In Search of the Trojan War (1985): Season 1, Episode 3 - The Singer of Tales - full transcript

In our search for the Trojan War,
we've constantly spoken of Homer.

Homer's epic poem, the "Iliad"
tells the tale of the war.

The "Iliad" is the beginning
of European literature

and yet it's still one of the widest-read books.

Here, Penguin books are running off
the 35th printing since 1952 of their translation.

That amounts to about a million copies
of just one version into English alone.

So if Homer were still around today,
he'd be a very wealthy man indeed.

The reason he's still read
is not because he's a classic

but because he's a great storyteller who uses
wonderful language, even in translation.

He gives us an image of a heroic age
which is so vividly realised

that, ever since, the audience have been unable
to resist the idea that it's true.



But is there any historical truth
behind Homer's tale of Troy?

Did that story go back, as so many
people would love to believe,

to a real event in the Bronze Age,
a historical Trojan War?

(CRASH OF THUNDER)

Homer has always been seen as the first
and greatest poet in Western culture.

But what connection, if any,
is there between the Greek Homer,

who may have composed
in the eighth century BC,

and the Mycenaean bards
of the 13th century BC

when the war is supposed to have taken place?

The tale of Troy has been told
for two and a half thousand years.

According to the legend, an armada
of 1,000 ships came from all over Greece

to try to recover the Greek -
or Achaean - queen, Helen,

who had eloped with Paris, prince of Troy.

The contingents gathered at Aulis
in central Greece.



There, their leader, Agamemnon,
sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia

to gain the gods' approval for the war.

After 10 years of siege, the city was destroyed.

Succeeding generations have seen the tale

as an archetypal image of the tragedy of war.

Homer's heroes fought with bronze weapons

but his portrayal of the common sufferings
of victors and vanquished is universal.

It came to mind to one man
even in the Western Desert.

General Sir John Hackett.

It's a story about the sort of people I know.

It doesn't matter where they are
or what their nationalities, what environment.

These are fighting people. They share a lot
of the characteristics of people I've known

in circumstances which to me
are not by any means unfamiliar.

Does this suggest to you that the facts of the
story of Troy as told by Homer are a mere story,

or could they actually reflect military reality?

Oh, I think so. I remember outside Mersa Matruh,

when there'd been a battle all day
and in the morning.

And in the short night there we were, and German
flares were going up practically all around us.

And we were eating a little, talking a little,

sleeping hardly at all and waiting for the morning.

Now, there's that story about
how the campfires of the Achaeans and Trojans,

like stars on a still night,
twinkled at each other out of the gloom

while the men around them waited
for the battle that would begin in the morning.

And I couldn't help asking myself

whether the thoughts and feelings
that were in these men's hearts and minds

were very different from those
that on that occasion outside Mersa Matruh

I knew were in our own.

Fire!

- Fire!
- Fire!

(WOOD) "A thousand fires burned in the plain

"and beside each one were 50 men
in the glare of the flames.

"So the Trojans stood to arms all night.

"Meanwhile, immortal panic,
companion of cold fear, gripped the Greeks

"as even their best men
were stricken with stark terror."

We begin with Troy itself.

Archaeologists have proved there was
an imposing citadel where Homer's tale says,

at the mouth of the Dardanelles.

A royal fortress with well-built gates and towers.

Finds of pottery show it had trading relations
with Agamemnon's Mycenae,

but that doesn't prove Homer's tale is true.

Is there anything in Homer's language
which can tell us whether his story

actually goes back 500 years before his day?

We'll start with a text,
the one we saw coming hot-foot off the press.

This is translated from modern, printed texts,

and they go back to this great book,
the original printed edition of Homer's "Iliad",

done in Florence in 1488.

What a wonderful piece of bookmaking it is.

The Greek scholars who constructed this text
used medieval manuscripts.

Behind those medieval manuscripts
lie Roman papyruses,

preserved in fragments in the sands of Egypt.

