Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (36 page)

Is the
Iliad all there is to go on when it comes
to the Trojan War?

In a word, no.

Many of the events that lead up to the
Iliad
are not actually described in the poem, which is sharply focused on the war itself, with vivid, pulsing descriptions of battle and the conduct of both men and gods. One of the most gruesome moments is told in the play
Agamemnon
by Aeschylus, and describes the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter. Ready to sail, the Greeks cannot get a favorable wind, because Agamemnon had once slighted the goddess Artemis. To save the expedition, Agamemnon is advised to sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia. Deceived into believing that she is going to marry Achilles, the young girl is dressed in a wedding dress and brought to the altar only to learn that she is going to be sacrificed. Once Iphigenia is dead, the winds blow fair. (In another version, Artemis intervenes at the last second and sends a substitute animal, just as God gave Abraham a substitute ram in Genesis when he was about to sacrifice his son Isaac.)

Another scene not in the
Iliad
—this one about Achilles—comes from myth. As Ovid tells it, Achilles had been dipped in the River Styx as a baby. Therefore, he could never be wounded, except at the spot where his mother held him by the heel. Achilles dies when he is shot in the heel by Paris. This was, of course, the origin of our phrase “Achilles’ heel,” which means a person’s weakness or vulnerable point.

Continuing the list of what is not in the
Iliad
is the actual fall of Troy. This scene is described in the
Aeneid
, an epic poem by the Roman poet Virgil. The
Aeneid
tells how the Greeks build a huge wooden horse, “the Trojan horse,” and place it outside the walls of Troy. Odysseus and other warriors hide inside the horse while the rest of the Greek army sails away. Although the prophetess Cassandra
*
and the priest Laocoon warn the Trojans against taking the horse into their city, they are ignored. But a Greek named Sinon, left behind to provide “disinformation,” persuades the Trojans that the horse is a sacred offering, which will bring them the protection of the gods. The Trojans then pull the horse into Troy, and in the night, as the Trojans “sleep off” their victory celebrations, Odysseus and his companions creep out of the horse. The gates of the impregnable Troy are opened, and the Greek army storms the city, having returned from a nearby island where their ships had been hidden. The Greeks wipe out almost all the Trojans, burn Troy, and take back Helen.

And finally, the cause of the war itself comes from ancient myth, not Homer. The real troubles begin with an incident at a divine wedding feast. All the gods and goddesses have been invited except Eris, the goddess of discord. Eris is offended and tries to stir up trouble. She sends a golden apple to the feast, inscribed with the words “For the most beautiful.” Three goddesses—Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite—each claim the apple for herself. Finally the handsome Paris, the son of Troy’s King Priam, is brought in to judge the dispute. While all three goddesses try to bribe him, he awards the apple to Aphrodite, because she promises him Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, the semidivine daughter of Leda and Zeus.

Helen is already married to King Menelaus of Sparta. But when Paris visits her, Aphrodite causes her to fall in love with the Trojan prince, and she flees back to Troy with him. Paris has not only stolen his host’s wife, he has broken a sacred code of being a proper guest. Menelaus and his brother, Agamemnon, organize a large Greek expedition against Troy to win back Helen—and for this she is, in the words of playwright Christopher Marlowe, “the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.”

Was there really a Trojan War?

Did it happen? Was Troy real? Did Agamemnon, Helen, and Hector live and breathe? Or did Homer, like Shakespeare in his plays about real kings, embroider a tale that made the mortal immortal?

Since Heinrich Schliemann’s nineteenth-century discovery of Troy, much digging has been done to try and get to the bottom of the Troy question. What Schliemann thought was Troy turned out to be actually a much earlier city, and after more than one hundred years of archaeology, scholars still don’t agree on Troy and the legends of the war. While some think Homer’s epic is an outright fiction, others believe it exaggerates small conflicts involving the Greeks from about 1500 to 1200 BCE. Still others say the legend of Troy is based on one great war between the Mycenaean Greeks and the city of Troy in the mid-1200s BCE. Archaeology and recent scholarship have combined to paint a portrait of this ancient face-off between two regional “superpowers.” Archaeologists have found strong historical evidence in the ruins of Troy and other places that confirms certain events described in the epics.

In an article for the
Archaeology Institute of America
(May 2004), Manfred Korfmann, a director of excavations at Troy and a professor of archaeology at the University of Tübingen, had this answer to the question of the “real” Trojan war:

“According to the archaeological and historical findings of the past decade especially, it is now more likely than not that there were several armed conflicts in and around Troy at the end of the Late Bronze Age. At present we do not know whether all or some of these conflicts were distilled in later memory into the ‘Trojan War’ or whether among them there was an especially memorable, single ‘Trojan War.’ However, everything currently suggests that Homer should be taken seriously, that his story of a military conflict between Greeks and the inhabitants of Troy is based on a memory of historical events—whatever these may have been. If someone came up to me at the excavation one day and expressed his or her belief that the Trojan War did indeed happen here, my response as an archaeologist working at Troy would be: Why not?”

Which crafty Greek hero can’t wait to get home?

Home is a powerful idea—as anyone who has seen
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
knows. But the little alien had it easy compared to the most famous homebound traveler in literature, Odysseus, the cunning king of Ithaca. He is the star of the
Odyssey
, one of the most influential works in Western history and among the greatest adventure stories ever told. Scholars still fight over its origins, but, traditionally, the
Odyssey
is thought to have been composed by Homer, probably in the 700s BCE. The poem describes Odysseus’s long journey home to Ithaca, an island off the northwest coast of Greece, after he fights against Troy. One of the heroes of the
Iliad
, Odysseus (changed in Latin to “Ulixes” and translated into English as “Ulysses”), is credited with the idea of the Trojan horse, and just as he used trickery to end the ten years of fighting, he relies on his wits to defy even greater odds in the
Odyssey
.

