The Trojan War (21 page)

Laocöon's fate convinced Aeneas and his followers to leave town; they withdrew to Mount Ida in time to escape the Greek onslaught. Vergil famously tells a different story, in which Aeneas stays in Troy, fights the Greeks, and then at last escapes the burning city while carrying his elderly father, Anchises, on his back. But the account in the
Sack of Ilium,
which records Aeneas's departure, strikes a more credible note. Aeneas would not have been eager to die for Priam, a king who had never given Aeneas the honor that he felt he was due. His homeland was south of the city, in the valley of Dardania beside the northern slopes of Mount Ida. What better place to regroup if Aeneas believed that Troy was doomed?

Helen played a double game. She had helped Odysseus on his mission to Troy and learned of his plan of the Horse. Now she tried to coax the Greeks out of the Horse, but Odysseus kept them silent—or perhaps the Horse was empty. Helen is supposed to have gone back home that night and prepared herself for the inevitable. She had her maids arrange her clothes and cosmetics for her reunion with Menelaus.

Whether or not there was a Trojan Horse and whether or not the Trojans brought it into town and dedicated it to Athena, it is easy to imagine them celebrating the end of the war. They treated themselves to a night of partying, according to the
Sack of Ilium.
It was now, when the Trojans were occupied, that Sinon supposedly gave the prearranged torch signal. Once watchers on Tenedos saw it, the expedition to take Troy rowed rapidly back to the mainland.

Surprise, night, and Trojan drunkenness would have given the Greeks substantial advantages, but taking Troy would require hard fighting nonetheless. Experienced warriors, the Trojans would have scrambled quickly after their initial shock. If the battle began in darkness, it no doubt would have continued well into the daylight hours. The epic tradition offers a few details of Trojan resistance. The Greek Meges, leader of the Epeans of Elis, was wounded in the arm by Admetus son of Augeias. Another Greek, Lycomedes, took a wound in the wrist from the Trojan Agenor son of Antenor.

But what the tradition highlights, of course, is Greek victory. Admetus and Agenor, for instance, did not savor their successes, because that same night one was killed by Philoctetes and the other by Neoptolemus. A Greek named Eurypylus son of Euaemon killed Priam's son Axion. Menelaus began his revenge by killing Helen's new husband, Deïphobus, brother of Paris and son of Priam. But the Greek known for scoring the most kills in the sack of Troy is Achilles' son, Neoptolemus. Among his victims, besides Agenor, were Astynous, Eion, and Priam himself, either at the altar of Zeus—no doubt the Storm God, where the Trojan king had sought shelter—or, as some say, at the doors of the palace because, not wanting to violate a god's altar, Neoptolemus was careful to drag his victim away first.

As for the Trojan women, tradition assigns Andromache to Neoptolemus and Cassandra to Agamemnon. Locrian Ajax had attempted to seize Cassandra but violated the altar of Athena or a Trojan goddess, which made the Greeks loath to reward him and thereby earn divine enmity. Prudent Bronze Age warriors knew better than to insult an enemy's god. For example, when Hittite King Shuppiluliuma I conquered the city of Carchemish around 1325
B.C.
he sacked the town but kept all his troops away from the temples of Kubaba and Lamma. He bowed to the goddesses instead.

Priam's daughter Polyxena was, according to the
Sack of Ilium,
slaughtered at the tomb of Achilles as an offering to the hero's ghost. Little Astyanax, Hector's son, was murdered by Odysseus—thrown from the walls, in one version—lest he grow up and seek vengeance.

And then there was Helen. The
Little Iliad
states that Menelaus found her at home, in the house of Deïphobus. Menelaus's sword was drawn to seek vengeance on the agent of his humiliation and suffering, but Helen had merely to undrape her breasts to change his mind. It is the sort of story that we can only wish is true.

So much for the epic tradition. What do other Bronze Age texts and the archaeological excavations tell us about the sack of Troy? Bronze Age documents show that however brutal the sack of Troy may have been, it would have conformed to the laws of war. Cities that did not surrender would, if they were captured, be destroyed. This rule goes as far back as the first well-documented interstate conflict, the border wars between the two Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma between 2500 and 2350
B.C.

When the Greeks sacked the city, they put Troy to the torch. Archaeology discloses that a savage fire destroyed the settlement level known as Troy VIi (formerly called Troy VIIa). Blackened wood, white calcined stone, and heaps of fallen building material were found in a thick destruction layer of ash and dirt about twenty inches to six feet deep. The inferno can be dated, according to the best estimate, sometime between 1230 and 1180
B.C.
, more likely between 1210 and 1180.

