Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History, Episode 4: Trojan Horse or Trojan Hoax? Was There a Real Trojan War? I’m Scott Emmons.  

 In the last couple of episodes, I covered the Mycenaean civilization, which the ancient Greeks looked back on as a legendary Age of Heroes. The Trojan War was thought of as kind of a swan song, the last great event of that heroic age. The story was told not only in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but in a whole series of long poems known as the Epic Cycle — all of which are now lost, except for a few fragments. To the Greeks, the Trojan War was ancient history. That doesn’t mean they believed everything in the epics was literally true. They understood poetic license, and they knew that stories of the heroic past were embellished. But even Thucydides, who has a reputation as the most hard-nosed of the ancient historians, accepted that the Trojan War was a real event and that people like Agamemnon were historical figures. 

 The modern outlook is a different story. As we saw in Episode 2, the prevailing view was very skeptical until Heinrich Schliemann excavated at Hisarlik and convinced many that the Homer’s Troy had actually existed. Since then, scholars and amateurs alike have pondered the question: Was there really a Trojan War? Or was it just a product of the later Greek imagination? So before leaving the Bronze Age behind, I’m devoting this episode to that question, which never quite seems to go away. Spoiler alert — there’s no definitive answer. At the end of this episode, we’re not going to have a hard yes or no. But along the way, we’ll discover some fascinating clues that can at least help us connect the Trojan story to events of the Late Bronze Age.

 So, what is this story that’s had such a powerful hold on the western imagination for nearly three thousand years? I’m sure this will be familiar to a lot of listeners, but for those who don’t know the story or may need a refresher, I think I ought to provide a basic outline. There’s a lot of mythological back story, but the real “inciting incident” comes when a Trojan prince named Paris abducts Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, from Sparta, and takes her back to Troy. Now, just to complicate things, Homer hardly ever calls that prince Paris; his usual name for him is Alexander. Keep that in mind, because it’ll be important later on. In any case, Helen is already married to King Menelaus of Sparta, who doesn’t take it well. He runs to his big brother Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, and gets him to lead an expedition of all the Greek heroes across the sea to get Helen back. The Greeks besiege the city of Troy for ten long, bloody years. Finally, they trick the Trojans into bringing a giant wooden horse into their gates, with a force of elite Greek warriors hiding inside it. At this point the Trojans think the war is over, so they spend the day celebrating. The Greeks wait until everyone’s passed out from drinking and exhaustion, then spring out of the horse, open the gates to the rest of the army, kill almost everybody, take some of the women captive, and burn Troy to the ground.

 That’s the Trojan War legend in a nutshell. Our search for a historical Trojan War has to start with our two main narrative sources, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. But we’re already in murky waters, because Homer himself is a legendary figure. We don’t really know who he was or even if he ever existed. It’s doubtful whether both epics were composed by the same person. The exact dates of the poems are in question, but the general consensus is that they were composed sometime in the late 8th century BCE. So right away, you can see a problem. According to the most widely accepted Greek tradition, The Trojan War ended in 1184 BCE. That date was determined by the mathematician Eratosthenes, who was an extremely smart guy. He’s best known for calculating the circumference of the Earth with less than a 1% margin of error. Well, if Eratosthenes’ date is even remotely accurate, there are four to five hundred years between the Trojan War and Homer. So the big question is, do the epics preserve anything real from the Bronze Age? And if they do, how can we tell?

 For the answer to that, we can start with a little archeology on the poems themselves. This is going to take us down a pretty deep rabbit hole. And I have to confess, I’m indulging myself a bit here, because I find the composition of the Homeric epics fascinating, and I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to talk about it. But I promise it’ll tie in with the main topic.

 So, into the rabbit hole we go. Anyone reading Homer for the first time will notice right away that there’s something unusual about the composition. There’s a lot of repetition of phrases and lines. Even long passages are sometimes repeated word for word. One of the most common types of repeated phrase is an epithet, in other words a descriptor that’s used over and over for a certain character. A common example is “swift-footed Achilles.” He’s called that again and again, whether he’s running into battle or just kicking back in his tent. The narrative context doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it fits the meter, that is, the rhythm of the poetry. 

