FOUR

HOMER: THE SINGER OF TALES

How could Homer have known about these things?

When all this happened he was a camel in Bactria!

LUCIAN, The Dream

They [the Greeks] were late in learning the alphabet and found the lesson difficult … it is a highly controversial and disputed question whether even those who took part in the Trojan campaign made use of letters, and the true and prevalent view is rather that they were ignorant of the present-day mode of writing. Throughout the whole range of Greek literature no disputed work is found more ancient than the poetry of Homer. His date, however, is clearly later than the Trojan War; and even he, they say, did not leave his poems in writing. At first transmitted by memory the scattered songs were not united until later; to which circumstance the numerous inconsistencies of the work are attributable.

JOSEPHUS, Against Apion

THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY are by common consent the beginning of European literature. It is an extraordinary paradox – unique in culture – that the beginnings should be unexcelled masterpieces; not inchoate ‘primitive’ works, but great poems of enormous length and sophistication. We can safely assume that there had been earlier and cruder Greek epic poetry before Homer, but we know nothing of it. Instead, here, ‘leaping out of the head of Zeus fully armed’ are representations of a heroic age so vividly and powerfully realised that, ever since, their audience has been unable to resist the idea that they are in some way ‘true’. In the classical world it was generally accepted that their author was a poet of genius called Homer, of whom virtually nothing was known: even the name suggests a pseudonym (homeros = hostage). In the ancient world it was also accepted that Homer composed without the aid of writing – that is, he was an oral poet.

Recently detailed studies of oral epic poetry have been made in different parts of the world – Serbia, where it survived in a debased form until recently; Ireland, where the last (prose) epic performer lived long enough to be recorded, in the 1940s;Albania and Armenia, where shreds of the bardic tradition still hang; Zaïre, where until recently the full-blown thing itself could still be witnessed. All these have taught us a great deal about how great poems – and exceedingly long ones – can be orally composed and transmitted without the aid of writing. The characteristics of such works – notably the so-called formulas, or repeat phrases – show that the Homeric poems are, as Josephus and the ancients thought, characteristically oral poems. But in what sense were they composed? Was there one act of composition, or a gradual accretion of a poetic tradition? Did Homer exist? When were the poems written down, and what relation does the written text we have bear to that first written text, let alone to the orally composed poem(s) which may have preceded it? These are the problems which for the last two centuries have been at the centre of what scholars call the ‘Homeric Question’.

Though we assume that ‘Homer’ was orally composed, we only know his poems through writing – through written texts. In the last century our knowledge of the text has increased with the discovery of over 600 papyrus fragments from Egypt which preserve parts of the Homeric text, but essentially they have not meant any real change in what we call Homer. In the case of the Iliad this means a manuscript tradition which starts in the tenth century AD in Constantinople: our two best and earliest manuscripts were produced at that time (the bulk of 200 surviving MSS of Homer are from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD).

Though Greek studies had largely died out in the Latin west during the Dark Ages, ‘Homer’ continued to be studied in Byzantium where it remained part of the school curriculum despite its pagan ethos. In the great period of the AD 860s a new revised edition of Homer was prepared by Byzantine scholars in the imperial university, and subsequent work on the manuscript traditions led to the famous book, now in St Mark’s in Venice, known as Venetus A, the most authoritative edition of the Iliad. As always, the bulk of the early and rare texts did not survive because of war: in this respect the sack of Constantinople in 1204 must have been a great disaster, if not on a par with the loss of the library at Alexandria by fire in the first century BC. Even before the final sack of Constantinople, in 1453, the tradition was taken up in the west by Italian humanists who brought back a large number of manuscripts from the Byzantine Empire in the last century of its existence. After 1453 manuscripts were taken from surviving Greek monastic libraries; today such places are virtually denuded of classical texts, but their plundering has ensured the survival of Greek literature.

The tale of Troy, as we saw earlier, never lost its interest, being part of the intellectual currency of the Latin west. Homer’s text itself was already attracting attention in the mid-fourteenth century when the Italian poet Petrarch took Greek lessons, though he did not acquire enough to read a copy of Homer given him as a present by a Byzantine ambassador. In the 1360s the Italian scholar Pliato, a friend of Boccaccio, attempted translations of part of Homer into Latin, and by the end of the century you could attend lectures on Homer in Italy.

The idea of establishing a text scientifically took longer to come about, and it was not until the new art of printing was being practised that we find a spate of editions, first of Latin classics and then of Greek, in the last decades of the fifteenth century. In their way these were the most important element in the west’s rediscovery of Greece, which earlier in this book we viewed from the point of view of the travellers, the physical rediscovery. The first printed text of Homer appeared in Florence in 1488, its editor a Greek. However it was in Venice – which was to be the centre not only of the printing trade as such, but of the Greek publishing trade for three centuries – that the great printed edition of Homer was brought out in 1504 by the Aldine press, founded by Aldus Manutius with the express idea of printing Greek texts; the editorial work was again done by a Greek, the Cretan scholar Musurus. The dissemination of the printed text (seven major European editions were brought out in the sixteenth century) opened up modern critical discussion of the text, and as scholars compared Homer with other classical Greek literature it quickly became obvious that it could not be analysed on the same basis. He was evidently not a writer at all, but an oral composer, and ancient authority could be found to corroborate this idea.

The passage from Josephus quoted above was used by early modern scholars who concluded that, no matter how old the manuscripts, it would be impossible to hope for a sound text of an author who had composed orally perhaps centuries before he was ‘collected’ and put down in writing. Early scholars generally followed the tradition found first in the Roman writer Cicero that Homer had only been written down in c.550 BC at the command of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus. The first modern attempt to set Homer in his culture was that of the philosopher Vico, who maintained that Homer was really a collective name for the work of successive generations of poets who made up the oral tradition. The Iliad, then, would be a ‘collective’ work only set down in writing by the Pisistratids in the sixth century; there were, in short, many Homers. Vico’s brilliant theory anticipated much of modern research, but at the time he had no influence. Instead it was the Anglo-Irish traveller Robert Wood, whom we met in the search for Troy, who was the first to argue critically for Homer’s orality in his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer of 1769. Among the languages into which Wood’s book was translated was German, and in Germany it had its profoundest influence. Indeed it was instrumental in provoking what is widely regarded as the greatest of all books on Homer, F. A. Wolf’s Prolegomena. Wolf wrote in 1795, with the advantage of the recent (1788) publication of the greatest of all manuscripts of the Iliad, the Venetus A, which, though of the tenth century AD, is packed with the marginal notes of centuries of commentators, going back to the Alexandrian criticism of the third century BC. Wolf was convinced that Homer had been illiterate, that he had composed around 950 BC, and that his poems were transmitted by memory until, around 550 BC, they were committed to writing by Pisistratus. He was, however, also prepared to believe in a real Homer, a single poet of genius who ‘began the weaving of the web’ and, he wrote in his Preface to the Iliad,

carried the threads down to a certain point. … Perhaps it will never be possible to show – even with probability – the precise points at which new threads in the weave begin: but if I am not mistaken we can say that Homer was responsible for a major part of the songs, the remainder the Homeridae who followed the lines laid down by him.

