Chapter 7 MYTH AND HISTORY

The Trojan war,which is half history,^[1]half legend,is the most celebrated story of the ancient world.Its fame was secured by the poet Homer in his great epic poem,the Iliad.^[2]By epic we mean that what is described is something that is larger than life,something that ordinary humans are not capable of doing or enduring.

From the 17th to the 19th centuries some scholars disputed whether there ever had been a place called Troy or a Trojan War.However,in the 1870s the German archaeologist,Heinrich Schliemann,excavated a site in northwestern Turkey which is generally now agreed to have been ancient Troy.^[3]That does not mean that Homer’s account of the Trojan war should be taken as historical fact — only that there was a city that was sacked some time between 1250 B.C.and 1150 B.C..Homer was writing in the 8th century B.C.,centuries after the war had taken place.

The origins of the war take place in the realm of mythology^[4]and are attributed to Zeus,although his motive is a mystery.At the marriage of Peleus and

Thetis,^[5]Eris,goddess of Discord,was not invited.Nonetheless she appeared and threw an apple into the room where the gods were gathered.On the apple were written the words“To the fairest,”i.e.to the most beautiful.This caused argument between the three goddesses Hera（Juno）,Athena（Minerva）and Aphrodite（Venus）.Hence the apple is called the Apple of Discord.

In order to resolve the dispute,Zeus sent the three goddesses with Hermes（Mercury）to Mount Ida,where Paris,son of King Priam of Troy,^[6]a mortal,would decide which goddess was the fairest.

When they reached Mount Ida,Hera offered Paris wealth and power,including all of Asia if he would choose her;Athena offered him wisdom and fame in war;but Aphrodite offered him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world,Helen.^[7]Paris chose Aphrodite.^[8]

Paris was already married.Even more unfortunately in the light of what happened next,so was Helen.Helen’s husband was King Menelaus of Sparta.^[9]Paris met Helen when he visited Sparta as the guest of King Menelaus.When Menelaus was called away to a funeral,Paris eloped with Helen.^[10]Not surprisingly,Menelaus was furious when he discovered how his guest had abused his hospitality.He told his brother,King Agamemnon,what had happened and together they decided to declare war on Troy in order to obtain the return of Helen to Menelaus.^[11]A coalition of all the Greeks was formed in order to achieve this.^[12]

If we view the war between Greece and Troy as an historical event,then it makes no more sense to say that the abduction of Helen was the cause of it than to say that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was the cause of the First World War.It would have been only the occasion rather than the cause of war between two great rival powers.After all,there are many occasions in Greek mythology when women were abducted without such grave consequences：for example,Theseus took Ariadne,and Jason,Medea.

Among the Greek forces were many of the greatest warriors of Greek mythology.Foremost among them was Achilles,who was the son of Peleus and the sea-goddess Thetis,and so,like many heroes,half mortal and half god.Hearing the prophecy that Achilles would die in war,his mother dipped him in the waters of the river Styx between earth and the Underworld in order to make him invulnerable.However,the heel by which she was holding him was not dipped in the water and so remained vulnerable,and he was eventually killed by an arrow that struck his heel.Hence the expression“Achilles heel,”meaning a person’s one weak point.

Having heard an oracle to the effect that her son would die if he fought against Troy,Achilles’ mother had sent him to the island of Skyros to be disguised as a girl at the court of king Lycomedes.But Agamemnon sent Greek leaders in search of him and Odysseus,himself a reluctant participant in the war,cleverly identified him by sounding a horn at which the other women fled but Achilles seized weaponry ready in defence.Achilles commanded the Myrmidons,warriors from his father’s native land in Thessaly to the north of Greece.Without their participation,the war would grind to a stalemate.

