Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

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  For the Greeks, the great urban civilizations of the Mediterranean lay temptingly and glitteringly to the south, and you might wonder why, of all the places they might have chosen for their encounter with the city, Troy became Homer’s focus. Is there any evidence that in the years of the Greek arrival, in the centuries around 2000 BC, Troy was the site worth sacking?

  It was certainly not the richest, biggest or most powerful city of the Near East. Seen from the churning dynamos of money and power in Egypt and Mesopotamia, or from the great port cities of the Levant, Troy, on the far northwestern corner of Anatolia, can have looked like little more than a regional outpost of the urban world, a place that did indeed have a citadel and a lower city, but which was nevertheless on the very margins of the urban universe. But seen from the other direction, “in the eyes of its northern neighbours,” as the Oxford and Sheffield archaeologists Andrew and Susan Sherratt memorably put it, “Troy must have been the brightest light on the horizon.” It sat at one of the great crossroads of antiquity, performing the role later filled by Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul, controlling the routes between both the Aegean and the Black Sea and Anatolia and southeast Europe. The persistent north winds that blow across windy Troy, and a steady north–south current through the Dardanelles, meant that no sail-driven ship could make its way north there. Every cargo had to be landed. Every precious object coming west from Anatolia of necessity passed through this four-point pivot. Every movement from the north into the Mediterranean, and every Mediterranean desire to reach the Danube, the gold of Transylvania, the great rivers of the Pontic steppe and the copper mines that lay beyond them, or the metals coming from the Caucasus—all had to come through Troy.

  The great Trojan treasures found by Heinrich Schliemann are now in Russia, where they were taken by the Soviets at the end of World War II. The silver and gold vessels, the bronze, the jewelry and the astonishing carved stone axes were buried in Troy perhaps as early as 2400 BC or as late as 1800 BC. Schliemann named what he found “Priam’s Treasure,” and from the very beginning was ridiculed for imagining that the levels of the city in whose ashes they emerged, Early Bronze Age Troy II, a thousand years or more before the conventional date of the Trojan War, could have had anything to do with Homer’s Trojan king.

  But just as at Mycenae, Schliemann’s suggestion is worth considering. He had found a burned layer along with a gate and a tower, and considered them “the ruins and red ashes of Troy.” In just the same way, his assistant Wilhelm Dörpfeld later settled on Troy VI, destroyed in about 1300 BC, and the Cincinnati archaeologist Carl Blegen came down in favor of Troy VIIa, which came to an end soon after 1200 BC. That remained the modern consensus under the huge German excavations from 1988 to 2003 led by Manfred Korfmann. But, as the British archaeologist Donald Easton has written, these were “three different sets of material evidence all supposed to prove the same identification and authenticate the same event.” There is nothing to associate Homer with any archaeological remains at Troy. The only pointer toward a date around 1200 BC is the guess made by Herodotus in his history. But his guesses, and those of other classical Greeks, were stabs in the dark at a time when no one knew how to date the distant past. There is certainly no better reason to associate Homer with the Troy of about 1200 BC than with a city a millennium earlier. And if finds are anything to judge by, the later Troys seem to have been poorer than the city Schliemann identified as Priam’s. Just as it is possible to imagine that the warriors in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae are themselves not the ancestors of the Homeric heroes but their sons and grandsons, there is nothing inherently unlikely in Schliemann’s suggestion that the Trojans of about 2000 BC were living in the city to which the Greeks laid siege.

  Sophia Schliemann, aged twenty-two, wearing “The Jewels of Helen,” Athens 1874.

  Nothing found in later levels of Troy can in any way match what Schliemann found here. It was a mass of gold and silver: six gold bracelets, two gold headdresses, one gold diadem, four golden basket-earrings, fifty-six golden shell-earrings, and 8,750 gold beads, sequins and studs. The jewelry was probably made in Troy. A great deal of evidence for smelting and casting has been found in the city. But these treasures are also signs of Troy’s connections north and south. The tin the Trojans used for their bronzes probably came from Afghanistan. The beautiful golden basket-shaped earrings which Schliemann found are identical to others that have been found in Ur in Mesopotamia. There is amber here from Scandinavia, even a bossed bone plaque of a kind found at Castelluccio in Bronze Age Sicily.