After Wolf, there was a tendency to ‘disintegrate’ the text of Homer into a mass of interpolations and shorter oral poems grafted on to a primitive ‘original Iliad’ by later poets and editors. Some, though, still emphasised the ‘single poet’ idea: Goethe, for instance, wrote a short treatise on the unity of the Homeric poems, a view, incidentally, strongly held at the present time. But Wolf stated all the problems with a clarity and tact which have not been bettered, and it would be misleading to suggest that an answer has yet been reached.

In the two centuries since Wolf wrote, three major discoveries have been made which have had a fundamental influence on the Homeric question. Two we have already met. The first was the rise of scientific archaeology, and the opportunity it offered to discover a ‘real’ Bronze Age underneath the Homeric poems. This we have seen as the driving force of Schliemann’s obsession with Homer and Troy. And indeed this bore rapid fruits in the discovery that Homer did indeed describe artefacts from the Bronze Age: at Mycenae Schliemann himself was soon looking at representations of boar’s-tusk helmets and tower shields, and handling silver-studded swords: a ‘real’ connection seemed to be demonstrated. Soon enough the palace at Tiryns presented an image of a Bronze-Age royal establishment which again bore clear similarities to the Homeric megaron (see here). Archaeology was also suggesting that the places Homer mentioned as being important in the Bronze Age were indeed so, even if insignificant afterwards. The decisive discovery was Dörpfeld’s unearthing of the Mycenaean-period citadel on Hisarlik, since this suggested for the first time that the central tale of the Iliad was indeed based on a real Bronze-Age place and real events. Archaeology has continued to build on these impressions over the last century, impressions both tantalisingly evocative of Homer and at other points utterly divergent. But the assumption of a strong connection remains, and given a degree of critical scepticism seems justified.

The second discovery was largely the work of Milman Parry and his follower Albert Lord, who were able to prove that oral transmission lies behind Homer’s text, thus supporting the argument of Josephus, and of scholars up to Wolf, that this text was composed without writing. The way in which oral poets work, the nature of formulaic composition, has been examined in many cultures and field workers have recorded comparable material in a number of countries, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The lines of this are clear, and some of the important publications are listed in the bibliography.

The third and most recent revolution in Homeric scholarship was the discovery that the Linear B tablets were in Greek, and that therefore there was a cultural and linguistic continuity between Homer and the Bronze Age. Parry’s discoveries about oral techniques could now be applied to the transmission of the epic through the Dark Ages up to the time when writing began again in Greece (the first monumental inscriptions appear a little before 700 BC). Moreover it was now possible to look at the continuity of the language in detail, to study dialect change and to see, for instance, how many of Homer’s words appear in Linear B Greek, how many actual phrases there are in which Homer is describing Bronze-Age artefacts with Mycenaean words, or where the subject is accurately described even though the older language has dropped out. Much work needs to be done on this: for instance, no work has yet been done on Mycenaean Greek words existing in inferior texts of Homer which were dropped out of the main tradition by later editors, though they may actually have greater authority. The decipherment of Linear B has opened up possibilities for Homeric studies which are only just starting to be explored.

WHEN WAS THE ILIAD COMPOSED?

The general opinion today about the Iliad (and the Odyssey too) is that they were composed not orally, but by a poet building on oral tradition though using writing. In the eyes of many people, the introduction of writing into Greece was in some way tied up with Homer’s genius: it has even been suggested that the Greek alphabet was actually devised to write down the Homeric poems in c.700 BC. There are obvious objections to this idea. First, the writing of these two immense poems in a predominantly oral culture at the very moment of the introduction of writing goes against all we know of such processes in history; this is not how the introduction of ‘communications technology’ works in relation to creative art, whether in the transition from preliterate to literate culture, from writing culture to print, or (to point to our own time) from print to electronic systems. It is difficult to imagine that such a mammoth and expensive task as recording (on papyrus or parchment?) such lengthy poems could have been undertaken when society – and, more important, the poet’s audience – was still to all intents and purposes illiterate. This idea is based on the idea that Homer’s originality was such that he foresaw the importance of writing. In fact, as we know now, the poem’s language and style point to oral composition. There is nothing in either poem, however long and sophisticated they are, which exceeds what we now know of oral composition. Homer then could have composed orally, but his work may have been recorded in writing considerably later.

On this scenario the earliest time of recording would be around 650 BC, when writing was developed in Greece. But the oral epic tradition was still thriving in the fifth century BC, so oral ‘composition’ of the Iliad and the Odyssey as late as the sixth century BC is not impossible. In fact, as we have seen, there existed in antiquity a tradition that the Homeric poems had been collected and given their final form in Athens during the reign of Pisistratus, one of the last of the Athenian tyrants, in the sixth century. The history of the texts could go something like this.