Achilles’ cousin Ajax was among those assembled.Enormous in stature and with a shield made of seven bulls’ hides,he was strongest in defence;almost uniquely among the Greeks he achieved all he did without assistance from the gods,and was proud to do so,fighting many a duel with the Trojan champion,Hector.There was also Patroclus,Achilles’ childhood companion and closest friend.And Palamedes,inventor of the game of dice,and the man who had exposed Odysseus’ attempt to feign madness so as to avoid serving in the war.His military skills incurred the jealousy of other leaders and he was to be the victim of deliberate wrongful accusation of treason by Odysseus,resulting in his judicial murder,in which Agamemnon was also complicit.^[13]There was also young Diomedes,king of Argos,favorite of Athena;apart from Herakles,he alone among the Greeks had fought and wounded two gods.^[14]

Agamemnon’s fleet was ready to sail but lay becalmed in the harbour.This was because Agamemnon had angered the goddess Artemis（Diana）by killing a hind in her sacred grove.She required that he sacrifice his daughter,Iphigenia,before the fleet could sail.In a terrible conflict between his love for his daughter and what he perceived to be his duty to his fellow Greek leaders,Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter.The heart-rending decision is the subject of Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Aulis,where Iphigenia is brought home on the pretext that she is to marry Achilles.Achilles,discovering that he has been thus used,was ready to disregard the wishes of the entire Greek army and come to Iphigenia’s defence.In the end it is Iphigenia herself who nobly persuades him to allow the sacrifice to proceed in the public interest.^[15]

The war did not go well for the Greeks.Troy was well fortified.Furthermore,after nine years’ fighting,there was a highly personal quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles over the spoil from the conquests they had made up to that point.Achilles’ fury was aroused because Agamemnon had stolen from him the daughter of a priest of Apollo.^[16]Considering himself to have been dishonoured,he retaliated by refusing to fight.The consequences were immediate.Led by Hector,the greatest warrior among the fifty sons of King Priam,^[17]the Trojans drove the Greeks back to their ships and began to set fire to them.^[18]

His closest friend,Patroclus,urged him to fight.When Achilles still refused,with his permission Patroclus took Achilles’ armour and went out to meet Hector in battle.In the ensuing duel,Hector killed Patroclus,and stripped him of his armour and put it on himself.

Achilles’ anger^[19]is a major theme in the Iliad,and the death of Patroclus elicited a full demonstration of it.He settled his quarrel with Agamemnon and went out to fight Hector.Hector’s father and mother（King Priam and Queen Hecuba）watched from the city walls as their son was killed by Achilles.Not only was Hector killed;his body was also gravely dishonoured.Achilles tied Hector’s body to his chariot and dragged it round the city walls three times.Then he took it away and would not allow it to be buried.Having killed Hector,Achilles arranged an elaborate funeral and funeral games for Patroclus and raised a great mound on the site of Patroclus’ pyre.The throats of twelve young Trojan prisoners were slit as they were sacrificed on the pyre and Hector’s body was dragged round the funeral mound three times at dawn for twelve days.^[20]

King Priam,deeply distressed by his son’s death and by the treatment of his son’s dead body,went secretly to Achilles’ tent by night,guided by the god Hermes in disguise.Kneeling before him,he begged for his son’s body.Achilles was moved.He released the body and there was a twelve-day truce in the war.^[21]

After the burial of Hector,reinforcements arrived for the Trojans in the form of an Amazon army led by Penthesilea,a daughter of Ares（Mars）,and a contingent under the huge Ethiopian,Memnon,the son of Priam’s half-brother.Penthesilea was soon killed by Achilles,who fell in love with her corpse and kept it by him in his tent.Memnon almost succeeded in burning the Greek armada of ships.The Greeks put forward Ajax to engage him in single combat,but Achilles intervened and killed Memnon himself.It was to be his last conquest.For soon afterwards he was killed by an arrow in his heel shot by Paris but guided by the god Apollo.^[22]After Achilles’ death,Ajax and Odysseus competed to receive his armour,which had been forged by Hephaistos（Vulcan）.When the armour was awarded to Odysseus,Ajax felt cheated,in his rage lost his mind,and committed suicide.