But this written tradition
only takes us back about as far as 550 BC.

In other words, 700 years after the Trojan War

and perhaps 200 years after Homer's own time.

There's a problem, then. Did Homer,
whoever he was, actually write this poem?

The opinion in Roman times was that he didn't,

that the poem had been preserved orally for
a long time before it was committed to writing.

If that's the case,
then this text that we know as a book

is actually the record of an oral performance
about two and a half millennia old!

The question was how to prove it.

The text of Homer contains features
that aren't explicable if it was written down.

Chief among them are the repetitions.

The text is full of repeated lines,
phrases and even whole chunks.

Among them one special feature
and that is what we call the formulas,

the descriptive tags or epithets
applied to the heroes.

"Swift-running Achilles",
"Hector of the bright helmet".

We can just make out one of them here.
"Theos Odysseus", "Brilliant Odysseus."

And just higher up here,
"Great-hearted Odysseus."

An even more interesting group of epithets
is applied by Homer to Troy,

which he calls "well-built", "finely-towered",
"beetling", "windy" and "bearing many horses".

Has Homer made up those descriptions
or do they go back before his time,

perhaps to before the end of the Bronze Age?

To answer that, we need to know
more about Homer himself.

Homer's identity, however,
is still a great mystery.

Modern experts cannot agree whether
he was one man, two, several, or even a woman.

The ancients believed that he was one man,

whose name, mysteriously,
means "the hostage".

They thought he was blind,

that he had lived just before 700 BC in Ionia -

what is now the western coast of Turkey.

Here Greeks had migrated in the Dark Age

which followed the collapse
of Mycenaean civilisation.

It was a new world which would see the birth
of Western science, medicine and philosophy.

If Homer existed, he worked
as a professional singer, a bard,

in royal and noble courts on these coasts.

His was an oral society on the verge of literacy.

The ancients assumed he had written his text.

Modern scholars think the "Iliad" was committed
to writing in the century after his death

but that Homer himself
was working in a fully oral tradition.

But what does that mean?

(MAN SPEAKS IN GAELIC)

Kilgalligan, on the Atlantic coast
of County Mayo, Ireland.

Here, the oral tradition has lingered on.

The last performer of epics
the length of the "Iliad" died only 40 years ago

but there are still storytellers reciting tales
of heroic deeds in heroic language.

They resemble Homer in their style of speech,
especially in the formulas or runs,

whose repeat passages,
like Homer's, are highly formalised.

The storyteller we have come to hear
cannot read or write and speaks only Gaelic.

His name is John Henry.

(JOHN TELLS STORY IN GAELIC)

For 10 summers, John's repertoire
has been recorded by Dr Seamus O'Cathain

of University College, Dublin.

John has not yet run out of stories.

You couldn't just break it down
for me in translation, line by line?

Is that a difficult thing for a storyteller to do?

It's very hard to do and very hard to translate.

A lot of the words don't mean
anything in particular. It's alliterative.

It's fully within the ancient tradition of runs.

Just to catch the flavour of it?

(THEY SPEAK IN GAELIC)

"They raise their sails..." Perhaps billowing
or bellying sails or something like that.

(IN GAELIC)

"Long threads or ropes to the tops of the masts."

(IN GAELIC)

"200 rowing...

"12 on the steering...

"Sand coming up and foam going down...

"Splish-splash..."

(JOHN RECITES IN GAELIC)

"Whales and seals swimming behind..."

(JOHN CONTINUES IN GAELIC)

In English, you might say
they set sail and they got there!

But it's more complicated than that!

(MICHAEL) What impelled him
to learn the stories?

John's the man to answer that.

(THEY CONVERSE IN GAELIC)

John says this was the attitude of mind
he always had.

He was greedy for stories.
And, of course, he got them.

(THEY CHATTER IN GAELIC)

Now no one in Kilgalligan
is learning the tales from John,

to pass them on, as he did.