 Greek epic is composed in a very strict meter called the dactylic hexameter. That term might make your brain hurt if you’re hearing it for the first time, but “hexameter” just means that every line is made up of six metrical units. And each of those units can be one of two types. It can a dactyl, which is a long syllable followed by two short ones, so BUM-pum-pum. Or it can be a spondee, which is just two long syllables, BUM-PUM. Every line is composed of dactyls and spondees combined in different ways. To give you some idea of how it sounds, I’m going to recite the first two lines of the Iliad in Greek, and I’m really going to exaggerate the long and short syllables. In these opening lines, the poet calls on the Muse, saying: “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, the destructive wrath that brought countless woes to the Achaeans.” The Achaeans being one of several terms Homer uses for the Greeks. Now, here it is in my very exaggerated rhythmical Greek:

 μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε

 Just from those two opening lines, you can hear that the rhythmical pattern is a key part of the form. So one reason Achilles is so often called “swift-footed” is that the epithet fits perfectly at the end of a line: “podas okus Achilleus.”  If a different number of syllables is needed, he can be “godlike Achilles,” “dios Achilleus.” If Agamemnon comes at the end of a line, his epithet is very often “king of men”: “anax andron Agamemnon.”

 If you were taking a poetry class today and you wrote like that, your teacher would probably say you need to work a little harder with your descriptors. Instead of going back to the well with “swift-footed Achilles,” try to find something more appropriate to the situation you’re describing. But the rules are different for Homeric epic. Scholars had known it since ancient times, and I think there was always some vague understanding that it had to do with the way the poems were performed orally, before the advent of writing. But a big advance in our understanding came in the 1930s when a young Harvard professor by the name of Milman Parry went off to live in the mountain regions of what was then Yugoslavia, and there he got to know a lot of non-literate Bosnian singers who composed and performed poetry extemporaneously. Some of their compositions were epic poems that could run to as many as 13,000 lines. Parry made hundreds of recordings of these singers, studied them in depth, and what he found was that they used repeated elements, which he called formulas, in a way that looked a lot like the Homeric epics. 

 The key process here is oral composition. These singers that Parry studied weren’t reciting a fixed text from memory; they were telling a familiar story off the cuff, often tailoring it to a particular occasion or a specific audience, and using those formulas to help them construct the narrative. By analyzing their performances, Parry showed that the Homeric epics must have had their roots in the same kind of oral composition. So you can imagine a pre-Homeric bard singing a story from the Trojan War, and when he needs to talk about Achilles in a way that fits that strict hexameter, he can drop in that epithet “swift-footed Achilles” without having to think of a new phrase on the fly. 

 Now, that’s not to say that the Homeric epics as we have them are what a performer came up with on the spot. One of the big questions in Homeric studies is how they came to be written down. It’s possible that one of these singers — maybe named Homer — learned to read and write, and then wrote out the epics as he would have sung them. It seems more likely to me that the poems went through a slow process where maybe parts were written down, then they were compiled and revised until they finally took the form of the fixed texts we have. No one knows for sure. But almost certainly, what we have aren’t really orally composed poems but written works that have their roots in oral composition.

 Okay, now we can climb out of the rabbit hole and get back to the original question. Can this give us any sense of whether the epics preserve anything from the Mycenaean era, the time when the Trojan War supposedly took place? Well, the form and the language show that the oral tradition goes back a very long way. For example, we’ve talked about the “w” sound in Mycenaean Greek that had disappeared by the time the Homeric epics were written down. So Mycenaean “wanax” becomes “anax” in Homer. But according to the way ancient Greek defines long and short syllables, that “w” sound is often needed at the beginning of certain words to make the meter come out right. That’s a clue that the line was composed long before Homer, when that “w” sound was still part of the word. Long story short, the poems as we have them preserve some traces of earlier, Mycenaean Greek. And remember, the hexameter itself is a very strict form with a lot of rules about how words can fit together. For that very reason, it tends to preserve formulas for a long time. If a good turn of phrase fits the meter perfectly, it’s likely to get passed on from one singer to the next down the generations.

 Okay, so the language of the epics preserves some very old material. What about content?  Do the poems reference anything that definitely comes from the Mycenaean era? You’ll hear different opinions about that, but the short answer is yes. In the tenth book of the Iliad, a minor Greek warrior gives Odysseus a helmet. And Homer goes off on a digression about how it was made, how it started as a kind of leather cap, and then it had rows of boars’ tusks sewn onto the outside. Well, that kind of helmet wasn’t used in Homer’s time. But boars’ tusk helmets were well known in Mycenaean Greece. They’ve been found in a number of Bronze Age graves, and they often appear in Mycenaean art. They were clearly a status marker for elite warriors. Your average foot soldier could never have afforded one. It’s estimated that about 40 to 50 boars had to be hunted down and killed to make one of those helmets. You really had to be a honcho just to own one. Anyway, I agree with many scholars that the boar’s tusk helmet is a solid example of real Mycenaean content in Homer.

