Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War

by Naoise Mac Sweeney,Jan Haywood

26 Goldhill 1997, 149: ‘[the Troades] emphasise[s] the insufficiency of words to deal with the violence and suffering of war’.

  27 Clarke 2004, 74–90.

  28 Brillet-Dubois 2015, 172 examines Cassandra’s use of several topoi in this section of her speech that are found in epitaphioi logoi.

  29 Barlow 1986, ad 353ff.

  30 Poole 1976, 278.

  31 Croally 1994, 123: ‘she engages in what might be called historical revisionism’; cf. Dué 2006, 140: ‘lament often provides a new perspective on the sequencing of events’.

  32 Various scholars have observed that Cassandra’s catalogue of Odysseus’ struggles reasserts the authority of the Odyssey; see, e.g., Barlow 1986, ad 436, Gregory 1991, 180–81, n.21, Torrance 2013, 221 and Brillet-Dubois 2015, 172.

  33 Munteanu 2010–2011, 140.

  34 For the sophists in fifth-century Athens, see Gilbert 2002 and Barney 2006.

  35 For the portrayal of sophists in Attic comedy, see Carey 2000.

  36 On the metapoetic significance of the term ‘καινός’ in the Troades, see Torrance 2013, 229–30.

  37 Cf. Il. 5.447, which places Artemis on the side of the Trojans.

  38 Lee 1976, ad 511–14. On lamentation as the unifying theme of the Troades, see Suter (2003) and cf. Dué 2006, 139.

  39 Visvardi 2011, 283–84, cf. too Barlow 1986, ad 511ff, Croally 1994, 245 and Munteanu 2010–11, 137–38 (‘the Muse … sings in tears a new repertoire about the Trojan War … they immortalize female suffering, not male conquest’, 137); Torrance 2013, 228: ‘sufferings are [made] an appropriate subject for poetic performance’.

  40 For other terms used to denote ‘song’ in the Troades, see Torrance 2013, 220.

  41 Torrance 213, 220–21.

  42 Davidson 2001, 78.

  43 Bachvarova 2016b argues that such a Trojan Iliad must indeed have existed in the Iron Age.

  44 On this scene, see Amerasinghe 1973, Barlow 1986, 205–08, Lloyd 1992, 99–112, Croally 1994, 134–62, Meridor 2000, Goff 2009, 63–71, Marshall 2011, 38–43, and Blondell 2013, 182–20. For a useful summary of different scholarly interpretations of the debate, see Davidson 2001, 75–76 and Goff 2009, 70–71. For the ἀγών elsewhere in Euripides, see Loyd 1992.

  45 Cf. MacNeice 2002, 36: ‘the whore and the buffoon | Will come off best’.

  46 Blondell 2013, 130–31 suggests that Helen’s name itself exercises a kind of supernatural power, hence Menelaus’ reluctance to repeat it. Most editors excise lines 862–63, in which Menelaus utters Helen’s name.

  47 Amerasinghe 1973, 103 notes that Hecuba’s prayer indicates the brief resurrection of her hope for revenge. It is notable that elsewhere in the drama Hecuba expresses deep scepticism in the reality of divine justice (469, 1240–41). On the sophistic quality of Hecuba’s prayer, see, for example, Griffin 2001, 69, Goff 2009, 64, and Mastronarde 2010, 220–22, who characterizes the prayer as ‘an ironic marker of a high point of illusory confidence and futile construction of order’ (222). On vengeful Hecuba already in the Iliad, see Il. 24.212-14.

  48 Blondell 2013, 168. Note too Aristophanes Frogs 1043–56, which signals Euripides’ tendency to stage disreputable women.

  49 Cf. Blondell 2013, 187: ‘Helen therefore wins her first victory … suggesting, on his [Menelaus’] part, a certain weakness of resolve’.

  50 Thus, e.g., Barlow 1986, 207–08, Michelini 1987, 158, Lloyd 1992, 304, Croally 1994, 136, 144, Goldhill 1997, 146, Goff 2009, 67–68, Blondell 2013, 187, 193–95, and Karamanou 2016, 365.

  51 Compare the Iliad, which uses the same phrase somewhat differently Il. 5.62-64: ‘[Phereclus] also built for Alexander the seemly ships, the beginning of evils, those [ships] that were the affliction of all Trojans, and of his own self’ (ὃς καὶ Ἀλεξάνδρῳ τεκτήνατο νῆας ἐΐσας | ἀρχεκάκους, αἳ πἕσι κακὸν Τρώεσσι γένοντο | οἷ τ᾽ αὐτῷ).

