the Genalogia Regum Anglorum of Ailred of Rievaulx (Freeman 2002, 55–87), and the royal lineage recounted in the Nun of Barking’s translation of the Vita Ædwardi Regis (MacBain 1993). Beyond genealogy, the mid-late twelfth century saw an explosion of historiography in the Plantagenet realm, all of which featured stories of Trojan descent. In Latin, these works included: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae 1; Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum; Alfred of Beverley’s Annales sive Historia de gestis regum Britanniae. In general, it seems that the Plantagenets’ politicized interest in history led to something of a renaissance in historical literature in the twelfth century in Britain and northern France (Damian-Grint 1999, Albu 2001). Significant amounts of historical writing also appeared in the vernacular languages, implying a broader readership for these stories than might be assumed for
the Latin histories. These include a rendering of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work into French by the Norman poet Wace in the Roman de Brut; Wace’s history of the Dukes of Normandy in his Roman de Rou; Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique des ducs de Normandie; and Layamons’ Brut. Indeed, such claims became so common that by the end of the century in Britain, historical chronicles were referred to as ‘bruts’ – a reference to Brutus, the supposed Trojan ancestor of the British and the standard starting point for all historical writing.

  18 Beaune 1991, Bouet 1995 and Ewig 1998.

  19 For a recent edition of and introduction to the Gesta Philippi Augusti, see Carpentier, Pon and Chauvin 2006.

  20 After stressing these two main stemma, Rigord also later mentions other escapees from Troy, including the descendants of Helenus the son of Priam, who lived in slavery in Greece for two centuries before being rescued by Brutus and heading to found Britain; other sons of Antenor who founded cities in northern Italy; and the descendants of Aeneas.

  21 The text of Rigord used in this chapter is that of Carpentier, Pon, and Chauvin 2006.

  22 For Sunno and Genebaud, see: Carpentier, Pon and Chauvin 2006, 197, n.157.

  23 The idea of Antenor as a traitor to Troy can be found in Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1.48, but appears even more clearly in two of the main texts used in the twelfth century as sources for the Trojan War story: Dares Phrygius, De Excidio Troiae Historia (Antenor’s treachery is at 39–42); and Dictys Cretensis, Ephemeris Belli Troiani (an account of Antenor’s treason can be found at 5.8-12). The idea of Antenor selling out his homeland also appeared in popular literature of the twelfth century: e.g. Benoît, Roman de Troie lines 23, 497–25, 713.

  24 See Hering 2015, 64 for the theory of reditus regni Francorum ad stirpem Caroli’, which became a vital tenet of Capetian ideology in the early thirteenth century.