His only audience is the tape recorder,

a sure sign that the tradition is nearing its end.

Now we have no need of such guardians
of the tradition.

Today we recall our lists
from a computer terminal,

not from the memory of a bard.

The idea of memorising 200 names on
an international flight would seem absurd to us.

To deliver a poem the length of the "Iliad"
is simply inconceivable.

But it is still possible to see such a performance.

To find it, we must travel far afield.

This is the barren landscape
of Turkish Armenia,

within sight of the Soviet border,

over 1,000 miles
from Homer's "wine-dark Aegean".

To these lands the Turks migrated
from the Asian steppe in the 11th century AD,

bringing their ancient traditions with them.

In the town of Kars, they still survive.

(HE SINGS IN TURKISH)

Like Homer, these men are professional bards.

They sing and play at weddings,
feasts and funerals.

They were brought up from childhood
in the tuition of a master.

This man, Seref Tasliova,
was given away at seven years

because even then
it was seen he had the bardic gift.

He is now a master.

His repertoire includes 100 tales
from the Turkish medieval "Epic of Koroghlu",

many of them over an hour long.

He's singing from "Koroghlu" now.

Here in Kars, the audience sat for three hours,
as long as we might sit in a cinema,

thrilled by the playing
and by the pathos of the singing.

Here it is still possible
to feel the spell worked by a bard

when he has an audience
who believe in his magic.

However distantly, Homer did something
like this two and a half thousand years ago

when he sang the tale of Troy.

But what does this tell us about
the way Homer's text has come down to us?

In Homer's "Odyssey", King Odysseus
praises the bard Demodocus

for his performance of the tale of Troy.

"You sing it," he says,
"as if you were there yourself

"or as if you spoke to someone who was."

In Ireland and Turkey we gained some idea
of how bards achieve that kind of effect.

The sort of formulas, for example,
that John Henry used in Mayo

show the mechanism of memory

and show how ancient elements
can be preserved within the formulas

and their rigid metrical patterns.

And in Turkey, the great length
of the "Koroghlu" epic

and its archaic medieval language,
shows how poems of this immense length

can be memorised and orally transmitted
by a single man, a professional.

Both the audiences in Ireland and in Turkey

view the tale teller as a professional,
a specialised occupation.

For Seref Tasliova in Kars,
it's his job, quite simply.

But we have to ask whether that tale
actually goes back to the Bronze Age.

Before we do, it's worth pointing out
there's nothing intrinsically unlikely

in the idea that the "Iliad" could go back
to an eye-witness account of a Bronze Age war.

In Dark Age medieval Europe,

Viking kings took their bards
with them on their campaigns

in order to sing old songs
and compose new ones about their deeds.

These were only written down centuries later.

If that could happen in one culture,
it could have happened in Mycenaean Greece.

But did it? Was there a Mycenaean
bardic poem about Troy

and how were the stories transmitted
over the 500 years before Homer?

Such questions are now at the centre
of the academic industry spawned by Homer.

At Cambridge, Dr John Chadwick,
an expert in Bronze Age Greek,

is especially interested in the problem
of the transmission of the tales before Homer.

I think they are transmitted by being taught

from one generation to the next.

In each generation there are people
who devote themselves

to learning these stories.

I don't think they transmit them
exactly and purely accurately.

They will improve upon the story in retelling it.

They may just forget what the original was

or they may quite consciously take two
different stories and combine them into one.

And that is the impression
which one gets from Homer,

except that, of course, in so doing
he has produced a masterpiece.

He has not just put together
separate, isolated poems.

He has transformed the whole

into a completely new poem.

But his sources no doubt consisted

of these transmitted, orally transmitted versions

of events in Mycenaean times.

And you would be prepared to accept
that they contained...

they also included the story
of a sack of a city called Troy?

I think it's very likely, yes.
There was a poem on the sack of Troy.

I think that the details
which Homer includes in this

very likely come from a number
of other sources as well.