 Another classic example is the long passage in Book Two of the Iliad that’s known as the catalogue of ships. Now, if you’re reading the Iliad just to enjoy the story, this is, without a doubt, the most boring part of the whole epic. For over 250 lines, Homer lists the contingents that came to fight in the war, the towns they came from, who the leaders were, and how many ships it took to bring them over. As narrative, it’s an absolute snore. But when you look at it through a historical lens, it becomes more interesting. Because it includes not only towns that were still around in Homer’s day, but also Mycenaean centers that had been abandoned at the end of the Bronze Age. Towns that were unknown in Homer’s time. Now, you might think, “Okay, those places could be fictional.” Well, that’s where a scrap of Mycenaean writing comes to our aid. A line in the catalogue of ships mentions three towns in Boeotia, the region dominated by the city of Thebes. Those towns are called Eleon, Peteon, and Hyle. The classical Greeks knew nothing about those places. But in 1993, a big Linear B tablet was discovered in Thebes with all three of those names listed as part of its territory. So it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the catalogue of ships must have existed in some form way back in the Mycenaean period.

 So yes, the Homeric poems include some Bronze Age material. But that doesn’t mean everything goes back that far. There’s a passage in the Iliad where the women of Troy take a tapestry as an offering to the temple of Athena, and they’re going to lay it over the knees of the statue. Well, that kind of temple with a seated cult statue was a later development. It wasn’t around in the Mycenaean period, so that story element has to have come in later. 

What we have in the Homeric epics is a mix of material from the Mycenaean world and later times. We can point to a few specific things that are definitely Mycenaean, some other things that have to be later, and a lot of things we can’t date at all. The catalogue of ships gives us a tantalizing clue that there might have been a joint expedition of Mycenaean kingdoms against a foreign enemy. And that’s about as far as the Homeric poems themselves can take us. It’s time to look somewhere else for clues, and that place is Troy itself.

 I think this is the perfect place for a break. Epic Greek History is ad-free, and I don’t plan to put any of my content behind paywalls. Believe it or not, I’m not doing an ancient Greek history podcast for the money. It does cost money to produce, though, so if you enjoy the podcast and would like to offer a little financial support, you can now do so for as little as three dollars a month at epicgreekhistory.com. Just click on the “support” button and choose your contribution level. Meanwhile, instead of an ad break, let’s have…

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 I mentioned earlier that the Homeric epics were written in a meter called the dactylic hexameter. “Hexameter,” of course, just means each line has six metrical units. “Dactylic” is more interesting. It comes from the Greek “daktylos,” which means “finger.” So what does a finger have to do with a poetic meter? Well, I haven’t been able to do a rigorous fact check, but the explanation I’ve heard makes sense to me. Remember that a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short ones. BUM-pum-pum. So it’s analogous to a human finger. Hold your index finger out straight, and you’ll see that it has a longer bone and two shorter ones. So a dactylic rhythm is literally a “finger rhythm.” If that’s starting to sound a little off-color to you, you’re not alone. The Greeks noticed it too. The comic playwright Aristophanes made a crude joke about it in his play “The Clouds.” I’d go on, but I’d rather not have the hosting company to slap an “explicit content” label on this episode. So that’s it for today’s moment of Greek!

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 We’ve seen that the Homeric epics preserved some material from the Mycenaean era, which means some of what they say about the Trojan War might have come from contemporaneous accounts. For our next line of evidence, we need look at Troy itself, its archaeological record and its place in the geopolitical world of late Bronze Age Anatolia. Now, at Troy we immediately run up against a couple of big questions. First, how do we even know it’s Troy? Archaeologists haven’t turned up any “Welcome to Troy” signs as far as I know. We’ll come back to that question, but assuming for now that we’re in the right place, which Troy are we even talking about? Troy was around for centuries, and it was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times. When Schliemann excavated in the 19th century, he discovered what he took to be King Priam’s treasure, but we now know that those finds were over a millennium too early for the Trojan War. So we need to look for a period in the archaeological record that corresponds to the late Mycenaean era in Greece. That brings us to two levels that archaeologists have labeled Troy VI and Troy VIIa. Mycenaean pottery has been found in both of those levels, so we know we’re in the right general time frame.