Once upon a time there was a famous oral poet whose name was Homer. He came from the world of the Ionian Greek colonies, perhaps from Chios or Smyrna, and it is thought that he may have composed around 730 BC. For some reason, perhaps because he was the best, he came to be regarded as the embodiment of oral epic poetry as such, and the most famous later group of singers considered themselves to be his descendants; these were the so-called Homeridae, the ‘sons of Homer’, on Chios. Homer lived perhaps in the eighth century BC, by which time the tale of Troy was evidently widely told in Aegean courts, for we find potentates naming themselves after its heroes: Hector of Chios, Agamemnon of Kyme. Perhaps their courts were where Homer found his patrons and sang his songs, along with the festivals of the Ionian cities, especially the Panionion at Mykale. Such was Homer’s impact that later generations came to consider much of the early epic poetry as his, and much of it may have been handed down, taking care to preserve the words ‘as Homer sang them’. Then, during the expansion of sixth-century Athens, a tyrant with political ambitions wished to turn the local festival to the goddess Athena into one with a more ‘national’ appeal. A magnificent temple of Athena was built on the acropolis (predecessor of the surviving Parthenon), public festivals were promoted, and among other activities recitals of epic and historical poems were arranged to glorify the Athenian state. At this time, as he sought the leadership of Greece for Athens, he conceived the idea of securing for Athens what were unanimously viewed as the most magnificent of the traditional Greek epics, especially the Iliad, which told of the first undertaking by a united Hellas. He therefore paid for the best of the Homeridae to come to Athens to dictate Homer as ‘truly’, as fully and as beautifully as possible to an Athenian scribe.

The Iliad text which lies behind the one we know could have been recorded from a bard so late on, then; but even if this specific scenario be rejected we should probably look after 650 BC. Such collection and writing down of the ancient songs usually takes its impetus from the outside, and often comes at times when writing is beginning to be more widely used. An obvious parallel is Charlemagne’s collection and recording of the old oral vernacular epics of the Frankish and Germanic peoples following his reforms in writing and literacy in eighth-century-AD Europe. Today, in the early twenty-first century, as oral traditions are all but dead in industrialised countries, we ourselves are attempting to do something similar. Homer then, we may guess, was recorded by a ‘collector’, if posthumously.

We began with the premise of Josephus that these poems were created when writing was unknown in Greece. As mentioned earlier, when modern studies of Homer began, Robert Wood and F.A. Wolf agreed that Homer had not known writing, and Wolf concluded that Homer’s original was irretrievably lost. The oral-formulaic views of Milman Parry and his school, by analogy with Yugoslav bards, were in many ways a return to Wolf’s point of view. In recent years we have had to combine the ‘oral’ view with the idea that it was Homer’s originality to see the way his great work could be preserved by writing, in other words that Homer composed at an important cultural moment, just as writing was introduced into Greece: thus the ‘great man’ theory of literary creation found its advocates. Today, our interpretation presents a synthesis of all these views: poems perhaps ‘composed’ only in the seventh or sixth century BC – specifically to be written down – but poems which carefully preserved more ancient strata handed down in the oral poetic traditions of Ionia. We may therefore say that, because of the oral nature of the poems, we have the ‘originals’ fairly closely; that is, the poems recorded in 650–550 BC. What relation they have to Homer, if he existed, is no longer so easy to prove, but it seems likely that the Homeridae of the sixth century BC could give a reasonably close account of stories already formulated in the eighth century BC. But like all oral poets they selected, omitted and innovated to suit the occasion and the patron, singing their poems in the form most pleasing to the audience at hand. Later editors certainly played their part in altering the text after the sixth century BC; the most influential period was the third century BC, when the Alexandrian school of critics tried to establish a definitive text. An interesting case is their alteration made at the start of Book Six where a line ‘in the ancient books’ about fighting ‘between the river Scamander and the stomalimne’ was changed to ‘between the waters of Xanthos and Simois’ by Aristarchos because it did not fit the topography of the Troad in his own day. Some passages were condemned simply for their ‘low tone’; many other words have evidently dropped out of the transmission because they were no longer understood, though this must have gone on long before the poems were committed to writing.

WAS THERE MYCENAEAN EPIC POETRY?

From what tradition of poetry did Homer ultimately derive? Was there oral epic in Mycenaean times which has come down, however dimly, in Homeric epic? Was the tale of Troy itself already sung in Mycenaean citadels before their world collapsed? The Linear B tablets, of course, are the very antithesis of poetry in their bureaucratic notations. But there were certainly singers of songs or tales, for one of the Pylos frescoes showed a lyre player or bard, and fragments of a lyre were found in a tholos tomb at Menidi. It is, on the face of it, likely that there was actual epic poetry celebrating the deeds of the Mycenaean kings which came down to us in Homer, and this is assumed now by many scholars. Certainly themes like those in the Iliad and other Greek myths are commonly found in the poetry of many contemporary Bronze-Age peoples, especially in Ugarit, the great trading city in northern Syria, where the epic of Krt is another tale of abduction of a royal woman and the siege of a city.

But how are we to judge the Bronze-Age substratum in Homer? First there are descriptions of actual Mycenaean objects in Homer. The tower-shaped body shield usually associated with Ajax and represented on the Thera frescoes was already obsolete by the thirteenth century BC. The figure-of-eight shield occurs on thirteenth-century frescoes from Mycenae, Tiryns and probably Knossos. The ‘silver-studded sword’ is known from sixteenth- and fifteenth-century finds. The leg greaves indicated in Homer’s epithet about the ‘well-greaved Achaians’ likewise have been found in Bronze-Age tombs and not in the succeeding Iron Age. The boar’s-tusk helmet, perhaps the most famous of all (carefully described in Iliad, X, 261) has been found on numerous representations, with a full example from Knossos; Homer even notes how the tusks are laid in rows with the curves alternating. Nestor’s cup, decorated with doves (Iliad, XI, 632 ff) and with two handles, sounds something like the cup found by Schliemann in Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae. The technique of metalwork inlay described in the making of Achilles’ shield is exemplified in the shaft grave daggers (on which the tower shields are well pictured). There is also the question of Homer’s references to a thorax, or suit of body armour, made of bronze plates: such a suit has now been found at Dendra. Add to these examples the almost universal assumption in Homer that bronze is the metal for swords and tools, and you have an impressive collection of detail in the military sphere which suggests that Homer is preserving descriptions from long before his time, though our knowledge of the intervening Dark Age is too imperfect for us to say with absolute certainty that some of these artefacts could not have been used after the collapse of Mycenaean power. The only sure way of showing that the Homeric tradition had roots in the heroic poetry of the Mycenaean Age would be by demonstrating survivals of specifically Mycenaean poetic language in Homer. Unfortunately this is difficult to do. The language of Homer is a mixture of many dialects and periods, predominantly Ionic (reflecting Homer’s background in the Smyrna region and that of his successors, the Chiot Homeridae?), but it also contains a number of words in the more ancient Arcado-Cypriot dialect, spoken in the isolated areas of Arcadia and Cyprus, both of which go back to the Mycenaean period. Such words then can indicate a survival of more ancient forms; so too can some of the rarer Linear B words. Unfortunately in all of Homer only one phrase looks to be certainly Mycenaean, namely the phasganon arguroelon, ‘silver-studded sword’, with its variant, ksiphos arguroelon. Phasganon and ksiphos (‘sword’) are Mycenaean words, as is arguros (‘silver’) and perhaps alos (‘stud’). Such swords have not so far been found between the later Mycenaean period and around 700 BC, which suggests that the epithet became attached to swords in the Bronze Age. But such a poor harvest suggests that direct verbal survivals coming down to the Ionian bards were very rare indeed.

