In Search of the Trojan War (39 page)

What about the details? Did Agamemnon really exist? Possibly: we know from Germanic and Celtic epic poetry that the names and pedigrees of the ancient kings are often preserved in some form; thus the Mercian overlord Offa could cite his ancestors back to kings who ruled before the English ever came to Britain. There is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the idea that the names of the last great kings of Mycenae, Atreus and Agamemnon, were handed down by the bards.

Did Helen really exist, and was her seizure the cause of the war? There is a parallel for the abduction of a royal woman being used as a pretext for war in the Norman invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century AD; on the other hand the attack on a castle or town to recover a captured princess is an ancient theme in epic, a stock story for bards whether they be in medieval Ireland, early India, or even thirteenth-century-BC Ugarit, so we would be unwise to insist on it. Nevertheless our evidence has shown that the seizure of women on overseas raids was indeed a common feature of this world, and the more beautiful the better. Of Helen we can at least conclude that she is possible!

We might also add a word about the other famous woman in the tale of Troy: young Iphigenia (or Iphianassa in Homer), whose sacrifice at Aulis was the prelude to the expedition and which has been the theme of so much later art, literature and music. There is no reason to think that she really existed, but one of the most remarkable of recent finds in archaeology has revealed evidence of human sacrifice, and even ritual cannibalism, in the Bronze Age. The discovery at Knossos of the remains of two children aged eight and eleven (the age of Iphigenia in the tale), who seem to have been ritually killed and
partially eaten prior to the catastrophe which overtook the palace and its suburbs in around 1420 BC, gives some substance to the idea that child sacrifice could have taken place elsewhere in the Late-Bronze-Age Aegean at moments of crisis. That sacrifices also preceded the fall of Pylos could be suggested by one of the last of the Linear B tablets from the palace, but this is by no means certain (
see here
). Nevertheless, the Knossos find invites a new look at famous tales such as the cannibalism of the children of Thyestes (Agamemnon’s uncle) and the sacrifice of Iphigenia herself.

As for the Trojan heroes, it is an interesting fact that of the names in the Linear B tablets which are found in Homer, twenty of them (one-third) are applied to Trojans: in other words, Greek names have been invented for Trojan heroes, Hector among them. But two names may not fit with this, and they are significant ones: Priam’s name looks like the Anatolian name Pariamu, found in Hittite texts, and Alexandros of Wilios does seem to have a connection with the Alaksandus of Wilusa named in Hittite tablets of the early thirteenth century and his alternative name Paris is very likely the Anatolian Pariya. More than that we cannot say. Evidently Greek tradition in the Dark Ages had only the dimmest notion of Asia Minor in the Heroic Age.

And what of the wooden horse? It has been explained as a simple fairy-tale motif, and as we have seen it has been rationalised as a wooden ram in a horse-shaped housing in which men could be contained. Recently, however, an intriguing explanation has been offered which is at least worth discussing, if only to be rejected. In this version, the tale of the horse has been connected with the god Poseidon, who we know existed in the Mycenaean pantheon. In Arcadia Poseidon was always worshipped in the shape of a horse, in other parts as a horseman or master of horses. For country folk he was Hippos, the horse. But Poseidon, even in historical times, was also regarded as the only originator of
earthquakes
. Here let us remember the alleged destruction of Troy VI by earthquake, and how in the tale Laomedon cheated Poseidon and was punished by the
demolition of his beautiful walls. Did a later bard invent the thrilling device of the wooden horse with the Poseidon connection in the back of his mind, transferring the older traditions to an earlier sacking by Herakles? To me such an explanation seems over-ingenious and frankly implausible, but if the Greeks did indeed sack Troy only after it had been shattered by an earthquake, can we still perhaps retain the connection of a cult idol of Poseidon, the god of earthquakes, in the shape of a wooden horse – left by the Greeks as a thank-offering? On the whole, it is best to admit that there is something unfathomably mysterious about the wooden horse story; it was evidently in existence long before Homer’s day, as we know from artistic representations, but more than that we cannot say.

