It is hard to say where the story started. Before Homer, that’s for sure. The shadowy figure credited with composing the Iliad and Odyssey is generally believed to have lived in the 8th century BC, when writing literature was still a new fad in the Greek world. We do not know whether Homer created written versions of these epics, but we can be certain that tales of the Trojan war were not created to capitalise on this new way of reaching audiences. Instead, the stories were much older, and had been finessed by generations of bards, who would recite the poems from memory, and doubtless tinkered with them as they went along. Even then, the themes of love and war ran deeper still. Depictions of a city under siege or a naval taskforce appear on a Mycenaean silver vessel and a Bronze Age fresco from Thera, while echoes of source material from Anatolia and the Near East reverberate through the Homeric literature. If all of these strands needed a suitable setting to weave them together, they found one in the Late Bronze Age Troy of c.1700-1200 BC. This sprawling city commanded the mouth of the Dardanelles, where the Mediterranean merges with the Black Sea, and East meets West. It proved the perfect time and place for a story of gods and mortals, fate and choice, love and hate, and the utter ruination of war.
The Iliad and Odyssey were merely two elements of a much longer epic cycle about the Trojan war, but they are the only segments that survive complete today. This is in large part due to the fanatical following that Homer inspired in the Classical world. His contribution came – assuming he existed at all – during what could be thought of as a Greek renaissance, when the Hellenic world rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the Mycenaean states, which had collapsed four centuries or so earlier. As well as providing a heroic past for various city states, the alliance of Achaeans – Greeks – who fought at Troy provided a handy reference for the growing sense of ‘Greekness’ in Homer’s day. If tales of Troy helped to forge a new Greek world, though, its influence on the Roman one was even starker. The Romans traced their lineage to Aeneas, a Trojan refugee who had a bit part in the original myth, before receiving his own spin-off from the poet Virgil. The resulting Aeneid swiftly established itself as Rome’s national epic. And where Rome went, medieval Europe followed. In the scramble to be seen as the empire’s heirs, by the 12th century most European powers purportedly – and falsely – claimed Trojan ancestry.
Centuries later, Troy was there once again at the dawn of modern archaeology, when Heinrich Schliemann – himself no stranger to mythmaking – set out on a quest to prove that Homer’s words were grounded in genuine events. So it was that the story became the driving force behind the rediscovery of the real-world location at the heart of the Trojan war cycle. Meanwhile the influence of the Iliad and Odyssey continues in a more or less recognisable guise in art, literature, and film right down to today. And just like the ancient bards, modern storytellers still refashion the material to suit audiences’ expectations, so that almost 3,000 years of changing expectations about love, war, sacrifice, and heroism can be traced like ripples through retellings of the Troy story. It could not be more fitting, then, that a major exhibition at the British Museum has assembled a beguiling blend of ancient and modern materials to tease out the myth and reality of Troy (see ‘Further information’ box on p.22).
Excavating Staffordshire