Heroes (formerly Talisman of Troy)

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  He has published twelve works of fiction, including the Alexander trilogy, which has been translated into twenty-four languages in thirty-eight countries, and The Last Legion, now a major motion picture.

  He has written and hosted documentaries on the ancient world, which have been transmitted by the main television networks, and has written fiction for cinema and television as well.

  He lives with his family in the countryside near Bologna.

  Also by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  ALEXANDER: CHILD OF A DREAM

  ALEXANDER: THE SANDS OF AMMON

  ALEXANDER: THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

  SPARTAN

  THE LAST LEGION

  TYRANT

  THE ORACLE

  EMPIRE OF DRAGONS

  THE TOWER

  PHARAOH

  THE LOST ARMY

  Ah, could we but survive this war

  to live forever deathless, without age,

  I would not ever go again to battle

  nor would I send you there for honor’s sake!

  But now a thousand shapes of death surround us,

  and no man can escape them, or be safe.

  let us go . . .

  Homer, Iliad XII, 322–8

  KEY TO MAP

  ITALY

  Mountains of Ice – The Alps

  Lake of the Ancestors – Lake Garda

  Eridanus River – River Po

  Mountains of Stone – The Ligurian Alps and Carrara Mountains

  The Blue Mountains – The Appennines

  Mountains of Fire – Vesuvius to Etna

  Island of the Three Promontories – Sicily

  BALKANS

  Hyster River – Danube

  Epirus – Albania

  Land of the Achaeans – Greece

  Palus Maeotis – Sea of Azov

  Pylum – Capital of Messenia

  Pontus Euxinus – Black Sea

  AEGEAN

  Ilium – Troy

  Tyre – Tyre

  Assuwa – Asia

  Keftiu – Crete

  GLOSSARY

  Ahhijawa – the Hittite word for the Achaeans.

  Ambron – word (Ambrones) used by Pliny to indicate the Ligurians.

  Assuwa – Hittite word, probably meaning Asia.

  Borrha’ – northeast wind; origin of Borea in Latin and Bora in Italian (and English). Etymology uncertain.

  Chnan – what the Phoenicians called themselves, meaning Canaanite. The term continued to be used in Northern Africa until the third century AD.

  Derden – One of the Sea Peoples listed in ancient Egyptian documents. (Dardani; the race of Aeneas).

  Dor – word used here to indicate the Dorians.

  Elam – Near Eastern region corresponding to the area of the Zagros Mountains in western Iraq.

  Enet – the Enetians, a people of northern Anatolia, named in the catalogue of ships in Book II of the Iliad as allies of the Trojans. As early as the fifth century BC, they were identified with the Venetics who settled in eastern Italy. Their Trojan leader, Antenor, was said to be the founder of Padova.

  Kardakas – a people appearing in Assyrian documents of the seventh century BC, corresponding perhaps to the Karduchians of eastern Anatolia. Probably the modern Kurds.

  Kmun – word used here to indicate the Camunians, a people of the eastern Italian Alps famous for their stone carvings.

  Kussara – Hittite city in central Anatolia, located not far from the capital, Hatti.

  Lat – word used here to indicate the proto-Latins.

  Lawagetas – a Mycenaean word (la-wa-ge-tas) indicating the head of the army.

  Lukka – one of the Sea Peoples, perhaps corresponding to the Lycians.

  Nbyt – sanctuary of the crocodile god Sobek on the upper Nile, today’s Kom Ombo.

  Ombro – word used here to indicate the proto-Umbrians.

  Pakana – Mycenaean word (pa-ka-na) for sword, giving origin to Homeric Greek phasganon.

  Peleset – the Sea Peoples, corresponding perhaps to the biblical Philistines.

  Pica – word used here for the Picenians, a people of eastern central Italy.

  Ponikjo – a Mycenaean word (po-ni-ki-jo) probably used to indicate the Phoenicians.

  Potinja – (po-ti-ni-ja) a divinity known as ‘potnia theròn’ (literally, the lady of the animals or the lady of living creatures) in historical times; the great Mediterraneasn mother goddess.

