by Stephen Fry
I suppose the point is that there is not too much difficulty or dissonance in us being able to entertain the historical and the imaginative in our minds at the same time. The ‘knowledge’ we have of the gods and heroes is akin to our knowledge of the Roman emperors, or the royal houses of Europe, or, for that matter, the mafia families of twentieth-century America, but it is also akin to the knowledge we have of fictional characters in Dickens and Shakespeare. Some people would point to the more obvious correspondence with fantasy characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Game of Thrones kingdoms, Harry Potter’s wizarding world or Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but this is perhaps not the time for ventilating my thoughts about the difference between myth and fantasy. The point really is that with myth we can sift and sort details of personality, archaeology and origins as we would with real lives and histories, yet simultaneously accept and embrace supernatural and symbolic elements of fiction and magic. To quote the newsman at the end of the John Ford western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), ‘This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’
The involvement or non-involvement of the gods in the story of the Trojan War is an indicator of how much one might want to treat the story as history and how much as myth. It is perfectly possible to do without the presence of the immortals entirely, as the Wolfgang Petersen film Troy (2004) with Brad Pitt as Achilles and Brian Cox as Agamemnon showed very clearly. Not an Olympian in sight. In the course of this book, I have occasionally paused to make the point that it is possible to interpret Homer’s description of gods assisting mortals as being metaphorical. When writers or artists of the most rational and sceptical stamp find themselves especially inspired or energized they will often describe themselves as ‘having had the Muse with them’. Greek archers who fired an accurate shot were bound to whisper, ‘Thanks, Apollo.’ It’s hardly different from boxers crossing themselves before a fight or thanking Jesus after one. Cricketers talk about ‘Mother Cricket’, actors talk about ‘Doctor Theatre’. When Achilles hears the voice of Athena telling him to calm down during his confrontation with Agamemnon, is he really hearing a goddess or is he listening to his own wiser counsels, the better angels of his nature? The beauty of Homer, and of myth, is that you can always take it to be both at once.
This ‘double determination’ of motive allows the real and symbolic to coexist in a way that is precisely Homeric and endlessly rewarding. Humanity cannot let itself off the hook, capricious, foolish and unfair as the gods may be. The first word of Homer’s Iliad is μῆνιν – mēnin, which is the Greek for ‘rage’. Rage, lust, envy, pride, greed … the sins and flaws of humankind energize all of the drama of Troy, but they are balanced by love, honour, wisdom, kindness, forgiveness and sacrifice. These, it is simple and obvious to say perhaps, are the same unstable elements that constitute the human world today. We live on the same see-saw. Dark human passions of selfishness, fear and hatred counterbalanced by kindness, friendship, love and wisdom. The field is still open for someone to portray all that better than Homer, but so far on my journey through life I have yet to see it done.
MYTH AND REALITY 2
It would be impossible to tell the story of the Trojan War without reference to Homer’s Iliad, long regarded as the first great literary work of the Western canon.fn1 The Iliad begins with rage and ends with sorrow: the rage of Achilles at Agamemnon’s appropriation of the slave girl Briseis and the sorrow of the Trojan people as they mourn the death of their champion Hector. This fractional part of the ten-year siege takes 15,693 lines of verse – each comprising between twelve and seventeen syllables – divided into twenty-four books. The concentrated unity of action, the complex and convincing characterizations, the depictions of such a multiplicity of human emotion and impulse, the cinematic shifts in perspective and point of view, the relentless energy and drive, the unflinching representation of violence, the flashbacks and foreshadowings, the depth, deftness and daring of imagery – these qualities and more have caused poets, artists, scholars and readers over the centuries to regard the Iliad, along with its companion piece the Odyssey, as the supreme works of narrative art to which all others aspire and by which all others are judged. And yet there remains a fundamental question which anyone encountering these works is bound to ask.
Homer and the Trojan War – did they even exist?
Now, if you are anything like me, a puzzled frown of concentration will mar the smooth regularity of your features whenever you encounter phrases like ‘the mid-twelfth century BC’ – a little mental arithmetic is almost always needed to give oneself a sense of time’s distance, especially when leaping the Year Zero hurdle that separates BC/BCE and our own AD/CE. We can’t even seem to agree on how to designate these eras, for heaven’s sake. I hope you will find that the timeline does the work of a dozen paragraphs and sheds useful light.
Over the millennia, and the last two centuries especially, so much dissent and disagreement, factionalism and feuding has enlivened and inflamed the world of Homeric scholarship that the field has taken on some of the characteristics of a kind of religious war. We have seen the Separatists versus the Analysts versus the Unitarians versus the Neoanalysts. A similar schism has obtained (right up to the time of my writing this) in the fevered world of Trojan studies. German antiquarians, classicists and archaeologists have dominated both realms, with American scholars coming a close second. Academics can get heated and intemperate about the most esoteric and obscure matters, as is well known, but in the case of Homer the stakes have always been high: proving or disproving his existence, definitively describing his modes of creation and settling the question of how much of what he wrote is fact or fable … These can almost be regarded as the secular equivalent of establishing the historical existence of Christ and his crucifixion. So much of who and how we are flows from the idea of Homer. Our culture may be Judaeo-Christian in its religious and moral grounding, but it is Graeco-Roman to at least an equal degree in these and other domains. If the Greeks and Romans looked back to Homer as the author and founder of so much of their identity – and they did – then it is unsurprising that settling the Homeric Question has long been something of a scholastic Holy Grail for our civilization.
