In Search of the Trojan War Read Online Free PDF

now have – most experts would rule out this last possibility. At any rate, Thucydides thought the story of Troy was true and the ‘imperial’ power of Mycenae a reality:
    We have no record of any action taken by Hellas as a whole before the Trojan War. Indeed, my view is that at this time the whole country was not even called Hellas. … The best evidence for this can be found in Homer, who, though he was born much later than the time of the Trojan War, nowhere uses the name ‘Hellenic’ for the whole force.
    Thucydides then considers increased knowledge of seafaring in the Aegean, ‘capital reserves’ coming into existence, and the gradual construction of walled cities with acquired wealth and a more settled life. All these facts he saw as prerequisites for a united expedition such as Homer describes:
    Some on the strength of their new riches built walls for their cities, the weaker put up with being governed by the stronger, and those who won superior power by acquiring capital resources brought the smaller cities under their control. Hellas had already developed some way along these lines when the expedition to Troy took place. Agamemnon it seems must have been the most powerful of the rulers of his day: this was why he was able to raise the force against Troy … at that time he had the strongest navy; thus in my opinion fear played a greater part than loyalty in raising the expedition against Troy. Mycenae certainly was a small place, and many of the towns of that period do not seem to us today to be particularly imposing: yet that is not good evidence for rejecting what the poets and what general tradition have to say about the size of the expedition … we have no right therefore to judge cities by their appearances rather than by their actual power and there is no reason why we should not believe that the Trojan expedition was the greatest that ever took place.
    Thus wrote Thucydides in the fifth century BC, that is, at as long a remove from the traditional date of the sack of Troy (of which more in a moment) as the signing of Magna Carta is from the present day. The lack of anything beyond the words of the poets and ‘general tradition’ is noteworthy; it should be said, though, that nothing in this interpretation has been rebutted by modern archaeology or textual criticism. It still remains a plausible model, despite the fact that many scholars today doubt the existence of the Mycenaean ‘empire’, the Trojan War, and even Troy itself: plausible, but as yet incapable of proof.
    How then did the ancients work out a chronology for their ‘prehistoric’ past? For instance, how did they date the Trojan War? In classical Greece detailed chronology went back to the first Olympiad in 776 BC. This date, we know, corresponds fairly closely to the adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks later in the eighth century, so, as we would expect, the adoption of a proper historical chronology came at about the time that written records start to exist. Hence George Grote’s great History of Greece , written as late as the 1840s and 1850s, begins with the first Olympiad; what lay before was for him unusable, for archaeology had not yet opened a window into prehistory. As Grote recognised, however, the ancient Greeks had a vast mass of legends, stories, genealogies and so on relating to this preclassical world and which they thought referred to real events just as much as Homer did: these were the ‘general traditions’ Thucydides mentions, and they had clearly been preserved orally. They often included detailed chronological relations – everyone for instance ‘knew’ that the sack of Thebes took place before the Trojan War, that the Trojan War preceded the Dorian invasion of Greece, and so on. Even from before Herodotus’ time historians had tried to construct a chronology for this and rationalise it as history, difficult as that was. Later on, Diodorus Siculus says how troublesome it was to write an account of