In Search of the Trojan War Read Online Free PDF Page A

Philoktetes was expelled from Thessaly by rebels; only old Nestor died happy, a last link with the Golden Age, the heroic world shattered by the Trojan War. Greek tradition dates the collapse of the Age of Heroes to within a generation or two of the war (eighty years, thought the historian Thucydides), and tells of ‘constant resettlements’, party strife and large-scale migrations, of heroes like Diomedes, Philoktetes and Idomeneus finding new lands in Italy, Sicily and western Anatolia. Finally, into Greece came an influx of Greek-speaking peasantry from the north, the Dorians, and their coming marked the endof Agamemnon’s world. At the end of the so-called Dark Age which followed, the poet Hesiod, farming in misery under Mount Helicon in Boeotia, looked back on the great struggles which had broken apart the heroic age, and destroyed ‘that godlike race of hero-men’ who lived between the Bronze Age and his own dismal Age of Iron: ‘foul war and the dreadful din of battle destroyed them … when war brought them over the great gulf of the sea to Troy for the sake of richly tressed Helen.’
    The grip that this legend continued to have on the Greek imagination is shown by an extraordinary tailpiece. A lesser hero, Ajax of Lokris, was said to have defiled Athena’s altar at Troy during the sack, and hence to have incurred her everlasting enmity. Belief in this story was so strong among the people of Lokris that from about 700 BC they sent each year, to serve the goddess in her temple at Troy, selected daughters who suffered indignities and even risked death in order to expiate the sin of their ancestor. Some, perhaps originally all, of the maidens stayed there until old age, cleaning the precinct, with shorn hair and bare feet, and as late as the fourth century BC the Trojans had the right – and exercised it – to kill those maidens they caught being secretly conducted to the sanctuary by their Lokrian guides. Those who got there lived out their days like slaves, in confinement and extreme poverty. This custom continued into the first century AD – an amazing testimony to the enduring potency of the legend in Hellenic society.
    HISTORY OR FICTION? THE VIEW OF THE ANCIENTS
    It is often said that the Greeks were the first people to deal with the events of the past in anything like a scientific manner, but it is clear that history has been far better preserved by the so-called barbarians than by the Greeks themselves. … Egyptians, Babylonians and Phoenicians by general admission have preserved the memorials of the most ancient and lasting traditions of mankind.
    JOSEPHUS , Antiquities of Judaea
    In the ancient world it was the almost uniform belief that the Trojan War was an historical event: the philosopher Anaxagoras was one of only a handful known to have doubted it, on the good grounds that there was no proof . But then, as now, everyone knew there was no primary source for the war; equally they knew that it had happened! It is a paradox unique in historiography. When the ‘Father of History’, Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BC, asked Egyptian priests whether the Greek story of the war was true, he was simply asking whether they had any alternative record of it, for there were no written sources before the epics of Homer were committed to writing, perhaps as late as the sixth century BC, hence there were no documentary sources at all available to the historians of the fifth century BC. It is interesting to see then that those historians were prepared to give total credence to the basis of the tradition in Homer. Out of Homer Thucydides ( c .400 BC) constructed a brilliant résumé of ‘prehistoric’ Greece which remains one of the most balanced and plausible accounts of how the war might have come about, though we cannot be certain how much is his own intuition from observable remains (‘archaeological’ sites) and deductions from the Homeric tale, or how much he derived from sources we do not