by Colin Wilson
If Butler had lived a century later, he would have taken a good photographer with him to Sicily and published a series of colour photographs of the various sites of the adventures of Ulysses in a coffee-table book, together with Homer’s descriptions. In fact, in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey (finally published in 1897), Butler includes half a dozen or so photographs, but none are as convincing as they might be. Probably the best way for a modern reader to make up his own mind would be to go to Sicily with a copy of Butler’s book. It has to be admitted that Butler’s own sheer excitement and enthusiasm convey a great deal of conviction. But the section of the book that describes the various places is less thorough than it could be. My own suspicion is that Butler was disheartened by the general skepticism he encountered and by the total lack of response from the various scholars to whom he sent pamphlets about his theory. The famous Professor Jowett, an Oxford scholar and translator of Plato, admitted frankly that he had not even glanced at the two pamphlets Butler sent him. A dozen publishers turned down Butler’s excellent prose translation of the Odyssey. So on the whole, it is not surprising that he failed to summon the necessary energy to argue the topographical part of the book as thoroughly as the rest.
The achievement is nevertheless considerable. At the time Butler was writing his book, most scholars took it for granted that Homer was the author of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Nowadays, very few take that position. Butler was admittedly wrong about the dates – he thought that at least a hundred years separated the two epics and that the Odyssey was composed around 1050 BC But then, Butler lacked the tools – and the archaeological information – that have enabled later scholars to be far more precise. As to his essential thesis – that the Odyssey was written by a woman – few people who follow his arguments with the Odyssey in the other hand will fail to admit that he could be right. George Bernard Shaw attended a Fabian Society meeting at which Butler lectured on the female authorship of the Odyssey and admitted that, while initially skeptical about the idea, he took up the Odyssey and soon found himself saying, “Of course it was written by a woman”.
Robert Graves was another classical scholar who allowed himself to be convinced, and whose novel Homer’s Daughter is inspired by the theory. The story is told by Princess Nausicaa, who describes how her brother disappeared after a quarrel with his wife and was assumed to have gone off to foreign parts. In fact, he has been murdered by a treacherous friend. Her father, King Alpheides, sails off to look for him, leaving Uncle Mentor in charge. Nausicaa’s suitors then behave exactly like Penelope’s suitors in the Odyssey and move into the palace. But when Nausicaa and her attendants are doing the laundry near the sea, they are approached by a naked man who has been shipwrecked; he is a Cretan nobleman named Aethon, and it is he who eventually slays the suitors and marries Nausicaa. Nausicaa then goes on to write the Odyssey, in which biography and legend freely intermingle. The merit of the book is that it enables us to grasp the sheer plausibility of Butler’s theory. Homer’s Daughter is one of Graves’s most underrated books – a careful re-creation of Sicily around 800 BC that deserves to be as widely read as I, Claudius.
Another interesting footnote to the Butler theory is that James Joyce used his prose translation of the Odyssey as the basis of Ulysses.
To summarize this part of the argument: it is probably fair to say that if the Odyssey was indeed the work of one single person – and was not the collective work of many bards – then the contention that it was written by a woman is highly plausible.
But what of our second question: did the siege of Troy really take place, or was it simply a myth? After all, it is obvious that the Odyssey, with its one-eyed giants, wandering rocks, and enchantresses who turn men into pigs, is basically a fairy tale. And the action of the Iliad is even more mythical, with the gods playing as important a part in the action as the heroes.
Let us review the story again. According to Greek legend, mostly based on the works of Homer, a prince named Paris (or Alexandros), son of King Priam of Troy, was a guest of King Menelaus of Sparta when he fell in love with Menelaus’s wife, Helen, who was a famous beauty. She was the daughter of the god Jove (or Zeus) and a princess named Leda, whom Jove seduced by turning himself into a swan. Many princes had sought her hand before she accepted Menelaus. So when Paris carried her off – with or without her consent – the indignant Menelaus went to ask for help from his brother, King Agamemnon, in Mycenae (he would have had to travel by sea, for roads were almost nonexistent), and an armada of ninety ships sailed for Troy. These included contingents led by many of Helen’s rejected suitors.
Troy – or Ilion – was a town whose wealth was founded on trade (like Mycenae, which was so rich that it was known as “golden Mycenae”). Its main industry seems to have been horse breeding. It is important for us to realize that in those days, the Mediterranean was swarming with pirates, so that no town could afford to be on the sea unless it had mighty defenses. Troy was a mile inland, but it had mighty defenses anyway, including immense walls with defensive towers. It is also important to realize that in the ancient world, peace was a rare commodity. The first thing man seems to have done when he began to live in settlements was to wage war on his neighbours, so that in the ancient world, the words “peaceable nation” were virtually a contradiction in terms. It was not until relatively modern times – about 1700 or so – that the rules of history changed and it became such a costly and highly destructive business to go to war that long periods of peace became the norm.8
So the Greeks attacking Troy found themselves in the position of a hawk trying to attack a tortoise. This was no ordinary siege – no town could hold out for ten years, as Troy did, if it was surrounded. The plain of Troy was notoriously windy – it still is – so the Greeks camped in a sheltered spot between two headlands and built a rampart to protect themselves. The Trojans had allies in other parts of Asia Minor, who sallied out to help them periodically. So it was less a siege than a spasmodic series of engagements.