 But the period of Troy VI through VIIa covers almost 600 years, so is there any way to narrow it down? Well, if Homer is any guide, the city we’re looking for should be magnificently wealthy. The Troy we know from archaeology had its ups and downs, but at various times it matched that description. The key to its wealth was its location for international trade. It sat near a harbor on the northwest coast of modern-day Turkey, near the entrance to the straits of the Dardanelles. That route leads ultimately to the Black Sea, so it’s vital for shipping. You can imagine that for trading ships sailing up the coast, Troy would be the last port of call before you’d enter the straits. It might be the place you’d restock with provisions before moving on. You might have goods to buy or sell there at Troy, and you might have to pay duties on the goods you’re moving. And if the winds were unfavorable for entering the straits, you might have to stay at Troy for a while, which would only add to its profits. 

 Now, if we’re looking for a Troy that has Homeric-level wealth during the late Mycenaean age, Troy VI has a lot to recommend it. The archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld continued Schliemann’s work at Troy, using much more scientific methods, and he conducted a close study of Troy VI. There were signs of affluence like fine pottery, ivory and other imported luxury goods, and a massive fortification wall that would have been a major expense to build. If you visit Troy today, that wall is an impressive sight, and one distinctive feature is what’s called its “batter” — meaning it slopes rather than standing perpendicular to the ground. It fits remarkably well with a passage in the Iliad where the hero Patroklos tries to scale, quote: the “angle of the wall.” Dörpfeld also determined that the last stage of Troy VI was violently destroyed, by Mycenaean Greeks as he assumed. So as far as he was concerned, the question was settled. Troy VI was Priam’s Troy.

 He made a strong case, but sometime later the American archaeologist Carl Blegen reexamined the evidence and determined that Troy VI was destroyed by an earthquake and not by an invasion. His candidate for Homer’s city was Troy VIIa, which looked a lot more like a city under siege. The inhabitants were now packed inside the walls, and dwellings were equipped with big storage jars for provisions. It was also clear that this time it had been destroyed by invaders. There were arrowheads, burned buildings, and the remains of unburied bodies in the streets. The trouble is, we just don’t know who those invaders were. They could have been Mycenaeans, but this is the era of the Bronze Age collapse, when cities and whole civilizations were falling all over the Mediterranean world. There were plenty of people out attacking cities, and they definitely weren’t all Greeks. There’s also the problem that Troy VIIa was a much poorer city rebuilt after the earthquake. So if Homer was telling the story of that destruction, did he conflate two eras to portray Troy as the wealthy city of the past and make its fall that much more dramatic?

 Well, there’s one more set of excavations to mention, directed by Manfred Kormann starting in 1988. Korfmann made it clear that he wasn’t out to prove anything about the Trojan War legend. He was approaching it purely as an important Bronze Age site. But it turned out that his findings did shed some light on Greek stories about Troy. He used geomagnetic imaging to explore a broader area and found that Troy was much bigger than was previously known. One problem that had troubled Schliemann was that the fortified area was too small to be the great city Homer had described. He speculated that there must have been a much bigger town in the plain below the citadel. Korfmann’s findings essentially confirmed that. He also determined that the lower town of Troy VIIa had been destroyed in war. Based on a reexamination of Mycenaean pottery by the archaeologist Penelope Mountjoy, he set the date of the destruction at about 1180 BCE — which is uncannily close to 1184, the date that Eratosthenes established for the fall of Troy.

 So archaeology gives us a few tantalizing clues, but we haven’t found any smoking guns. It’s time to look at a different line of evidence. We know Troy was important, but that doesn’t mean it was the great power in the region. The geopolitical superpower in Anatolia at that time was the Hittite empire. This is something historians knew next to nothing about until the early 20th century. Most of the evidence for the Hittites came from a few references in the Hebrew Bible, and most scholars thought they were a relatively unimportant group — if they existed at all. But excavations at the town of Boğazkale (Boh-AZ-ka-le) in Turkey revealed that it was the site of Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite empire. Those excavations turned up the royal archives containing about 10,000 tablets in multiple languages, including Hittite cuneiform. When those texts were deciphered, they revealed how extensive Hittite power had been in the region.