Like the
Iliad
, the
Odyssey
consists of twenty-four books, but it is considerably shorter, running some 12,000 lines long, and takes place over a period of about ten years. Unlike the
Iliad,
which is more of a tragedy, the
Odyssey
is an adventure tale, and in many ways more “fun.” It has been called a “comedy,” in the original sense of the word, which meant order was restored with the reuniting of a family. The good guys and bad guys are easily identifiable. Very different from Achilles or Hector, Odysseus is the crafty hero—resolute, curious, but mostly devoted, like E.T. or Dorothy Gale of Kansas, to getting back home after nearly twenty years away—ten of them fighting at Troy, three lost at sea, and seven more on the island of Calypso, where his tale begins.

Odysseus has been the prisoner of the sea nymph Calypso (whose name means “concealer”), when the gods of Mount Olympus decide that the time has come for him to return to Ithaca and his loyal wife, Penelope. During his long absence, she has been under pressure to accept that her husband is dead, and marry again so that Ithaca has a new king. Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, resents his mother’s noblemen suitors, and the goddess Athena suggests that he go to seek news of his father. Telemachus sets off in search of him.

Meanwhile, the tale returns to Odysseus’s adventures. When Calypso releases Odysseus, he sails away on a raft, but Poseidon—angry at Odysseus for reasons that will emerge—sends a storm that shipwrecks him. Washed ashore on a beach, he is discovered by Nausicaa, the beautiful daughter of the Phaeacian king. Sheltered by the Phaeacians, he recounts for them his years of wandering since the Trojan War when he set out for home with twelve ships carrying fifty men each.

First, he tells of his escape from the lotus-eaters, who consume a drug that makes men forget home and purpose. Next, he recounts his blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus with a hot wooden stake. Odysseus had cleverly told Polyphemus that his name was “Nobody,” so that the other Cyclopes would be befuddled when the wounded Cyclops roars that “Nobody” is trying to kill him. Concealing his crewmen under some sheep so they can pass by the blinded Cyclops, Odysseus and the crewmen eventually escape—but Odysseus then makes the mistake of taunting the giant and reveals his true name. Cyclops then prays to his father, Poseidon, who avenges the creature by vowing to make Odysseus’s homecoming a nightmare come true.

After being blown off course, Odysseus sails on to the island of the enchantress Circe, who changes all of the crewmen into pigs but wants Odysseus for a lover. Protected from the spell of Circe by a magical herb, Odysseus beds Circe and subsequently learns how to return his crewmen to human form and sail past the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. The sorceress also tells Odysseus how to navigate past the Sirens, sea nymphs who use their beautiful singing to lure sailors to death on a magic island. Finally, she warns the men not to eat the sacred cattle of Helius (the sun).

Odysseus’s ship survives most of these dangers and seems ready to reach Ithaca without further trouble until some of his men ignore Circe’s warnings and eat the sacred cattle of the sun. As punishment, the ship is destroyed by a thunderbolt. All the men drown, except Odysseus, and he is washed up on the island of the beautiful nymph Calypso, who promises Odysseus eternal life if he marries her. After seven years on Calypso’s island, Odysseus goes to the shore one day and weeps for his beloved wife, Penelope. Seeing this, Athena takes pity on him and asks Zeus to release Odysseus from his suffering. Odysseus builds a raft and lands on the island of the Phaeacians, where the young princess Nausicaa discovers him, naked, save for a strategically placed tree branch. The princess takes Odysseus to her father’s court, where he begins to recount his adventures.

After Odysseus finishes his story, he returns home. Reunited with his son, Telemachus, Odysseus goes to the palace, dressed in beggar’s rags. Penelope has spent years tricking her suitors by promising that she will choose one of them when she finishes a weaving, a project she unravels each night. The exasperated suitors demand that she finally choose among them, and she finally agrees to marry the man who can string Odysseus’s great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axes. Taking the bow himself, the disguised Odysseus wins the contest, then kills all 108 of the unarmed young suitors and is reunited with Penelope.

Did the Romans take all their myths from the Greeks?

The “Greek Miracle” in Athens—highlighted in the works of the three tragedians who based most of their works on the myths—soon came crashing down. A series of wars with rival Sparta began in 431 BCE. A great plague struck Athens, killing Pericles, among many others, in 429 BCE. In 404 BCE, Athens surrendered to Sparta, concluding the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars that had split Greece. Oligarchy, the rule of a few wealthy aristocrats, returned to Athens.

The doom of the Golden Age was sealed in 338 BCE, when King Philip from the northern province of Macedonia united all Greece under his rule. An era had ended. The curtains and lights had gone down on the glorious age of the city-state and all its remarkable accomplishments. But a new act was about to open in the drama of Greek glory when Philip was assassinated and replaced by his ambitious son, Alexander, a student of Aristotle, who, as Alexander the Great, spread Greek culture, language, and ideas throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Establishing his namesake city, Alexandria in Egypt, Alexander made it the center of Greek culture, a position it held for the next three hundred years. In the Hall of the Muses there, the classics of Greek literature were gathered, and science flourished as scholars took up the serious study of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. In Alexandria, Greek-speaking Jews translated the ancient Hebrew writings into the first Greek version of the Bible, known as the Septuagint, and Apollodorus collected his library—the most complete and straightforward accounting of Greek myths from the creation of the world to the death of Odysseus. Alexander’s massive effort to “Hellenize” his empire continued even beyond his death in the city of Babylon in 323 BCE.