The War That Killed Achilles Read online

  “Divine Homer,” according to the ancient Greeks, was a professional poet from Ionia, a region of Greek settlements along the western coast of Anatolia (now Turkey) and its outlying islands. This plausible tradition apart, his identity is lost in the mythic past; according to one testament, for example, his father was the river Meles and his mother a nymph.1

  The Iliad’s own origins are similarly murky. Certain poetic features (such as a complex system of metrically useful phrases and a marked use of repetition of passages and words) indicate that behind the Iliad there lay a long tradition of oral storytelling. The Iliad’s references to geographical place-names and to types of armament and other artifacts that can be correlated with finds of modern archaeology, combined with linguistic evidence, indicate that some of its elements date back to the Bronze Age. These historic relics were melded with themes, language, and characters borrowed from other traditions, folklore and Near and Middle Eastern poetry and mythology being particularly rich sources. Some elements are even of pre-Greek origin. Helen’s name, for example, can be traced to the Indo-European *Swelénā, from the root *swel—“sun,” “solar glare,” “burn,” “grill.” Her prototype was a Daughter of the Sun, the abduction of the Sun Maiden being a recurrent motif in old Indo-European myth.2

  Certain of the Iliad’s features can be teased out to suggest at least the character, if not the actual storyline, of the Bronze Age epic tradition. The hero Aias, for example, with his distinctive towerlike shield and huge size, belongs to the Greek Bronze Age, as do the easy communion between gods and men, similes comparing men to lions, and heroes of a stature with the gods. Above all, we can infer that the early tradition sang of battle and of death in combat.3

  The epic’s journey can be traced in the history of two extinct peoples: the Bronze Age Greeks—known to Homer as “Achaeans” and to modern historians as Mycenaeans, after their principal settlement—and the Trojans, a Hittite-related people of western Anatolia.

  The Mycenaeans came to power on the Greek mainland in the seventeenth century B.C., and while the large southern peninsula called the Peloponnese was the main region of their strongholds, they were sailors, raiders, and warriors as well as traders and by the mid-fifteenth century B.C. had assumed political and cultural ascendancy throughout the Aegean. Golden and other precious objects unearthed from their graves reveal that they were a wealthy people. Some of this wealth came from legitimate trade, but fragmentary references to Mycenaean troublemak ers in the records of the contemporary Hittites suggest that bands of individuals, if not organized armies, roamed the Anatolian coast looking for plunder: possibly the dramatic action of early epic had followed such seaborne raids.4 Certainly the determinedly militaristic themes of Mycenaean art, with its depictions of sieges, marching warriors, and departing fleets, give every indication that the Mycenaeans were a martial people.5

  The height of their wealth and power was reached in the late fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C., an era known as the “palatial” period in deference to the great palace complexes that were now built. Often set on strategic heights and encircled by massive fortification walls, the palaces functioned as both defensive strongholds and the headquarters of a sophisticated, feudal bureaucracy. Archives of documents found at some of the sites, written on baked clay tablets in an early form of Greek using a syllabic ideogram script dubbed “Linear B,” contain seemingly inexhaustible lists—of tributes, taxes, commodities, stores, and military equipment—a glimpse at once of the wealth, organization, military character, and naked materialism of the ruling order.6 No diplomatic documents, characteristic of other Bronze Age societies in the Near and Middle East, have been found amid the piles of Linear B tablets; no treaties or letters between embassies or rulers, no historical accounts of skirmishes or battles; no poems or prayers or fragmentary epics—nothing but the careful, acquisitive lists of possessions:Kokalos repaid the following quantity of olive oil to Eumedes: 648 litres of oil.

  One footstool inlaid with a man and a horse and an octopus and a griffin in ivory.

  One footstool inlaid with the ivory lions’ heads and grooves . . .

  One pair of wheels, bound with bronze, unfit for service.

  Twenty-one women from Cnidus with their twelve girls and ten boys, captives.

  Women of Miletus.