  52 Similarly, Blondell 2013, 188.

  53 Note that it is Deiphobus who accompanies Helen when viewing the Trojan horse in the Odyssey (4.274–76).

  54 Most editors, following Wilamowitz, excise lines 959–60, which refer to Helen’s new husband; for a defence, however, see Lee 1976, ad 959–60, who argues that the reference to Deiphobus makes sense in the light of the play’s connection to the Alexander, in which Paris and Deiphobus are bitter rivals; cf. too Scodel 1980, 143.

  55 In this speech, Helen refers repeatedly to the Greeks using the word Hellas, rather than employing the Homeric terms ‘Achaean’ or ‘Argive’, which are used elsewhere in the drama. This illustrates further the contemporary qualities of her speech, which offers a sophistic reinterpretation of Helen’s role in the conflict.

  56 Goff 2009, 66.

  57 Some of the ideas developed here intersect with those of Karamanou 2016, 364–66.

  58 Pace Gellie 1986, who views Helen as a childish figure that subjects the Homeric myths to an outdated reading. The nuances of Helen’s characterization in both texts demonstrate that this is too simplistic.

  59 Goff 2009, 67–69.

  60 See references in see below p.113, and especially n.24. The classic work on the portrayal of ‘barbarians’ on the tragic stage is Hall 1989.

  61 For instance, see Lee 1976, xxiii, Dover 2001, 4 (more cautiously) Barlow 1986, 205.

  62 Cf. Amerasinghe 1973, 103: ‘[we cannot] unravel the complex of causes that were responsible for the fate of Troy’; Croally 1994, 159–60, Goldhill 1997, 148, Goff 2009, 39, and pace Marshall 2011, 40.

  63 Thus Gregory 1991, 174, Scodel 1980, 98, Goldhill 1997, 147, Davidson 2001, 76, Dover 2001, 3, Mastronarde 2010, 79, 222, Marshall 2011, 42, Blondell 2013, 197–98, 200–01, Torrance 2013, 228, Rabinowitz 2016, 208, and contra Lloyd 1992, 112. Croally 1994, 157–59 and Goff 2009, 71 are somewhat non-committal on this point.

  64 Green 1999, 110.

  65 See Papageorgiou 2004 for the ‘Agon of the Logoi’.

  66 Wright 2010 explores Euripides’ relationship with his literary predecessors.

  67 Cf. Marshall 2011, 33–34 and Torrance 2013, 228. In the Iliad, by contrast, Polydorus is murdered by Achilles (Il. 20.407-18).

  68 Dover 2001, 8, Clay 2010, 237–39, Burian 2010, 154–57, Torrance 2013, 235–36. For the Troades as a thorough critique of Athenian imperialism, see Croally 1994 and cf. Gregory 1991, 155–83. For a sceptical reading, which downplays any Euripidean allusions to and critique of these contemporary events, see Green 1999.

  69 Cf. Munteanu 2010–2011, 138.

  70 See especially Van Erp Taalman Kip 1987 and cf. Mastronarde 2010, 77, n.27; contra Karamanou 2016, 360: ‘Euripides seems to have aimed at conveying a strong anti-war message’.

  71 Poole 1976, 277.

  72 There are several versions of the text of Troilus and Cressida. The text used here is that of the Arden Shakespeare, edited by Bevington 1998.

  73 This is true even of a more learned audience. It has been suggested that Troilus and Cressida was originally performed at the Inns of Court, implying an audience with a particularly high level of education. This theory has now been questioned: Bevington 1998, 87–90. For the generalized sense of the ancient past in Tudor times, see Burrow 2013, 7–8.

  74 Indeed, the cover page of one of the quarto versions gives its title as: The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid, while the cover page of the folio records the title as: The Tragedie of Troyus and Cressida.

  75 For a detailed study of the life of Essex, see Hammer 1999. For a recent thematic reinterpretation, see Dickinson 2012.

  76 The myth was in circulation as early as the twelfth century, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Histroria Regum Britanniae, see p.150 and n.5 below.

  77 As one modern scholar has put it: ‘No traditional story was so popular in the Elizabethan age as that of the siege of Troy’ (Tatlock 1915, 673).

  78 For example, descent claimed from Paris: ‘From him my Lineage I derive aright, | Who long before the ten Years Siege of Troy, | Whiles y
et on Ida he a Shepherd hight, | On fair Oenone got a lovely Boy:’ (Spenser, The Faerie Queene 3.9 stanza 36). Also: ‘For noble Britons sprang from Trojans bold, | and Troynovant was built of old Troye’s ashes cold’ (Spenser, The Faerie Queene 3.9 stanza 38).