The flames must have spread fast. One house in the lower city tells the story: a bronze figurine, as well as some gold and silver jewelry, was left abandoned on the floor of a room. The inhabitants had fled in panic.

Imagine Troy's narrow streets clogged, and imagine the rolling cries of disoriented refugees, the wailing of children; the growls and snorts, bleating, high-pitched squeals, and relentless howls and barks of terrified barnyard animals (in the Bronze Age, typically kept within the town walls at night). Imagine too the clatter of arms, the clang and whistle of cold bronze, the soft sound of blood squirting onto paving stones, the cheers of the avengers, the whiz of javelins in flight, the reverberation of a spear that has found its mark, the holler and thud of street fighting, the surge of wails and curses, the gush and choking of pain, and much of it muffled by a fire burning fast enough to sound like a downpour.

Archaeology draws a picture that is consistent with a sack of Troy. Outside the doorway of a house on the citadel, for example, a partial human male skeleton was discovered. Was he a householder, killed defending his property? Other human bones have been found in the citadel, scattered and unburied. There is also a fifteen-year-old girl buried in the lower town; the ancients rarely buried people within the city limits unless an attack was preventing them from going to a cemetery outside town. It was even rarer to leave human skeletons unburied—another sign of the disaster that had struck Troy.

Two bronze spear points, three bronze arrowheads, and two partially preserved bronze knives have been found in the citadel and lower town. One of the arrowheads is of a type known only in the Greek mainland in the Late Bronze Age. The lower town has also yielded a cache of 157 sling stones in three piles. Another supply of a dozen smooth stones, possibly sling stones, was found on the citadel, in a building beside the south gate that looked to the excavators like a possible arsenal or guardhouse.

None of this evidence proves beyond doubt that Troy was destroyed in a sack. The fire that ravaged the city could have been caused by accident and then been stoked by high winds. If Troy was destroyed by armed violence, were the Greeks responsible? The archaeological evidence is consistent with that explanation but does not prove it.

O
n the mountaintop, where the goats forage in the crevices between the rocks and the only sound beside their bleating is a sudden burst of wind in the wildflowers, the sky is the same shade of pale blue and gray as the eyes of the goddess Athena. That's when it happens: not during an afternoon plunge into one of the chilly pools of Ida, the mountain rich in springs, nor in the thickening darkness when the owls appear and the night's first bats take wing. Only here, on the heights, where the light rakes the treeless ridge, does he let the truth come out, and the truth is that he is no herdsman. Only then, when he relaxes his guard, does he remember that he is a soldier who knows the sound of javelins whirring through the air and the sight of the wounded men crawling on the plain.

Aeneas, son of Anchises, would surely like to stay on the mountain. The mountain is his mother. It was here long ago that Anchises slept with the luminous goddess of love. Aeneas grew up on Ida's slopes, hunting deer in the woods and careening down its trails on wild horses. He takes his bearings by the bees that pollinate its flowers and by the star that rises above it, by the Evening Star, Aphrodite herself, or Ishtar, as she was more likely known in the Troad. If anyone can lead him back, the goddess can, since she was a deity not only of love but of war.

If he must come down from Ida, Aeneas would choose to live in the Dardanian Valley that lies in its lap below. The mountain-sheltered valley is as rich as it is wide and well watered: kingdom enough for any man. A river runs through the middle of its grain fields, seemingly as far from the sea as a sinner's heart is far from the gods. But this is the Scamander River, and twenty miles downstream it once ran red with the blood of Achilles' victims. Ida's native son cannot stay in Dardania; Aeneas has to lead the survivors back home. All his life he has complained about his treatment by Priam and his sons, and now that they are gone, Aeneas is heir to the throne. On his broad shoulders lies the fate of Troy. Or so we may imagine him thinking one day, not long after the Greeks had left and the fires had died down in the ruins of the city.

Legend has it that Troy was completely destroyed, but in fact the city was soon rebuilt. The new Troy was once again a great center. It was not as rich or as grand as Priam's city and it was not inhabited by the same people. But there were sources of continuity, and none greater than Aeneas himself.

Epic tradition offers several versions of Aeneas' fate, from captivity under Neoptolemus in Greece, to triumph in Italy near the future site of Rome—after an amorous detour in Carthage. But the
Iliad
is clear. Achilles scoffs at Aeneas for wanting to replace Priam as king, when everyone knows that one of Priam's many sons will inherit the throne. But Poseidon knows better. As the god predicts of Troy after the war,

The way to the throne of Troy began on Mount Ida, where tradition says that Aeneas gathered together the refugees from the defeated city.