But that there was something
which connected Troy with Mycenaean Greece

seems to me very likely indeed.

But what was that connection?

Why did Greek tradition
focus its most heroic legend

and an armada of 1,000 ships
on this tiny place?

Can we detect when Troy
became the centre of the tale

from clues in Homer's language itself?

The description of Troy in the "Iliad"

certainly suggests that bards of Homer's day
knew what the site of the city looked like.

Homer gives us a few interesting facts
about the general situation of Troy.

The first one is that it's windy, very windy.

I don't think that's just a stock phrase by a poet.

Anybody who's been here knows
the wind blows from the north 12 months a year.

In the days before moisturisers, what that
must have done for Helen's complexion,

your guess is as good as mine.

The windiness has added point
because the site was an exposed high one.

Homer tells us that it was "beetling, towering".

That may seem to be an exaggeration,

but you've got to remember
that the hill was much higher than it is today.

The level of the royal palace
would have been well above my head.

Its classical builders have cut the top away.
Schliemann pushed the side out.

You've got to imagine the hill being
much more compact and steep.

This was a tall headland exposed
to the blasts of wind from the north.

But that, doubtless,
was true in Homer's own day too.

Does Homer know what Troy looked like
in the Bronze Age?

Here, there has been
a dramatic new discovery.

Soil cores taken in the plain show
that at the time of the Trojan War,

the city stood above a great bay
which silted up during classical times.

This could be reflected in Homer's description
of sailing from the Dardanelles inside Ilios,

and when he tells of the wide bay
of the sea in front of Troy.

But that was still true in Homer's time.

Is there anything in his picture of the city itself

which could go back
to the time of the Trojan War?

Three of his phrases suggest the handing down
of a genuine bardic memory

of a late Bronze Age Troy.

First, Homer tells
of "the great or sacred tower of holy Ilios

"by the main gate of the city."

Here, Hector's wife Andromache
ran like a mad woman

because she had heard the Trojans were losing.

At the main gate of the city,
there was a tower enclosing an altar

and fronted by pedestals
for the idols of the Trojan gods.

Is Homer's "great tower of holy Ilios"

a genuine memory
of the gate tower of Bronze Age Troy?

Second, Homer says
that the Greeks almost broke into Troy

when three times the Greek hero Patroclus
tried to scale the slope of Troy's towering wall.

But three times Apollo battered him back.

The walls of the historical Troy
do have a distinctive angle

but in Homer's own time
they were buried in debris.

The last passage concerns the fine walls of Troy

which Homer says had been built
with the aid of the gods.

Here he gives us
an extraordinarily precise detail.

He says that at one point
in the circuit, on the western side,

there was one section of the wall
which had not been replaced

by those beautiful constructions
of Apollo and Poseidon,

that on the western side
there was a badly built weak wall,

and that was where the goddess Athena
told the Greeks to attack Troy.

And amazingly enough, when Wilhelm Dörpfeld
was excavating the circuit of Troy VI,

in 1893-4, he found that on the western side

there was one section of the old circuit
that had not been replaced.

Now, Homer cannot possibly have seen this.

He was composing 500 years on

when this whole section
was under mounds of debris.

That suggests that he is incorporating
a genuine bardic memory of this place

from the Bronze Age.

That raises the question,
is Homer talking about a real war?

Finds made by archaeologists show
that the bards had handed down to Homer

some genuine memories of Mycenaean warfare.

Homer accurately describes
what is clearly a Mycenaean helmet

sewn with rows of boars' tusks.

Though he lived in the Iron Age,

everywhere in the "Iliad" Homer assumes
that the weapons and armour are of bronze.

In describing their swords,

Homer sometimes uses the phrase
"silver-studded",

The memory and even the expression
could be Mycenaean.

The bards then did hand down to Homer
some genuine memories

of the heavily-armed Mycenaean warrior class,
Bronze Age knights in armour.