The Trojans,already by now much weakened,suffered a further blow when one of Priam’s fifty sons,Helenus,who was gifted with prophetic powers,was captured by Odysseus.Helenus revealed the remaining obstacles in the way of the fall of Troy.First,Achilles’ son,Neoptolemus,and Philoctetes,the bosom friend of Herakles,must be present with the Greek armies.Odysseus fetched them both,giving Neoptolemus his father’s armour,while Philoctetes brought with him the bow bequeathed him by Herakles.More challenging was that the Palladium,the wooden statue of Athena which had been in Troy since its foundation,must be stolen and taken away from the city.Dressed as beggars,Odysseus and Diomedes gained entry to the city by a sewer.By chance Odysseus met Helen of Troy herself,and she enabled them to steal the Palladium by betraying where it was kept.In order to claim all credit for the theft for himself,Odysseus attempted to murder Diomedes on their way back to the Greek camp but was forestalled when Diomedes caught sight of the shadow of his companion’s sword in the moonlight.Still,Diomedes held back from killing Odysseus,knowing that his rival was essential to the fall of Troy.The theft of the Palladium caused Trojan morale to sink to new depths.

The Greeks now resorted to a ruse suggested by Odysseus.They pretended to withdraw but retired only as far as the nearby island of Tenedos.And,with Athena’s help,they built a huge wooden horse,which they left outside the gates of Troy.Inside the huge horse were hidden Greek warriors.

Priam’s daughter,Cassandra,^[23]warned against the horse,claiming that it contained armed men.But Sinon,a Greek who pretended to have deserted to the Trojans,persuaded them that the horse was a gift from Athena and that they should take it into the city.^[24]He claimed that the Greeks,believing that Athena had turned against them because of the theft of the Palladium,had constructed the wooden horse to win back her favour;and that they had built it so large in order that the Trojans would not be able to take it inside the walls of Troy because,if they succeeded in doing so,the city could never be taken.The Trojan priest Laocoon cried out that the Greeks should never be trusted,even when bearing gifts;^[25]and he hurled a spear at the horse,causing the Greeks’ weapons within to resound.However,at this point two huge sea-serpents emerged and strangled first Laocoon’s sons and then Laocoon himself.^[26]Most of the Trojans interpreted this as a sure sign of the gods’ displeasure at Laocoon and so took the horse into the city,even destroying part of the city walls in order to do so.

When evening came and the Trojans were feasting and drinking,the Greeks emerged from the wooden horse and set fire to Troy,totally destroying it.Their compatriots returned from the island of Tenedos and participated in the sack of the city.Neoptolemus killed King Priam at the altar in his own courtyard.Odysseus and Menelaus searched for and found Helen.^[27]Menelaus made ready to kill his adulterous wife but his hand was stayed when she let slip her clothes,causing him to be consumed by lust.Odysseus then proceeded to throw Hector’s son from the battlements so that the son could never avenge his father’s death,while Neoptolemus claimed Hector’s widow Andromache^[28]as loot.Cassandra sought refuge in the temple of Athena,where she clung to the wooden image that replaced the stolen Palladium.She was delivered to Agamemnon as his prize.Hecuba was delivered to Odysseus as his.Prior to the fall of Troy,she had taken the precaution of placing her youngest son under the protection of the king of Thrace.But on hearing of the fall of Troy,the king had the boy murdered in order to ingratiate himself with Agamemnon.^[29]Polyxena was ritually sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles.The Trojan Women,a play by Euripides performed in 415 B.C.,describes that fate of these unfortunate women.^[30]

Among the Trojans,King Priam’s cousin,Aeneas,^[31]son of Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite,fought on until ordered by the gods to escape.Aeneas then rescued his elderly father and the Penates,^[32]carrying them on his shoulders out of the burning city.Agamemnon saw them fleeing and let them go on account of Aeneas’ piety,and possibly also because Aeneas had been one of only a few Trojan leaders to have urged the surrender of Helen and an end to the war.In the confusion Aeneas lost his wife,although his son escaped with him.The gods ordered him to make his way to Italy,where he would set in motion the events that led to the foundation of Rome.