There exist History and Prehistory. Put simply, prehistory is what happened in the human world before the development of writing. Prehistory can therefore be studied only by reading not words but objects. This study is archaeology: the analysis and imaginative reconstruction of ancient buildings and their ruins, the excavation and interpretation of artefacts, relics and remains. History, conversely, is mostly analysed through documentary records – manuscripts, tablets, inscriptions and books.
Human prehistory is understood to have begun around three and half million years ago, when our hominin ancestors first constructed stone tools whose archaeological traces we can unearth and examine. Anything before that time we call palaeontology, where the only indications left behind are fossils. History, on the other hand, is extraordinarily recent. It began not much more than five thousand years ago, with the invention of phonetic scripts in Babylonian Sumer, writing systems that were spread by the trading Phoenicians all around the Mediterranean world, developing into the alphabets we still use today – chiefly Greek, Roman and Cyrillic. Separately, and a little later, the Chinese and other civilizations further east developed their own, non-phonetic, ideographic systems. That is a sweeping outline; a closer look reveals squiggles and wrinkles as we shall see.
The periods of the prehistorical era are named according to the prevalent materials of those ages. The first and longest period (three million years at least) was the Stone Age. Then, around seven and a half thousand years ago, the first metallic age was entered when humankind learned the trick of smelting copper. With the addition of a little tin (and maybe some nickel, zinc or arsenic if there was any to hand) the alloy bronze came into being a couple of thousand years later. Harder and stronger than its constituent metals, bronze could be fashioned into
tools, weapons, armour and ornaments. Another two thousand years or so after this, techniques were developed that allowed the mining and smelting of an even more versatile metal – iron. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. There’s an argument that, since the late Industrial Revolution, we have been living in the Oil Age, and perhaps now – somewhat distressingly – the Plastic Age.
What we call the Trojan War was fought more than three thousand years ago, around 1200 BC, by Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations which had arisen in what we today call Greece and Turkey in about 1550 BC (naturally such dates are no more than current best guesses). In western Greece, on the peninsula of the Peloponnese, flourished the city state and empire of Mycenae.fn2 This was the fabled kingdom of Agamemnon. To the east of the Aegean, on the northwest coast of Asia Minor, stood the city of Troy.
The literate era began in the last years of the Bronze Age. Scholars have deciphered some of the forms of writing that existed during this time. The civilizations we are interested in, those of the Greek and Trojan regions of the Mediterranean, used various scripts during the Bronze Age. The Minoan (Cretan) script called ‘Linear A’ is still a mystery to us, but the Mycenaeans used a descendant called ‘Linear B’ which was eventually cracked in the twentieth century. These writing systems developed separately from the Sumerian alphabet-style script which, as we shall see, had yet to reach the Greek world.fn3
Nonetheless, all this should surely mean that the story of the Trojan War is historical. Writing existed in its time, the Mycenaeans used it and thus there should, or could, exist a documentary trail leading directly from the siege of Troy to the present day. In fact this is not the case. Quite soon after the supposed time of the Trojan War (some have even suggested as a result of it) the Mycenaean civilization collapsed, and what are known as the Greek ‘Dark Ages’ descended. The most usual explanation for this collapse is a combination of apocalyptic horsemen: namely, some kind of geological or climate catastrophe, a famine, a plague and the invasion of the Greek and Mediterranean world by the so-called ‘Sea Peoples’.fn4 As a result of these disasters and the abandonment of the great city states of the Mycenaean Bronze Age, the art of reading and writing Linear B was utterly forgotten.fn5 For centuries, until the Phoenicians spread their alphabet through trade, the entire region remained non-literate. This meant that during the Dark Ages a functionally prehistorical mode of transmission was the only way any memory of Mycenae and the Trojan War could be passed from generation to generation – not by word of pen, but by word of mouth: the ‘Oral Tradition’. In this window of time (or whatever the dark equivalent of a window is), the stories of the Trojan War were passed down, as of course were the stories of Zeus, Olympus and the gods, heroes and monsters of what we call ‘Myth’. Whether those who passed them on thought of one set of stories as historical and another as mythical we can only speculate.
After a full four hundred years of this darkness, things began to change in fundamental and dramatic ways. The Phoenician alphabet evolved into the early Greek alphabet, of which we have records from the vases and inscriptions of the period. Politically and demographically a large increase in population (perhaps as a result of better and more reliable weather and sea levels) saw the development of the poleis, the Greek city state. This period, known as the Archaic Age, was the precursor to the fully historical Classical Age, the ripely sophisticated time of Plato, Socrates, Euripides, Pericles and Aristotle. Most Greeks of the Archaic Age remained illiterate, however, and narratives of the past were still communicated by oral declamation rather than writing. It was in this Archaic Age that the figure we call Homer is generally supposed to have lived. When I was at school, one teacher told me confidently that Homer was born in 800 BC, on the northern Aegean island of Chios, and died in 701 BC, a blind old man of ninety-nine. Another teacher maintained, with equal certainty, that Homer was from Ionia, now Turkish Anatolia. Modern scholars regard all of these stories as guesswork at best.