The refugees might have meditated on the irony of Troy's fate. For all their fury, the Greeks never surrounded the city or sealed it off from the outside world. They tried to storm Troy's walls but failed. Nor did pitched battle between armies led by heroes succeed in the conquest of Troy. Only the steady pressure of Greek raids on Troy's hinterland, which lay open to Greek sea power, bled the city white. And in its vulnerable state, Troy fell prey to a fatal act of espionage. It was cunning and not courage that killed Troy.

We in turn may reflect on the ironies of epic. Like a chronicle of the pharaohs or the annals of a Hittite king, the
Iliad
idealizes war. The focus is on divinely inspired heroes who carry out superhuman deeds and suffer only clean wounds. The Greeks crowd the stage and Troy is doomed, although the struggle is so grand that it takes ten years. Yet Homer is honest enough to hint at the real war of far shorter duration; a war of filth and disease, of attacks on civilians, and of ordinary men who died lonely deaths. Helen is not only a beautiful but also a light-fingered cause of war, since she made off with her husband's treasure as well as his honor, and the Greeks wanted the gold back. Besides, they were far more interested in capturing enemy women than in regaining Menelaus's runaway bride.

Both in his exaggerations and his honesty Homer is truer to the Bronze Age than is usually recognized. Bronze Age poets regularly inflate battlefield deeds, but other Bronze Age texts preserve the truth: a way of war that was sometimes low-intensity, often devious, and always squalid. Thanks both to oral tradition and also perhaps to non-Greek written sources, Homer preserves these truths even though Troy fell centuries before his lifetime.

As they returned to their ships from the ruins of Troy, the Greeks would have carried their wounded and the bodies of their dead, and driven a crowd of captive Trojans forward, with cartloads of booty following. The art of the Bronze Age shows many such lines of prisoners, naked as often as not, hands tied behind their backs or locked in wooden beams. Then the plunder and women had to be divided among the army. The chiefs, naturally, got first pick. Neoptolemus, for example, is said to have chosen Andromache, Hector's widow; the other heroes accepted his choice, no doubt glad to have satisfied his considerable ego. The sons of the late, great Athenian hero Theseus, Acamas and Demophon, were content to rescue their mother, Aethra; according to Athenian tradition, she had gone to Troy as Helen's lady-in-waiting. At least they were content according to one story; another version says that Agamemnon gave them “many gifts” as well.

Like many a conquering army, the Greeks fell out with each other as soon as the war was over. The immediate cause of the quarrel was the question of Locrian Ajax and his sacrilege against Athena or her Trojan equivalent, by having inadvertently taken a statue of her when he grabbed Cassandra from the goddess's temple. By violating the goddess's image, Locrian Ajax subjected the whole army to her vengeance. Agamemnon and Menelaus, brothers and now rivals, argued in front of the troops. Agamemnon wanted to put off their departure until he could make amends by carrying out a big sacrifice to Athena; Menelaus wanted to go home. The Greeks had already stoned Ajax, and Menelaus no doubt reminded the men of this punishment. Agamemnon said that wasn't enough.

No ancient army, in any period, would think of making a long journey having incurred the wrath of a god. But Menelaus, Diomedes, and Nestor sailed away with their men the next day anyhow. As Nestor later explained it, Athena's punishment had already started with the royal quarrel; the safest course seemed to be to get far away from Troy. Nestor reached Pylos without incident. Likewise, Diomedes made it home safely to Argos, and Neoptolemus went to his father's ancestral land, Phthia, which he had never seen before, having grown up on the island of Scyros. But he played it safe by avoiding the treacherous sea and traveling overland.

Locrian Ajax escaped Athena, only to run afoul of Poseidon, who let him survive a shipwreck only to drown the man for his blasphemy. Menelaus lost most of his ships in a storm and was blown off course to Egypt with the rest. By the time he finally reached Sparta, the news was waiting of his brother's fatal homecoming. When Agamemnon returned to Mycenae, he was murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and the lover whom she had taken in his absence, Aegisthus, who was engaged in a blood feud with Agamemnon.

The sons of Atreus were never lucky in love. Menelaus brought back his prize, Helen. The
Odyssey
depicts the couple reunited and ruling in Lacedaemon, surrounded by war-won trophies in the royal palace. They lived to celebrate the marriage of their daughter to Neoptolemus. So the king was certainly better off than his butchered brother. Yet Helen's practice of slipping drugs into Menelaus's wine suggests that not all was happy in the royal halls.

Odysseus took ten years before reaching home—no doubt another case of the Bronze Age expression for “a long time until finally.” In the Bronze Age, being blown off course, being shipwrecked or marooned were not uncommon occurrences, so there is some plausibility in the outline of the
Odyssey.
When Odysseus at last reached Ithaca he found his enemies in charge of his household and battled them to restore his authority.