Our search is nearly over. The sack of Troy was remembered because it was the last fling of the Mycenaean world; no other king of Mycenae would claim ‘Great Kingship’. As in medieval Ireland the best bards sang the latest stories, and Troy was the latest. A generation or so later the cracks appear in their world. The fate of all cities was not necessarily the same; Mycenae and Tiryns were damaged by earthquakes; Pylos may have been sacked by local rebels; Messenia suffered large-scale depopulation, as possibly did Lakonia; the Argolid experienced a new influx; there were migrations overseas; no great single collapse, but progressive decline, disintegration, weakening of powerful authorities meaning less and less rebuilding (though in some places, such as Tiryns, the reverse would be true). Many centres were abandoned for good, and around them there was a steady influx of Greek-speaking peasantry from outlying areas, settling in abandoned countrysides like impoverished immigrants from the Third World, a kind of gold-rush remembered by tradition as the arrival of a new people, the ‘Dorians’. In some places a recognisably Mycenaean life lasted through the twelfth century; Mycenae was abandoned around 1100 BC. The peasantry and local leaders still lived on, but a complex series of events had led to the failure of the developed palace civilisation of the Late Bronze Age. So specialised was the literacy devised to run this
system that the knowledge of writing vanished with the end of the palaces and the death or dispersal of their tiny literate élite; their society no longer had any need of the written word.

In summing up these factors let us not forget the legends, at least as models for what
might have happened
. They tell us of constant rivalries within the royal clans of the Heroic Age – Atreus and Thyestes, Agamemnon and Aigisthos, and so on – and we can certainly say that such feuds are characteristic of this kind of society at all times. The legends of the Epigoni and Herakles also may preserve traditions of wars between the city states of the Mycenaean world and the feuding clans of the great royal families. Historians and anthropologists of the Dark-Age west can point to exactly similar feuds in the royal clans of Carolingian, Merovingian, Ottonian and Anglo-Saxon society: one of the chief functions of royalty there was to resolve the internal strife which in such societies is the norm. Bronze-Age Greek kingship cannot have been any different. The epic told of how on his return from Troy the ‘Great King’ Agamemnon was murdered by a rival kinsman, and other kings faced deposition or rebellion; these legends go back to the end of the Bronze Age, and, though we cannot prove them, they are plausible: studies of kingship in the Near East offer many parallels and suggest that the large kin groups of Bronze-Age royal clans must have continually brought up rival claimants. Where the royal person is so important, much rested on his security; if he fell, internal dissension could follow – ‘political’ power advanced and receded swiftly. Thucydides’ account, then, seems basically acceptable: the long duration of the war against Troy and ‘the late return of the Hellenes from Ilium caused many revolutions, and factions ensued almost everywhere … and it was the citizens thus driven into exile who founded the cities [overseas]’: Thucydides dates the overrunning of the Peloponnese by the ‘Dorians’ eighty years after the fall of Troy; only after that, he says, did the main migrations take place to Ionia, the islands, Italy and Sicily: ‘all these places were founded subsequently to the war with Troy’. However simplified, this basic picture has been confirmed by archaeology.

As for the preservation of the story through the ‘Dark Age’, it may well have been sung in the courts of Mycenae and Tiryns during the twelfth century BC. The ‘catalogue of ships’ was probably constructed by a bard in the twelfth century out of a genuine list of the famous places in the Mycenaean kingdoms of Greece; it was intended to be a backward-looking work, harking to the Golden Age of the heroes. An audience in the 1100s knew that places like Pylos no longer existed: Nestor represented the Golden Age of old-fashioned kingship, fatherly and stern, but ‘fair’: this was what a great
wanax
was like (the word, as
anax
, is preserved by Homer). They were the kings who held the ‘empire’ together – the twelfth-century-BC equivalent of ‘Victorian values’, one might say. Memory of the sites of many of the key places was preserved orally on the spot, so that in the eighth century we have tales enshrined in a rich and detailed bardic tradition fostered in émigré communities in Ionia. In Lakonia and the Argolid, where the heartland of Mycenaean power had resided, hero cults developed, centring on Mycenaean tombs where offerings were left to the heroes of that marvellous age; at the Menelaion site the memory survived, sponsored by numerous pilgrims who came leaving offerings for Helen and Menelaos; at Amyklai, another Bronze-Age palace site in Lakonia, there seems to be continuity of cult right through to classical times. In Sparta, surprisingly, as well as Mycenae, we find a cult of Agamemnon. In Orchomenos the great treasury became a shrine for ‘King Minyas’; the same process was repeated at countless more obscure Mycenaean tholos tombs, especially where they could be identified with places in the catalogue of ships. Homer is the culmination of this development, the high point – though by no means the end – of a long bardic tradition. If we say he composed around 730 BC we may not be far off; but how much later the
Iliad
was set down in writing is unclear; as we have seen, the seventh century may be the most realistic guess. But long before then the tale had developed on the site of Hisarlik itself, where possibly from before 700 BC the people of Lokris sent their maidens to serve Trojan Athena. By then the
fact, whatever
that
was, had become a legend, and in turn the legend had become a fact. Which is where we came in.

