The Trojan War Read Online Free PDF Page B

“feeble” or “despicable.” The god Apollo offers a withering put-down: Menelaus is a “soft spearman.” He was, in fact, faintly ridiculous.
    She blamed uncontrollable passion for her decision to leave home, husband, and daughter, Hermione, for Paris. But that is what gamblers say when they look back afterward. The real Helen, one suspects, knew just what she was doing.
    Paris was no fool for love either. His abduction of Helen may have had less to do with lust than with power politics. By capturing Helen, Paris carried out a bloodless raid on enemy territory. He may have been a knave but he was no pawn: he aimed to use Helen to advance his own position in the royal house of Troy and his country’s position in the international arena. Ultimately, her aim was to use him too, so the adulterous couple was less like Romeo and Juliet than Juan and Eva Perón.
    The modern reader is skeptical of Homer. Surely, something as big as the Trojan War was about more than a case of wife-stealing. In ancient times others felt similarily, and the Greek historian Herodotus (ca. 485–ca. 425 B.C. ) quoted the opinion that the Greeks were fools to make a fuss about Paris and Helen and go to war. And so they would have been if the only reason for the Trojan War had been the beautiful wife of Menelaus. In fact, the Greeks had many reasons to make war on Troy, involving both domestic politics and foreign policy.
    Yet Homer is not mistaken but merely authentic. The Bronze Age was an era that preferred to put things in personal terms rather than in abstractions. Instead of justice, security, or any of the other issues that would be part of a war debate today, the Bronze Age tended to speak of family and friendship, crime and punishment. Near Eastern kings proclaim in their inscriptions that they fought to take vengeance on their enemies and on rebels; they fought those who boasted or who transgressed their path or who violated the king’s boundaries or raised their bows against royal allies; they fought to widen their borders and bring gifts to their loyal friends. A Hittite king says that his enemies attacked him when he came to the throne because they judged him young and weak—their mistake! Allies are royal vassals, obliged to have the same friends and enemies as the king.
    Consider an example from Canaan in the 1300s B.C. When the sons of the ruler of Shechem asked the mayor of Megiddo to join their military campaign against the city of Jenin, they personified the matter: the cause of the war, they said, was the murder of their father by citizens of Jenin. Failure to help would also be personal, as it would turn the sons into Megiddo’s enemy.
    We would, therefore, expect the Bronze Age to put the causes of the Trojan War in personal terms—murder, rebellion, or even wife-stealing—rather than the aggression, competition, resentment, covetousness, and insecurity that underlay the conflict. But these latter factors were there. They can be traced in Greek and Trojan archaeological finds and in Hittite and other Near Eastern documents. Let’s begin with the texts.
    Both sides saw conflict looming between Troy and Greece. Hittite texts trace a rising tide of troubles in the 1200s B.C. Around 1280 B.C. , Troy gave up its traditional policy of splendid isolation to make an alliance with the Hittites. The king of Troy, Alaksandu, had great wealth but not enough military power to protect his lands, cities, vineyards, threshing floors, fields, cattle, and sheep, not to mention his wife, concubines, and sons—to use the terms of Hittite treaties. The Hittites, in turn, were always looking for allies in turbulent western Anatolia, a region that distracted them from their main interests to the south and east.
    So Troy became what the Hittites called a “soldier servant,” that is, a Hittite vassal state with military responsibilities, with a promise of Hittite military protection in