Historical artist Peter Connolly,
an expert in ancient weaponry,

has recreated the heroes of Troy

with the Mycenaean war gear
which might lie behind Homer's descriptions.

We do have a few fragments of armour

and some ideas coming from
central Europe and places like that

that give us some inkling
of what it may have been like.

There have been found
three scales like this at Troy.

If one looks at the holes along the side

one can see that they were stitched
to a fabric or leather garment underneath

and probably overlapping like this
to cover the stitching here

so it wouldn't get cut in the actual fighting.

The difficulty is to what extent
do the earlier cuirasses -

like this reconstruction of the Dendra armour -
have to the period we're talking about?

This is a particularly interesting armour
because Achilles had one weak spot,

the back of the lower leg or the Achilles' heel.

This covers you right the way
from the nose down to the knees,

with leg guards covering the front.

But if you turn it round...

...you can see the only part that is vulnerable
is the back of the lower leg.

Fantastic. What about the things
that Homer says about the heroes,

like Ajax's great shield
and the swords of the time?

It is possible that Ajax is an earlier legend.

The giant in his armour with this huge shield
may come from an earlier legend

which must put Hector on an earlier legend too
'cause he also has this huge shield.

As Homer says of Hector,

when he walked away from the duel with Ajax,

his shield tapped him on the heels and neck.

He wore it over his back
on a strap going round the neck.

As he walked it tapped his neck and heels.

The perfect example
is the most revolutionary of weapons.

This was an entirely new type of weapon,
a slashing weapon.

- This could cut off a man's arm.
- This is the pitiless bronze?

The weight is up here.
It's a lashing weapon like that.

This was introduced
around the period of the Trojan War?

We find a lot in central Europe
but they're coming into Greece about this time.

They were also developing this,

which is a mixture of the earlier
Mycenaean types for the handling.

Also has characteristics of this.

Again, it's very small, but it's a hacking weapon,
like a butcher's cleaver.

Imagine someone having his shoulder cut off!

The "Iliad", then, has many layers,
some even older than the Trojan War.

But some trace elements seem to go back
to a Mycenaean war poem.

So is it possible to say
whether that poem was about a specific war,

that is, a war fought by Greeks
in the plain of Troy?

At the Dardanelles, wars have been fought
from pre-history to our own times.

The irony was not lost on those Homer lovers

who died in sight of Troy in 1975.

"They say Achilles in the darkness stirred

"and Priam and his 50 sons wake, all amazed...

"...and hear the guns and shake for Troy again."

This is Cape Helles,
by the Dardanelles, opposite Troy.

Here stands the monument
to the 36,000 men of what was the British Empire

who died in 1915 in as futile a war
as Troy itself -

Gallipoli.

Round the monument are lists of regiments
drawn from every part of the Empire -

Assam, New Zealand, Ireland, Lancashire,

men who no doubt died as fearfully
as the heroes on the other shore.

Just imagine that all the written records
of our own civilisation

were destroyed
in some inconceivable catastrophe,

and that in three or four thousand years' time,

archaeologists came and uncovered
the foundations of this structure.

If they dug around it, they might come
across fragments of the lists of names

with a "Singh" from Burma, a "Joyce" from Dublin,
a "Wood" from Manchester.

But I wonder whether from those simple facts,
without any written record,

they could guess the story of Gallipoli,
the story of that fruitless venture

by an imperial power
which had once extended across the world,

coming to this windswept and forlorn spot.

The story of Gallipoli, if it had only survived
in legend, would never have been believed.

Yet it is a real war
and this is a real record of that war.

But what form would such a record
have taken in a prehistoric oral society?

And did the bards ever have
such a record for the Trojan War?

Amazingly enough, something like it
was preserved by Homer himself.

In the "Iliad" there is a strange list of 164 places.

Homer says these provided the troops
for the 1,000 ships which went to Troy.

It claims to be the actual roll call
of the Greek expedition -

"the catalogue of ships". But what is it?

An authentic Bronze Age war record
handed down by the bards?