THE LATER HISTORY OF ILION, NEW ILIUM

The power of tenacious survival on the inherited ground is one of the most striking characteristics of the people who flourished on the Trojan acropolis through the Bronze Age.

CARL BLEGEN
,
Troy and the Trojans

We cannot leave the story of Troy without looking at its subsequent history. The city is after all the centre of our story, and as we said at the start, it is a city which existed for over 4000 years. The destruction wrought by the Greeks from Mycenae in the thirteenth century BC (if ever it happened) was but one destruction among many, and, as before, the inhabitants returned to the ruined city and rebuilt it. But the people of the succeeding city, VIIa, as we have seen, lived through violent and unstable times; their shanties and storage jars perhaps testify to that. The brief life of that phase of the city ended in terrible violence: the city was stormed and burned down; many citizens were killed, some even left dead in the streets. But after the raiders had gone, even then some survived to make the wrecked city habitable, to build their huts on the calcined stumps and blackened debris. What we call Troy VIIb 1 was still the home of descendants of the founders of Troy VI who had first settled on Hisarlik in around 1900 BC. Evidently the fortification wall still stood high enough to offer protection, and to build houses against: the south gate was still the city’s main gate. They still made their Grey Minyan ware; even contacts with the Mycenaean world are still there: there are quite a few examples of twelfth-century ware (LH III C). But the Aegean world had suffered great changes. After half a century or so newcomers came to live on the hill of Hisarlik: their arrival left no marks of violence, so perhaps the impoverished inhabitants of VIIb 1 offered no resistance. The newcomers are marked by a dramatic change in pottery style, for
they were makers of a crude handmade pottery called Knobbed Ware after its decorative knobs or horns: ’a strange phenomenon on a site where the potter’s wheel has been familiar for many centuries,’ said Carl Blegen. It looks primitive and perhaps the older inhabitants of Troy thought so: the Knobbed Ware is characteristic of the Late Bronze Age in Hungary and the Danubian culture, but probably came to the Troad over the Dardanelles from Thrace; they came, too, bearing hammer axes, pointed hammers, socketed and flat celts – all well-known Hungarian types – which were found by Schliemann in his digs.

But the previous inhabitants still seem to have survived: enough of the local Grey Minyan continued to be made and used in some quantity, so part at least of the earlier people lingered on in VIIb too. Had a Thracian warlord with his retainers and women perhaps come here for security during the movements of peoples north of the Aegean, the troubles of the time of the Sea Peoples, and taken control without a struggle? Had he perhaps been accepted by the Trojans, who had no king of their own?

Troy VIIb 2 received the odd pot from the Mycenaean world, but otherwise was a poor backwater. Towards 1100 it ceased to exist. Evidence of burning in several houses suggests that this settlement too was destroyed by fire, presumably put to the torch and looted. This marked the end of ancient Troy, though not, perhaps, the end of the Trojans. New evidence suggests that even now a tiny settlement hung on around the shrines below the west wall. Also at this time a considerable body of Trojans may have taken refuge on the summit of Bunarbashi, high above the gorge through which the Scamander flows down from the mountains into the plain of Troy: a site farther inland, more remote from the sea and the perennial sea raiders, easier to defend; there they might hope that the terrors of the passing of the Age of Bronze to the dismal Age of Iron would pass them by. (These heights of Bunarbashi, it will be remembered, were the site which Lechevalier thought was that of Troy in
Chapter 1
.) Whoever they were, these people carried with them the tradition
of making Grey Minyan pottery and maintained it down to the end of the eighth century BC, a span of nearly 300 years. Then Bunarbashi was abandoned in its turn. Now it is an extraordinary fact – noticed by Carl Blegen – that at the end of the eighth century, when Bunarbashi was abandoned, the site on Hisarlik suddenly is lived in once more, and by people who could still make Grey Minyan pottery! Had some of the descendants of the original inhabitants returned to their old home? It is an intriguing thought, but Blegen’s archaeological evidence is tenuous in the extreme; in essence the new Troy – Ilion – was a Greek colony, looking west, and for more than 1000 years it would form part of the
oikoumene
– the common world – of the classical Hellenic civilisation.