'The Odyssey' and 'The Iliad' are giving up new secrets about the
ancient world
By Jonathan Gottschall
September 28, 2008
NEARLY 3,000 YEARS after the death of the Greek poet Homer, his epic
tales of the war for Troy and its aftermath remain deeply woven into
the fabric of our culture. These stories of pride and rage, massacre
and homecoming have been translated and republished over millennia.
Even people who have never read a word of "The Iliad" or "The Odyssey"
know the phrases they have bequeathed to us - the Trojan horse, the
Achilles heel, the face that launched a thousand ships.
Heinrich Schliemann thought he had found King Priam's treasure, but
his claims were discredited. (Hulton Archives/Getty Images) Heinrich
Schliemann thought he had found King Priam's treasure, but his claims
were discredited.
Today we still turn to Homer's epics not only as sources of ancient
wisdom and wrenchingly powerful poetry, but also as genuinely popular
entertainments. Recent translations of "The Iliad" and "Odyssey" have
shared the best-seller lists with Grisham and King. "The Odyssey" has
inspired works from James Joyce's "Ulysses" to a George Clooney movie,
and an adaptation of "The Iliad" recently earned more than $100
million in the form of Wolfgang Petersen's "Troy" - a summer
blockbuster starring Brad Pitt as an improbable Achilles.
The ancient Greeks, however, believed that Homer's epics were
something more than fiction: They thought the poems chronicled a real
war, and reflected the authentic struggles of their ancestors. But
modern scholars have generally been more skeptical. The poems describe
a culture that thrived hundreds of years before Homer was born, and
which would have seemed legendary even to him. Scholars have allowed
that a kernel of historical truth might be tucked beneath the layers
of heroic hyperbole and poetic embroidery, but only a small kernel. In
the last 50 years, most scholars have sided with the great classicist
Moses Finley, who argued that the epics were "a collection of fictions
from beginning to end" and that - for all their majesty and drama -
they were "no guide at all" to the civilization that may have fought
the Trojan War.
But thanks to evidence from a range of disciplines, we are in the
middle of a massive reappraisal of these foundational works of Western
literature. Recent advances in archeology and linguistics offer the
strongest support yet that the Trojan War did take place, with
evidence coming from the large excavation at the likely site of Troy,
as well as new analysis of cuneiform tablets from the dominant empire
of the region. Insights from comparative anthropology have transformed
studies of the society that created the poems and allowed us to
analyze the epics in a new way, suggesting that their particular
patterns of violence contain a hidden key to ancient Greek history -
though not necessarily the key that Homer's readers once thought they
were being given.
"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" are our most precious artifacts of early
Greek culture. Aside from the dry and voiceless remains of
archeological sites, the poems are the last surviving impressions of
the society that created them - what the people hoped for, what they
despaired of, and how they managed their social and political lives.
The poems are time machines - imperfect, surely - that show us people
who were so like us, and so different, too. And they are still
revealing new truths about the prehistoric civilization that has
exerted such a strong formative influence over the art, the history,
and even the psychology of the West.
. . .
The desire to find truth in Homer has a long and checkered history,
and no figure looms larger than the German businessman and self-taught
archeologist Heinrich Schliemann. In 1870 he landed on the western
coast of Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) with a copy of "The Iliad" in
his hand. On the plain before him, an unimpressive mound of grass and
stone and bushes swelled 100 feet into the air. Tradition had long
identified this mound, called Hisarlik, as a possible site of the
historical Troy.
Schliemann soon reported to the world, breathlessly, that he and his
diggers had found the charred remains of a grand citadel destroyed in
prehistory by hostile men - that he had found Troy just where Homer
said it would be. The news was a worldwide sensation, and Schliemann's
view that the Homeric epics were fairly accurate chronicles of Late
Bronze Age history - that is, the Greek world of around 1200 BC -
dominated scholarship for more than 50 years.
But, in fact, Schliemann hadn't found Homer's Troy. Hisarlik was
occupied from 3000 BC until 500 AD, and subsequent archeological
excavations showed that the civilization Schliemann chipped from the
mound actually ended more than 1,000 years before the Trojan War could
realistically have been fought. When the German archeologist Carl
Blegen examined the proper layer of the Hisarlik mound, the settlement
he found seemed like a wretched and insignificant place. Schliemann's
amateurism, wishful thinking, and instinct for self-glorification had
led him into serious error, and ended up discrediting his claim that
Homer's poems were historically based.
But the newest digging at Troy is tipping the consensus again, perhaps
this time for good. Schliemann and Blegen, it now appears, had only
discovered the tip of the iceberg. The mound at Hisarlik thrusts up
from the plain, but most of its ruins are concealed beneath the
surface. In a project that has now been underway for 20 years, the
German archeologist Manfred Korfmann and hundreds of collaborators
have discovered a large lower city that surrounded the citadel. Using
new tools, such as computer modeling and imaging technology that
allows them to "see" into the earth before digging, Korfmann and his
colleagues determined that this city's borders were 10 to 15 times
larger than previously thought, and that it supported a population of
5,000 to 10,000 - a big city for its time and place, with impressive
defenses and an underground water system for surviving sieges. And,
critically, the city bore signs of being pillaged and burned around
1200 BC, precisely the time when the Trojan War would have been
fought.