  And:To-ro-ja—Women of Troy.7

  How women of Troy ended up as the inventory of a Mycenaean palace cannot be known from one slender entry, but the most straightforward explanation is that, like the women of Cnidus and Miletus—and Lemnos and Chios and other named settlements in Anatolia or the Aegean islands—they were, in the language of the tablets, “women taken as booty,” or captives, carried off to serve as “sewing women,” textile workers, “bath pourers,” and probably in their masters’ beds.8 A letter written around 1250 B.C., the conjectured time of the war, by the Hittite king Hattusili III to an unnamed Mycenaean king, referring to the transportation and resettlement of some seven thousand Anatolians, by capture and inducement, in Mycenaean land, indicates the scale of Mycenaean interference.9 A few Hittite documents and the Linear B entry, together with a wealth of Mycenaean pottery discovered at Troy itself, are evidence that in the course of their travels—for trade, plunder, or colonization along the Anatolian coast—significant contact had been made between the people of Mycenae and the inhabitants of Troy.10

  Situated at the entrance of the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles), Troy itself had a history more ancient than that of any of the Mycenaean palaces. The earliest, very small Trojan settlement had been built around 2900 B.C., perched on a low hill above a marshy and perhaps malarial plain that was cut by two rivers, the Simoeis and the Skamandros.11 Seven major levels of settlements were built on the site between the date of its foundation and its abandonment nearly two thousand years later, in 1050 B.C.12 Of these seven levels, that dubbed Troy VI (dated from 1700 to 1250 B.C.) spanned the period of Mycenaean dominance in Greece. Itself built in eight distinct phases, on the ashes of its predecessors, Troy VI was constructed with discernible novel skill and style, suggesting that a new people had claimed the ancient site; the Luwians, an Indo-European people related to the powerful Hittites, are known to have settled at this time in northwest Anatolia and are the most likely candidates for these new Trojans.13

  On the hill, the palatial citadel was rebuilt and refurbished, with graceful, gently sloping defensive walls constructed of blocks of carefully finished limestone. Standing some seventeen feet in height, the stone walls were in turn surmounted by a mud-brick superstructure, so that from stone base to brick summit the walls rose to nearly thirty feet; strategic towers strengthened the defenses, and stone ramps led to gateways in and out of the city. These details would be retained by the epic tradition, for the Iliad knows of Troy’s wide ways and gateways, its towers and “well-built walls.” Below the citadel, a lower city housed a population of approximately six thousand souls.14

  Thus at the time of Mycenae’s height of power, in the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries B.C., Troy was a substantial settlement, surmounted by a palace citadel and happily situated at the entrance to the Dardanelles, which in turn controlled access to the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea beyond.15 Its influence extended not only throughout the Troad but as far as islands such as Lesbos, in the eastern Aegean, where the archaeological record, evidenced principally in pottery (and even by the lead element in copper objects), shows that from at least 3000 B.C. these islanders had shared the material culture of the Trojans.16

  For all this, however, Troy was never more than a local power. The great Hittite kingdom that ruled Asia Minor from its capital in Hattusa (now Boǧazköy, in central Turkey) held ultimate sway, and clay documents from the extensive Hittite archives show that Troy was merely one of its vassal states. 17 Mined by scholars for evidence of the “real” Troy and Trojan War since they were first deciphered, the Hittite archives have yielded tantalizing clues, made more substantial by discoveries of recent years. A refe
rence to the “Ahhiyawa,” ruled by a Great King across the sea, for example, is now generally taken to refer to the Achaeans—the name most commonly used in the Iliad for the Mycenaeans.18 Similarly, Hittite “Wilusa” is now confirmed to be the Homeric Ilios; or more properly, with the restoration of its original ancient w-sounding letter, the “digamma”—“Wilios.”19 Particularly intriguing is a reference made in a letter from the Hittite king Hattusili III to an unnamed king of Ahhiyawa, around 1250 B.C.: “in that matter of Wilusa over which we were at enmity . . .”20 This, then, is evidence that, on one occasion at least, a Mycenaean king had engaged in hostilities over Ilios.

