by Homer
The earliest, very small Trojan settlement had been built around 2900 B.C., on a low hill above a marshy and possibly malarial plain cut by two rivers that the Iliad calls Simoeis and Scamander.16 Archaeologists have identified seven major levels of settlements built on this site that span nearly two thousand years, the last being abandoned around 950 B.C.17 Of these seven levels of settlement, that at the very end of Troy VI (dated from 1700 to 1250 B.C.) is the usual candidate for the Troy of any Trojan War.
Built on the ashes of its predecessors, Troy VI was constructed with novel skill and style, suggesting that a new people had claimed the ancient site; the Luwians, an Indo-European people related to the powerful Hittites, are known to have settled at this time in northwest Anatolia, and are the most likely candidates. A palatial citadel was rebuilt on the hill, with handsome, gently sloping defensive walls constructed of blocks of carefully dressed limestone. Standing some seventeen feet in height, the stone walls were in turn surmounted by a mud-brick superstructure, so that from stone base to brick summit the walls rose to nearly thirty feet. Strategic towers strengthened the defenses, and stone ramps led to gateways in and out of the city.18 These details are known to the Iliad, which describes Troy’s wide ways and gateways, its towers and its “well-built walls.” Below the citadel, a lower city housed a population of an estimated six thousand souls.19 The last of Troy VI’s stages—Troy VIh—ended in 1250 B.C., falling to what appears to have been a combination of earthquake and enemy action.20
There is no material evidence to connect the Mycenaeans to the fall of Troy. The Hittite royal archives, however, have yielded tantalizing clues about the historical relationship between the two peoples of the Iliad. A reference to the Ahhiyawa, ruled by a great king across the sea, for example, is now generally taken to refer to the Achaeans—the name the Iliad most commonly uses for the Bronze Age Greeks, whom we call Mycenaeans.21 Similarly, Hittite Wilusa is now confirmed to be the place Homer calls Ilios or Troy; or more properly, with the restoration of its original ancient w-sounding letter, the “digamma,” “Wilios.”22 Particularly intriguing is a reference made by the Hittite king Hattusili III in a letter to an unnamed king of Ahhiyawa, around 1250 B.C.: “Now as we have reached agreement on the matter of Wilusa over which we fought . . .”23: This, then, is evidence that on one occasion, at least, a Mycenaean king had come to blows with an Anatolian power over the town called Ilios.
If Troy VIh did indeed fall to Mycenaean invaders, the Mycenaeans did not have long to savor their victory. Despite the strength and watchfulness of their great citadels, the Mycenaeans could not forestall the cataclysmic disaster that ended their own civilization, dramatically and suddenly, around 1200 B.C., a generation or so after the fall of Troy—a time that saw the collapse of many Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern powers. Numerous explanations are offered for this collapse—natural disaster, plague, internal unrest, disruption of trade, foreign marauders. Most recently, a study of fossilized pollen from the Late Bronze Age points to severe and widespread drought between 1250 and 1100 B.C., findings that are corroborated by a thirteenth-century B.C. letter from a Hittite queen to Ramses II: “I have no grain in my lands,” she wrote at what would have been the start of this devastating drought.24
Remarkably, it was the view of later ancient writers that the Trojan War itself was the cause of Greece’s undoing. The Odyssey gives evidence of social unrest in the wake of the war, with its depiction of the return of the veteran hero Odysseus to his own land, where he finds his estate has been plundered in his absence by usurpers who did not fight at Troy. “It was long before the army returned from Troy, and this fact in itself led to many changes,” wrote Thucydides in the fifth century B.C., “There was party strife in nearly all the cities and those who were driven into exile founded new cities.”25
The collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms led to the abandonment of the major palace sites, with waves of refugees striking out for other parts of Greece or the Aegean. Throughout Greece, the archaeological record shows diminished populations living in reduced conditions. In most parts of Greece, trade is lost. Literacy is lost. This Dark Age of Greece was to last some four hundred years.26
The fact that the Iliad has preserved memories of the great palaces, certain types of armor, and other elements of Mycenaean life must mean that the epic-tradition was carried across this protracted period of illiteracy by oral storytelling. Like a snowball rolling down the hill of time, the tradition accumulated material from each age through which it passed. A mix of words and syntax from different ages and different dialects, studded with conscious archaisms, the language of the Iliad is “artificial,” which is to say never spoken by any particular people, but rather the legacy of generation after generation of oral poet.
