The Iliad, Troy - History and Myth

Revision as of 13:20, 28 February 2012

Leading up to the Greek Arrival at Troy

Menalaus of Sparta 37° 4' 55" N, 22° 25' 25" E had married Helen. At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, Helen is abducted and taken to Troy by Paris

The Judgment of Paris refers to being efectively bribed by Hera, Athena and Aphrodite to choose between power or sex and he chooses Helen. Was Helen really abducted, is she wicked or just coerced by Aphrodite? Nonetheless, Paris violated the Greek hospitality and Helen left her daughter and took gold

Menalaus goes to Agamemnon and they set sail for Troy with over 1,000 ships. Odysseus pretends to be mad but Palamedes sees through the deception. Later Odysseus plants gold in his tent and he stoned as a traitor. Odysseus secures the involvement of a reluctant Akhilleus after he uncovers his disguise in Skyros 38° 52' 60" N, 24° 31' 0" E

An omen occurs at Aulis. A snake slithers from an alter and eats 8 chicks and the mother and was turned to stone. The seer Kalkhas interprets this that the seige of Troy will last ten years.Kalkhas interprets another omen that requires Agamemnon to choose between avenging Paris' adultery of sacrificing his daughter Iphigeneia. This sets in motion a series of revenge kills that accounts for Agamemnon, his wife Klytemnestra and her lover Aigisthos

Arkhilleus's fate is also sealed. His mother knew if he killed Tenes and warned him. Arkhilleus makes love to Tenes's sister. He vows to revenge her and his killed by Arkhilleus. When he finds out who he has slain he knew his fate was sealed.

When they arrive at Troy, Menalaus makes an appeal for Helen's return. An Oracle tells them the first Greek ashore will die. Protesilaos leaps from the ship and his killed by Hektor. The Greeks swarm ashore and Akhilleus lands with the Myrmidons. Any attempt to construct an accurate chronology is doomed becuase of different accounts. But they are some key events. Akhilleus kills Troilos in Apollo's temple before he reaches twenty years of age, which means Troy will fall

What is the Iliad about?

It is also known as the Wrath of Arkhilleus. and represents the first real European literature as well as the Greek Mythological tradition. The Iliad is set in the Mycenaean age 1,600- 1,110 bce. In Xenophon's Symposion a character called Nikeratos is able to recite the Iliad and the Homer's Odyssey but it probably went through many improvisations just like a jazz musician will do before getting back to the main themes.

Homer picks up the story in the 10th year. It is written in 15,693 lines of dactylic hexameter poetry divided in to 24 books (One for each letter of the Greek Alphabet)

In Homer's story Khryses is captured by Agamemnon and when he refuses to release the priest a plague is inflicted. he agrees to release him but demands Akhilleus's captured girl instead Briseis. Akhilleus is ready to kill Agamemnon but refrains and decides to no longer fight for the Greeks. The poem explores the consequences of this. Meanwhile, Paris duels with Menelaos, Hektor and Menalaos, Aias and Hektor. The Trojans are getting the upper hand and Agamemnon offers to give back Briseis in pristine condition. Akhilleus still refuses to fight but his cousin Patroklos is uneasy about the advances and persuades Akhilleus to lend him his armor. Patroklos is successful but pushes his luck too far and is killed by Hektor. Akhilleus swears revenge on Hektor even though this will hasten his own death. Equally, Hektor knows he must fight eben though he would rather not.

After killing Hektor Akhilleus drags him back behind his chariot. His father Primam comes to see Akhilleus at night and pleads for his son's return for proper burial. Wrath turns to sympathy and he agrees. One the twelve days of funeral are over the fighting will commence leading to the destruction of Troy and death of Akhilleus.

The crucial issue here is not the war and heroics itself but time which means value and honor or paying a penalty. The ultimate goal is to win eternal fame or kleos. What matters is the opinion of others. Agamemnon insults Akhilleus. Oddysseus doesnt care about the rights and wrongs of the argument but he is concerned with outcomes

It is less about war than that it is about a code of ethics, especially as Homer decides not to dwell on the final sack of Troy so my summary of the Iliad would be that it is about honour and dishonour captured through three different prisms.

Firstly, the Judgment of Paris. Even though it plays a small part in the Iliad, Paris’ catastrophic choice of beauty over power when he chooses Helen and dishonors Menalaos, starts a series of tragic events that begin the ten year war with the Trojans and end with the sack of Troy.