It will also be clear that there are areas where Homer diverges completely from what we know of the Bronze Age. Most obviously, Homer has no idea of the complex bureaucratic world of the palaces with their accounting and rationings, their penny-pinching control over every sheep: evidently this world passed right out of the tradition, leaving instead the nostalgic ‘heroic’ Golden Age idealised retrospectively in the eighth century BC by the immigrant society of Ionia. An interesting sidelight on this is Homer’s idea of the use of chariots. In the Bronze Age they were actually used for fighting – at least they were among the Hittites and Egyptians, and both Linear B and Hittite tablets suggest that the Greeks used them in this way too, as we shall see. In the Iliad, however, chariots are only used for transport, apart from odd phrases which suggest a dim memory of the real state of affairs, as in Nestor’s orders to the Pylian troops: arraying chariots and cavalry in front, infantry behind: ‘When a man from his own car encounters the enemy chariots, let him stab with his spear. … So the men before your time sacked tower and city’ (Iliad, IV, 308). So the poetic tradition only vaguely remembered the details of true ‘heroic’ warfare, and obviously very little Mycenaean poetry about warfare and palace life passed into later epic tradition.

Consequently the epic tradition itself is unlikely to have formed around the remains of already existing Mycenaean epics on the tale of Troy, as has been assumed – even if the tale of Troy was a theme for Bronze-Age poets. It was in the Dark Age which followed the Mycenaean world that the creative part of the pre-Homeric epic tradition began to work. This has been confirmed by much modern work on Homer; it was popular singers of the Dark Age who spun their nostalgic tales about the great days of the Mycenaean past, and we can point to parallel developments in epic tradition in many cultures, Celtic, Germanic and African.

Such conclusions may be depressing for those who would wish to see the Mycenaean world faithfully reflected in the Homeric stories, but of course they do not rule out the idea that the basic story of the siege of Troy – and even some of the characters – still goes back to the Bronze Age, for an epic tradition can still accurately preserve events without ever using Mycenaean language. What about the basic tale, then?

THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPS

As Schliemann was the first to demonstrate, the places mentioned by Homer as having been the chief centre of his story were indeed the chief places in Mycenaean Greece. Mycenae was the greatest citadel and the most powerful; Tiryns, Pylos and Orchomenos were of a similar rank. Where Linear B archives give names, they confirm many of the Homeric names – Pylos, Knossos, Amnisos, Phaestos and Cydonia, to name only the best known; that Mycenae was called by its Homeric and classical name is shown by an Egyptian inscription of the fourteenth century BC. This was perhaps only to be expected, especially once it was discovered that Linear B was Greek and that there was thus linguistic continuity between Homer and the Late Bronze Age. But in the Second Book of the Iliad there is a remarkable list of 164 places said to have sent troops to Troy, the so-called catalogue of ships:

They who held Argos and Tiryns of the huge walls,

Hermione and Asine lying down the deep gulf,

Troizen and Eionai and Epidauros of the vineyards,

They who held Aigina and Mases, sons of the Achaians,

Of these the leader was Diomedes of the great war cry. …

Translated by R. Lattimore

The catalogue was originally constructed independently of the Iliad; indeed it is generally accepted that it is earlier than the Iliad, and was created separately as a list of names though its language is as purely Homeric as the rest of the poem. This independence is shown not merely by the differences and discrepancies between it and the Iliad proper, but by its placing, for it was not designed to occupy its place in the Iliad, purporting to be a record of the assembly of the Greek forces at the start of the war. At what stage it was placed in the Iliad has been argued fruitlessly for a long time. Nevertheless many critics have seen it as embodying Mycenaean tradition in a purer form than the Iliad as a whole. Indeed some have gone so far as to accept it for what it claims to be, the actual muster list of the Greek forces which sacked the historical Troy. This theory indeed has gained some support from a number of Linear B tablets from Pylos (see here), which record military dispositions and troop numbers. The late Denys Page, in one of the most stimulating studies on this subject, boldly concluded not only that the catalogue was substantially from the Mycenaean period, but that it was an actual order of battle and its connection with an overseas expedition ‘must be historically true’. He thought the list was preserved independently of the poetical tradition which culminated in the Iliad and was incorporated at a late stage, because it differs so much from the Iliad over points of fact. Lastly, Page thought the list of peoples and places ‘not much altered’, though the numbers might be a late invention. This dramatic conclusion, so seductive in its appeal – that we possess an authentic record of the Greek army which went to Troy – must be treated with caution. Is it true to say that this list – even if it is from the Bronze Age – ‘must be’ a battle order? Why do early societies construct such lists? What is the catalogue?

WHAT’S IN A LIST?