The tales of trouble in Mycenae and Ithaca perhaps offer a hint of the violence that in fact struck the Mycenaean palaces. Sometime around 1190/1180
B.C.
a wave of destruction hit the major centers on the Greek mainland, including Pylos, Tiryns, Athens, and Mycenae itself. Archaeology shows that life continued in the lower towns but the palaces on the citadels were destroyed, and with them went a way of life that included luxury goods, manorial estates, and scribes keeping written records. Greek civilization continued but at a lower level of complexity and wealth.

A similar fate was in store for many of the citadels of Anatolia, Cyprus, Canaan, and Mesopotamia. Egypt weathered the storm but it felt its force nonetheless. Clearly, it was a disastrous time throughout the Bronze Age world of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

The causes of this decline are unclear. Earthquakes appear to have played a role, but they were probably not the only source of trouble. Dynastic disputes, imperial overstretch in adventures like the Trojan War, bad harvests, peasant unrest, may all have contributed. In Anatolia, grain was scarce shortly before 1200
B.C.
, perhaps suggesting climate change that affected Greece as well.

There is only weak evidence for foreign invasion, whether by the Sea Peoples or the Dorians. The Dorians were Greek-speakers from northwestern Greece. Contrary to popular misconception, they did not come south until much later, so they could not have destroyed the Mycenaean palaces. But the Sea Peoples do fit chronologically. They attacked and destroyed the city of Ugarit around 1190
B.C.
They seem to have played a role in the fall of the city of Hattusha around the same time, and they attacked Egypt but were driven back. They were more successful in Canaan, where they settled down as the people known later as the Philistines.

Who were the Sea Peoples? The answer is not yet clear, but we do know that they were a coalition, and there is good reason to think that some of them were Greeks. So, if the Sea Peoples sacked the Mycenaean palaces, they might better be thought of as a faction in a Greek civil war rather than as foreign invaders.

The Hittites, at any rate, had other problems besides the Sea Peoples. Well before the city of Hattusha was sacked, it suffered decline and depopulation. Parts of the Hittite Empire in southern and southeastern Anatolia had become separate kingdoms. Various branches of the Hittite ruling dynasties were enmeshed in intermittent feuds that sometimes turned very nasty. Although Hattusha fell, marking the end of the Hittites' great central Anatolian empire, the Hittite kingdoms in the south managed to survive for centuries more.

We are only beginning to understand why most of the palaces of the eastern Mediterranean were in ruins by not long after 1200
B.C.
Future research should shed much new light on the matter. But whatever the truth was, it was probably as complex as the process that left most of the cities of Europe and Japan in ruins by 1945. Just as no single cause can explain World War II, so the Sea Peoples alone cannot explain the end of the palace civilization of the Bronze Age.

Archaeology shows that after the burning and probable sacking of Troy VIi, the city was reconstructed—and in no mean way. Wherever possible, old buildings were repaired and streets were repaved, but new structures went up as well. Troy VIj (formerly known as Troy VIIb1)—to use the archaeologists' ungainly name for this new Troy—was not poor. Gold and bronze jewels, an iron ax, and a carnelian seal have all been found there. And it is to this city, several generations later (ca. 1130
B.C.
) that prehistoric Troy's only inscription may be dated, the married couple's seal referred to earlier.

Of course the new Troy was not as rich as the old one. Agriculture provides a clue here. While Priam's Troy produced wheat, Troy VIj subsisted on barley, a poorer grain, which ancient peoples usually fed to animals. And the new Troy was not inhabited by the same people—not after the deaths and deportations. So a new population emerged in Troy VIj: a mixture of old Trojans and newcomers from the Balkans.

Imagine Aeneas back again in Troy. He lives with the din of carpenters, stonemasons, and brick bakers. The dead have been buried, the rubble cleared, the stones replaced. Sheep and cattle have been herded to their pens within the walls. Libations have been poured to the gods.

From his half-built home on the citadel, one evening Aeneas might have looked out on the plain, a tawny sea of grain lying still in the pale blue light. Turning, he would see Poseidon's realm, a silvery ribbon stretching as far as the islands' walls. And as a brisk breeze of Boreas ruffled his hair, he might have looked down on the new town rising. With all the inevitable problems, Aeneas might have been proud of his role in lifting up Troy like a stone out of deep water, to use a Hittite expression. The lofty works of the gods, the peaks of Mount Ida and of Samothrace, would soon be replicated once again by the proud man-made towers of Troy.