The Wrath of Akhilleus. Wrath motivates Akhilleus relationship with both Agamemnon when he takes the captured Briseis from Akhilleus, thus dishonoring him, and with Hektor after Hektor slays Patroclus mistaking him for Akhilleus. Both events are pivotal in turning the outcome of the war in favour of, and then away from the Trojans.

Finally, it is the Tragedy of Hektor. In many ways a more multi-dimensional examination of honor. In trying to honor his father, Priam, his wife and Paris, he realizes he cannot do one without jeopardizing the others, which leads him into a combat with Akhilleus that he knows he cannot win and seals the fate of Troy

It is difficult not to draw distinctions between the codes of Akhilleus and Hektor. Do we admire the single-minded, uncompromising determination of Akhilleus even though it is also ruthless and self-centered or Hektor’s more “human” qualities that displays courage and honour but also fear and questioning of his heroic code when confronted with Akhilleus?

Instinctively, I sided with Akhilleus because of his unwavering adherence of the heroic code regardless of the circumstances, whereas my wife was more sympathetic to Hektor's dilemma and comtemplation that to live might be better than an heroic death. In the end Hektor chooses the heroic code.

So now I meet my fate. Even so, let me not die ingloriously without a fight, but in some great action which those men yet to come will hear about

Critical Reaction to Homer's Troy

JC Scaliger compares Homer unfavourably to Virgil. Down thorough the years the primativeness of the heroism has been a subject of debate, especially in the more enlightened 18th Century. But in WW1 it took on more resonance and Rupert Brooke said They say that Archilles in the darkness stirred and Priam and his fifty sons Wake all amazed, and hear the guns

The Sack of Troy

A variety of sources take the tale to its conclusion such as Aithiopis by Arkintos known as little Iliad. Akhilleus is killed by Paris but depending on the sources the arrow was guided by Apollo (Virgil and Ovid Both Euripides and Plutarch says there was no divine intervention. Aias takes his body back to preserve the body. Both Aias and Odysseus claim the weaponary but the Greeks favor Odysseus and in despair Aias kills cattle and having lost honor kills hmself.

The Wooden Horse

The Iliad and Eternal Man

The moral environment of the Iliad can seem very alien to us. I wonder, when someone says that 'the lines of right and wrong are not very clear; for both men and their gods,' if Agamemnon or Apollo would have agreed? Is the challenge here to transpose ourselves back into a world of very differing moral values? Would Odysseus say, 'Actually, the lines of right and wrong in our world are extremely clear.'? Or might he say, with a sigh, 'Yeah, your right! The lines of right and wrong are not very clear, even for the gods. I never know where I stand.'?

In tragedy, very often, you also get competing, and mutually incompatible, moral absolutes that clash head on. Indeed in the Troy mythology, once Paris abducts Helen, a whole train of events is set in process that puts conflicting demands on the main participants. The abduction struck at the very heart of the most fundamental relationship in Greek society, marriage, so Agamemnon led the assault on Troy to get Helen back. But then the Greeks were held up at Aulis, and the only solution was for Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia, which he did. In Aiskhylos' Agamemnon the chorus tell of the circumstances in which this happened, mentioning an omen in which two eagles swooped down and sank their talons into a pregnant hare. Although Aiskhylos never tells us why, this was deeply offensive to Artemis, and the seer Khalkas interpreted the omen as indicating that Iphigeneia should be sacrificed. Human sacrifice violated every rule of normal behaviour, yet Agamemnon could not shirk the choice: unacceptable option 1 – abandon the expedition to avenge Paris’ adultery; unacceptable option 2 – sacrifice his daughter. He knows that if, rightly, he takes revenge for Paris’ transgression, he has to transgress himself: that is how revenge works. Of the two impossible choices, he goes for the military one. Interestingly, the chorus are critical in their judgement:

And once he slipped his neck in the strap of Fate, his spirit veering black, impure, unholy, once he turned he stopped at nothing, seized with frenzy . . . Yes, he had the heart to sacrifice his daughter, to bless the war that avenged a woman’s loss.

Aiskylos does not make it easy for us to reach a definite conclusion about Agamemnon’s dilemma and responsibility, although we know that Zeus ordered the expedition to Troy, Artemis demanded Iphigeneia’s sacrifice, and Agamemnon is not being punished for previous wrongdoing. His gut reaction is to consider disobeying, but that would be pointless, since not only would the other Greek chieftains carry out Artemis’ wishes, but it would be contrary to the will of Zeus. Agamemnon knows that he must slaughter what is dearest to him, and then pay the penalty. That is what makes this truly tragic.

Did the Trojan War Really Happen?

