The Poet of Windy Troy

Bruce A. McMenomy

Possibly the greatest, and certainly the best-known, poems to come out of Greek civilization have, since antiquity, been attributed to a poet whose very existence is open to doubt. Ancient sources differ widely on almost every detail of Homer’s life. Some place him as a contemporary of the events he described; others would place him as much five hundred years after the time — itself not easy to determine — of the Trojan War. The linguistic evidence, however, drawn from the layers of the language in the poems, and at certain practical details of the narrative, can narrow the question of date considerably. Because the poet uses many post-Mycenaean word forms, and also because he describes such things as statues and battle tactics that are decidedly later than 1200 B. C. — our best estimate of the date for the Trojan War — it is certain that he must not have been a contemporary.

The main argument against the existence of Homer at all has taken root in the suggestion that these two great epics — the Iliad and the Odyssey — are rather the products of a process of "traditional" composition. On this theory, the stories, handed down and continually altered from the time of their first composition, are the work of a series of poets, each of whom has added to or changed the particular words he had learned. Homer, according to such a construction, was not so much an individual as a composite of all these poets acting over time.

There is virtually no doubt that the poetry was first put together in an oral compositional mode; among the proofs are the presence of repeated verbal formulae, especially compound epithets ("far-shooting Apollo", "grey-eyed Athena", "wine-dark sea", etc.) These phrasings are apparently designed for ease of memorization, and recent work has shown that their places in the line of verse are governed by strict metrical rules. It is clear, as well, that the written versions of the two poems are a good deal later than the oral forms, suggesting that they have evolved even as languages have evolved.

Nevertheless, there is a very strong argument to be made that the central thrust of the story at the heart of the Iliad and the Odyssey represents the guiding vision of a single poet and master storyteller, and even if this narrative was itself polished over many generations in the retelling, it is this essential core that retains its compelling appeal to us even today. Subsequent generations for 2500 years have found in these poems a universality that largely transcends cultural boundaries and limitations of time and place; each generation finds new treasures, suited to its own conditions and values, and often set its hand to the task of reworking them for its own time. If any single story stands at the head of the Western European tradition, it is this two-part tale of the Trojan War and what happened afterward.

Metropolitan Bust of HomerAs the historicity of Homer was never questioned in the ancient world, neither was the war itself. Though dates and locations varied, and some (including Thucydides) tended to minimize the importance of the war, still it was universally held to have happened. Later, from the end of the Middle Ages through much of the nineteenth century, scholars advanced — in ever stronger terms — the notion that the war had not in fact happened at all, but was instead a fiction used by Homer as a context for his universal stories.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, a naive but passionate German named Heinrich Schliemann attempted to put the theory to the test by using the discipline — then still in its infancy — of scientific archaeology. He went to the sites in Turkey where he reasoned Troy must have stood, and began to dig. In due course, he discovered the wreckage of a major city, buried in a mound called Hissarlik, which many believe to have been Homer’s Troy.

Schliemann’s findings were a mixed blessing: on the one hand, he restored some faith in the historicity of the Trojan story; on the other, he destroyed a good deal of evidence by digging hastily and keeping inadequate records of his findings. In the end, he discovered the ruins of not one, but at least seven separate cities, one built atop the rubble of the another, but found that he was largely unable to distinguish which layer might have been the Troy of Homer’s narrative. Since Schliemann’s day, however, though the debate about the meaning of the Hissarlik excavation continues, few deny that there is probably at least a kernel of narrative truth to the story of a great war at Troy, and the final destruction of the city. Still, the confirmation is tenuous: there is not much one can find in a heap of stone, pottery, and miscellaneous artifacts that could support or refute the notion that the war that had been waged there was even remotely associated with Mycenaean Greeks attempting to recover a stolen queen, or that the city was destroyed using the ruse of a large wooden horse, or that Alexander (Paris), Priam, and Hector, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles or Odysseus had ever existed. Until very recently, these too were dismissed as fanciful. In the last few years, however, certain Hittite documents (the Hittites being an Indo-European race who lived inland) have been discovered that mention Alexander (as “Alexandush”), and at approximately the time at which the war would have taken place. Clearly there is a great deal that we do not know; yet we may well believe that even such ancient documents could preserve some points of an essential story of great moment.

For all this, however, the question of whether the Trojan War stories are true or not is probably secondary. Whatever mixture they may represent of fact and fancy, they tell a tale that is at its center important not because of the history it preserves, but because of the human truth it brings into focus. For, like most great stories, they are fundamentally about what it means to be a human being.

Contents of this page © Copyright 2001, 2007 by Bruce A. McMenomy.

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