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Dörpfeld and Blegen.

      A kind of Renaissance of views of the late 18[[th]] and early 19[[th]] centuries happened, when doubts about the historical reality of both the Trojan War and Troy itself were very popular.

      While Ancient thinkers considered Homer to be not only the most skilful poet but also the greatest scientist, and his poems to be a source of the truest historical and geographical information (according to Strabo, “Homer surpassed all people of the ancient and new time, not only due to the high dignity of his poetry, but… knowledge of the conditions of public life”[37]), the science of the Modern Age completely subverted his authority. Not only was the information about the events described in the Iliad and the Odyssey considered to be unreliable, but the very existence of Homer was put into question. Scientists’ skepticism reached the point that for some time believing that there was some considerable culture in Aegis before the 1st millennium B.C. was considered madness.[38] According to their judgments, all these “rich in gold Mycenae”, “blossoming Corinthes” and “magnificently arranged Troy”, inviting envy by their riches even amongst Greeks of the classic era, were only imaginary cities populated with fiction characters – the descendants and relatives of the Olympic gods, such as Agamemnon, Achilles, Diomidius and Priam. At the same time, there have always been scientists, who trusted in Homer’s word and were ready to defend their point of view.

      At the turn of the 18[[th]] and 19th centuries the harshest arguments about Homer took place. The ones being in doubt were Englishmen John McLaurin, who published Treatise in evidence that Troy was not captured by the Greeks (1788), and Jacob Bryant, who published Treatise concerning the Trojan War and expedition of the Greeks as it was described by Homer, demonstrating that such expedition had not ever been held, and that such a city of Phrygia hadn’t existed (1796). The latter violently polemized about historicity of Troy with archaeologist Lechevalier, the very person who first located Ilion in the Bunatbashi area. “Cabinet critics heatedly argued about trifles – location of the Greek ships and even the probable number of children born by camp whores”.[39]

      At the very height of the scholarly battles, the great romantic Byron visited the plane at the Hellespont coast. The atmosphere of these places made him believe that Homer’s poems were true. 11 years later he wrote in his diary, “I stood upon the plain daily, for more than a month, in 1810; and if anything diminished my pleasure, it was that the blackguard Bryant had impugned its veracity (the Trojan war)… I venerated the grand original as the truth of history (in the material facts) and of place. Otherwise, it would have given me no delight. Who will persuade me, when O reclined upon a mighty tomb, that it did not contain a hero? – its very magnitude proved this. Men should not labour over the ignoble and petty dead – and why should not the dead be Homer’s dead?”[40]

      Despite such poetic arguments by Byron, the belief that the Trojan War was only the fiction of the blind Homer remained popular among scientists for another half a century until Schliemann’s excavations assured the scientific community of the historical value of great cities described in the Iliad, such as Troy, Mycenae, Tirynthos and Orchomenus. At first sight, some finds of the amateur archaeologist accurately corresponded to the items described by Homer. For instance, the blade of a bronze dagger found in Mycenae depicted the famous tower shield; in the Iliad, such item belonged to Ajax.

      Fig. 21. Hellespont in the Canakkale District.

      Other items found were the remains of a helmet made of wild boar fangs, depicted in the 10[[th]] rhapsody of the poem, and so on. All these seemed to be sound proof that the Trojan War had been real. And Homer himself already seemed to be at least a younger contemporary of his heroes or even an immediate witness of the events he described. “Data provided by Homer gradually became kind of “a guidebook” for those studying the Aegean culture of the Mycenae epoch”.[41]

      However, Schliemann’s romantic epoch ended up quite quickly. Already in the late 19[[th]] century, serious studies were performed, demonstrating that the material culture and everyday life of the Homer’s heroes did not correspond to the cultural environment of the Mycenae civilization and should have been associated with a later period.[42] Having armed his characters with iron weapons and darts known in the Bronze Age, Homer ignored all typical signs of the Mycenae culture, mentioning neither cobbled roads with bridges, nor water lines and water drains in the palaces, nor the fresco paintings. Even written language that already existed before the 12[[th]] century B.C. and was demonstrated in clay plates found by Arthur Evans at the beginning of the 20[[th]] century during the Knossus excavations on Cyprus, wasn’t mentioned by Homer. Thus, it appeared that when the Iliad and the Odyssey were written, the Mycenae civilization had been already forgotten. Thus, trustworthiness of Homer’s stories were once again put in doubt.

      Harvard philologists Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who in late 1920s and early 1930s studied style of Homer’s epic, also fanned the flames in a way. To learn about the technique for creating, learning and transferring of oral legends they undertook several expeditions to the Balkans to study the living epic tradition. Having collected and studied a huge amount of folklore material, they found out that in time epic was based not on telling some finished texts, but rather on transferring a set of resources used to develop a song: plots, canonical images, and stereotyped word-and-rhythm formulas, which singers used like language words. In particular, this allowed performers to reproduce (or, more precisely, to create in the course of the performance) poems consisting of thousands of lines.[43] Each time the song was an improvisation, though, it remained a form of collective creativity.

      Fig. 22. American historian Moses Finley calling on the “deletion” of Homer’s Trojan War from the history of the Greek Bronze Age. (Image © Olga Aranova.)

      The folklore nature of Homer’s poems that were of exactly such formula style was proven, thus (over 90 percent of the Iliad text was comprised of such formulas – a staggering number, especially upon considering the refinement and intricacy of the Greek hexameter).[44] It is hard to expect that folklore tales would mirror some true historical reality.

      Moses Finley, a reputable historian, insisted on that point, too. In his book The World of Odysseus (1954), he affirmed that searching through Homer’s works for authentic testimonies concerning the Trojan War, its causes, outcome and even composition of coalitions is just the same as studying the history of Huns in the 5[[th]] century by the Song of Nibelungs or appealing to the Song about Rolland to reconstruct the course of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. Finley grounded his doubts on both the data for comparative philology and results of the economic history study of Homer’s society by means of the model proposed by French anthropologist Marcel Mauss.

      In his famous book The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss studied the mechanism of operation of traditional society’s economy based on the gratuitous expenditure principle. According to Mauss, archaic economy does not push advantages. At its bottom there is the potlatch (a holiday held to distribute all of the tribe’s property; however, another tribe receiving the gifts undertakes to make a greater and more generous potlatch. Thus, accumulated and spent wealth circulation starts, for the prestige of ones and enjoyment of others.[45]

      By reconstructing the system of exchange in the Hellenic world, Finley discovered that the socio-economical relations mirrored in Homer’s poems were close to those existing under eastern despotism and that they were absolutely untypical for the Mycenae society during the Trojan War period (13[[th]] and 12th centuries B.C.). The Iliad and the Odyssey somewhat restored the reality of the 10[[th]] and 9[[th]] centuries B.C. (i.e. the Dark Ages). On this basis, Finley directly stated that the Trojan War depicted by Homer should be razed from the history of the Greek Bronze Age.

      Moses

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