 So can those Hittite writings tell us anything about Troy? The answer to that is a tentative yes. A few tablets, around two dozen, refer to a city called Wilusa. Now, that name doesn’t sound anything like “Troy,” but the city actually has two names. Homer usually doesn’t call it Troy, he calls it Ilios or Ilion. That, of course, is where we get the title “Iliad.” And remember that the initial “w” sound in Mycenaean Greek had disappeared by Homer’s time. So the earlier version of Ilios would be “Wilios,” which bears a striking resemblance to the Hittite name “Wilusa.” Studies of Hittite geography have helped to establish that Wilusa’s location matches well with the archaeological site of Troy. Some Hittite tablets also refer to a place called “Ahhijawa,” which may sound familiar if you know your Iliad. Homer uses three different names for the Greeks. He calls them Argives and Danaans, but the term he uses most often is Acheans, or “Achaioi” in Greek. In Bronze Age Greek that was probably “Achaiwoi,” which again sounds a lot like “Ahhijawa” in the Hittite texts. Ahhijawa is also described as being “across the water.”  Obviously, there’s room for doubt about this. But for the purposes of this podcast, I’m going to assume that Wilusa is Troy and Ahhijawa is Greece, or at least a part of it.

 Assuming those identifications are correct, one tablet provides what to me are some really mind-blowing pieces of the puzzle. It’s a treaty of alliance between the Hittite king and the city of Wilusa, with clear indications that the Hittites are the dominant power. Troy comes across as a kind of vassal state. But the really striking thing for us is that the king of Wilusa is addressed as “Alaksandu.” That can only be the Greek name Alexander. Which I hope will ring a bell, because Alexander is the name Homer usually uses for Paris, the Trojan prince who abducted Helen. Of course, that doesn’t prove that the Alexander of the Iliad was a real person, but it strongly suggests that Homer or whatever sources he drew on knew of an Alexander in the Trojan royal family. The evidence is fragmentary, but it seems plausible that Alexander could have been a royal name that got passed down through generations. To me, this counts as one of those “kernels of truth” that legends often preserve.

 The Hittite texts also give us some hints that Mycenaean Greeks had some involvement in power politics and military conflicts in the area. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on this, because frankly it’s hard for me to keep it straight even reading it in a book, and I think it would be just about impossible to follow in a podcast. In broad terms, though, it seems that Mycenaeans occasionally took part in regional conflicts, sometimes against the Hittite empire and sometimes in alliance with it. It’s often unclear just how much Mycenaean involvement there was. In some cases it might have amounted to just a few mercenaries. 

 Just to provide an example, though, one group of tablets from the early 13th century BCE can give us a little insight into the sometimes tense relations between the Hittites and Mycenaeans. These tablets refer to a character called Pijamaradu, who was a kind of pirate warlord who meddled in the politics of the region, including Wilusa — in other words Troy. This guy was a headache for the Hittite kings for several decades, and he had a base of operations in a town called Millawata, which was a Mycenaean outpost. That town later became the important Greek city of Miletus. One tablet is actually a letter from the Hittite king to the king of Ahhijawa, complaining that the Greeks are protecting that rogue character Pijamaradu and helping him evade the authorities. 

 So it’s clear that the Mycenaeans had their interests in the area, but there’s nothing in the Hittite documents to suggest a 10-year siege leading to the total destruction of Troy. What we have instead are some vague indications that Mycenaeans were involved in different conflicts at different times. There may even be an echo of that in the Greek tradition, because according to legend, there wasn’t just one expedition against Troy. In the previous generation, Herakles himself had led Greek forces against the Trojan king Laomedon.   

 At this point, questions about the Trojan War seem like the heads of the mythological hydra — for every one that gets answered, two more spring up. It’s amazing that we have that letter to the king of Ahhijawa, but who was he anyway? And what exactly did Ahhijawa mean to the Hittite king? Was it all of Mycenaean Greece or just one of the kingdoms — and if so, which one? Sifting through these 3000-year-old scraps of evidence, I feel like I’m trying to observe something very far away through a smoky, distorted lens. So before the next break, I’d like to summarize what to me are four key pieces of evidence.

 1)        The site we call Troy probably really is Troy, called Wilusa by the Hittites, and it was a subservient ally to the Hittite empire.

2)        Ahhijawa in the Hittite texts probably refers to Mycenaean Greeks, who were sometimes involved in regional disputes that involved Troy.