But in the tenth year of the war something happened, and Troy fell and was destroyed; all its men were massacred, and its women and children were carried off into slavery. According to Ulysses in the Odyssey, it was he who suggested the stratagem of building a wooden horse and filling it with armed men, then pretending to sail away. But of course, this could well have been an invention of the author (or authoress) of the Odyssey.
The story of the search for Troy is one of the most fascinating in the history of archaeology, and its conclusions are more satisfyingly positive than those in the case of the search for Homer’s identity.
One story concerning the search for Troy begins in 1829, when a seven-year-old boy named Heinrich Schliemann received a copy of Jerrer’s Universal History for Christmas. When he saw the picture of Troy in flames, he was struck by the thought that nothing could possibly destroy such mighty walls. The young Schliemann resolved that he would one day go and investigate the matter for himself. His father was a country parson in Neu-Buckow, Germany, who was dismissed after being falsely accused of misappropriating church funds. Heinrich had to become a grocer’s assistant at the age of fourteen. Tuberculosis led him to give up his job and embark for South America as a cabin boy. After a shipwreck he drifted to Amsterdam, where he became a clerk and learned English. At the age of thirty-two he learned that his brother had died in California and sailed for America to claim his estate. It was a good time to go; the gold rush made him rich, and in 1863 he was finally able to realize his ambition to search for Troy. Together with a sixteen-year-old Greek schoolgirl, whom he married, he sailed for the northern coast of Turkey to begin his search.
Most scholars accepted the notion that the remains of Troy would be found on a mountain near Bunarbashi, about three hours from the sea. Schliemann, using the Iliad as a guide, disagreed – Homer’s heroes rode between Troy and the coast several times a day. Schliemann concluded that a more likely site was a mound called Hissarlik in present-day Turkey, about an hour f
rom the sea. (And in ancient times, the sea came much farther inland.)
It was an inspired guess, typical of Schliemann’s incredible luck. When he had obtained permission to dig there, Schliemann began excavations – in 1871 – with a large gang of workmen. They soon encountered the remains of a town, but it dated from the Roman period, and it was a mere hundred yards in diameter. Below this was another ruined town. And then another. And then another. Eager to find Homer’s Troy, Schliemann ordered his men to slice a great trench through the middle of the mound and keep going until they reached bedrock. All told, there proved to be the ruins of nine cities, one on top of the other.
Twelve years later, Schliemann announced that he had found the treasures of King Priam – treasures that, for some odd reason, he had always been convinced would still be there. (He never explained why the conquerors had not simply stolen them when they destroyed Troy and massacred its inhabitants.) In his autobiography he tells a remarkable story of how he had glimpsed a copper vessel through a hole in the wall and waited until his workmen had gone to lunch – he was afraid they might be tempted to steal – before he and his wife removed a treasure of drinking vessels and jewelry. The finds were to make him world famous.
There is, in fact, a disappointing postscript to this story. When, in 1972, Professor William Calder, of the University of Colorado, decided to start checking on Schliemann’s biographical information, he soon discovered that the great archaeologist was a mythomaniac of the first order. His story about being received by the president of the United States on his first visit to America was pure invention; so was his tale of being present in San Francisco on the night of the great fire in May 1851. It became clear that his fortune was founded on cheating the bankers to whom he sold gold dust and that the story of the finding of the Trojan treasure was also an invention – it had actually been found over a considerable period and concealed from the eyes of his partners in the enterprise, a Turkish pasha and an American named Frank Calvert. Calder’s research proved that Schliemann was a crook. Yet there can be no doubt that, in spite of this, he was an inspired archaeologist.
In fact, Schliemann’s next major venture was to excavate Mycenae, in southern Greece, the home of Agamemnon, the Bronze Age king who led the expedition to Troy; here he uncovered still more treasure and revealed again that, where archaeology was concerned, his intuition was awesome. A dig at Tiryns, the home of King Diomedes (another Homeric hero), in 1884 uncovered some of the finest remains of Bronze Age civilization to date.
In 1889 Schliemann returned to Hissarlik and renewed his search for evidence of Homer’s Troy. What he found, in 1890, was at once exciting and depressing. Outside the mound, and well beyond the limits of what he had believed to be Homer’s Troy, he came upon the remains of a large building that in turn contained the remains of pottery that was unmistakably Mycenaean. The conclusion was obvious: he had sliced straight through the Troy he was looking for. In the following year, Schliemann died of a stroke, collapsing in the street; his death frustrated his plans for still more ambitious excavations.