Or a later fiction?

Geoffrey Kirk, formerly
Regius professor of Greek at Cambridge.

Many of the places mentioned
were known in the Mycenaean age

and ceased to be of any importance afterwards.

It's obviously based on perhaps a poem,
perhaps a prose listing

of the ships as they assembled
at Aulis to go over the Aegean to Troy.

(WOOD) Could you bear to let me hear some?

We have the Codex mori
open at the entry of Argos and Mycenae,

both of which are interesting.

(HE READS IN ANCIENT GREEK)

So then Diomedes,
good at the war cry, was leader.

And then it goes on to say that he...
"With them there came 80 black ships."

(CONTINUES IN GREEK)

I think myself that it's got a good deal
of Mycenaean content

but it also certainly has some Dark Age content.

Like everything in Homer,

it's a mixture of the very archaic, the Mycenaean,

contemporary with the Trojan War,

the views of Homer's own time
in the eighth century BC and shortly before,

and the whole period between the two.

- The problem is detecting which bit's which.
- Exactly.

And that, for Homer lovers,
is the $64,000 question!

There's only one way to find the answer.
Go and look.

Agamemnon's capital, Golden Mycenae.

Any bard worth his salt would have heard
of this and other major sites in the catalogue.

Their legends were famous.
Their cyclopean walls still stood.

But it is the obscure sites,
often forgotten in later times,

which offer us the hope of proving at least part
of the catalogue goes back to the Bronze Age.

The search takes you far off the beaten track.

Take the delightfully named
"Thisbe of the Many Pigeons",

which Homer says was one of 60 places
in central Greece

which sent their men to Troy in 50 black ships.

The only clues are the pigeons and the name.

There's still a Thisbe in Greece.

Like most of the catalogue sites,
it's not in the tourist guides.

It's best to ask the locals for guidance.

These could even be the descendants
of the men who went to Troy.

(HE SPEAKS IN GREEK)

The trouble is, there's so much
history to choose from,

the Bronze Age is not
what immediately springs to mind.

(DISCUSS IN GREEK)

That squared masonry is the classical city.

What we want is 1,000 years earlier.

There it is.

A Mycenaean tomb was plundered here
long ago. It's now part of local folklore.

On top, typical cyclopean walls
and a scatter of Mycenaean pottery.

Thisbe of the Many Pigeons was real enough.

One up to Homer.

Pity about the pigeons!

(WOMAN CALLS TO PIGEONS)

At Thisbe, I learned my first lesson.

"Never underestimate Homer. "

Dawn in the Evrotas estuary

on the south coast
of Menelaus' kingdom of Sparta.

Somewhere here, says the catalogue,
lay the seaward city of Helos

which sent men to Troy in the 60 ships
of the Spartan contingent.

The plain here is still called Helos,

but the search is complicated
by the fact that the sea has receded miles.

After the pigeons of Thisbe, however,

the Bronze Age past had started to come alive.

It's easy as you approach through
this flat country with reeds and marshes,

the bumpy road, the seabirds,

to imagine Paris himself,
perhaps, approaching it by sea.

This was the main Mycenaean port
of the Gulf of Helos.

You see this limestone cliff rising
above the plain about 70 or 80 feet,

what was in fact a low promontory
in Mycenaean times.

It's called Agios Stefanos.

There was a little city on that limestone bluff
under an impenetrable tangle of thorns.

But why here when there is nothing today?

An abandoned Bronze Age quarry
behind the site shows why.

Agios Stefanos was the export point
for this mottled green stone, found only here,

which was much coveted by Bronze Age kings.

It is the only possible site
for Homer's seaward city of Helos.

Homer's catalogue of ships says
that Agamemnon took troops to Troy

not only from mainland Greece,
but from many islands including Crete.

And in the 80 Cretan ships, there were men
from an obscure little place called Rhytion.

Here we have no clues, only the name,

perhaps partly preserved
in today's village name, Rotasi.