  79 For example: ‘Brutus, the first king of this land, as soon as he settled himself in his kingdom, for the safe and peaceable government of his people, wrote a book in the Greek tongue, calling it the Laws of the Britons, and he collected the same out of the laws of the Trojans’: Coke, 3 Reports 4 (1602), Preface viii a.

  80 See papers in Shepard and Powell 2004.

  81 Chapman dedicated the first instalment of his translation to Essex when it was published in 1598, entitled the Seaven Bookes of the Iliades. For Chapman and Essex, see Briggs 1981. For Chapman and his celebrated translation of the Iliad more generally, see Sowerby 1992.

  82 It is worth noting that in Troilus and Cressida, neither Achilles nor Agamemnon comes off particularly well. Achilles, although he styles himself as a great warrior and chivalric lover, is obsessed with his own reputation, and after the death of Patroclus goes against the wishes of his beloved Polyxena to murder Hector in the most dishonourable fashion – ambushing him while he is unarmed and setting a platoon of Myrmidons on him. Agamemnon, in contrast, is unimpressive from the outset. While deeply concerned with status and hierarchy, he fails to offer leadership, instead following the suggestions of Ulysses. Indeed, when Aeneas arrives to treat with the Greek host, he does not recognize Agamemnon as a great king, and instead speaks to him as he would a common soldier.

  83 Jonson’s words were published in a poem entitled ‘To The Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us’, which Jonson prefixed to the first folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays (1623).

  84 For the transmission of the Trojan War myths from antiquity through the medieval period, see Aerts 2012 and Desmond 2016, 253–57; and Chapter 5 below. For Shakespeare’s use of these sources, see Presson 1953.

  85 Troilus first appears as a romantic hero in the twelfth-century French romance poem the Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, and originally is depicted as a lover of Briseis. Cressida replaces Briseis as Troilus’ lover in Boccaaio’s Filostrato, and the story of the pair was popularized in England most famously by Chaucer. See papers in Boitani 1989 for the development of the Troilus and Cressida story through medieval and early modern European literature; and also Desmond 2016, 258-61; Pearsall 2015, 35-43.

  86 For a list of the available Latin translations at the time, see Tatlock 1915, 742.

  87 Arnold 1984, Martindale and Taylor 2004, and Burrow 2013.

  88 Arnold 1984, Silk 2004, Pollard 2012, Demetriou and Pollard 2017.

  89 For the availability of Greek tragedy and Homeric poetry, and its cultural status in Early Modern England, see Demetriou and Pollard 2017. For the question of Shakespeare’s knowledge of Homer either directly or through various mediating texts, see Presson 1953, Braden 2017, and Schein forthcoming.

  90 Bednarz 2001.

  91 For the ‘War of the Theatres’ and The Poetaster, see Bevington 1998, 6–11.

  92 In some versions of the text, this phrase reads ‘All the argument’ rather than ‘All argument’. The former implies more of a comment on the immediate argument – the cause of the Trojan War; while the latter implies a broader comment on argument and debate as a whole. As mentioned at the start of this section, I am following the text of the Arden Shakespeare, edited by Bevington (1998), which has opted for the latter.

  93 Serpigo was a term for a creeping skin disease.

  94 For the Euripidean ἀγών, see Lloyd 1992.

  95 Interestingly, when Hector incites Paris to single combat with Menelaus in the Iliad, he does so using similar arguments to those deployed here by Troilus, focusing on honour and shame (Il. 3.39–57).

  96 Demetriou and Pollard 2017, 15.

  97 Arnold 1984 and Pollard 2012.

  4

  Seeking Truth

  In this chapter we address one of the most pervasive strands in the Trojan War tradition and Iliadic receptions – the issue of the historical truth behind the Trojan War. In order to explore this, we have considered two prose texts that might be broadly considered as historiographical, in that they claimed to set down the truth concerning the ancient past.

  In the first section, Jan investigates the work of the fifth century BCE historian Herodotus, who offers his readers an alternative account of the events at Troy, notably concerning Helen’s ‘true’ whereabouts. Herodotus was not the first to reject Helen’s physical presence at Troy, but he was perhaps amongst the first to subject the Homeric poems to a rigorous set of inquiries, exposing the subtle limitations of the Iliad as a document suitable for conveying historical matter, yet simultaneously reasserting the essential historicity of the Trojan War as related by the Homeric narrator. Naoíse then moves on to look at Heinrich Schliemann, who also set out to establish the ‘truth’ of the Trojan War, this time by discovering the physical remains of the Homeric city. Schliemann sought to position his research between the new science of archaeology and the traditional discipline of classical philology, while still appealing to a popular audience. Like Herodotus, he tried to apply notions of objective truth and rationalism to the Homeric poems and found them lacking; and like Herodotus, he nonetheless upheld their cultural significance and their central position within the Trojan War tradition.