After six years’ wanderings,^[33]he was shipwrecked at Carthage,^[34]where he met the queen,Dido.The two fell deeply in love.But the gods sent Hermes（Mercury）to remind Aeneas of his duty to continue his journey to Italy.Aeneas obeyed.Dido was so distraught with grief that she killed herself.^[35]

When he reached Italy,Aeneas married the daughter of King Latinus.On his death he was deified.The adjective often used to describe Aeneas is“pius”（Latin）or“pious”（English）,because of his devotion to duty and his reverence for the gods.

Pious is not the adjective that springs to mind when contemplating the Greek gods or the behavior of these ancient Greeks today.Rather,the story of the Trojan War is one in which both gods and men engage with great emotion and sometimes with a highly developed sense of honour in the senseless butchery of war.The extreme violence and cruelty,the dishonesty,the frequent absence of moral sensibilities,should nauseate us.The treatment of women,itself an inevitable offshoot of the culture of violence,bears the mark of a very primitive culture.And yet this mixture of myth and possible history has been read by generations as the ancient Greeks themselves described it,as something noble and glorious.We should read it more critically today.

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注释

[1]However,the Iliad is only one of the twelve epic narratives（of which ten are incomplete）which form an Epic Cycle providing a narrative of the entire war.

[2]The Iliad is 15,693 lines long.The poem covers only fifty days in the final year of the Trojan War.Its principal theme is the wrath of Achilles and his quarrel with Agamemnon.“Wrath”is the opening word of the poem.

[3]There was strong evidence of warfare having taken place at Layer VII of the excavation.Schliemann also believed he had found the grave of King Agamemnon — he is reputed to have said,“I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon”— but the gold masks which were his main evidence for this were later dated to the 16th century B.C.,three hundred years too early.

[4]The merging of myth and history is not unique to ancient Greece.King Arthur and the British resistance to Saxon invasion is another example.Similarly the myth of Romulus and Remus and the origins of Rome.

[5]According to some sources,Thetis was a sea nymph who was so beautiful that she was courted by Zeus.However,when,in order to obtain release from an eagle daily eating his liver,Prometheus revealed to Zeus the prophecy that the son of Thetis would be greater than Zeus himself,Zeus abandoned the idea of marrying her and decided that she should marry the mortal Peleus instead.The son of Peleus and Thetis was Achilles.

[6]Troy and Mount Ida are in the west of modern Turkey.（There is also a Mount Ida in Crete,not to be confused with this one.）

[7]It was about Helen that the playwright Marlowe（a contemporary of Shakespeare）wrote the famous lines：“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium?”[Ilium = Troy]Helen was the daughter of Zeus and Leda.Disguised as a swan,Zeus seduced Leda.Both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo painted the subject,but their paintings were subsequently destroyed,on grounds of indecency.Copies,however,survive.

[8]The Judgment of Paris was a favorite subject of artists from the time of the Renaissance.Lucas Cranach the Elder painted at least four versions in the early 16th century and Rubens painted at least three in the early 17th.

[9]Sparta was one of the city states in the south of Greece.

[10]Helen left behind her nine-year-old daughter,Hermione.

[11]King Priam of Troy refused to order his son to surrender Helen because Priam’s own sister,Hesione,had earlier been abducted by Telamon of Salamis.Priam had reluctantly refrained from initiating a war to obtain her return on the advice of his council.

[12]Because of her beauty,Helen had many suitors.At the prompting of Odysseus,they all swore to provide military assistance to the eventual successful candidate were she to be abducted after her marriage.

[13]Euripides wrote a play entitled Palamedes about this injustice.