Schliemann had indeed proved that Troy existed – ancient records make it clear that there was simply no other great city in the area. But of the nine cities that had been uncovered, which one was it? Schliemann had been convinced that it was the second from the bottom – because it showed signs of having been destroyed by fire – and in order to reach it, he had ordered his workmen to slice a huge trench through the seven layers of ruins that lay above. He was to learn too late that his Troy was a thousand years too old and that his brutal methods had destroyed a large part of the city he was looking for. But again, which of the other eight was Homer’s Troy?
Schliemann’s collabourator, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, continued and completed Schliemann’s work. The discovery of the large building containing Mycenaean pottery – probably a royal hall – had furnished him with the clue he needed. It indicated that the walls of Homer’s Troy extended well beyond the boundaries of the mound of Hissarlik. And when Dörpfeld excavated at the southern edge of the mound, he soon uncovered walls greater than any Schliemann had found. This – the sixth city from the bottom – was the city they had all been looking for. These walls had a slight inward slope, just as Homer had indicated in the Iliad (Patroclus had made a determined attempt to scale them), and there was a mighty tower that must have been about sixty feet high before it had been reduced by more than half. There was a gate in the east wall and the remains of another tower, built of limestone blocks. Inside the walls he uncovered the ruins of five large houses and deduced that the citadel had risen in concentric circles. And although “Troy 6” measured only two hundred yards by a hundred and fifty yards, it must have been as impressive as a medieval castle. It was obvious now why the Greeks had failed to take it by storm. It must have towered over the plain of Scamander as Mont Saint Michael still towers over the flat Britanny marshes.
The next great step forward in Mediterranean archaeology was taken by the Englishman Arthur Evans, who began to excavate near the city of Heraklion, on the island of Crete, in 1900 and uncovered the remarkable royal palace at Knossos. He announced this as the palace of the legendary King Minos. According to Greek legend, the king’s wife, Pasiphae, had a taste for bestiality and became pregnant by a bull, giving birth to a monster called the Minotaur, which was half man and half bull. The legend also tells how Minos demanded a yearly tribute of seven youths and seven maidens from Athens and how these were thrown to the Minotaur, which was kept in a specially built labyrinth. The Greek hero Theseus went to Crete as part of the yearly tribute, killed the Minotaur, and escaped from the labyrinth with the help of a thread, given to him by Minos’s daughter Ariadne. Evans’s excavations revealed pictures of youths and maidens turning somersaults over the back of a bull, suggesting that there had been a bull cult at Knossos. And the mazelike palace was full of symbols of a double-headed axe, known as labrys. It began to look as if the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur was based on fact after all. If so, the same could apply to the story of the Trojan War.
One of Evans’s most important discoveries at Knossos was a quantity of clay tablets written in a form of hieroglyphics – actually, two forms, which became known as Linear A and Linear B. Evans was convinced that they were written in the unknown language of the ancient Cretans, which would mean that the Minoan civilization of Crete was not Greek. However, Linear B was deciphered by the scholar Michael Ventris in 1952, eleven years after Evans’s death, and proved to be an early form of Greek. (Linear A remains undeciphered.) And names found in the Linear B tablets included many place-names that had been mentioned in Homer.
Evans’s view dominated British archaeology for many years. An American named Carl Blegen disagreed. His excavations on mainland Greece in the 1920s convinced him that the Greeks had dominated Mediterranean civilization for a very long time indeed – as far back as 1900 BC. In 1932 he began a new series of excavations at Hissarlik, whose aim was to use the latest dating techniques (which relied heavily on pottery) to try to establish the age of all the levels and to learn as much as possible about each.
Blegen was able to establish that the bottom layer dated back as far as the fourth millennium BC (Modern dating is 3600.) But when he came to study the sixth Troy, which Dörpfeld had believed to be Homer’s, he reached a conclusion that seemed to contradict Dörpfeld: that it had been destroyed by an earthquake. The walls had crumbled, and in one place the foundations had even shifted. That seemed to rule it out as the Troy burned down by Agamemnon. And Dörpfeld, who visited the site in 1935, had to agree. Blegen dated Troy 6 about 1260 BC, possibly ten years earlier.
But at the next layer, which he called 7a (because he found many subordinate layers in the course of his digging – a total of no less than fifty), he found something that looked much more promising. The streets of 7a were a kind of shantytown, where there had formerly been houses of the nobility, now there were cramped “bungalows”. It looked as if all the people who normally lived
outside Troy had been crowded into its confines – which is what you would expect in a siege. Inside the gate was a building that Blegen called the “snack bar” – a combination of bakery and wine shop. (Blegen imagined the Homeric heroes rushing in there after battle to refresh themselves.) Moreover, this Troy had been burned. He found smashed skulls, charred skeletons, and an arrowhead. It was this that led Blegen to announce triumphantly, “The sack of Troy is a historical fact”.
There was one obvious objection to this shantytown being Homer’s Troy: if the walls had been badly damaged by earthquake at some earlier stage, then surely the Greeks would have had no trouble in conquering the unprotected citadel? But closer examination disposed of this objection. Although the walls had been damaged, the circuit still remained complete; they would still have been a formidable obstacle. Many scholars were convinced that Blegen had found the Troy of the Iliad.