The War That Killed Achilles (3 page)

 

 

“Divine Homer,” according to the ancient Greeks, was a professional poet from Ionia, a region of Greek settlements along the western coast of Anatolia (now Turkey) and its outlying islands. 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.
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The
Iliad
's own origins are similarly murky. Certain poetic features (such as a complex system of metrically useful phrases and a marked use of repetition of passages and words) indicate that behind the
Iliad
there lay a long tradition of oral storytelling. The
Iliad
's references to geographical place-names and to types of armament and other artifacts that can be correlated with finds of modern archaeology, combined with linguistic evidence, indicate that some of its elements date back to the Bronze Age. These historic relics were melded with themes, language, and characters borrowed from other traditions, folklore and Near and Middle Eastern poetry and mythology being particularly rich sources. Some elements are even of pre-Greek origin. Helen's name, for example, can be traced to the Indo-European
*Swelénā,
from the root
*swel—
“sun,” “solar glare,” “burn,” “grill.” Her prototype was a Daughter of the Sun, the abduction of the Sun Maiden being a recurrent motif in old Indo-European myth.
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Certain of the
Iliad
's features can be teased out to suggest at least the character, if not the actual storyline, of the Bronze Age epic tradition. The hero Aias, for example, with his distinctive towerlike shield and huge size, belongs to the Greek Bronze Age, as do the easy communion between gods and men, similes comparing men to lions, and heroes of a stature with the gods. Above all, we can infer that the early tradition sang of battle and of death in combat.
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The epic's journey can be traced in the history of two extinct peoples: the Bronze Age Greeks—known to Homer as “Achaeans” and to modern historians as Mycenaeans, after their principal settlement—and the Trojans, a Hittite-related people of western Anatolia.

The Mycenaeans came to power on the Greek mainland in the seventeenth century B.C., and while the large southern peninsula called the Peloponnese was the main region of their strongholds, they were sailors, raiders, and warriors as well as traders and by the mid-fifteenth century B.C. had assumed political and cultural ascendancy throughout the Aegean. Golden and other precious objects unearthed from their graves reveal that they were a wealthy people. Some of this wealth came from legitimate trade, but fragmentary references to Mycenaean troublemak ers in the records of the contemporary Hittites suggest that bands of individuals, if not organized armies, roamed the Anatolian coast looking for plunder: possibly the dramatic action of early epic had followed such seaborne raids.
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Certainly the determinedly militaristic themes of Mycenaean art, with its depictions of sieges, marching warriors, and departing fleets, give every indication that the Mycenaeans were a martial people.
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The height of their wealth and power was reached in the late fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C., an era known as the “palatial” period in deference to the great palace complexes that were now built. Often set on strategic heights and encircled by massive fortification walls, the palaces functioned as both defensive strongholds and the headquarters of a sophisticated, feudal bureaucracy. Archives of documents found at some of the sites, written on baked clay tablets in an early form of Greek using a syllabic ideogram script dubbed “Linear B,” contain seemingly inexhaustible lists—of tributes, taxes, commodities, stores, and military equipment—a glimpse at once of the wealth, organization, military character, and naked materialism of the ruling order.
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No diplomatic documents, characteristic of other Bronze Age societies in the Near and Middle East, have been found amid the piles of Linear B tablets; no treaties or letters between embassies or rulers, no historical accounts of skirmishes or battles; no poems or prayers or fragmentary epics—nothing but the careful, acquisitive lists of possessions:

And:

How women of Troy ended up as the inventory of a Mycenaean palace cannot be known from one slender entry, but the most straightforward explanation is that, like the women of Cnidus and Miletus—and Lemnos and Chios and other named settlements in Anatolia or the Aegean islands—they were, in the language of the tablets, “women taken as booty,” or captives, carried off to serve as “sewing women,” textile workers, “bath pourers,” and probably in their masters' beds.
⁸
A letter written around 1250 B.C., the conjectured time of the war, by the Hittite king Hattusili III to an unnamed Mycenaean king, referring to the transportation and resettlement of some seven thousand Anatolians, by capture and inducement, in Mycenaean land, indicates the scale of Mycenaean interference.
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A few Hittite documents and the Linear B entry, together with a wealth of Mycenaean pottery discovered at Troy itself, are evidence that in the course of their travels—for trade, plunder, or colonization along the Anatolian coast—significant contact had been made between the people of Mycenae and the inhabitants of Troy.
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Situated at the entrance of the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles), Troy itself had a history more ancient than that of any of the Mycenaean palaces. The earliest, very small Trojan settlement had been built around 2900 B.C., perched on a low hill above a marshy and perhaps malarial plain that was cut by two rivers, the Simoeis and the Skamandros.
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Seven major levels of settlements were built on the site between the date of its foundation and its abandonment nearly two thousand years later, in 1050 B.C.
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Of these seven levels, that dubbed Troy VI (dated from 1700 to 1250 B.C.) spanned the period of Mycenaean dominance in Greece. Itself built in eight distinct phases, on the ashes of its predecessors, Troy VI was constructed with discernible 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 for these new Trojans.
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On the hill, the palatial citadel was rebuilt and refurbished, with graceful, gently sloping defensive walls constructed of blocks of carefully finished 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. These details would be retained by the epic tradition, for the
Iliad
knows of Troy's wide ways and gateways, its towers and “well-built walls.” Below the citadel, a lower city housed a population of approximately six thousand souls.
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Thus at the time of Mycenae's height of power, in the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries B.C., Troy was a substantial settlement, surmounted by a palace citadel and happily situated at the entrance to the Dardanelles, which in turn controlled access to the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea beyond.
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Its influence extended not only throughout the Troad but as far as islands such as Lesbos, in the eastern Aegean, where the archaeological record, evidenced principally in pottery (and even by the lead element in copper objects), shows that from at least 3000 B.C. these islanders had shared the material culture of the Trojans.
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For all this, however, Troy was never more than a local power. The great Hittite kingdom that ruled Asia Minor from its capital in Hattusa (now Boǧazköy, in central Turkey) held ultimate sway, and clay documents from the extensive Hittite archives show that Troy was merely one of its vassal states.
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Mined by scholars for evidence of the “real” Troy and Trojan War since they were first deciphered, the Hittite archives have yielded tantalizing clues, made more substantial by discoveries of recent years. 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 most commonly used in the
Iliad
for the Mycenaeans.
¹⁸
Similarly, Hittite “Wilusa” is now confirmed to be the Homeric Ilios; or more properly, with the restoration of its original ancient
w
-sounding letter, the “digamma”—“Wilios.”
¹⁹
Particularly intriguing is a reference made in a letter from the Hittite king Hattusili III to an unnamed king of Ahhiyawa, around 1250 B.C.: “in that matter of Wilusa over which we were at enmity . . .”
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This, then, is evidence that, on one occasion at least, a Mycenaean king had engaged in hostilities over Ilios.

No documents have yet been found at any of Troy's levels; a single seal stone unearthed at Troy VI, inscribed in Luwian, remains the only written evidence.
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How Troy survived, how it amassed wealth enough to build its impressive walls, can only be guessed. The number of spindle whorls unearthed by excavators has been interpreted as evidence of a long-established textile industry, while horse bones found at Troy VI may be evidence of horse breeding: in the
Iliad,
Homer's Troy is “famed for its horses.”
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Particularly suggestive, however, is the small, late- Bronze Age cemetery discovered close to Troy's western harbor, in which roughly a quarter of the miscellaneous cremations and burials contained Mycenaean objects. Independent of Troy, it appears to have been a burial ground for foreign mariners, or traders.
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At the same time, evidence of Mycenaean contact beyond the Hellespont and Bosporus is very sparse, indicating that most trade did not venture farther, but stopped at Troy. Whether this was because the Trojans actively controlled the strait, perhaps exacting tariff as was done in later eras, or simply because of the difficulty of sailing Bronze Age keelless ships against a stiff prevailing current and wind cannot be known.
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In Greek mythology and epic, the war between the Greeks and Trojans was directly caused when Paris, a son of King Priam of Troy, visited the Greek king Menelaos of Sparta and abducted, or seduced—even in antiquity there was a difference of opinion—the king's wife, Helen, taking with him many possessions. There is no reason this tradition could not reflect some historical truth. Given that the Linear B inventory lists clearly indicate that women were captured in Mycenaean raids along the Anatolian coast, it is at least possible that raids were also made in the other direction. The union in myth of Greek Helen with Asian Paris could also reflect a dim memory of a—perhaps resented—politically arranged marriage between a Hittite prince and his Greek bride.
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On the other hand, the cause of the “Trojan War” may simply have been cold-blooded quest for plunder, with a series of raids romantically conflated into the Bronze Age's single Great War. Significantly, early mythological and epic stories refer to two sacks of Troy by Greeks over two successive generations, as well as, intriguingly, a failed campaign to the region led by Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae.
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The last of Troy VI's phases—Troy VIh—ended in 1250 B.C., falling to what appears to be a combination of natural disaster and enemy fire. The same population, much reduced in both size and circumstances, remained on the site, crowding the once-palatial citadel with what would appear to have been a clutter of small tenements: either the ruling elite were remarkably accommodating of these new inhabitants or they had fled, abandoning their palace to humbler folk.

If Troy VIh fell to Mycenaean invaders, the Mycenaeans did not have long to savor their victory. Despite the strength and watchfulness of their own great citadels, with their lookout posts and stockpiles of prudent stores, 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. Various reasons for the collapse have been speculated—natural disaster, internal unrest, disruption of trade, foreign marauders. That it was the Trojan War itself that left the Greek world vulnerable to such discord was the view of later ancient writers. This view is also reflected in the
Odyssey,
the second, later epic also attributed to Homer: on his return after the war to his native land, the hero Odysseus discovers that his estate has been plundered by usurpers in his absence. “It was long before the army returned from Troy, and this fact in itself led to many changes,” Thucydides wrote 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.”
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