Read In Search of the Trojan War for Free Online

some clearly utterly insignificant; similarly other myths centre on what were demonstrably Bronze-Age places – Nemea, Iolkos, Thebes and so on. If the myths of Greece actually contain a kernel of real history from the Bronze Age, as Thucydides believed, how do we prove it? In the last 100 years the new science of archaeology has attempted to provide answers. But before we turn to this attempt, we need to understand why the tale of Troy should have captured the imagination of our culture, for archaeology itself has not escaped that seduction. The story was clearly already the great national myth in Thucydides’ Greece, but that was nothing compared to what has happened to it in the two and a half millennia which followed him. To the afterlife of the myth I now turn.
    ‘PILGRIMS’ IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
    Such was the potency of the myth that a whole parade of conquerors felt drawn to stand and gaze on the plain where Achilles and Hector had fought it out. By then a small Greek colony had been founded on the overgrown ruins on Hisarlik. This was where tradition said the Trojan War had taken place, and in that belief the colonists of around 700 BC called it Ilion. When the Persian king Xerxes was poised to cross the Hellespont from Asia to Europe in 480 BC, Herodotus tells us:
    He had a strong desire to see Troy. Accordingly he went up into the citadel [i.e. of the city of Ilion] and when he had seen what he wanted to see and heard the story of the place from the people there, he sacrificed a thousand oxen to the Trojan Athena and the Magi made libations of wine to the great men of old.
    One hundred and fifty years later the crossing of the Dardanelles the other way, from Europe to Asia, was associated with the Trojan War in the suggestible mind of Alexander the Great. Alexander was intoxicated by the world of the gods and heroes, as they had been portrayed by his favourite poet Homer (he carried the Iliad with him and slept with it under his pillow). Leading his flotilla of ships to the Troad, Alexander sacrificed in mid-channel to Poseidon (so hostile to the Greeks in the Trojan War) and was the first to spring ashore on Trojan soil, throwing his spear into the ground to reinforce his claim that Asia was his, ‘won by the spear’ and ‘given by the gods’. Then, going into the walls of Ilion itself, he dedicated his armour to the Trojan Athena and took from her shrine ancient arms and a shield which (so it was claimed) had been preserved from the Trojan War. Leaving Troy he laid a wreath at Achilles’ tomb in the plain, as Arrian ( c .AD 150) recounts, ‘calling him a lucky man, in that he had Homer to proclaim his deeds and preserve his memory’.
    Alexander’s successors dignified little Ilion with a city wall, though it would never compete with a new city founded before 300 BC on the coast, Alexandria Troas. By Roman times the town, now known as Ilium, was semi-derelict. But once more, fired by the legend, a rich patron came along who believed in Homer’s ‘sacred Ilios’. Just as Alexander had claimed ancestry from the Greek hero Achilles, so Julius Caesar called the Trojan Aeneas his ancestor, and in 48 BC, according to Lucan in the Pharsalia , written in the first century AD, he visited the Sigeum promontory and the river Simois ‘where so many heroes had died’, and where now ‘no stone is nameless’: ‘He walked around what had once been Troy, now only a name, and looked for traces of the great wall which the god Apollo had built. But he found the hill clothed with thorny scrub and decaying trees, whose aged roots were embedded in the foundations.’ (‘Be careful, lest you tread on Hector’s ghost,’ a local enjoined him.) But ‘even the ruins had been destroyed’. Caesar’s disappointment would be echoed by many searchers who came after him! Lucan uses theoccasion to meditate on the immortality conferred by poets on egomaniac militarists: ‘Yet Caesar need not have felt jealous of the heroes