  Troy was the great entrepôt at the interface of the northern and southern Bronze Age worlds. The only way that Afghan tin and the Mesopotamian ways of working gold could have made their way to Bronze Age Transylvania and Hungary was through the Trojan gateway. No equivalent of Troy existed farther north or west. Only the palace center at Knossos in Crete could rival the extent of Troy in the centuries after 2000 BC. Just as the Vikings and the Crusaders would later lust after the riches of Byzantium and Constantinople, the Greeks longed for Troy.

  Another treasure, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and with an obscure history, provides yet more spectacular hints at what any Greeks, or proto-Greeks, might have found at Troy if they had arrived there in the centuries around 2000 BC. The Boston treasure seems to have come from “northwest coastal Turkey,” the province of Troy itself. It was made in about 2300 BC and consists of the gold ornaments to be buried with a noble woman: heavy lion-headed gold bangles, sun and moon disks to decorate a dress or headdress, golden pins, hair rings and diadems, finger-rings and gold ribbons.

  These objects add to the reality of early Trojan glamour, but the most intriguing aspect of them is that they are probably Egyptian or made by an Egyptian craftsman who had come to Troy, perhaps bringing Egyptian gold, to decorate a queen of Troy in a way she knew she deserved. He brought with him the motifs of the crouching lions and the lotus flower which were familiar at home in the Egyptian Old Kingdom, and which came north trailing clouds of imperial glory.

  Of all the objects that might be thought contemporary with the arrival of the Greeks in the world of cities, none can match the dazzling, hieratic power of the four Trojan hammer-axes that are now in Moscow. They are wonderful, high-polish, metal-mimicking, power-concentrating objects, three in a kind of jade, one in beautiful, gold-flecked Afghan lazurite. They were stolen by Schliemann in 1890, the last year of his life, from the part of the site at Hisarlik that belonged to his rival and enemy, the English diplomat and antiquarian Frank Calvert.

  But the squalor of that recent history is somehow appropriate. Schliemann named his son Agamemnon and in that choice declared himself the heir of “the greediest, most possession-loving of men.” You only have to look at these hammer-axes to feel some kind of desire to own them. Their smooth, cool solidity, the creamiest of surfaces in the hardest of materials, was surely designed for display and allure, even for envy. The beauty of violence is embedded in the ritual of their presence. Look at them with any kind of object-lust, and you will find yourself looking through the eyes of Agamemnon.

  Here in these objects, smuggled out of Turkey by Schliemann, legitimately wanted by the Turks, held on to by the Germans, hidden by the Nazis, taken by the Russians, then hidden again for almost fifty years, now also claimed by the distant heirs of Frank Calvert, you can see, far more than in the dusty, abused walls of Hisarlik, exactly what the marauding Greeks were after. Everything here concentrates a power which it then emanates. This is beauty and exoticism as instruments of control, embodying the core function of a great city, drawing in the rich and strange, then displaying it as a sign of dominance.

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  If the plain on which the Greeks are camped is the zone of severance and “the pitiless bronze,” the city is the realm of jointness and connection, a place for weaving. In Troy, woven cloth becomes the medium for Homer’s story. And in that detail there is an astonishing linkage between the archaeology of
Troy and the city portrayed in the Iliad. From Schliemann onward, archaeologists have found powerful evidence of an almost unparalleled scale of cloth-making in the city, at all levels of Trojan society. In the ashes of Troy II, which Schliemann identifed as Priam’s city, he found a small round clay box and in it the remains of a linen fabric decorated with tiny blue-green faience beads and a spindle full of thread. Carl Blegen in the 1930s found hundreds of tiny gold beads around the remains of a loom that had been set up with a half-finished cloth on it. And in Troy as a whole, these early levels of the city have produced over ten thousand clay spindle whorls, small weights attached to a spindle, whose momentum helped the process of spinning. It is a historical truth that Troy spun and wove.