So there we have it. The timeline tells the story far better than my confusing words. The Trojan War took place in the Bronze Age (say 1200 BC), the high cultures of the Bronze Age collapsed and a dark, illiterate age succeeded. The darkness lifted, iron was mined and smelted, writing returned and the story of the war, as declaimed by Homer, was finally written down a full seven hundred years after the events of that war. And here we are, another two and half thousand years later.
It is worthwhile reiterating that by the time of the rise of the Greek civilization from which we can trace our own descent – that culture of science, mathematics, philosophy, art, architecture, democracy, military and naval power; a self-conscious culture that wrote histories and plays about its origins and nature – by that time, the Trojan War was eight hundred years in the past and Homer three hundred years dead.
Mysteries have faced scholars and archaeologists since the Greeks of the Classical Age finally fixed Homer’s two epic poems by writing them down in the more or less agreed texts that we read today. One mystery is how Homer knew so much about events that were already at least four hundred in his past? How was he able to recount so many details of the siege, of the city of Troy itself, the royal families, the warriors, the lineages, and the events of the war? He had no writing, no archive to go on. For 450 years, in other words, ‘lesser’ Homers must have orally passed down these characters and episodes until he synthesized them and turned them into the first great piece of language-based art of which we are aware. To have done this, we assume, he must have grown up hearing oral accounts of the most varied and complex kind. Homer lived in Iron Age Greece or Turkey, but his works accurately depict Bronze Age warriors.fn6
When it comes to Greek mythology generally, there is a remarkable agreement between Homer’s works and those of his near contemporary Hesiod, on whom we rely for the stories of the birth of the Titans and gods, the establishment of Olympus and so many of the canonical details of Greek mythology.fn7 There is little doubt that a fair amount of reverse engineering took place in the literary Classical Age, a good deal of refining, smoothing out of anomalies and contradictions, and the creation of the consistent chronologies and genealogies that now exist. The myths were transformed from rough folk stories into finished literary creations, like rocks polished into gemstones. Staying with that simile, the literate Greeks of the Classical Age may have been responsible for mounting the stories in display cases, but it was Homer and Hesiod who had done most of the shaping, cutting and polishing.
Plato’s and Aristotle’s lives were nearly as far from Homer’s as ours are from the author of Beowulf, so it is unsurprising that they and their contemporaries knew so little about who Homer the man might have been. We know from the literature of Classical Greece that the Iliad and the Odyssey were admired, even venerated works, whose episodes were taken to tell a true history. As a young man setting out to conquer the world, Alexander the Great visited the sites of Ilium and was said to have paid homage to what was then understood to be the tomb of Achilles, the hero with whom he most closely identified.fn8 Mark Antony reputedly made a present to Cleopatra of the funerary statue of Ajax the Great. Later travellers like Strabo and Pausanias made many tours of Trojan and Mycenaean sites. They all took the stories to be truthful records of historical events.
During the Classical Age, popular sections of the Iliad and Odyssey were often performed in outdoor concerts attended by ordinary and very enthusiastic citizens. It seems that they believed Homer wrote those works down, something that seems strange to us, for we have been brought up with the firm idea that Homer was (if not illiterate) a bard, a rhapsode, a declaimer and perhaps even an improviser of epic verse, but not a writer. This is a recent view, however.
After our own Dark Ages, western Europe underwent a rediscovery of Greek and Roman civilization, art and culture, a rebirth that we call the Renaissance. Around 1450 Gutenberg’s invention of movable type printing allowed the widespread transmission of classical texts in ways that had been unthinkable in the foregoing centuries of mon
astic scribes producing books by handwriting. In 1488 printed copies of Homer became available. The impact was enormous, a kind of cultural Big Bang. In Britain alone, poets from Dryden, Pope, Keats, Byron and Tennyson and into the modern age were transformed by Homer. Painters, sculptors and philosophers pored over the pages of the original Greek and of each new translation. But they had no more sense that the Trojan War was a historical event than that Narcissus was truly transformed into a daffodil or that Heracles really did descend into the underworld and emerge with Cerberus slung over his shoulder.
This view changed largely as the result of the bold endeavours and determined showmanship of one man, Heinrich Schliemann. Born in Germany in 1822, Schliemann made, lost and made fortunes in Russia and the USA. The final fortune he accreted from speculation in the Californian goldfields allowed him, now an American citizen, to devote the second half of his life to his great passion – archaeology. Along with the other great archaeologist of the age, Britain’s Arthur Evans, he set about trying to find the great sites of the Greek Bronze Age. Evans concentrated on Crete, and his uncovering of Minoan treasures causes a sensation.