3)        Homer’s Catalogue of Ships must have existed in some form long before Homer and may be rooted in an actual event in the Mycenaean age.

4)        There was at some point a king of Troy by the name of Alexander, the same name as a major Trojan prince in the Iliad. To me that’s a strong indication that the Homeric epics preserve some memory of ancient Troy, however distorted that memory might be.

 That’ll take us to our second break. When we come back, we’ll look at the role of storytelling in shaping the Trojan saga. But now it’s time for…

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 Wouldn’t it be great if we had some written documents from Troy to tell us what the heck was going on? So far, only one tiny scrap of writing has been discovered there. In 1995, a bronze seal turned up with a badly damaged inscription, but enough of it survives to identify the script as Luwian, a language that was widely spoken in the Hittite empire. It seems to have had a man’s name on one side, accompanied by the title “scribe,” and the name of a woman — presumably his wife — on the other. Some authors have really run with this find and concluded that there must have been Luwian scribes living and working at Troy. But that’s a huge leap from one random find. The seal could just as easily have belonged to a visitor who lost it there. It’s possible that there was more writing at Troy and it just hasn’t been discovered yet, but I won’t be looking for those “Welcome to Troy” signs anytime soon. And that’s today’s random fact.

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 We’ve been looking at archaeology and Hittite texts to get some idea of Troy’s place in the geopolitical world of the time and its relations with Mycenaean Greece. But it’s important to keep in mind that the Trojan War as we know it is a story. Our main source is the Homeric epics, and even if they contain some truth, they’re a lot closer to historical novels than actual history. And remember, there are four to five hundred years between the traditional date of the fall of Troy and the time the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down. That’s a lot of time for a story to morph, for details to be added or to fall away. So in this last segment we’ll look at some of the influences that helped shape the Trojan story. 

 First, we need to look at where the Homeric epics were composed, and all indications are that it happened in the Greek settlements of Anatolia, in the coastal regions of what’s now Turkey. As I said earlier, we don’t really even know if Homer existed, but the legends about his life all put him in one or another of the Ionian Greek cities of that area. The language of the epics is a mix of different dialects, but it’s predominantly Ionian, which fits with those legends. So the epics originated in a part of the Greek world where there would have been a lot of contact with other Anatolian cultures — Phrygians, Carians, Lycians, and Phoenicians, to name a few. And when these people got together for trade, for political alliances, festivals, or what have you, they did what people do — they passed stories around.

 Now, the influence of Near Eastern stories on early Greek myth and literature and has been known for a long time. In 1849, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered, and when it was translated, it caused quite a stir, because it shattered a lot of assumptions. It made a lot of people uncomfortable because it contained earlier versions of biblical stories like the great flood. But it also clearly had a big influence on Homer. To take just one famous example, a major part of the Gilgamesh epic deals with the hero’s grief after the death of his companion Enkidu. That has a strong echo in the Iliad, when Achilles goes insane with grief after his companion Patroklos is killed. 

 So a lot of research has been done comparing Near Eastern texts with the earliest Greek authors, Homer and Hesiod. And notice that I said “texts,” because most of that work has focused on the stories as written documents. More recently, a scholar named Mary Bachvarova, in a book called From Hittite to Homer, has done an in-depth analysis of stories that are preserved in Hittite tablets, but she points out that the stories have to be seen in the context of oral transmission — in other words, the way stories were passed on from one singer to another. 

 Now, Bachvarova’s book is over 450 pages long, and I can’t do more than scratch the surface here. If you’d like a more in-depth introduction, there’s a very good interview with her in episode 42 of the podcast “Ancient Greece Declassified,” hosted by Dr. Lantern Jack. I’d highly recommend his podcast if you want to dig deeper into some of the topics I talk about here. For now, I can at least elaborate on one important Homeric passage that Bachvarova connects with a story preserved in a Hittite text. 

 At the opening of the Iliad, Agamemnon has a concubine named Chryseis, a captive taken in a raid on Trojan territory. The problem is, she happens to be the daughter of a priest of Apollo. So this priest comes to the Greek camp to offer a ransom for his daughter. The council of the Greek leaders is in favor of giving her back, but Agamemnon isn’t about to give up his war prize. So he sends the priest away and tells him never to show his face around there again. Well, Apollo of course punishes the Greek army with a plague. That forces Agamemnon to give Chryseis back, but he takes Achilles’ concubine as compensation, and that ignites the wrath of Achilles that drives the whole plot of the Iliad.