  When Helen first appears—the woman at the heart of the story, the Greek who was stolen by Paris the Trojan prince, whose infidelity began the war, who has come to love the Trojans but still longs for her homeland, who feels guilt and passionate desire for Paris but regret for the home and family in Greece she lost, who is in other words an amalgam of severance and connection—she is in the hall of her house weaving.

  On her loom is “a great cloth” that is called marmareën in some versions, in others porphyreën. These are powerful, laden words, both intimately connected with her history and with the sea. Marmareos can mean “gleaming or twinkling like sunlit, wind-stirred water;” porphyreos “heaving,” “surging like a sea swell,” “gushing like blood,” “pouring in like death in battle,” “lurid like a rainbow,” which for the Greeks was a portent of bad things to come, or “purple like the ink of the cuttlefish.” It is as if Homer concentrated in those phrases the whole sea-tragic story of the war, and Helen’s own catastrophe within it. Into the weft of her cloth, of a double fold, she is working many woven images “of the endless bloody struggles/the horse-taming Trojans and the bronze-armed Greeks/had suffered for her sake at the god of battle’s hands.”

  Helen, even as she remembers the source of her grief, becomes like Homer the weaver of the tale. As he tells it, she is weaving it. Dressed in shimmering linen, with two of her attendant girls beside her, she goes to the ramparts of the city, where the old men, singing like cicadas in the treetops, look at her and see in her face “how terribly like the immortal goddesses she is to look on,” that pun on the destruction that beauty can bring embedded in the Greek. Then, amid the horror of war, looking down from the closed ramparts at the armies drawn up below them on the open geometries of the battlefield, Priam, the king of Troy, does the beautiful thing, drawing Helen near to him, binding her in, weaving the reassurances of civility around her.

  Come over here, where I am, dear child, and sit down beside me,

  To look at your husband of time past, your friends and your people.

  I am not blaming you: to me the gods are blameworthy

  Who drove upon me this sorrowful war against the Achaians.

  This is love as a kind of weaving, a bringing together of the things that war has separated. The shuttle of the weaver travels to and fro, but the blade merely plunges in. The making and maintaining of a city is a multiple act, reflexive and responsive, in the way that the killing of an enemy, the one-way journey of a soul out through the teeth and down to Hades, could never be. That is why the offering that the Trojans make to the great goddess Athene is made of cloth.

  The queen herself goes down to the vaulted treasure chamber where her robes are, richly embroidered, the handwork of women from Sidon, on the far eastern shores of the sea, whom Paris himself has brought from Sidon, as he sailed over the wide sea on that journey on which he brought back high-born Helen … The best and the thickest with the finest embroideries, which shine like a star, gleaming and brilliant, they take as an offering to Athene.

  These are the treasures of the innermost place in Troy, the thalamos. These are its essential materials. It is a place of women and children, rich with fineness brought from the east, from the great urban civilizations of which Troy was the farthest outpost, far to the northwest, of their heartland in West Asia and Egypt. Here too, Homer is describing the meeting of worlds. This is what lies at the heart of the distant towers seen from the Greek camp on the shore, and it is here that the poem demonstrates its love and admiration for the marvelousness of women and womanliness.

  In the Greek camp, women are traded as commodities. A woman and a tripod are put up in one lot as a prize for a chariot race, where a tripod is thought to be worth twelve oxen and a good serviceable maid-of-all-work four. That is not the atmosphere in Troy or in the most erotic scene in the Iliad, where Hera, the queen of the gods, prepares herself for love. Troy is much closer than the Greeks to the gods. There is a shared atmosphere between the city and Olympus, and the beauty of cloth, the essentially Trojan material, slides easily over into heaven. Alongside the delicious ointments with which Hera burnishes her body, she dresses slowly, seductively. It all happens inside her private chamber on Olympus, the doors closed with a secret bar, a female inwardness. She smoothes her body with exotic oils, the perfume drifting down from heaven in a mist of scented rain over the surface of the earth, while around her shoulders she wraps the “ambrosial robes” that Athene has made for her. They are smooth and satiny, with many figures embroidered on them, and she pins them across her breast with a golden brooch, circling her waist with a sash, before borrowing from Aphrodite, the goddess of love, the magic breastband which has woven into it all the hidden powers of longing and desire, “the whispered words that can steal the heart from any man.” Weaving knows secrets which the heartless bronze could never hope to grasp.

