The Trojan War (28 page)

No one has read everything about the Trojan War. The sheer amount of scholarship on Homer, the archaeology of Troy, Mycenaean civilization, and Bronze Age warfare, not to mention Anatolia and the ancient Near East, is as long as it is exciting. This section lists only the main works used in writing this book. The focus is on scholarship in English and on publications of the last twenty years.

THE TROJAN WAR

Among several recent and important introductions, pride of place belongs to Joachim Latacz,
Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery,
translated by Kevin Windle and Rosh Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). This fundamental work rethinks the historicity of the Trojan War in the light of recent archaeology, Hittite studies, and work on Homer. But it is not always easy going for nonscholars. Some of the same ground is covered, although in much less detail, in Carol G. Thomas and Craig Conant's very good
The Trojan War,
Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Ancient World (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005). The volume includes a selection of primary documents. Trevor Bryce,
The Trojans and Their Neighbours
(London: Routledge, 2006), is an excellent introduction to the Late Bronze Age historical context, if debatable on certain points. Slightly out of date but still very good and very readable is Michael Wood's
In Search of the Trojan War,
updated edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), which scans the subject from Homer to modern archaeology to the Hittites. A shorter survey is available in N. Fields,
Troy c. 1700–1250
BC
(Osceola, Fla.: Osprey Direct, 2004). A number of valuable essays appear in Ian Morris and Barry Powell, eds.,
A New Companion to Homer
(Leiden: Brill, 1997). There is much helpful introductory material in Bettany Hughes,
Helen of Troy, Goddess, Princess, Whore
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). Archaeologist and historian Eric Cline has recorded a series of lectures, “Archaeology and the Iliad: Did the Trojan War Take Place?” for Recorded Books/Modern Scholar (2006).

The reader will quickly note that the Trojan War is a story not just of historical data but of the varying ways of interpreting those data. An introduction to the range of scholarly opinion can be found in these collections of essays: Machteld J. Mellink, ed.,
Troy and the Trojan War,
from a symposium held at Bryn Mawr College, October 1984 (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Bryn Mawr College, 1986), and a special issue of the journal
Classical World
91:5 (1998). A good summary of the state of debate in the early 1990s, before the most recent archaeological discoveries at Troy, is Hans Günter Jansen, “Troy: Legend and Reality,” in J. M. Sasson, ed.,
Civilizations of the Ancient Near East,
vol. 2 (New York: Scribners, 1995), 1121–34.

Ever since the modern study of history began in the 1800s, there have been two broad schools of thought about Troy. The
positivists
believe that the Trojan War really happened and that there is a kernel of historical truth—and then some—in Homer. The
skeptics
think there is no more truth in Homer than in a fairy tale. Heinrich Schliemann brought the positivists to prominence and they remained active through the mid-twentieth century. Important examples of the argument that there really was a Trojan War and that Homer's narrative reflects the Bronze Age are such books as T. B. L. Webster,
From Mycenae to Homer,
2nd edition (New York: Norton, 1964), D. L. Page,
History and the Homeric Iliad
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), and J. V. Luce,
Homer and the Heroic Age
(New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

In the decades after World War II, the skeptics gained the upper hand. The excavations of Troy in the 1930s pointed to a small and unimposing place—not the grand city of the
Iliad.
Linguists and students of inscriptions picked holes in the ancient texts that were supposed to provide written confirmation of the truth of Homer's tale. Finally, the bitter experience of the Second World War rendered unfashionable all heroic narratives, such as the Trojan War.