  As is the case with the receptions that have already been considered, these two authors and their works are divided on both chronological and cultural grounds, but this chapter will nonetheless show how they adopted some similar approaches to the Iliad. Both sought to mine the text for useable facts and historical information, deploying textual references and analysis of poetic details in the service of this goal. Both were concerned with issues of discipline and genre – they were keen to highlight what distinguished their own work from epic poetry in terms of form and content. Both also sought to bring a new objectivity to their work and to claim reliability based on first-hand inquiry or autopsy. Ultimately, Herodotus and Schliemann aimed to offer a corrective to Homeric epic by presenting their own research in dialogue with the poem, in which the dormant historical ‘truths’ of the Trojan War are ready to be illumined. For while these authors developed highly nuanced challenges to the Iliad’s commitment to historical accuracy, they were careful not to question the poem’s status as an artistic or cultural icon. This separation of the factual and the artistic is a central feature of a particular strand in Iliadic receptions – the strand that aims to identify what, if any, historical truth may be extracted from the epic.

  This historicizing approach to the Iliad is extremely popular today – indeed, perhaps more so at the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries than it has been previously. Such interest comes not so much from academia as from the popular sphere. Amongst researchers, agreement has largely been reached that the Trojan War as it is framed in the Iliad is not an historical event, although we now know that there were several wars at Troy around the end of the Bronze Age, some of which seem to have involved groups from the Aegean (intriguingly sometimes fighting alongside the Trojans rather than against them).1 The historicity of the Iliad is still a live question, however, in the popular discourse, particularly in popular books, television programmes, and magazine articles.2 Indeed, as we will see in Chapter 5, this was one of the key areas of discussion surrounding the release of the 2004 Hollywood film, Troy. Herodotus and Schliemann, as key proponents of this historicizing approach, helped to lay the foundations for debates on the Trojan War that are still carried out today.

  Herodotus and Schliemann both wrote in periods where the Homeric poems occupied a central, and almost indeed an unassailable position at the core of the Trojan War tradition. This is evident in their writings, in which the Iliad was the primary reference point for their analysis. When Herodotus seeks to challenge ideas about the Trojan War, he
offers us a reimagined Iliad, rather than a reworking of the Cypria, the Aethiopis, or another other poem from the Epic Cycle. Similarly, when Schliemann wanted to discover the truth about physical environment of Troy, he started with the Iliad as his essential guide, rather than the later (and potentially more accurate) descriptions of the city in Strabo, Pliny, or Quintus Smyrnaeus. Both Herodotus and Schliemann hoped to ‘correct’ their contemporaries’ understanding of the Trojan War. To do this, both felt that the key authority that they had to look to was the Iliad.

  Jan: Herodotus’ Trojan truths

  One of the signal developments of the fifth century BCE was the emergence of what is now recognized as the genre of historiography, heralded by Herodotus’ Histories – a text that emerged in both written and oral forms towards the end of the century.3 As indicated in the proem of the work, Herodotus sought to commemorate and to glorify the achievements of Hellenes and ‘barbarians’ alike, as well as to explain the chain of events that would lead to the war between Greece and Persia (1.1.0). Herodotus’ focus was thus on the more recent past, primarily on events that occurred no more than two generations before his time,4 though this did not inhibit him from including several accounts that in some way related to a more remote, sometimes mythical, past. For instance, following an extended digression in which Xerxes and his comrades discuss whether or not to invade Hellas, Herodotus reports that Xerxes marched out towards the Hellespont.

  ἐπὶ τοῦτον δὴ τὸν ποταμὸν ὡς ἀπίκετο Ξέρξης, ἐς τὸ Πριάμου Πέργαμον ἀνέβη ἵμερον ἔχων θεήσασθαι. θεησάμενος δὲ καὶ πυθόμενος ἐκείνων ἕκαστα τῇ Ἀθηναίῃ τῇ Ἰλιάδι ἔθυσε βοῦς χιλίας, χοὰς δὲ οἱ Μάγοι τοῖσι ἥρωσι ἐχέαντο.

  When Xerxes arrived at this river [i.e. the Scamander], he ascended the citadel of Priam, having a desire to see it. After he saw it and he learnt about each of the things that occurred there, he sacrificed one thousand oxen to Athena Ilias, and the Magi poured libations to the heroes.