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shall see – changed imperceptibly only over centuries). The Roman Empire in the west was about to disintegrate, and its new breed of witnesses did not find any moral succour for such cataclysms in the works of Homer: their Bible was Christian. The young Augustine of Hippo, the future saint, born in the yearof Julian’s journey to Ilium, was taught the classics as part of his education in North Africa, but admits to being bored to distraction by Homer (in fact he never bothered to learn Greek): evidently Hellenism was on the way out in fourth-century Christian (North African) Thagaste. Augustine and his like would soon inherit the earth, or at least its western part. The Christian father Basil, an older contemporary of Augustine (he had briefly been a fellow student with Julian at Athens), made a point of denying that the Trojan War ever happened: what was it, after all, but a mere pagan tale? It was a sign of the times. There were of course still Homeric scholars in fifth-century Byzantium, but their Greek studies were directed to a new end: the Empress Eudoxia, wife of Theodosius II, for instance, wrote a Life of Jesus in Homeric verse!
    Our last glimpse into the extraordinary hold which Homer maintained on the classical imagination for 1000 years is provided by a remarkable last testament of civilised Hellenism, the Saturnalia of Macrobius (early fifth century AD) which portrays literate and civilised Roman gentlemen, who still do know their Attic Greek, spending a dinner party making the most elaborate parallels between Homer’s and Virgil’s treatment of the story of Troy. To the very end the intelligentsia and political élite of the ancient world lived by Homer: Macrobius’ diners clearly knew huge chunks off by heart.
    But when the table had been cleared from that particular banquet, the early Middle Ages would be left more austere fare, a diet of Christian exegesis which usually rejected such stuff as Homer and called it devil’s entertainment. In the orthodox east, Byzantium (as a Christian empire) was an enemy of Hellenism and equated Homer and the rest with paganism and polytheism. In the west knowledge of Greek nearly vanished altogether, and not until the nineteenth century did the kind of obsessive cultivation of Homer reappear of which Julian and Macrobius would have approved. But that, as it were, is another story: in the west the story of Troy, in whatever form it came, never ceased to be told.
    THE TRANSMISSION OF THE TALE, FROM SAXON STORIES AND TUDOR MYTHS TO FIRST-WORLD-WAR POETS
    Four hundred and thirty winters before Rome was founded [i.e. 1183 BC] it happened that Alexander son of Priam the king of the burh of Troy abducted Helen, the wife of king Menelaus of Lacedaemonia, a Greek city. Over her was fought that great and famous war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The Greeks had a thousand ships of what we call the big longship type, and they swore an oath to each other that they would never return to their native land until they had avenged their wrongs. And for ten years they besieged that town and fought around it. Who can say how many men were killed on either side, of which the bard Homer has told! There is no need for me to tell it, says Orosius, for it is a long story and in any case everybody knows it. Nevertheless whoever wishes to know it can read in his books what evils took place, and what victims by manslaughter, by hunger, by shipwreck and by various misdeeds, as is told in the stories. For full ten years the war was waged between these people. Think then on those times, and on our own, which are the best to live in!
    An Anglo-Saxon account of the Trojan War, from a translation of Orosius made c .AD 895 in the circle of Alfred the Great
    The story of Troy never lost its appeal in the millennium between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. It fascinated the thegns of Alfred the Great around the firesides of Viking-Age Wessex, and with an added dash of love interest it was a hit