  No documents have yet been found at any of Troy’s levels; a single seal stone unearthed at Troy VI, inscribed in Luwian, remains the only written evidence.21 How Troy survived, how it amassed wealth enough to build its impressive walls, can only be guessed. The number of spindle whorls unearthed by excavators has been interpreted as evidence of a long-established textile industry, while horse bones found at Troy VI may be evidence of horse breeding: in the Iliad, Homer’s Troy is “famed for its horses.”22 Particularly suggestive, however, is the small, late- Bronze Age cemetery discovered close to Troy’s western harbor, in which roughly a quarter of the miscellaneous cremations and burials contained Mycenaean objects. Independent of Troy, it appears to have been a burial ground for foreign mariners, or traders.23 At the same time, evidence of Mycenaean contact beyond the Hellespont and Bosporus is very sparse, indicating that most trade did not venture farther, but stopped at Troy. Whether this was because the Trojans actively controlled the strait, perhaps exacting tariff as was done in later eras, or simply because of the difficulty of sailing Bronze Age keelless ships against a stiff prevailing current and wind cannot be known. 24

  In Greek mythology and epic, the war between the Greeks and Trojans was directly caused when Paris, a son of King Priam of Troy, visited the Greek king Menelaos of Sparta and abducted, or seduced—even in antiquity there was a difference of opinion—the king’s wife, Helen, taking with him many possessions. There is no reason this tradition could not reflect some historical truth. Given that the Linear B inventory lists clearly indicate that women were captured in Mycenaean raids along the Anatolian coast, it is at least possible that raids were also made in the other direction. The union in myth of Greek Helen with Asian Paris could also reflect a dim memory of a—perhaps resented—politically arranged marriage between a Hittite prince and his Greek bride.25 On the other hand, the cause of the “Trojan War” may simply have been cold-blooded quest for plunder, with a series of raids romantically conflated into the Bronze Age’s single Great War. Significantly, early mythological and epic stories refer to two sacks of Troy by Greeks over two successive generations, as well as, intriguingly, a failed campaign to the region led by Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae.26

  The last of Troy VI’s phases—Troy VIh—ended in 1250 B.C., falling to what appears to be a combination of natural disaster and enemy fire. The same population, much reduced in both size and circumstances, remained on the site, crowding the once-palatial citadel with what would appear to have been a clutter of small tenements: either the ruling elite were remarkably accommodating of these new inhabitants or they had fled, abandoning their palace to humbler folk.

  If Troy VIh fell to Mycenaean invaders, the Mycenaeans did not have long to savor their victory. Despite the strength and watchfulness of their own great citadels, with their lookout posts and stockpiles of prudent stores, the Mycenaeans could not forestall the cataclysmic disaster that ended their own civilization, dramatically and suddenly, around 1200 B.C., a generation or so after the fall of Troy. Various reasons for the collapse have been speculated—natural disaster, internal unrest, disruption of trade, foreign marauders. That it was the Trojan War itself that left the Greek world vulnerable to such discord was the view of later ancient writers. This view is also reflected in the Odyssey, the second, later epic also attributed to Homer: on his return after the war to his native land, the hero Odysseus discovers that his estate has been plundered by usurpers in his absence. “It was long before the army returned from Troy, and this fact in itself led to many changes,” Thucydides wrote in the fifth century B.C. “There was party strife in nearly all the cities and those who were driven into exile founded new cities.”27

  As at Troy, some local Mycenaean populations attempted to rebuild on the sites of devastation, returning to the rubble of what had been their homes to scavenge what they could from the citadels’ damaged walls and sanctuaries and storerooms; but as with modern disasters, those with the means to move on did so. Although sharing the same culture, religion, and language throughout Greece, the Mycenaeans were distinguished among themselves by regional differences, and when their world collapsed, they chose different routes of escape. Those who had lived in Boiotia, in central Greece, and in wild Thessaly, on the northern extremity of the Mycenaean world, drifted eastward to the island of Lesbos, possibly joining small settlements of kin who had settled here earlier, before or during the time of the Trojan War. Significantly, passing references are scattered throughout the Iliad to Achaean raids made in the Troad and eastern Aegean islands: “ ‘I have stormed from my ships twelve cities / of men, and by land eleven more through the generous Troad,’ ” says the Greek hero Achilles, in a passage that undoubtedly recalls his people’s conquest of the region.28 Excavations on Lesbos show that the indigenous culture was an extension of the Troad’s—by chance or ironic destiny, then, the Mycenaeans had settled among a people who were culturally akin to Trojans.29 Later Greeks, recounting fragmentary knowledge of their post-Mycenaean history, called these colonists Aeolians, from Aeolis, a son of Hellen, the eponymous clan hero of the Hellenes, or Greeks, and the term is used by historians today.