 Well, as recently as 1983, excavations at Hattusa turned up a tablet with a poem called the Song of Release. A striking thing about this tablet is that it’s bilingual. It has the poem in both Hittite and Hurrian. So right away we can see that these stories transcended language barriers. The opening of the poem takes place in the assembly of a city called Ebla, where the Storm God demands the release of captives that Ebla has taken from a nearby city. He promises rewards if the assembly meets his demand and punishment if it refuses. So we have a really striking parallel with the Iliad in this opening assembly scene with a god demanding the release of captives and threatening destruction. 

 Again, the only reason we have these stories is that they were written down on clay tablets. But Bachvarova’s key insight is that the texts are just transcripts of poems that were normally sung and heard, not read. We have to imagine singers performing at festivals, many of them bilingual or multilingual, listening to other performers, picking up story elements and turns of phrase that they can use in their own work. And naturally, they’d tailor their performances to different audiences. One group might be interested in a specific hero because they have an ancestral cult centered on that figure. Elites from a particular city might want to hear a version that emphasizes their city’s importance. Bachvarova even offers a hypothesis that at some early time there were pro-Greek and pro-Trojan versions of the Iliad. There’s no direct proof of that, but it would provide one possible explanation for why the Greek Iliad has so many passages that are sympathetic to the Trojan characters. 

 So the story of the Trojan War as we know it is the end product of a lot of telling and retelling, adapting, borrowing from other narrative traditions, and reshaping for different occasions and different audiences. The Homeric epics contain some material that is almost certainly from the Bronze Age. That Mycenaean boar’s tooth helmet, for example. When Homer refers to that angled wall at Troy, it’s tempting to think he or one of his sources had seen it. But the epics have absorbed so many story elements over 400-plus years, I’d be skeptical about taking any part of the narrative as historical fact. 

 There have been multiple attempts to join the archaeology with the legend, but the pieces never fit perfectly. Troy VI was immensely wealthy, but it was destroyed by nature rather than war. Troy VIIa fell to invaders, but it was a much poorer city than Homer describes. Sometimes, the efforts to make the pieces fit can get pretty fanciful. One theory suggested that the Trojan Horse was a mythical representation of the earthquake that destroyed Troy VI, because the god Poseidon is associated with earthquakes and also with horses. I guess if you spend a lot of time trying to make sense of all this, you can get a little punchy.

 So… Was there a real Trojan War? As I said at the beginning, there’s no definitive answer. But I think it would be a very unsatisfying ending to this episode if I didn’t offer some kind of resolution. And this is where I get to play my “not a historian” card. As an amateur, I have the luxury of being able to speculate. So here goes. I think there probably was a Trojan war in the sense that some Mycenaean powers combined forces for an expedition against Troy. Maybe because of a dispute with the Hittite empire, maybe for some other reason. Homer’s catalogue of ships, at least the core of it, goes back to Mycenaean times, and it seems likely that a real event sparked the legend. It’s not out of the question that that expedition was what destroyed Troy VIIa. It probably wouldn’t have involved the huge numbers of cities Homer lists, but once the legend started growing, more and more cities would want to claim they had a part in it. 

 That’s about as far as I’m willing to go, and it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. In fact, maybe we need to reframe the whole question. What features does a historical war have to have before we can call it “the Trojan War”? Does it have to have started because the Spartan queen Helen ran off with a hunky Trojan prince? Does it have to have ended with the Trojans bringing a giant wooden horse full of Greek soldiers inside their gates? I’m reasonably convinced that the city that Heinrich Schliemann dug up at Hissarlik is Troy, but as I’ve asked before, in what sense is it Troy? Most of us have something inside us that wants legends to be true. We want to believe in people and events that were larger than life. We want to believe in heroes. The trouble is, we also want history to be an accurate account of the past, but for most of us, the value of history lies in its power as narrative. And in the case of Troy, the story itself is a part of history. It was a huge part of what gave the classical Greeks their sense of themselves. The Trojan saga has fueled art, literature, drama, and cinema for the better part of three millennia. And if that’s not historic, what is?

 That’s it for this episode of Epic Greek History. In the next full episode we’ll look at the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization and its long aftermath. If you enjoyed this topic, please follow and share. And if you have comments or corrections, I’d love to hear from you. Just shoot me an email at scott@epicgreekhistory.com. I’m Scott Emmons, my theme music was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork were created by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.