In the English-speaking world, the most prominent postwar skeptic is M. I. Finley, who argued that there is more in Homer of the early Iron Age than of the Bronze Age; see his
World of Odysseus,
revised edition (New York: Viking Press, 1978); his contribution to M. I. Finley, J. L. Caskey, G. S. Kirk, and D. L. Page, “The Trojan War,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
84 (1964): 1–20; or “Lost: The Trojan War,” in his
Aspects of Antiquity: Discoveries and Controversies
(London: Penguin, 1991). See also several of the essays and the editors' conclusions in J. K. Davies and L. Foxhall, eds.,
The Trojan War: Its Historicity and the Context—Papers of the First Greenbank Colloquium
(Liverpool: Bristol Classical Press, 1981). More recent examples of skepticism about Homer's Bronze Age credentials can be found in several of the chapters of Morris and Powell, eds.,
A New Companion to Homer,
as well as in Ian Morris, “The Use and Abuse of Homer,”
Classical Antiquity
6 (1986): 81–138. But for a reassessment in light of the new evidence, see Ian Morris, “Troy and Homer,” Version 1.0, November 2005, Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, http://www.princeton.edu/˜pswpc/pdfs/mor ris/120506.pdf. (For skepticism about the new excavations at Troy, see below.)

Now the pendulum is swinging again. Prominent positivists in the last decade include Latacz in his
Troy and Homer;
Bryce, in his
Trojans and Their Neighbours,
and the late Ione M. Shear, an Aegean–Bronze Age archaeologist, in her
Tales of Heroes: The Origins of the Homeric Texts
(New York: Aristide D. Caratzas, 2000). G. S. Kirk offers a concise and cogent case for positivism in “History and Fiction in the
Iliad,”
in his
The Iliad: A Commentary,
vol. 2, Books 5–8 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 36–50. Hughes offers a vivid and well-researched study of Helen as a real-life Bronze Age Greek woman in
Helen of Troy.
She anticipates my conclusions about Helen's lack of passivity and about the personal nature of Bronze Age notions of interstate relations.

Two revolutions have shaped the study of the Trojan War in the last two decades, one in archaeology and the other in epigraphy (the study of inscriptions). For the results of new excavations at Troy since 1988 and for the debate about them, see below, and the overview in W. D. Niemeier, “Greeks vs. Hittites: Why Troy Is Troy and the Trojan War Is Real,”
Archaeology Odyssey
5:4 (2002): 24–35. The latest Hittite epigraphical research increases the likelihood that Troy (Ilion) was the city that the Hittites called Wilusa; that the people whom Homer calls Achaeans and we call Mycenaeans or Bronze Age Greeks were the Ahhiyawa of Hittite texts; that the Achaeans considered themselves equal to the Hittites; that they expanded from the Greek mainland to the southern Aegean islands such as Crete and Rhodes and to the Anatolian mainland; and that they were piratical raiders whose ships struck as far afield as Cyprus and Lebanon. On recent discoveries in Hittite epigraphy, see J. D. Hawkins, “The End of the Bronze Age in Anatolia: New Light from Recent Discoveries,” in A. Çilingiroglu and D. French, eds.,
Anatolian Iron Ages 3
(London: British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, 1994), 91–94; J. D. Hawkins, “Tarkasnawa King of Mira,”
Anatolian Studies
48 (1998): 1–31; Michael Siebler, “In Theben ging's los,”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
August 12, 2003, 31, http://www.faz.net/s/RubF7538E273FAA4006925CC36BB8AFE338/Doc˜EC6CFECB6D44B4344B70010A6675AF6A3˜ATpl˜Ecommon˜Scontent.html; and F. Starke, “Ein Keilschrift-Brief des Königs von Theben/Ahhijawa (Griechenland) an den König des Hethitischen Reiches aus dem 13. Jh. V. Chr,” handout, August 2003. Archaeology adds the information that Late Bronze Age Greeks colonized the city of Miletus on Anatolia's Aegean coast. See W. D. Niemeier, “Miletus in the Bronze Age: Bridge Between the Aegean and Anatolia,”
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
46 (2002–03): 225–27.

