In Search of the Trojan War (2 page)

Michael Wood

PROLOGUE

Ilium was for a considerable period to the Heathen world, what Jerusalem is now to the Christian, a ‘sacred’ city which attracted pilgrims by the fame of its wars and its woes, and by the shadow of ancient sanctity reposing upon it. Without abusing language, we may say that a voice speaking from this hill, three thousand years ago sent its utterances over the whole ancient world, as its echoes still reverberate over the modern
.

CHARLES MACLAREN,
The Plain of Troy Described
(1863)

THE CAR FERRY
from Gallipoli across the ‘swift-flowing Hellespont’ describes a great arc upstream to reach the bank opposite at Çanakkale, so powerful is the current which sweeps down the Dardanelles. Turquoise waves of an unnatural brilliance thump against our sides, their tops whipped into spray by the unremitting wind. Here at the narrows, where Lord Byron swam across and Xerxes built his bridge of boats, the channel is less than a mile wide. Behind us lies the peninsula of Gallipoli, and memories of a more recent war. Ahead is the shore of Asia, the minarets of Çanakkale. This has been a crossing for armies, traders, migrating peoples since before history. And it is the way to Troy.

The way to Troy! Surely there are few other names which evoke such feelings for so many of the inhabitants of the world? In all the stories told by mankind and recorded through its history, is there a more famous place?

From the cobbled streets of Çanakkale a modern tarmac road leads southwards along the coastal strip, past the site of ancient Dardanos, now just a featureless crest above the sea, littered with sherds. On the right-hand side, pinewoods slope down to the shore, on the left is a range of low hills. Ships can be seen making their way up to the Black Sea or down to the Mediterranean – a Greek freighter, a Russian cruiser, and tiny
fishing-boats gathering for the mackerel and tunny harvest just as they did in the Bronze Age. After 10 miles or so the road leaves the coast and descends from Erenköy (Intepe) into a fertile plain dotted with fields of cotton, sunflowers, valonia and wheat; there are cattle grazing, and white poplars and willows line the rivers and irrigation dykes. Here you might even see camels loaded with tobacco and ancient-looking roped storage jars on their gaily woven saddle-cloths. This is the valley of the Dumrek Su, the ancient Simois. In front of you at right angles to the road stretches a long wooded ridge, perhaps 100 feet above the plain: the road ascends it steeply, and on the top there is a sign to the right: ‘Truva’ – Troy.

You turn onto a narrow country road, and head along the ridge westwards, towards the sea. If you go left, after the road forks, you pass through the village of Çiplak: muddy lanes, overhanging Anatolian wood-framed houses, their plaster crumbling, wattle exposed; in the road cows being coaxed into the yard by a little boy with a long cane; a gaggle of geese. This was where Heinrich Schliemann lived at first when he started excavating the site in 1870. Then it was a village of ‘ferocious’ Turks, probably founded in the fifteenth or sixteenth century when life had finally died out on the nearby site of New Ilium. In 1816 travellers remembered that the village was built out of the ruins of the city, and indeed Schliemann says that in 1873 the new mosque and minaret were constructed with stones from his excavations. You drive on, past the village of Tevfikiye with its souvenir shops and its spurious ‘House of Schliemann’; this place was entirely built out of the wreckage from Schliemann’s dig. West of Tevfikiye the sown fields are strewn with stones, sherds and fragments of red and white veined marble. This plateau is the site of the classical city of New Ilium, ‘New Troy’, which existed from 700 BC to AD 500. Throughout the ancient world this place was believed to stand on the site of the city sacked in the Trojan War. The wind blows fiercely, shaking the oaks which grow around the site itself, whipping up the dust. Through the trees you catch sight of a towering timber horse, set up so that
tourist parties can pose for snaps in front of ‘the fierce beast of Argos’ from whose belly the Greek heroes sprang to ‘lick their fill of the blood of princes’. And that wind! Cold and unrelenting. (Had Homer not said that Troy was above all ‘very windy’?)

Walk through the glade of pines around the site museum, through a neat little garden lined with urns, fluted column drums and statue bases inscribed in the beautiful majuscule of classical Greek: broken phrases which speak of the sense of oneness which bound the classical world together: ‘Meleager greets the Council and the people of Ilium … prompted by his veneration for the temple and by his feeling of friendship for your town. …’ (The definition of civilisation: ‘life in a city’; ‘Ask me for a true image of human existence,’ wrote the Roman Seneca, ‘and I will show you the sack of a great city.’)