First let us make a general point. While we may be rightly sceptical of the idea that the catalogue may go back to a written list on Linear B tablets, it is nevertheless the kind of list which appears time and again on those tablets: lists of names, lists of produce, lists of military gear and armed forces (scholars have even claimed to have found an authentic Mycenaean ‘ship catalogue’ in the Pylos tablets). Linear B was not flexible enough for the Greek language; it was a highly conventionalised and purely syllabic system of writing which could cope with administrative notations but not with complicated historical and literary composition. We can see the same principle in the development of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing: three-quarters of all extant inscriptions (there are around 150,000 of them) are administrative documents – in essence, lists. Even the Ugaritic tablets (fourteenth to thirteenth centuries BC), though they include literary texts, are mainly (two-thirds of the 500) lists, including lists of people and geographical names. Indeed in Egyptian texts contemporary with the palaces of Mycenae and Ugarit we find scribal manuals where the whole structure of the cosmos can be broken down into enormous lists to be learned as part of a scribe’s training, including the ninety-six towns of Egypt, expressions for mankind, and names of foreign people and places ‘drawing up Keftiu names and of the foreign places in the islands’. Schoolboys of the XVIII dynasty also had to list the names and typical produce of countries, using ‘as many foreign words and names as possible’. Such lists, if we had them complete with descriptive epithets, would form a counterpart to the Homeric catalogues, as a thirteenth-century papyrus suggests: ‘Have you been to the land of the Hittites? Do you know what Khedem is like? Have you trodden the road to Meger with its many cypresses … Byblos, Beirut, Sidon … Nezen by the river, Tyre of the port, richer in fish than sand.’ The Egyptian ambassadors of the fourteenth century BC who recorded with phonetic accuracy lists of Syrian, Near Eastern and Aegean cities, including Amnisos, Knossos and Mycenae (see here), were only performing in a small way a feat educated people did all the time. (The practice, incidentally, did not stop in the Bronze Age: Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey could ‘deliver himself with fair accuracy, of a page or so of Homer’s Catalogue of the Ships’ when he wanted to declaim something solemn and impressive, and at least one elderly civil servant would recite it as a cure for insomnia, according to The Times of 12 November 1964!)

Such lists, then, have been seen by anthropologists as characteristic of societies making a transition from illiteracy to literacy (Homer’s age), or when literacy is only a limited and cumbersome medium and the preserve of a very small number of people (as was the case with the Late Mycenaean bureaucracy). Egyptian and other parallels could suggest that lists like the catalogue were more likely to have been learned as ‘interesting lists’ rather than to have begun life on clay tablets before being transferred to the oral tradition (if such a thing is even conceivable).

The fact is that as yet we know too little about the nature and extent of literacy in Mycenaean kingdoms – and next to nothing about the poetry which was recited by Mycenaean bards in their royal halls – to be able to suggest how and why the catalogue first came into being. We also need to be wary of the tendency on the part of societies to invent tradition: just because it may be roughly contemporary does not necessarily mean it is ‘true’. With that in mind, let us look at what the list has to tell us.

A number of clues suggest that the catalogue reflects Mycenaean Greece. Most important is that several places are named, and can be securely located, which were inhabited in Mycenaean times but not subsequently lived in until after the eighth century BC, when the catalogue is assumed to have reached its present form. Eutresis in Boeotia is the best example, abandoned around 1200 BC and not resettled until 600 years later; others include Krisa, the spectacular site overlooking the gorge below Delphi, Pylos and Dorion (Malthi in the Soulima valley) in Messenia, and Hyrie (Dramesi) in Boeotia. It was at Hyrie that a ship stele was discovered which Blegen thought was a monument to an overseas expedition, such as that against Troy. That the catalogue preserves any such places suggests that it goes back at least to Mycenaean traditions of the twelfth century BC. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that none of the identifiable places named in the catalogue can be shown not to have been inhabited in Mycenaean times; of the eighty or ninety so far located, three-quarters have shown signs of Mycenaean occupation. Moreover, all those excavated have revealed Mycenaean occupation, and of these about a third have failed to produce evidence of subsequent Iron-Age occupation. These facts can be said to prove a Mycenaean origin for at least part of the catalogue (though of course they do not necessarily prove that it has anything to do with the Trojan War). The only argument against it would be if we could show that some places in it did not exist then, and, as we have seen, this is not so. Let us look at one example in more detail.

‘WINDY ENISPE’

It is difficult to find these places today, and you would be no better off if you did, because no one lives there.

STRABO, Geography

My example from the catalogue is chosen to illustrate an important point: that many of the catalogue sites could not be located by the Greeks themselves in classical times. Homer might have known about Mycenae and Tiryns from visible remains and folk-tales, but how did he come to select numerous other places for which the geographers in historical times looked high and low before giving up in disgust: ‘cannot be found anywhere’, ‘does not exist’, ‘disappeared’? How did Homer even know that such places existed? How did he know their names? How did he know that Messe had pigeons or that Enispe was windy? In particular, how did he know about places which, as we have seen, were abandoned at the end of the Mycenaean era and were never lived in again?

By common consent among catalogue buffs the most hopeless case for modern identification was the triad of obscure little places in Arcadia: ‘Ripe, Stratie and windy Enispe’. Even Lazenby and Hope-Simpson, the doyens of footsloggers-after-Homer, admitted defeat without a fight, not even knowing whether to steer their legendary battered Morris towards western or central Arcadia!

However, a Greek archaeologist, C.T. Syriopoulos, following up unpublished clues unearthed in a road cutting in 1939, has located a prehistoric site in north-western Arcadia near Dimitra in Gortynia, which was intensively inhabited from Neolithic times to the twelfth century BC, when it was deserted for ever. The site is on a rocky hill on the southern slopes of Mount Aphrodision (it is accessible from the Tripolis–Olympia road) and dominates one of the crossings of the river Ladon. The Ladon flows down into the Alpheios and its steep wooded valley is one of the loveliest and most untouched areas of the Peloponnese. West of the habitation site on the commanding peak of Agios Elias are fortification walls which may be of the thirteenth century BC. The pottery is ‘provincial’, which is what we would expect of an apparent backwater. Pausanias says that ‘some people think Enispe, Stratie and Ripe were once inhabited islands in the Ladon’, to which he replies, ‘anyone who believes that should realise it is nonsense: the Ladon could never make an island the size of a ferry boat!’ But if the word for island (nesos) is interpreted (as it can be) as a piece of land made between a river and its tributary, then Dimitra could indeed be called an island in the Ladon, between the main river and two tributaries. And if this is accepted, then neighbouring Stratie could also be an ‘island’ in the Ladon, the place called Stratos by the second-century-BC historian Polybius, which might plausibly be placed (on Polybius’ evidence) at a place called Stavri, three hours’ walk from Dimitra along the course of the Ladon to the south-west. As for ‘windy’ Enispe, the name could hardly be more appropriate: the Dimitra site is buffeted by strong winds which scour up the valley of the Ladon and its tributary the Kako-Lagadi: the present-day threshing floor on top of the prehistoric site – using the constant wind for grain-winnowing – underlines the point. And if the fortifications on Agios Elias are indeed Bronze Age, and were the refuge of the inhabitants of thirteenth-to twelfth-century-BC Enispe, then so much the better for wind!