[14]He fought and wounded both Ares and Aphrodite.He also fought and might have killed Priam’s cousin,Aeneas,had not Aeneas’ mother,the goddess Aphrodite,intervened to save her son.

[15]The story of Iphigenia was an extremely popular subject for 18th century operas,the most distinguished of which is by Gluck（1774）.

[16]It is hardly surprising therefore that in the Iliad Apollo intervenes in favour of the Trojans during the war.

[17]Nineteen of Priam’s sons were legitimate,by Hecuba.He also fathered fifty daughters.

[18]Achilles’ mother,Thetis,had begged Zeus to support her son in his quarrel with Agamemnon,and Zeus responded by allowing the Trojans to succeed,thereby proving that Achilles was indispensable to Greek victory.

[19]It is the word with which the poem begins.

[20]The greater part of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida（1602）is about the war up to the death of Hector.

[21]At this point the Iliad comes to an end.

[22]According to one version,Achilles wished to marry Priam’s daughter Polyxena.Priam consented to this on condition that the siege of Troy was raised.But Polyxena,seeking revenge for Achilles’s killing of her brother Troilus,son of Hecuba by the god Apollo,persuaded Achilles to reveal his vulnerability in his heel,thereby enabling Paris to kill him at the shrine of Apollo to which she had persuaded him to come barefoot.Ajax carried Achilles’s body back to the Greek lines,where it was cremated and the ashes mixed with those of Patroclus.

[23]Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba.Her beauty caused Apollo to grant her the gift of prophecy.However,when she did not return his love,Apollo placed a curse on her so that no one would ever believe her predictions.Today a“Cassandra”is shorthand for someone who correctly predicts a coming disaster but who is not believed.

[24]Sinon had been left behind in fetters by the Greeks when they withdrew.When he was found by the Trojans,he told them that his countrymen had wanted to sacrifice him in order to secure a favourable wind for their journey home,and that Odysseus wanted him silenced for fear that he would reveal the truth about the murder of Palamedes.

[25]Hence the famous line from the Roman poet Virgil in his epic poem the Aeneid：“et timeo Danaos dona ferentes”—“I fear the Greeks even when they come bearing gifts.”

[26]Laocoon’s fate was the inspiration for one of the greatest sculptures of the Roman world,Laocoon and His Sons.The marble dates from the 1st century B.C..The statue,which may have belonged to the emperor Nero at one stage,was unearthed in 1506 and acquired by Pope Julius II.It now stands in the Vatican museum in Rome.

[27]Paris having been killed by Philoctetes,Helen had married another of Priam’s sons,Deiphobus,who was brutally killed by Odysseus and Menelaus.

[28]The fate of Andromache inspired tragedies by Euripides in the early 420s B.C.and by the French playwright Racine in 1667.

[29]There are differing accounts of the fate of Hecuba.One tells that she was put to death for her remorseless and persistent accusations against the Greeks for their cruelty and breach of faith.Another recounts that she avenged herself against the king of Thrace by luring him to meet her with promises of secret treasures,then blinding him and killing both his sons.To escape the vengeance of the people of Thrace she then turned herself into a bitch and howled perpetually.Shakespeare mentions Hecuba in five of his plays,most notably in the soliloquy in Act Two of Hamlet.

[30]415 B.C.was during the Peloponnesian War,and the same year that the Athenians took the island of Melos and slaughtered its populace.The playwright was drawing a deliberate parallel.

[31]Aeneas was the son of Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite.

[32]The Penates were the household gods.When they reached Rome,they were placed in the temple of the goddess Vesta.

[33]The story of Aeneas’ journey was later told in the greatest of all Latin epic poems,the Aeneid,by the Roman poet,Virgil,in the first century A.D.

[34]Carthage is today in modern Tunisia.

[35]The story of Dido and Aeneas is the subject of the greatest English opera of the 17th century — Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell（1659–1695）.The most moving part of the opera is Dido’s lament,which she sings shortly before killing herself.