  Behind the Mycenaean immigrants lay their land, their cities, the graves of their ancestors. As refugees they had undoubtedly carried with them whatever they were able of their former lives—gold and precious goods, if feasible, the clothes on their back, household wares—or so one presumes, for this is the way of all refugees, down to the present day. Many things they were unable to preserve, however, and valuable assets evaporated with the disintegration of their civilization: literacy, for example, vanished and was not to reappear for nearly five hundred years.

  Of all the things the refugees carried from their shattered world, the most significant were also the least tangible—the gods they worshipped, the language they spoke, the stories they told. Here, in the region of Lesbos, memories of the lost Mycenaean world were handed down to subsequent generations in stories and poems: tales of great cities, rich in gold; remembrances, often muddled, of battles fought and types of armor. Their poems sang of the exploits of warriors who fought like lions and communed with the gods, of favorite heroes, such as the great Trickster whose wily devices always got the better of his foes, and a stubborn giant of a man who fought behind a shield that covered him like a wall—heroes who would later be known to the world as “Odysseus” and “Aias.”30

  Along with such common elements, the refugees also carried traditions that were specific to Thessaly. At some point, a new and electrifying character strode into the evolving narrative about warriors and war, a semidivine hero indelibly associated with rugged, faraway Thessaly, who was called “Achilles.” The old martial tradition also adopted a specific conflict, shaping itself around the siege of an actual town whose ruins now lay just a day’s sail away, on the Hellespont, in western Anatolia: “Taruisa,” in the language of the Hittites, “Troia” in Greek—Troy.31

  Presumably the Trojan allies among whom the Mycenaeans were now settled possessed stories of their own about the city—its people, its plight, and its destruction; scattered Anatolian words and phrases embedded in the Iliad are evidence of contact between the colonizers and local inhabitants.32 With the ruins of their own cities behind, and the ruins of another a day’s sail ahead, the Aeolic poets entrusted with the old epic narrative might have come to see, from t
heir new vantage, that the old story of Troy’s destruction was inextricably bound to the story of their own.

  The evolving epic was still centuries from completion, with other critical stages yet to come. Possibly in the late tenth or early ninth century B.C., the Aeolic epic was absorbed by poets working in Ionic Greek. 33 Sophisticated and innovative, the Ionians enhanced the old Aeolic epic with parallel traditions and made it their own. Despite its discernible strand of well-embedded Aeolisms, the Iliad we have today is composed in Ionic Greek, and ancient tradition held Homer to be a poet of Ionia.34

  Such, then, was the mix of elements that were passed down by epic poets over the five centuries that followed the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, into the era historians have dubbed variably as Greece’s “Dark” or “Iron Age”—the age in which Homer lived. During this still-little-known period, populations declined, as did material culture. Yet for all its relative poverty, life and society must not only have endured but eventually thrived, for when the “Dark Ages” ended, a vibrant, new human landscape was revealed. City-states had replaced the feudal palace settlements of Mycenaean times, expeditions abroad had led to the colonization by Greek settlers of new lands, writing had been reestablished, using an alphabet adapted from the Phoenician—and Homer’s Iliad had been composed.

  Little at all is known about how the Iliad received its final form. Was it dictated? Was it written? For whom was it performed? Recitation of the entire poem would last for days, suitable entertainment perhaps for occasional festivals, but it seems more likely that the epic was performed in episodes. The Odyssey gives portraits of two professional singers, both belonging to the courts of noble families, who perform short “lays”;35 one of these singers, Demodokos, is blind, a fact that inspired a tradition that Homer himself was a blind bard.36 The small, aristocratic, and mostly—but by no means exclusively—male gatherings for whom the poets of the Odyssey perform are plausible models for the audiences of the Iliad. 37