If the identification of these sites is right, and if Pausanias’ informants were correct, then the third lost site, Ripe, should be at the confluence of another tributary of the Ladon. Indeed there is a site further down the Ladon, an hour and a half’s journey on foot from Stratie at a place called Agios Georgios, on another ‘island’ of the Ladon, where tombs of the later Mycenaean period are alleged to exist.

Homer’s account, then, describes in a plausible order the three main settlements of this mountainous area of north-west Arcadia, and they fall into place intelligibly in the sequence and direction of his list of all the Arcadian sites. An enigma which defeated no less than Strabo and Pausanias may be solved.

The cumulative effect of the discoveries of modern archaeology is to show that for all its strangeness, and accepting its later accretions, the catalogue goes back to a genuine list from the Bronze Age. Homer says there were pigeons at Messe and Thisbe, wind at Enispe, coast at Helos (and horses and wind at Troy, for that matter), because it was true. How else could Eutresis, uninhabited since around 1200 BC, appear in the list?

However, when we turn to the political arrangements of the kingdoms described by Homer, the groupings of all the obscure places, we encounter grave difficulties in making the catalogue fit what we know of thirteenth-century-BC Greece. Here our only real control is information from the palace archives. The Linear B tablets give us detailed records of two Mycenaean kingdoms named in the catalogues, Knossos and Pylos, which can be compared with Homer’s catalogue. The Knossos problem is a thorny one, as we have seen, but if the revised dating of the tablets is accepted, then the archive dates to around 1200 BC, roughly the same time as the catalogue purports to be. However, only three of Homer’s seven Cretan towns are named in the tablets (Knossos, Lyktos and Phaestos), though the tablets agree with Homer that Idomeneus’ kingdom was restricted to the central area, and many places named in the tablets still await elucidation (another town in the catalogue, Milatos, has now produced important Late-Bronze-Age remains). Pylos presents even more difficulty, for though Homer and the tablets both give Messenia nine towns (an interesting coincidence in itself), only Pylos and Kyparissia are present in both lists, though Homer’s Amphigeneia and Helos may also be identifiable on other fragments among the Pylos tablets. But the remaining seven names of the chief Pylian towns on the tablets cannot be squared with Homer, and thus a leading authority on Linear B now believes Homer to be ‘almost worthless’ in any attempt to reconstruct the geography of Mycenaean Greece. Homer does, however, seem to be speaking of real places in his lists, and though the discrepancy with the tablets is disturbing, it is worth asking whether the political divisions in the catalogue – bizarre as they are in some cases – reflect a real situation which once pertained, but at another time. For instance could Homer’s Pylian kingdom reflect a situation after the destruction of Pylos? If, say, a bard were reconstructing a list of famous places in the twelfth century BC, he would surely have known that Pylos had been the centre of Messenia, even though it was destroyed before his day? There may even have been some Dorian petty dynast who claimed to be Nestor’s inheritor, rather like the Celts in the sub-Roman twilight in Britain. In any case, Pylian refugees who had emigrated to Athens would have kept alive the memory of ‘sandy Pylos’. Elsewhere there was still a recognisably Mycenaean life in kingdoms like Mycenae, Tiryns and Athens in the twelfth century BC; in Lakonia, too, some sort of occupation continued on the Menelaion, and there was evidently a kind of continuity at certain sites like Amyklai: indeed Homer’s list of places in Lakonia fits very well with the archaeology.

The catalogue is full of strange political divisions. It ignores the Iliad by giving the chief heroes, Achilles and Odysseus, insignificant kingdoms; it relegates Ajax to tiny Salamis; it divides the plain of Argos, with Agamemnon – that is, Mycenae – ruling only the northern plain and the Isthmus area, and Diomedes of Tiryns in control of the lower plain, Argos and Asine. Perversely, most experts have thought that these divisions are so unlikely that they must reflect a real situation which once obtained in Greece; but trying to make them work for the thirteenth-century heyday has proved difficult. Nevertheless, as the evidence of the sites themselves strongly suggests that the core of the list of sites itself comes from the Bronze Age, it seems at least conceivable that some of the political divisions in it could be Bronze Age. The answer may be that the kingdoms reflect the century or so after the heyday of Mycenae; that originally, stripped of its later accretions, the catalogue is actually the creation of the twelfth or eleventh centuries BC, after the decay of Mycenaean civilisation, when some of the kingdoms had declined and when some palaces had been destroyed, but when Mycenaean civilisation hung on in some places. For example, in the case of Mycenae the catalogue suggests a time when a larger state comprising the north-west of the Peloponnese had split into two: for Mycenae and Tiryns the catalogue is inexplicable as a document from the thirteenth century (LH III B), when Mycenae was the centre of the Argolid with a network of roads from it (see Chapter 5), but it is plausible as relating to the situation after 1200 when, if anything, Tiryns grew in power and population (see here). Again – as we shall see – the evidence for Orchomenos suggests the same, confined to one small corner of Lake Copais (see here). Here too the catalogue’s emphasis on the Boeotians – dominating it, but playing no role in the story – is explained: in fact tradition in Thucydides’ day had it that they did not arrive in Boeotia until sixty years after the Trojan War. The catalogue then betrays traces of the Mycenaean decline, and originally must date from the (late?) twelfth century BC. That it refers to places destroyed around 1200 BC is no argument against this: oral traditions of the Mycenaean world were presumably still strong enough in the succeeding three or four generations for their names and even their distinguishing epithets to be remembered. We may suspect that the catalogue was composed in the declining years of the late Mycenaean world for the edification of the petty dynasts who ruled in the shoes of the Atreids in an ever-diminishing Mycenae. That it had anything to do with a possible Trojan War is unprovable; even if it came from the Mycenaean world this is no guarantee that it is not simply a list of ‘interesting places’ associated with the war in an ‘invention of tradition’ of a kind which often happens in the aftermath of golden ages: sub-heroic audiences are the most avid consumers of such fictions. The catalogue, then, with its visions of a united Greece in its last great overseas venture, harks back to the ‘good old days’ when Achaia was great and had strong and glorious kings – ‘leaders of men’ and ‘kings of many islands’ who knew what to do when foreigners came and plundered their treasures or carried off their women.

