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

‘prehistory’ because he could not find a reliable collection of dates for the period before the Trojan War. Thucydides too limited himself to the broad conjecture that, before the time of the dominance of Mycenae, Cretans from Knossos had exerted a hegemony over the Aegean. As for the date of the war itself, most calculations varied between around 1250 BC in Herodotus and 1135 BC in Ephorus; the earliest was 1334 BC in Doulis of Samos, the most influential the date arrived at by the librarian of Alexandria, Eratosthenes (1184–1183 BC). Such dates – expressed as ‘so long before the First Olympiad’ – were usually computed from genealogies, with estimates of the length of generations, especially of the old Dorian royal families of Sparta. A remarkable example of how accurate such records could be survives in a little country church in Chios, where a family memorial stone names fourteen generations which take us back from the fifth century BC to the tenth century BC: it is thus possible , at least, that such material can be accurately preserved over centuries.
    The most precise ancient dating of the Trojan War is to be found on the Parian marble, a chronicle of notable events, imaginary or real, computed off the legendary genealogies of the kings of Athens coming down to the mid-third century BC.Carved on a great slab of marble from the island of Páros, it was bought in Smyrna by an English ambassador of Charles I to the Ottoman court, who brought it to England where it became part of the Earl of Arundel’s collection. The marble was damaged in the Civil War when the prehistoric portion was destroyed, but luckily it had been copied by the antiquarian John Selden; thus we know that it dated the origin of the cult at Eleusis to the early fourteenth century BC, the sack of Thebes to 1251, the foundation of Salamis in Cyprus to 1202, the first Greek settlements in Ionia to 1087, Homer’s floruit as 907 – and the sack of Troy to 5 June 1209 BC! Unfortunately the intriguing precision of the month and day is an astronomical computation derived from a misunderstanding of a line in the Little Iliad – ‘it was midnight and a bright moon was rising’ – which was interpreted as meaning a full moon: the nearest one to midnight occurs on the last lunation before the summer solstice!
    It will be immediately apparent from such material that the Jewish historian Josephus’ remarks about Greek historiography, written in the first century AD and quoted here , were accurate: the classical Greeks had no good source for their prehistoric past. Oral tradition, especially in the shape of Homer, was all they had to rely on, because, as Josephus points out in his preface to the Jewish War , ‘it was late, and with difficulty, that they came to the letters they now use.’ In terms of ‘archaeology’ the Greeks also had little sense of the ancient past: ‘as for the places they inhabit, ten thousand destructions have overtaken them and blotted out the memory of former deeds so that they were ever beginning a new way of living.’ There were of course ‘archaeological’ digs in the ancient world; people were always finding remains, and knew the names of the cities which Homer says sent troops to Troy (remember Thucydides’ remarks ( see here ) on the ruins of Mycenae in his day, which he had clearly visited). In such places many Mycenaean tombs were found in the seventh and eighth centuries BC, and were associated with Homer’s heroic age, for offerings to the heroes were left in them, a practice which continued into classical times. But the way suchfinds were interpreted shows that the ancients had no concept of what we now call Bronze-Age history; oral transmission was their only vehicle. In one sense, then, the problem of the historicity of the Trojan War is no different today from what it was for Thucydides: Homer and the myths tell the story; the places they name were and are still visible, some clearly once powerful,