  Sherden – a people commonly listed in ancient Egyptian documents; one of the Sea Peoples. May correspond to Sardinians.

  Shekelesh – one of the Sea Peoples, perhaps indicating the Siculians or Sicels, ancient inhabitants of Sicily.

  Sikanie – word used here to indicate the Sicanians, among the most ancient inhabitants of Sicily.

  Sobek – the crocodile god of the ancient Egyptians.

  Telepinu – a first name in Hittite; may correspond to the Greek Telephos.

  Teresh – one of the Sea Peoples. May correspond to the Greek Tyrsenoi: that is, the Tyrrhenians or proto-Etruscans.

  Urartu – ancient name of Armenia, present in Assyrian-Babylonian documents and in the Bible.

  Vilusya – Hittite site recognized by many scholars as Ilium, or Troy.

  Wanax – Mycenaean term (wa-nax) for ‘lord,’ origin of Greek hanax.

  Wanaxa – (wa-nax-a) the female form of wanax origin of Greek hanassa.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This story is liberally inspired by the lost poems of the Trojan cycle, especially those which narrate the returns of the heroes of the War of Troy. The most famous of these returns is certainly Homer’s Odyssey, which enjoyed such fortune from the very start that it outshone the poems of the ‘lesser’ journeys, which were subsequently lost. The tales they told, mentioned in Book XI of the Odyssey, must nonetheless have been fascinating, and would provide a wealth of material for the great tragic poets of the 5th century: Aeschylus’s Orestean trilogy (Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers and the Eumenides), Sophocles’s Ajax and Euripides’ the Trojan Women, not to speak of Virgil’s Aeneid.

  My aim in this novel was, in a way, to fill in that huge gap between the events that immediately follow the Trojan War and the situation depicted in the Odyssey. The myths of this period describe the total destabilization of Mycenaean Greece, with most of the kings dying during their homeward voyages, assassinated upon their return or driven from their lands. This situation, however, seems to be at least partially reversed in Books III and IV of the Odyssey, when Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, visits Pylos. The normalization seems to be the work of Menelaus, king of Sparta, who enjoys a privileged relationship with Nestor, has bound Achilles’s son Pyrrhus to him through marriage with his daughter, and has plans to send Ulysses to settle in the Peloponnese. Furthermore, Menelaus’s return from Egypt seems closely connected with Orestes’s killing of Aegisthus (Odyssey, III, 306).

  The killing of queen Clytemnestra and the usurper Aegisthus at Mycenae is usually seen in myth as Orestes personally exacting revenge for his father’s death, but we cannot exclude actual dynastic internecine wars; there is archeological evidence of possible traces of partial destruction outside the walls of Mycenae that may have preceded the fall of this civilization, traditionally attributed to the Dorian invasion which coincides with the era in which the palaces were destroyed.

  Modern historical reflections, supported by archeological research, no longer uncritically accept the so-called Dorian invasion. In his introduction to the latest edition of The World of Odysseus, M. Finley actually calls into question historical authenticity of the War of Troy tout court, claiming that it could only have occurred, if at all, in the Iron Age and not the Bronze Age.

  This novel certainly does not mean to propose solutions to historical problems which are still open, but rather to explore the fascination and power of myth and the traces it has left everywhere, in our territory and in our past. The myths which have inspired this novel have their roots in the still little known
period of transition between the end of the Bronze Age and the start of the Iron Age, when the entire Mediterranean world was shaken by a series of catastrophes: the Hittite empire of Anatolia collapsed, Egypt was invaded by the so-called ‘Peoples of the Sea’, and the Terramara civilization in Italy was extinguished in less than half a century, leaving nothing in its wake. The Mycenaean world – the world of Homer’s heroes – disintegrated as well, perhaps as the result of an invasion, as discussed above, or perhaps due to as yet unidentified causes, such as severe climate change, for example, which may have forced sizeable populations out of their original settlements.