Beyond the trees you come to the site itself, a hill called Hisarlik. You see immediately that you are on the edge of the plateau. Northwards and westwards the land falls away quite sharply to the vivid green of the plain, so the city stood on an eminence, if not ‘beetling’, as Homer has it, then at least raised above the plain. To the south-west, beyond the Sigeum ridge which marks the coast, is the distinctive humped back of the little island of Tenedos, where Homer says the Greeks had a base during the ten years of the siege. On the north-western horizon – if the weather is fine and the sky clear (it is not often so) – you can see the Aegean Sea and, reaching into it, what seems a long promontory. This is the island of Imbros, and peeping over the top of Imbros (if the light is exceptionally good) is a vision of glory: the great mountain called Fengari on Samothrace, about 50 miles away. It was from Fengari, ‘the wooded top of Thracian Samos’, says Homer, that the god Poseidon watched the Trojan War; this splendid spectacle, the traveller Edward Clarke wrote in 1810,

… would baffle any attempt at delineation, it rose with prodigious grandeur; and while its aetherial summit shone with indescribable brightness in a sky without a cloud, it seemed, notwithstanding its
remote situation, as if its vastness would overwhelm all Troy, should an earthquake heave it from its base.

At your feet is what we today call Troy. If your expectation is something grand, something to recall the ‘topless towers of Ilium’, a medieval castle perhaps, or the Cyclopean walls of Greece, you will be disappointed. The place is tiny, 200 yards by 150: the size of, say, St Paul’s Churchyard or Euston Station concourse in London. In front of you is a stretch of finely built walls, behind them an overgrown maze of superimposed ruins of many ages, a jumble of gullies and ditches choked with bushes and rubble.

The first thing you notice is that the ruins exist at several levels and that there is not, as it were, one single Troy. This is compounded by the difficulty of distinguishing features of the different phases of Troy and of seeing where the surviving remains fit together; there is no coherent picture. For a start, most of the site is now destroyed: classical builders erecting a new civic centre levelled the hill and swept away much of the interior of the earlier cities. Archaeology has done the rest; of necessity archaeology destroys the very thing it examines, for to find out facts it must remove the evidence by lifting it out of the ground. So, as the visitor strolls over the site today only a few jagged pinnacles give an idea of the original height of the hill before excavators attacked it from 1870 onwards. They were: Heinrich Schliemann in six major campaigns between then and 1890; Wilhelm Dörpfeld in 1893 and 1894 and the American Carl Blegen between 1932 and 1938. There remain now only these pinnacles, and one small untouched area on the south side for future generations to check the work of earlier investigators.

From the citadel at least, then, little new evidence is now likely to emerge in the world’s greatest archaeological detective story. Most of what there was left to modern times was destroyed by Schliemann, before the techniques had evolved which we use today, enabling us to distinguish the complexities of levels and to date the styles of pottery accurately.

So our picture of Troy today depends on what Schliemann, Dörpfeld and Blegen did, and how they interpreted it. The results of their work can be seen all around the site in the painted yellow signs numbered Troy I–IX, denoting the nine main phases in the lifespan of the city from before 3000 BC to the end of the Roman Empire, for the hill is a stratified mound, like the ‘tells’ so common in the Near East though a rarity in the west. Indeed so significant is this site that even if the tale of Troy had never existed it would still be one of the key sites in the Mediterranean world, for what it tells us about the continuity and development of human civilisation in the Aegean and Asia Minor.

The first thing to remember is that Troy (if indeed it ever bore that name before the legend named it) itself was only ever a royal citadel, home of a few dozen families and their retainers; it was a royal city on a little hill, sheltering a few hundred people with perhaps 1000 or so living around it. In its heyday, this tiny hill was still only the equivalent of a walled palace. Later it would become the acropolis of the classical city of New Ilium, situated in one corner of a small provincial town in the Roman Empire. It was never a great success, a boom town; its theatre was only built to accommodate 6000 spectators, and its population may perhaps be more accurately gauged by an inscription (third or second century BC?) which says that 3000 people had to be fed at one of the city’s public feasts. That at least gives us some idea of the scale of the real city which existed on this site.