Here there is an unexcavated Acropolis-like hill

with a scatter of pottery sherds
going back deep into pre-history.

The locals must think I'm crazy!

I hope he doesn't ask where I'm going.
He won't believe a town in Homer!

(SPEAKS IN GREEK)

- Rhytion, Rhytion!
- Rhytion!

So Homer's world is still alive after all!

The search for Homer's catalogue
takes you to many such forgotten corners.

My journey led me to over 40.

Half of the 164 names
have so far been identified

and all those examined have shown
traces of Mycenaean occupation.

Most important, some were abandoned
after the fall of the Mycenaean world

and never lived in again until after Homer's day.

Proof that at least some of the catalogue
does go back to the Bronze Age.

Exactly why the catalogue was compiled
we may never know for sure.

But it remains possible
that it is connected with a real event.

That brings us back
to the first line of the catalogue,

Homer's "rocky Aulis".

This is where the legend
said the Greek armada assembled for Troy.

Here Agamemnon sacrificed
his daughter Iphigenia -

Iphianassa, as Homer calls her -
to get a fair wind.

Gave her to the goddess Artemis,
as was later believed,

where the classical sanctuary of Artemis stood.

Its ruins are visible today

in the shadow of an immense cement factory.

Over the railway, you enter
a strange deserted valley, barren and sinister.

Almost a taboo place.

Bronze Age Aulis looked
over the famous straits where the tides meet.

Here, it was said, the Greek fleet had anchored.

Above the little bay is a rocky acropolis

where the familiar broken sherds
of Mycenaean pottery have been found,

although all is now blanketed by concrete dust.

Mycenaean chamber tombs were found
down there when the concrete works was built.

There's also traces of Mycenaean settlement
around the sanctuary.

So this part of the catalogue
and the story does fit with archaeology.

And if the Greek chiefs did indeed meet here
in Mycenaean Aulis before they set sail,

then it may have been here
that they held their last night's celebrations,

although celebrations blood-dimmed
by the events which took place

down there in the sanctuary of Artemis.

On the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Homer is silent.

Later Greek tradition gives us the detail.

"In Aulis they waited, waited
while the winds brought costly delay.

"Hulls and cables rotting,
wasting away the flower of the Greeks.

"Then the army prophet came up with a solution.

"The winds could be changed
by an offering to the gods,

"the blood of a girl.

"Her prayers, her cries of 'Father',
her virgin youth counted for nothing.

"Her father prayed and told them
to hold her like a goat above the altar,

"to bind her mouth, to gag the sound
which might be a curse upon her royal house.

"Agamemnon brought himself
to sacrifice his daughter,

"to sponsor a war for a faithless woman."

Did it really happen?
The sacrifice sounds like a fairy tale.

When we know more about the Bronze Age,

we may be able to say whether, like so much
of Homer's story, it has a darker truth.

In conclusion, Homer stands
at the end of an oral tradition

which must take the story far back before him.

It took generations of bards to refine
the language in which he tells the tale.

And inextricably embedded in that language,

with its elaborate range of formulas,
is Troy itself.

It seems to me, then, there's very good reason
to think that the expedition against Troy

is the fundamental and central fact of the story

and must go back to the Bronze Age.

You can deny that the Trojan War ever took place

but then you have no historical
or archaeological peg

to explain the creation of a fictional tale of Troy,
centring on the hill called Hisarlik,

at any time in between the end
of the Bronze Age and Homer's own day.

And to me that is a fatal objection

to those who would deny
that the Trojan War ever took place.

An overgrown and deserted ruin

in a sparsely populated corner
of north-western Anatolia

is hardly likely to be picked out
as the scene of the Greeks' national epic

unless at some point it really had been
the focus of war-like deeds

so memorable that ever after
they were celebrated by the bards in song.

"Was it so hard, Achilles, so very hard to die?

"Thou knowest and I know not.

"So much the happier, I."