  Some researchers have interpreted the myth of Phaethon’s chariot scorching the earth before being downed by Zeus’s thunderbolt as the metaphor, or historical memory, of a catastrophic natural event. The novel hints at this event in the mysterious object which plunges into the swamps of the Po valley, in accordance with the myth that locates Phaeton’s fall at the mouth of the Eridanus river. His grieving sisters were transformed into poplar trees on the banks, and their tears into drops of amber, the same Baltic amber that archeologists have found in such abundance in the late Mycenaean settlement of Fratta Polesine, located near the extinct northern arm of the Po, which the ancients called Eridanus.

  Among the lost and wandering heroes of the Homeric saga, I’ve chosen to follow Diomedes, retracing an itinerary celebrated in the traditions of the Greek colonies of Italy; there is evidence of a cult of Diomedes along the entire Adriatic shore, from the Illyrian coast to the Venetian lagoons, from the mouth of the Po to the wide river valley, from Ancona to Puglia and the Tremiti islands, where a certain kind of seagull with a woeful cry is still called ‘Diomedean’. I’ve attempted to weave his wanderings into the rich background of epic tradition.

  This epic tradition includes the tale of the two Helens, and the myth of the Palladium, the idol which was said to make the city which possessed it invincible. Many Greek and Italian cities, through the age of written history, claimed to hold the true idol in their sanctuaries, Rome included. Other myths include the fall of Phaeton’s chariot at the mouth of Eridanus, as already mentioned, the Oracle of the Old Man of the Sea at the mouth of the Nile, the legend of Aeneas’s landing on the plains of Latium (later elaborated by Virgil) and the tradition which has Padua founded by the Enetians, led by the Trojan Antenor. The diffusion of these myths in Italy have helped current scholars to trace the earliest colonial penetration of the Greeks into Adriatic, Ionian and Tyrrhenian waters, without excluding the intriguing possibility that this penetration may have taken place on much more ancient routes, dating back to Mycenaean times and thus, once again, to the epic Homeric cycle of the ‘returns’.

  Modern philological and archeological knowledge allows us to integrate these traditions so as to create the most likely sequence of events. The battle beneath the walls of Mycenae, for example, incorporates what we currently know about that type of conflict, knowledge which Homer would no longer have been aware of in his time. For example, in the Iliad, the chariot is used as a means of transport, to carry the combatants to the battle site, while in reality it would have been used in Mycenaean times as a war machine; simply, at the time the poem was set down, this memory had been lost.

  The reader will have noticed an intentional Homeric ‘patina’ which seeks to evoke the atmosphere of epic poetry, set against the background of the Mycenaean culture in Greece and of the late bronze age in Italy, which remain our chronological reference points. This picture includes the presence, in Italy, of the peoples who would populate it in the following centuries: Etruscans, Latins, Ligurians, Apulians, Picenians and Venetics. Although current historical knowledge cannot demonstrate their presence in this obscure period of archaic migration, I’ve suggested it to accentuate the theme in the novel of the newly forming Italic and European peoples, hinted at, for example, in the myth of the Pelasgians (‘sea wanderers’). For the sake of compacting the narrative, the events described here take place in a much shorter period of time than is conventionally accepted both in the epic tradition and in the archeological indicators of historical events; I’ve done this to render them more dramatic and to allow myself to weave a possible itinerary which blends myth and imagination.

  The author’s dream is just this: that fortuitous intuition, or simply love for a lost world, can succeed in retracing the steps of the heroes celebrated in the epic tradition, and transform them into flesh and blood, animated, however, by energies and ideals whose memory has been long lost to us.

  For Marzia, Flavia, Valeria and Marcello

  First published 2004 as The Talisman of Troy by Macmillan

  First published in paperback 2004 by Pan Books

  This edition published 2006 as Heroes by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2010 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

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  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-52713-2 PDF

  ISBN 978-0-330-52712-5 EPUB

  Copyright © Valerio Massimo Manfredi 1994

  Translation copyright © Macmillan 2004

  First published in Italian 1994 as Le Paludi di Hesperia by

  Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano

  The right of Valerio Massimo Manfredi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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