Close study of the Iliad indicates that this epic-making process is in fact even older than the Bronze Age, and indeed draws on sources from outside the Greek world. For example, the name of Helen of Troy can be traced to the Indo-European *Sweléna¯, associated with burning and sun glare. Helen’s prototype was a Daughter of the Sun, the abduction of the Sun-maiden being a recurrent motif in old Indo-European myth.27 The comradeship of Achilles and Patroclus has long invited comparison with that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Near Eastern epic of Gilgamesh, variants of which can be dated as far back as the third millennium B.C. Nearly half of the Iliad’s 15,693 lines are in direct speech, meaning that to some degree the epic is as much a drama as it is a narrative. The prototypes for this kind of dramatic presentation are also found in the Near East, in tales, myths, and poems in Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Ugaritic, and Hittite.28
The antiquity of the Iliad’s tradition is also apparent in the poem’s distinctive meter—its rhythm—which is called dactylic hexameter; dactyl is the Greek word for “finger,” and like a finger the poetic dactyl has one long and two short units. Hex is Greek for “six,” and accordingly the dactylic hexameter line consists of six such metrical units—more or less; the meter allows the substitution of two longs (a spondee) for a dactyl, and the last unit always has a two-beat ending (usually a spondee, sometimes a trochee, which is long-short). This flexibility affords great variety in the metrical shape of every line of verse, avoiding monotony. It is a striking fact that certain Homeric phrases are closely related to phrases found in Vedic Sanskrit literature. For example, the Greek phrase kléos áphthiton—meaning “everlasting glory,” a concept central to the heroic ethos—has a close cognate in the Sanskrit śrávas ákȿitam. Both the Greek and Sanskrit phrase, moreover, are in hexameter—suggesting they descend from a common Indo-European, or even Proto-Indo-European, heroic poetic tradition.29
The Iliad’s oldest linguistic stratum is Aeolic, a dialect that was spoken in Boeotia in central Greece and in Thessaly, on the northern edge of the Mycenaean world. Significantly, Achilles is a Thessalian hero, and the Iliad refers to legends relating to Thessaly, Boeotia, and other regions with Thessalian connections. Following the collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms, these Aeolic speakers drifted east as far as the western coast of Anatolia and the island of Lesbos, just off the Anatolian mainland.30 There is compelling evidence from the Hittite archives that Mycenaeans had been present on Lesbos from as early as the fifteenth century B.C., and it may be that these later Aeolic-speaking immigrants were now joining kin or countrymen. Archaeological excavations show that the inhabitants of the island shared the culture of the Troad. Thus by chance or destiny, Greek poets carrying the epic tradition had settled among a people who were, in terms of culture, Trojans.31
While these Aeolic-speaking immigrants had lost their land, their cities, the graves of their ancestors, they still brought with them much of value, such as the gods they worshipped, the language they spoke, and the stories they told. Here in the region of Lesbos, memories of the lost Mycenaean world were handed down to subsequent generations in stories and poems: Tales of great cities rich in gold, remembrances, often muddled, of battles waged and types of armor, exploits of warrio
rs who fought like lions and communed with the gods.32
And at some point, a new and electrifying character strode into the evolving narrative, a semidivine hero indelibly associated with the Aeolian homeland in faraway Thessaly, called Achilles. There is much evidence to suggest that Achilles was originally a folk hero possessed of supernatural gifts that made him invulnerable—a horse, a spear, magic armor—and that he was swept into the epic tradition at a relatively late date. In the Iliad, he bears indelible traces of his folk origins but has been stripped of all magically protective powers, and indeed his divine gifts only underscore his mortality. Thus in the Iliad, the immortal horse of Achilles does not carry him to safety, but prophesies his death; his wondrous armor is forged by the divine smith Hephaestus, who clearly states to Achilles’ grieving mother that the armor cannot protect her son from dying:
“Would that I were so surely able to hide him away from death and its hard sorrow,
when dread fate comes upon him,
as he will have his splendid armor, such as many a man
of the many men to come shall hold in wonder, whoever sees it.”33
Although born of a goddess, the hero of the Iliad is wholly mortal, and indeed his mortality is one of the unmoving poles about which the epic turns.34
The archaeological record on Lesbos indicates that despite the waves of migrations that continued over several generations, the Aeolic-speaking newcomers made very little impact upon the local Anatolian culture. This would suggest that there was no hostile conquest of one people by another.35 A few scattered Anatolian words and phrases embedded in the Iliad give further evidence of contact between colonizers and native people, and the Iliad’s descriptions of the geography of the Troad show close acquaintance with the region.36 This period during which Aeolic poets shaped the epic tradition while in the shadow of Troy possibly accounts for one of the most striking features of the Iliad: namely, that this Greek epic derives much of its emotional power from the tragedy of the Trojans. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the epic’s deeply sympathetic depiction of the enemy was the result of close acquaintance during this period; possibly the Aeolic poets heard stories of the legendary war from the Trojan side.37
Just as Aeolic speakers traveled from their homelands eastward, so others were migrating from other parts of Greece. From their homelands in the Peloponnese and Athens, speakers of Ionic Greek migrated to the central western coast of Anatolia and its adjacent islands. And sometime around 800 B.C., the epic tradition—the Iliad-in-the-making—passed from Aeolic-speaking poets into the hands and dialect of Ionian poets. Thus despite its anciently embedded Aeolic words and phrases, its Aeolian hero Achilles, and its emphasis on Aeolian-speaking regions of Greece, the Iliad we have today is composed in Ionic Greek, and ancient tradition held Homer to be a poet of Ionia.
How the transference from one people and dialect to another happened is unknown, but not wholly mysterious. Ionic Euboea, the long slender island close to the central Greek mainland, which had significant contact with Lesbos, is thought to be a likely place for this transference.38 The distances between the Aeolic and Ionic settlements were in any case not great, and the eighth century B.C. was a time of energetic trade and movement. The centuries of Dark Age had ended. Enterprising individuals and communities were leaving Greece to establish colonies, from the Black Sea to southern Italy and Sicily. Evidence of significant social upheaval is seen in the fact that the new age opened upon an entirely different political landscape. The old palace complexes and their feudal societies were gone, and the city-state with its vocal citizenry was ascendant—a fact perhaps reflected in the Iliad’s depiction of Achilles’ fearless challenge of his inept superior, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae.
And this is the age in which literacy is rediscovered. Of the two earliest known examples of the new Greek alphabetic writing, one is an inscription incised on a wine jug from a cemetery near the Dipylon Gate in Athens, and dated to 740 B.C., preserving enigmatic lines of hexameter verse: “ . . . the dancer who dances most delicately. . . .” The other, scratched on a clay cup found in the grave of a ten-year-old boy in the Greek colony of Ischia, in Italy, is also in hexameter (with the first line in prose). Dated to 735–720 B.C., the inscription reads: “I am the cup of Nestor, a joy to drink from. / Whoever drinks from this cup, straightway that man / the desire of beautiful-crowned Aphrodite will seize.”39 Astonishingly, these early lines of written verse apparently make playful reference to a scene in Book 11 of the Iliad, in which the magnificent cup of the Achaeans’ aged counselor Nestor is described. We have come, then, to the age of Homer.