That said, did the bards, who originally conceived the idea of recording in song the names and deeds of the heroes who took part in the ‘Trojan War’, actually know something about the leaders and forces of a real war, or did they concoct the great list of places from Mycenaean Greece? Did they invent heroes from the stock names, like Ajax, whose tower shield perhaps betrays him as a hero of an earlier stratum of epic? Or Achilles, with his sea goddess mother and his magical attributes? Also, if there was Mycenaean epic poetry, then the tale of Troy would not have been the first siege to be the subject of song. We find a siege portrayed on the sixteenth-century ‘siege rhyton’ (vase) found by Schliemann; an attack on a town was depicted on a wall-painting in the megaron at Mycenae; the story of the expedition against Thebes may already have been the subject of story and song, and a suitable model. Are there, in fact, any specific elements in the tale of Troy which suggest that the epic which has come down to us accurately remembered details and incidents of a real Bronze-Age event?

HOMER’S STORY

I take it that certain central facts in Homer’s story must be correct if we are to accept even the basic likelihood of the tale of Troy. If we cannot yet prove that a city called Troy was sacked by Greeks, we can at least show that in other significant details Homeric tradition was right. For instance, Hittite and Egyptian evidence suggests that Homer was correct in names he called the peoples: Achaians and Danaans, in the case of the Greeks, and Dardanians in the case of the Trojans. But was Troy actually called Troy?

As we have seen, nothing has ever been found on the site of Hisarlik which indicates its name in the Bronze Age. Even if diplomatic tablets did exist there, they were destroyed long ago. Linear B could give us a Trojan woman (Toroja) but we cannot be certain. In a Hittite document of c.1420 BC the western Anatolian state of Wilusa or (Wilusiya) appears next to a place called Taruisa, which – tantalisingly – appears only this once in the Hittite archive. If we could postulate an alternative form, Taruiya, for this name then we might have similar forms to Homer’s Troia and Wilios in north-western Anatolia at the right time. However the present state of research into Hittite geography means that this seductive hypothesis cannot be pressed too far. The knotty problems surrounding the possible appearance of Greeks in Hittite sources are discussed in Chapter 6, but we can at least say that, as our evidence for Late-Bronze-Age geography grows, Homer has not yet been proved wrong and in some new instances we can corroborate his story. But it is to Hisarlik itself that we must go to have any hope of answering the question, did the story centre on Hisarlik–Troy from the Late Bronze Age: was Hisarlik always the focus of the Greek epic of Troy?

‘SACRED ILIOS’: HOMER ON THE TOPOGRAPHY OF TROY

How long had Troy featured in the tale? In other words, was the story always about a city which stood near the Dardanelles in the region since called the Troad? We need to ask this question, for it has often been claimed that the bards grafted the Trojan location on to an older model, for instance a poem about the Mycenaean sack of Thebes, or even an Achaian attack on Egypt such as that mentioned in the Odyssey. In a sense it does not matter what date we assign to Homer, whether the tale was composed in Ionia in 730 BC or was written down from a Chiot bard in around 550 BC. Whichever date we choose, we are concerned with the period of the Aeolian Greek colony founded on Hisarlik in the eighth century BC. We have seen evidence in the tale of the Lokrian maidens in Chapter 1 that this place was already associated with the tale of a Greek expedition to Troy before around 700. Even if we assume, as many do, that a bard called Homer actually visited the Aeolian colony of Ilion soon after its foundation in c.750 BC, we have to explain why obscure little Ilion became the centrepiece for the Greek national epic. It is a question which those who flatly deny the historicity of the Trojan War have found difficult to answer. What we cannot know for certain is whether, around 730 BC, architectural features of Bronze-Age Hisarlik (Troy VI–VII) were still visible. But if an epic tale which goes back to the end of the Bronze Age told of an attack on a real citadel of that time, should there not be surviving traces in Homer’s description?

As we saw in Chapter 1, the earliest travellers to the Troad were convinced that the poet had sung from personal observation – that he had actually been there. From Cyriac of Ancona to Alexander Kinglake visitors had seen, for instance, that it is indeed possible to see Samothrace from the top of Hisarlik, peeping over the heights of Imbros 50 miles away: ‘So Homer appointed it, and it was,’ as Kinglake said. There was certainly no disputing the general lie of the land – the islands, the Dardanelles, Mount Ida and so on – but other aspects of Homeric topography caused (and still cause) controversy; for instance the double spring of hot and cold water below the western wall – perhaps the most precise topographical feature that Homer mentions – could not be found and led as acute an investigator as Lechevalier astray, to the ‘Forty Eyes’ springs at Bunarbashi. Schliemann did in fact find remains of a spring, 200 yards from the west wall at Hisarlik, which had been blocked long ago by an earthquake, though it seems likely that the poet merged the Bunarbashi springs with the Hisarlik one for poetic effect. The problem is not so much Homer’s ‘accuracy’ as a topographer, which is strictly a nonsensical idea, but the powerful effect his largely generic descriptions have had on everyone who reads him – but then that is what good poets do! On any reading of the evidence it would be expecting too much to expect all these epithets and details to cohere on the ground, but is it possible that, as Bronze-Age elements have certainly survived elsewhere in the poem, something has been preserved of Troy itself?

The general epithets Homer uses for Troy are of course not inapposite for the citadel on Hisarlik – ‘well-built, beetling, steep, horse breeding’, and so on – but none is linguistically early; horse breeding, for instance, has attracted the attention of archaeologists because their finds of numerous horse bones suggest that horse breeding was a feature of the Bronze-Age Trojan plain (as it was later); but the phrase itself is not of Mycenaean date, though the memory is conceivably early. Well-built walls, strong towers and wide streets – which impressed Dörpfeld so much in Troy VI – are certainly applicable to Late-Bronze-Age Hisarlik more than to any other fortress in the Aegean, but they are applied to other places by Homer. ‘Windy’ is interesting; it is used of only one other place, Enispe, as we have already seen, and it is certainly applicable to Hisarlik, as anyone knows who has stood on it and felt the north wind which sweeps all year long round what was once a higher promontory. But such a description does not mean we have touched the Bronze Age. The description of Ilios as ‘holy’ is notable and raises a special linguistic problem: the word used comes from Aeolia, the north-western Aegean, and not Ionia, and may well be from an early linguistic stratum of the story, though probably not of the Mycenaean Age; nevertheless the finds of cult idols around the gates of Troy VI on Hisarlik, including six at the southern gate alone, could suggest that the place was remembered as having been uniquely sacred.