In the sense that we characterise a war in the 21st Century or, perhaps more poignantly, Gallipoli during World War One then the answer must be no. But if you take a step back from the story, history and analysis, it is plausible that the area identified near the Dardenelles may well have been a flash point between the Mycenaens and Hittites, given its strategic location as a trade route and, for that reason, settlements may have been fortified. It is also possible that these events may have been retold down the ages to Homer’s time and if you were a poet of the time you could give your story resonance and appeal by using an historical backdrop that the audience could relate to. Homer used the Trojan Wars to develop his theme of the heroic code while others writers used the war to frame the events to fit their own time and politics.

Ultimately, even after watching the video tour of Hisarlik, and the impressive fortifications, there is little evidence of a war on the scale retold in the stories and I came away thinking that the stories of the Trojan War have now displaced the history they are retell

I find it difficut to believe that if we take the Trojan War as popularly imagined (1,000 ships and battles over 10 years), that the Greeks could sustain a force without a supply chain and some permanent bases to house, feed and arm an army for a prolonged battle and some evience to support to support it. After watching the video and researching the University of Cincinnati site ^[1] it led me to believe that there could have been a series of skirmishes over hundreds of years and that we might be seeing evidence of this in the building and rebuilding of Troy but not on the scale related by Homer or Virgil

Thucydides agrees with you! - Book 1, ch. 10 (sorry for the archaic translation...)

We ought not therefore to be incredulous [concerning the forces that went to Troy nor have in regard so much the external show of a city as the power; [3] but we are to think that that expedition was indeed greater than those that went before it but yet inferior to those of the present age, if in this also we may credit the poetry of Homer, who being a poet was like to set it forth to the utmost. And yet even thus it cometh short. [4] For he maketh it to consist of twelve hundred vessels, those that were of Boeotians carrying one hundred and twenty men apiece, and those which came with Philoctetes fifty: setting forth, as I suppose, both the greatest sort and the least; and therefore of the bigness of any of the rest he maketh in his catalogue no mention at all, but declareth that they who were in the vessels of Philoctetes served both as mariners and soldiers; for he writes that they who were at the oar were all of them archers. And for such as wrought not, it is not likely that many went along except kings and such as were in chief authority; especially being to pass the sea with munition of war, and in bottoms without decks, built after the old and piratical fashion. [5] So then, if by the greatest and least one estimate the mean of their shipping, it will appear that the whole number of men considered as sent jointly from all Greece were not very many.

'Increased knowledge from archeology has only confused the issue further. Many details of the epics, such as boar tusk helmets? would seem to place the events in the Late Bronze Age, but other features do not fit. It is assumed that the world of the Mycenaen period was ornamented and to some extent garbled, with the contemporary ie. 8th Century BCE details"

'The evidence from Troy is also confusing. Schliemann discovered several levels. It would seem that two levels Troy V1 and Troy V11 are considered most likely to be the city of Priam. Troy V1 has massive city walls, resembling Homer's description but its destruction around 1300 BCE was, both too early for the peak of Mycenean power and was apparently caused by an earthquake. (I need to find out when the peak of Mycenaen power was) Troy V11 was a much poorer city?'

As an aside, all the wonderful finds Schliemann supposedly discovered (there are suggestions that he bought them in the souk and planted them in situ) when offered, were refused by the Greek state (they had no museum to put them in)so they went to Berlin and there were taken by the Russians during their invasion of Germany and hidden until quite recently when they surfaced in Russia.

www.unmuseum.org/troy:htm

So was there a battle between the people of Troy and the people of Mycenae 37° 43' 51" N, 22° 45' 22" E . It seems doubtful. Was their a battle between two conflicting, powerful nations? But there must have been a fact that set off the Bards creating a 'myth'.

The nub of the issue seems to me to be this:

There's no problem in ascertaining that there was warfare at Hisarlık, and quite a bit of it in the 13th century BCE (as there was all over the Aegean world at that time). But if you want to prove that The Trojan War really happened (and you might want to define exactly what we mean by that), you probably need to establish three things:

1.When it happened 2.Where it happened 3.That Mycenaeans were the aggressors

There are many places where Mycenaeans might have made pirate raids, and various scholars want the Trojan War to be a conflation of these activities. Others separate Troy from Hisarlık altogether, and locate it in, for instance, northern Greece, Egypt, or Karatepe in south-east Turkey - this link might be of interest: http://www.bmcreview.org/2011/10/20111003.html

1. ↑ http://cerhas.uc.edu/troy/explore.html