To the ancient Greeks, “Divine Homer” was a professional poet from Ionia, with the island of Chios and the city of Smyrna on the Anatolian mainland being the usual contenders for his place of birth. This plausible tradition apart, his identity is lost in the mythic past; according to one testament, for example, his father was the river Meles and his mother a nymph. The Odyssey gives a portrait of a professional singer working at the court of a noble family who is blind, a fact that inspired the tradition that Homer himself was a blind bard—the truth of which is impossible to know.40
As indistinct as was the ancient view of Homer, it is straightforwardly clear compared with modern views about him. Who Homer was, or was not, how he composed, whether he wrote or dictated, and whether he composed both the Iliad and Odyssey are the subjects of the so-called Homeric Question, and the most contentiously debated aspects of Homeric scholarship. Modern views range from the belief that Homer was the last and defining poet writing at the end of the long epic tradition; to the belief that there never was a Homer at all, but only a shared tradition passed down by generations of bards; and on to the extreme view that there is no single definitive Iliad, only versions of its various performances.41
Modern scholarship on the subject is dated to the work of Milman Parry in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which securely established the oral heritage of the Homeric poems. A hallmark of Homeric language is its formulaic expressions. People, places, things, events are regularly evoked by standard, recurrent phrases. Thus swift-footed Achilles; godlike Paris; resourceful Odysseus; white-armed Hera; black ships; the nourishing earth. Parry demonstrated that the epic system of formulaic phrases was not merely poetic or aesthetic, but functional: in other words, the formulaic language serves a formally useful purpose. Therefore the choice of a particular noun-epithet phrase, according to Parry, was determined by its metrical position in a line of verse, and not by the poet’s interest in the attribute. So ships in Homer are black, well-balanced, seagoing, many-benched, many-oared, and swift. In Greek, as in English, each of these attributes, with its different number of differently emphasized syllables, has a different metrical “shape,” appropriate to different parts of the verse-line. The poet’s use of “swift ships” as opposed to “well-benched ships,” then, has nothing to do with a desire to emphasize speed over construction; the choice is determined only by the metrical phrasing that is needed.
Oral poets in living traditions generally do not recite works strictly word for word from memory (although some do), but improvise to some extent with each performance. A ready stock of noun-epithet units serving any metrical need is very handy for a poet singing his song “live” and without opportunity for the kind of reflection and revision that writing allows. As Parry observed, the Homeric formulaic system ensured both that key nouns possessed a formulaic phrase for any given metrical position in a line of hexameter verse, but no more than one such phrase. Such a combination of both scope and economy, Parry claimed, could have been achieved only by the refinement of use over many centuries.42 Once taken as conclusive proof of the strict orality of the Homeric poems themselves. Parry’s work has come to receive more critical scrutiny. While few today would dispute the epic’s evident debt to traditional oral poetry, there is wide debate concerning the ultimate authorship, or compilation of the poems.
In addition to these short formulaic phrases,
a variety of repeated themes, scenes, and patterns inform the Iliad. The causative event of the Trojan War, the abduction of Helen, for example, is mirrored by the causative event of Achilles’ anger, the abduction of his prize Briseïs. Passing references are made to the anger of Paris and of Aeneas, which hint at larger stories, now unknown to us, that mirrored the Iliad’s grand subject, the anger of Achilles. Scenes of battle are built on repeated patterns: A suggests to comrade B that they attack the enemy together; B agrees and they charge; party C stands firm but calls for aid, and so on.43
Similarly, lengthy set pieces describing a variety of activities such as making sacrifice, arriving or setting out on a journey, bathing, making oath, and arming are repeated throughout the epic. So in the Iliad, a ritual of sacrifice is described in solemn detail:
Then when they had prayed and thrown the scattering barley before them
they first drew back the heads of the sacrificial animals and cut their throats, and flayed them,
and cut out the thighbones and covered them over with fat
they had made into double folds, and placed raw flesh upon them;
the old man burned these on a cleft-stick and over them poured in libation
dark-gleaming wine; and the youths beside him held sacrificial forks in hand.
Then when the thighbones had been consumed by fire and they had tasted the entrails,
they cut up the other parts and pierced them through on spits
and roasted them with care, and then drew off all the pieces.
And when they had ceased their work and prepared their meal,
they feasted, nor did any man’s appetite lack his due portion.44
The scene is from Book 1 but is repeated with minor variations on two other occasions in the epic. Such repetition is not only stylistically impressive, creating an elevated, solemn tone, but also highly practical: ready-made scenes, like ready formulaic phrases, are of obvious value to the performing poet.