  There is a wariness in Homer about these delicious feminized delights of the city. They are not from the world of the warrior on the plain. When Nastes of the Karians, one of the Trojan allies from elsewhere in Anatolia, turns up for battle like a girl for a party, in golden clothes, “poor fool,” he is soon dead: “He goes down under the hands of the swift-running Ajax and fiery Achilles strips him of his gold in the river.” It is a wet, messy killing as Achilles, the agent of nature, takes his revenge.

  Alongside pathetic Nastes is Paris, whose lust was the cause of the war, and who is now an empty urban fop, a pretty boy, beautiful, woman-crazed, a Hollywoodized warrior, happier in scented rooms, in bed with his beauty, than out fighting where his city might need him to be. His helmet is embellished with a richly embroidered chin strap, with which he is very nearly choked to death by a Greek, before a god rescues him and whisks him away to his boudoir. Homeric distrust of the potential for unmanliness in the city, whose beauties and order are nevertheless deeply desirable, is never far beneath the surface.

  These polarities sharpen as the war deepens. The Greeks become increasingly animalistic. The Trojans are increasingly identified with the great walls that will save them from the savages at their gates. Group battle scenes give way to a sequence of individual tragedies. The shedding of blood is now close-focus. Dark underlayers bloom, and a persistent suggestion heaves up, just beneath the surface, that these men are cannibals.

  Something of this has been there from the start. Agamemnon has said that the Greeks should not hesitate to kill Trojan babies. Zeus accused Hera of wanting to walk in through the gates of Troy and eat Priam and his children and the other people there, to take them raw, to glut her anger. But by the middle of the poem, the levels of body-abuse have steepened and animality has entered the battle.

  Idomeneus stabs Erymas straight through the mouth with the pitiless

  bronze, so that the metal spearhead smashes its way clean up through

  the brain, and the white bones splinter,

  And the teeth are shaken out as he hits him and both eyes fill up

  With blood, and as he gapes he spurts blood through his nostrils

  And his mouth, and death’s dark cloud closes in about him.

  The Myrmidons, the men Achilles has brought here from Phthia, are

  like wolves, who tear at raw flesh,

  in whose hearts battle-rage knows no
end,

  who have brought down a great antlered stag in the mountains,

  and then feed on him, till their lips and cheeks are running with blood,

  and who then move off in a pack, the crowd of them,

  to drink from a spring of dark water,

  lapping with their narrow tongues along the black edge of the water,

  belching up the clotted blood, their bellies full and their hearts unshaken.

  The Greeks begin to lose the fight. Achilles refuses to stir from his tent. His beloved Patroclus takes his armor and wears it so that the Trojans might think Achilles himself has returned to the battle. The trick works, the Trojans take fright and Patroclus starts to push them back from the ships. But he goes too far; Hector kills him, and he lies dead in the dust. Standing over his body, in the midst of battle, Hector makes the great statement of the city against the plain.

  Patroclus, you have thought perhaps of devastating our city,

  Of stripping from the Trojan women their day of freedom

  and dragging them off in ships to the beloved land of your fathers.

  Pea-brain!… Now vultures will eat your body raw.

  Idiot! Not even Achilles can save you now.

  The armies fight over the body of Patroclus with a new and horrible intensity, a struggle that lasts for hundreds of lines. In the fight, the beautiful Trojan Euphorbus is killed by Menelaus, and his lovely hair, braided with gold and silver, like the body of a beautiful wasp, is soaked and clotted with blood, civilization drenched in war. Menelaus now, with the battle frenzy in him, is like a mountain lion that has caught a delicious cow, the best cow, and is “mauling the kill, gulping down the guts that are inward.” Hector strips the armor from Patroclus, the glorious armor which Achilles had lent him, and drags at the body, meaning to cut the head from the shoulders “and give the rest to the dogs of Troy.” He promises huge rewards to those who can drag back to the city the now naked body of Patroclus, who has become nothing but flesh, stripped of meaning, meat for the dogs and birds.