The numbers Troy I–IX are broken down into forty-seven subdivisions. These phases of human habitation one above the other were formed by the constant rebuilding which is still practised in Anatolia (in fact the arrival of modern furniture has proved so destructive that compacted earth floors are now relaid every couple of years), by human destruction (the usual fate of cities in the ancient Mediterranean world), by an earthquake, or simply by abandonment. The survivors or successors cleared up and rebuilt on top, levelling the debris, covering the refuse, the food and animal bones, the ashes or whatever with a fresh layer of earth, building new mudbrick walls, and starting again. In this
way the hill of Hisarlik spread and grew, accumulating 50 feet of debris in places on the side of the hill. London, in comparison, in its 1900 years or so, has managed 20 feet of strata, in which modern archaeologists have been able to distinguish not only its general historical development but also the great events which have marked it – for instance the sack of London in AD 61 during Boudicca’s revolt, the great fires of 764, 1077 and 1666, the Blitz in 1940, and so on.

A mound like Troy, then, is a paradigm of human history: end and beginning of new races and civilisations, witness to destructions and rebuildings, testimony to the sheer antlike resilience of humankind. This is ‘civilisation’ not in the terms of
The Last Supper
or
The Art of Fugue
, but in terms of mudbrick, bone pins, handmade pots: the long-term, slow ascent (if such it is) of Man.

Today the visitor can walk at one level over the great walls of the city contemporary with the Mycenaean Age in Greece, which was excavated by Dörpfeld in 1893–4 and whose violent end he took for the death of Homer’s Troy. Across it lie walls and a theatre from Roman Ilium (Troy IX), the town which the Apostles knew. Up the street from the main gate you pass the footings of the shanties of Troy VIIa; you can still see signs of the fire which overwhelmed them and which Blegen thought marked the sack of Homer’s Troy. From the top of the street you can walk over to the walls of Troy II (2500 BC) and stand at the ramp where in 1873 Schliemann found his controversial treasure, the ‘Jewels of Helen’, under a mass of fire debris: the fire which he thought was the sack of Troy. So in two or three minutes’ walk you have gone from the time of the kings of Mycenae to the time of Jesus, to that of Alexander the Great, to the time when the Great Pyramid was built: different Troys and different sieges.

Standing in the tremendous trench which Schliemann drove through the north of the mound, steep-sided and desolate, with smashed ends of walls hanging out of what is left of the hill, it is difficult for the visitor to make the epic tale come alive in the mind’s eye. Was this indeed the place of which the ancient poet
sang? If so, it has been ‘dug out by the mattock of Zeus’, as Aeschylus says in the
Agamemnon
, consumed by a ‘whirlwind of doom’; a city ‘ground to dust’.

And yet Troy is a place whose memory will far outlive the last trace of its physical existence. On an unromantic reading of the evidence it was merely a small city in the Mediterranean, one of thousands of centres of human society which lived and died between the Stone Age and modern times: one city, but one which has come to stand for
all
cities. In western culture, in the languages and memory of what we call the Indo-European races, it is perhaps the most famous of all cities; and all because of one story, the story of its siege and destruction, the death of its heroes, including Hector, at the hands of Agamemnon, Achilles and the Achaian Greeks – all for the sake of Helen, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’. The tale is in the bedrock of western culture. From Homer to Virgil, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Berlioz, Yeats and the rest, it has become a metaphor. Trojan horses, Achilles’ heels and Odysseys have become figures of speech in many languages; ‘working like a Trojan’ is still worthy of praise. From Xerxes and Alexander the Great to Mehmet the Turk it has been a political and racial exemplar, the root, as Herodotus believed, of ‘the enmity between Europe and Asia’. It is a story so universal that it was used by French playwrights to evade censorship, while conveying their message, in Nazi-occupied Paris. Similarly, in exile in 1942, the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch would affirm that ‘it was the fantasy of the Nazis to become the new Achaians, demolishing an old civilisation’, comparing Hitler with Achilles. Inevitably the universality of the theme has lent itself to Hollywood epic movie-makers, in films like
Ulysses
and
Helen of Troy
; so too it has been amusingly satirised on television in the ‘non-interventionism’ of
Star Trek
(where Captain Kirk regretfully left the Trojans to their fate) and in the ‘interventionism’ of
Dr Who
(in which the good Doctor, who had no such scruples, was the one who gave the Greeks the idea of building the wooden horse!).