The positivists fall into several different categories. Some date the Trojan War to around 1300
B.C.
(at the end of Troy VIh) and others to around 1210–1180 (at the end of Troy VIIa—also known as Troy VIi). This book adheres to the latter view, as does Shear in her
Tales of Heroes
. Advocates of a date around 1300
B.C.
include Michael Wood and D. F. Easton, “Has the Trojan War Been Found?”
Antiquity
59 (1985):188–95. Others agree that Homer reflects the genuine historical memory of the Greek people, but deny that there was ever one Trojan War. Instead, they say, Homer took several centuries of wars in Anatolia and turned them into a single conflict. His poems are a smorgasbord of events; most of them really happened but not in any one time or place. The current excavators of Troy tend to this view. Emily Vermeule and Sarah P. Morris date the core material of Homer's poems back to the early Mycenaean era; see E. D. T. Vermeule, “Priam's Castle Blazing: A Thousand Years of Trojan Memories,”
Troy and the Trojan War
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986): 77–92, and Sarah Morris “A Tale of Two Cities: The Miniature Frescoes from Thera and the Origins of Greek Poetry,”
American Journal of Archaeology
93:4 (October 1989): 511–35.

This book argues that the Trojan War was caused by a combination of fear, honor, and self-interest: Thucydides' trio of motives underlying international relations. There has been no shortage of other theories. To cite just one category, for clashing economic interests as a cause of war between Greeks and Anatolians (including Trojans), see E. H. Cline,
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: International Trade and the Late Bronze Age Aegean
(Oxford: Tempus Reparatum, 1994); Christopher Mee, “Aegean Trade and Settlement in Anatolia in the Second Millennium
B.C.
,”
Anatolian Studies
28 (1978): 122–55; Christopher Mee, “Anatolia and the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age,” in Eric H. Cline and Diane Harris-Cline, eds.,
The Aegean and the Orient in the Second Millennium
B.C.,
Proceedings of the Fiftieth Anniversary Symposium, Cincinnati, April 18–20, 1997,
Aegaeum
18 (1998): 137–48; Trevor R. Bryce, “The Nature of Mycenaean Involvement in Western Anatolia,”
Historia
38 (1989): 1–21.

The Trojan War is not just a war but a cultural icon. Films, novels, fashions, and current events shape perceptions of it; there are influences from which not even scholars are immune. Barbara Tuchman saw Homer through the lens of the Vietnam War in
The March of Folly from Troy to Vietnam
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1984): 35–50. In Germany, the debate over the new excavations at Troy takes place against the background of reunification, which may be one reason why discussion has been so bitter; see Johannes Haubold, “Wars of
Wissenschaft:
The New Quest for Troy,”
International Journal of the Classical Tradition
8:4 (Spring 2002): 564–79.

TROY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Troy was excavated from 1871 to 1891 by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and then again in 1932–1938 by Carl W. Blegen. In 1988, excavations at Troy were resumed after a fifty-year hiatus, having been preceded a few years earlier by a dig about five miles away at Be
ik Bay (the Trojan Harbor). These new excavations are directed by Ernst Pernicka, successor to the late Manfred Korfmann, with the cooperation of Brian Rose. In addition to archaeologists, the excavation team includes anthropologists, art historians, chemists, computer scientists, epigraphers, geologists, Hittite specialists, Homerists, students of ancient plant life (archaeobiologists), and others. Reports of “Project Troia,” the ongoing excavations at Troy, as well as articles on the archaeology of Troy and the Troad, may be found in
Studia Troica,
a scholarly journal published annually since 1991. Articles appear in English or German, each with a brief summary in both languages. Since 1998, the annual archaeological report has been published in both languages; earlier reports are in German with an English summary. News, bibliography, and other valuable information are also available in English on the Internet at http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/troia/eng/index.html. A summary of the state of the excavations at Troy, based on a 2003 lecture (in German) by the late director of the excavations, Manfred Korfmann, can be found at http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/troia/deu/trier_deu.pdf. An excellent introduction to the excavations and their meaning for historians is found in Latacz,
Troy and Homer,
15–100.