It is a pity that Homer is not more precise about the relationship of the citadel to the sea for new discoveries show that in the Bronze Age Hisarlik was actually a sea-girt headland. At the time of Troy II the ramp found by Schliemann went down to a narrow plain and the sea, a wide bay which was entered between two headlands. By the time of Troy VI the sea was probably a mile from the hill. Troy, then, was a major port at the mouth of the Dardanelles which, like Miletus and Ephesus, eventually silted up and lost its raison d’être. This crucial discovery makes sense of the whole history of Troy–Hisarlik in a way impossible before (though the existence of the bay was assumed by ancient writers and by early modern writers such as Wood). Homer’s topographical indications, however, do not in this case describe what he must have seen, though two phrases may reflect it, where he has the eddying Scamander coming down to the ‘broad bay of the sea’ and when he describes a ship turning aside from the main channel of the Hellespont to come ‘within Ilios’. We cannot, it would seem, say that Homer’s topography is more like the Late Bronze Age than his own time, though some geomorphologists who have studied the new evidence think that it might be.

The poetic diction surrounding Troy and Ilios is not, of course, restricted to noun-epithet phrases like ‘windy Troy’ and so on. It contains certain archaic features which are not closely datable, such as the strange preposition proti and the regular observance of the digamma (the ‘W’, which does not exist in later Greek) in Wilios, the original form of Ilios. The broad impression gained by linguistics from this kind of material is that the story and its phraseology have been gradually refined and reduced to achieve extraordinary flexibility and utility with a very small vocabulary – an important proof that the tale of Troy had been told many times before it reached the form it takes in the Iliad. But what linguists cannot say is whether those many tellings spanned one, ten or twenty generations of epic singers.

To summarise: it is thought that narrative poetry of some kind existed in the Mycenaean Age and that some fragments of it exist in Homer, but very few in number; a very large part of Homeric formulaic vocabulary is more recent. But of course fragments of the hypothetical Mycenaean saga may exist in the Homeric epic quite independently of vocabulary and diction. The most striking example is the famous boar’s-tusk helmet, manifestly a Mycenaean object though there is nothing in the diction of Homer’s description which is ancient in itself. This reminds us that archaic diction can drop out of a text transmitted in this way even when an accurate description remains. In this light let us finally look at three points in Homer’s physical description of Troy which can be considered as going back to the Bronze Age and which a singer of Homer’s day may perhaps not have known. In none is there any linguistic feature which must be old; in all there are rare authentic details which could derive from an actual siege description of Bronze-Age Hisarlik.

1. The ‘batter’ or ‘angle’ of the walls of Troy: ‘three times Patroclus climbed up the angle of the lofty wall’ (Iliad, XVI, 702). Is this a description of the characteristic feature of the architecture of Troy VI? Blegen notes in his report that there were sections where the blocks were not close-fitting which his workmen could easily scale in just this fashion. (Only the top courses of the walls of Troy VI were visible in the eighth century BC, ‘so weathered that they could hardly be recognised as the once splendid masonry’, said Dörpfeld.)

2. ‘The great tower of Ilios’ (Iliad, VI, 386). This was a beautifully built tower flanking the main gate of Troy, and there is an implication that it could be a place of propitiation – Andromache goes there instead of to the temple of Athena. The south gate of Troy VI was certainly the main gate of the Late-Bronze-Age city, the ‘Scaean Gate’ if any (now that we know the plain was a bay it makes sense that the main gate faced inland, and there is no archaeological evidence for a major gate facing the bay). The south gate of Troy VI vas flanked by a great tower of finely jointed limestone blocks; moreover it was built round a major altar, and outside were six pedestals (for cult idols?) and a cult house for burnt sacrifices. All in all there seems a case that the ‘great tower of Ilios’ preserves a memory of Troy VI.

3. Perhaps the most precise memory of all is the stretch of wall that was epidromos ‘by the fig tree where the city is openest to attack and where the wall may be mounted’ (Iliad, VI, 434). This tradition of a weak wall, apparently on the west, received extraordinary archaeological confirmation when Dörpfeld, as we saw in Chapter 2, found that the circuit wall had been modernised except in one short stretch of inferior construction on the western side. Again, this suggests an authentic detail from Troy VI.

It seems fair to conclude that the tale of Troy antedates the Iliad by at least the length of time needed for Ionian oral singers to create the extensive and elaborate but refined and economised range of epithets and formulas for Ilios, Troy and the Trojans. There is good reason to think, as Martin Nilsson did in his classic study Homer and Mycenae (1933), that the expedition against Troy is the fundamental fact and central point of the myth and must go back to the Bronze Age. Non-Homeric, mainland, versions of the saga existed too, suggesting that the story antedated at least part of the migration period. These pointers carry the theme well before the Aeolian Greek settlement of the Troad and the refounding of Greek Ilion, whose earliest possible date is c.750 BC. Only the strange story of the Lokrian maidens (see here) suggests any Greek connection with, or interest in, the Troad in the Dark Ages, and there seems no historical or archaeological peg to explain the creation of a tale of Troy between the end of the Bronze Age and the eighth century BC. This is one of the arguments which in my opinion defeat the attempts of some scholars to deny any connection between the story and the site of Hisarlik. A deserted, ruined and overgrown site in a sparsely populated area of northwest Anatolia, with no visible links with Greece, surely cannot have been selected as the setting for the Greek national epic unless it had at some time in the past been the focus of warlike deeds memorable enough to have been celebrated in song. The simplest explanation is that the tale of Troy owed its central place in later epic tradition to the fact that it was the last such exploit before the disintegration of the Mycenaean world – bards in all cultures must have in their repertoire the most up-to-date songs as well as the traditional ones, and Troy was the last.