In his influential book, "Troy and Homer," German classicist Joachim
Latacz argues that the identification of Hisarlik as the site of
Homer's Troy is all but proven. Latacz's case is based not only on
archeology, but also on fascinating reassessments of cuneiform tablets
from the Hittite imperial archives. The tablets, which are dated to
the period when the Late Bronze Age city at Hisarlik was destroyed,
tell a story of a western people harassing a Hittite client state on
the coast of Asia Minor. The Hittite name for the invading foreigners
is very close to Homer's name for his Greeks - Achaians - and the
Hittite names for their harassed ally are very close to "Troy" and
"Ilios," Homer's names for the city.
"At the very core of the tale," Latacz argues, "Homer's 'Iliad' has
shed the mantle of fiction commonly attributed to it."
But if the Trojan War is looking more and more like a historical
reality, there is still the question of whether the poems tell us
anything about the motives and thinking of the people who actually
fought it. Do the epic time machines actually take us back to the
Greek culture of the Late Bronze Age?
It is almost certain that they do not. Homer's epics are a culmination
of a centuries-long tradition of oral storytelling, and extensive
cross-cultural studies of oral literature have established that such
tales are unreliable as history. Homeric scholars believe that the
epics were finally written down sometime in the 8th century BC, which
means that the stories of Achilles and Odysseus would have been passed
by word of mouth for half a millennium before they were finally
recorded in what was, by then, a vastly changed Greek culture. Facts
about the war and the people who fought it would have been lost or
grossly distorted, as in a centuries-long game of "telephone."
Scholars agree that the relatively simple and poor culture Homer
describes in his epics is quite sharply at odds with the complex and
comparatively rich Greek kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age, when the war
would have taken place.
But even if the epics make a bad history of Greece in 1200 BC - in the
sense of transmitting names, dates, and accurate political details -
scholars increasingly agree that they provide a precious window on
Greek culture at about the time the poems were finally written down.
Moses Finley, who believed that the epics were "no guide at all" to
the history of the Trojan War, did believe they were guides to Homer's
own culture. And by turning an anthropological eye to the conflicts
Homer writes about, we are now learning far more about what that
culture was really like.
. . .
Reconstructing a prehistoric world from literary sources is rife with
complications. But there are aspects of life in the Homeric era upon
which most scholars agree. Homer paints a coherent picture of Greek
attitudes, ideology, customs, manners, and mores that is consistent
with the 8th century archeological record, and holds together based on
anthropological knowledge about societies at similar levels of
cultural development. For instance, we can trust that the Greeks'
political organization was loose but not chaotic - probably organized
at the level of chiefdoms, not kingdoms or city-states. In the epics
we can see the workings of an agrarian economy; we can see what
animals they raised and what crops, how they mixed their wine,
worshipped their gods, and treated their slaves and women. We can tell
that theirs was a warlike world, with high rates of conflict within
and between communities.
This violence, in fact, opens an important window onto that world.
Patterns of violence in Homer are intriguingly consistent with
societies on the anthropological record known to have suffered from
acute shortages of women. While Homeric men did not take multiple
wives, they hoarded and guarded slave women who they treated as their
sexual property. These women were mainly captured in raids of
neighboring towns, and they appear frequently in Homer. In the poems,
Odysseus is mentioned as having 50 slave women, and it is slave women
who bear most of King Priam's 62 children. For every slave woman
working a rich man's loom and sharing his bed, some less fortunate or
formidable man lacks a wife.
In pre-state societies around the world - from the Yanomamo of the
Amazon basin to the tribes of highland New Guinea to the Inuit of the
Arctic - a scarcity of women almost invariably triggers pitched
competition among men, not only directly over women, but also over the
wealth and social status needed to win them. This is exactly what we
find in Homer. Homeric men fight over many different things, but
virtually all of the major disputes center on rights to women - not
only the famous conflict over Helen, but also over the slave girls
Briseis and Chryseis, Odysseus's wife Penelope, and all the nameless
women of common Trojan men. As the old counselor Nestor shouts to the
Greek hosts, "Don't anyone hurry to return homeward until after he has
lain down alongside a wife of some Trojan!"
The war between Greeks and Trojans ends in the Rape of Troy: the
massacre of men, and the rape and abduction of women. These events are
not the rare savageries of a particularly long and bitter war - they
are one of the major points of the war. Homeric raiders always hoped
to return home with new slave-concubines. Achilles conveys this in his
soul-searching assessment of his life as warrior: "I have spent many
sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their
women."
Historical studies of literature are sometimes criticized for
ignoring, or even diminishing, the artistic qualities that draw people
to literature in the first place. But understanding how real history
underlies the epics makes us appreciate Homer's art more, not less. We
can see Homer pioneering the artistic technique of taking a backbone
of historical fact and fleshing it over with contemporary values and
concerns - the same technique used later by Virgil in "The Aeneid," by
Shakespeare in his history plays, and by Renaissance painters
depicting the Bible and classical antiquity.
And understanding Homer's own society gives us a new perspective on
the oppressive miasma of fatalism and pessimism that pervades "The
Iliad" and, to a lesser but still palpable extent, "The Odyssey."
While even the fiercest fighters understand that peace is desirable,
they feel doomed to endless conflict. As Odysseus says, "Zeus has
given us [the Greeks] the fate of winding down our lives in hateful
war, from youth until we perish, each of us." A shortage of women
helps to explain more about Homeric society than its relentless
violence. It may also shed light on the origins of a tragic and
pessimistic worldview, a pantheon of gods deranged by petty vanities,
and a people's resignation to the inevitability of "hateful war."
Jonathan Gottschall teaches English at Washington & Jefferson College.
He is the author of "The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the
World of Homer," and he is currently at work on a novel of the Homeric
age called "Odysseus, A True Story."
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