PEOPLE: Seeing ourselves in a very old text!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2024

In search of historic Troy: Was there ever some such city as the ancient walled fortress memorialized in The Iliad and remembered today as Troy?

Inquiring minds decided that they wanted to know. We assigned the youthful analysts this task.

They could have consulted the flight of birds, as people frequently do. Instead they conducted hours of dogged research. 

Eventually, they gifted us with this compilation of their findings:

Troy

Troy or Ilion was an ancient city located in present-day Hisarlik, Turkey. It is best known as the setting for the Greek myth of the Trojan War. The archaeological site is open to the public as a tourist destination, and was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.

Troy was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt during its 4000 years of occupation. As a result, the site is divided into nine archaeological layers, each corresponding to a city built on the ruins of the previous. Archaeologists refer to these layers using Roman numerals, Troy I being the earliest and Troy IX being the latest.

Troy was first settled around 3600 BC and grew into a small fortified city around 3000 BC (Troy I). Among the early layers, Troy II is notable for its wealth and imposing architecture. During the Late Bronze Age, Troy was called Wilusa and was a vassal of the Hittite Empire. The final layers (Troy VIII-IX) were Greek and Roman cities which served as tourist attractions and religious centers because of their link to mythic tradition.

The site was excavated by Heinrich Schliemann and Frank Calvert starting in 1871. Under the ruins of the classical city, they found the remains of numerous earlier settlements. Several of these layers resemble literary depictions of Troy, leading some scholars to conclude that there is a kernel of truth underlying the legends. Subsequent excavations by others have added to the modern understanding of the site, though the exact relationship between myth and reality remains unclear and there is no definitive evidence for a Greek attack on the city.

Four thousand years of human occupation! At times like these, we're visited by the soul of Carlotta Valdes. In Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, she seizes the soul of the Kim Novak character as that character and Scottie stand beneath a grove of California's redwood trees.

The trees are the world's oldest living things, she is told. As you can see in the screenplay, she's told that the trees have stood for two thousand years or more.

"What are you thinking?" she is then asked. 

"Of all the people who have been born, and have died, while the trees went on living," she says.

At any rate, there were nine successive versions of prehistoric and historical Troy, or so the analysts tell us. The Iliad would have recorded a siege of something like the seventh iteration. 

That Troy is portrayed in the following way in that ancient war poem:

Troy

[...]

The Iliad portrays Troy as the capital of a rich and powerful kingdom. In the poem, the city appears to be a major regional power capable of summoning numerous allies to defend it. 

The city itself is described as sitting on a steep hill, protected by enormous sloping stone walls, rectangular towers, and massive gates whose wooden doors can be bolted shut. According to Dares Phrygius, there were six such gates ...The city's streets are broad and well-planned. At the top of the hill is the Temple of Athena as well as King Priam's palace, an enormous structure with numerous rooms around an inner courtyard.

In the Iliad, the Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the Scamander river, where they beached their ships. The city itself stood on a hill across the plain of Scamander, where much of the fighting takes place. 

That was the Troy of the ancient war poem. The poem describes the conclusion of a ten-year siege which, like many contemporary journalistic events, most likely didn't occur.

Our question: Can we possibly see ourselves in that ancient poem? 

The Iliad records a lengthy siege of the city of Troy. Today, the redder portion of our nation is conducting a siege of the Biden White House, even as our own blue tribe is conducting a much more high-minded judicial siege of former president Trump.

For all our struggles, our blue tribe has slipped behind in a series of polls as we stage our own lengthy siege. Can we learn to see ourselves more clearly in the beautifully crafted episodes of the western world's first and greatest war poem?

In our view, we need to see ourselves more clearly! Can the episodes of this ancient poem help us accomplish this task?

Tomorrow, we'll explore that basic question in a bit more detail, For today, we'll only add this:

At least in the Robert Fagles translation, many of the Iliad's characters are extremely hard to distinguish from people like us who are living today—from contemporary people like us. 

Their concerns are our concerns, as the Mariel Hemingway character tells the Woody Allen character in the slightly peculiar 1970 film, Manhattan. 

In the end, are we all just a bunch of people? When we observe the characters in The Iliad, do their impulses and their reactions possibly seem to be a great deal like ours?

Tomorrow, we'll look at the headstrong conduct of Agamemnon, lord of men—the angry conduct which kickstarts the story of this poem right in its opening lines. Today, let's consider one small passage which comes from the poem's Book Nine, out of twenty-four books in all.

After ten years of struggle, the Achaeans (the Greeks) are losing ground in their attempt to sack Troy. Agamemnon, lord of men now suffers a virtual nervous breakdown. 

Nestor the seasoned charioteer leaps to his feet to rally the troops—to maintain unity in the ranks.

Nestor's speech to the headstrong young Diomedes is one of our favorite passages in all of literature (though in fairness, we aren't well-read). Two captains are then dispatched to make "the embassy to Achilles"—to the mighty warrior who is sulking in his tents and is refusing to fight.

Achilles is the greatest warrior in any of the armies assembled on either side of this siege. That said, his fury is vast, and it has already lasted through nine books of the lengthy poem. 

We'll focus on Odysseus here. To our eye and ear, we're seeing a contemporary person as Fagles offers these beautiful lines:

So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,
praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth
that they might bring the proud heart of Achilles
round with speed and ease.

For the record, several key moments in this poem occur "where the breakers crash and drag." 

In this moment, Odysseus is walking toward a council with Achilles, praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth—by inference, possibly trembling a bit—that his embassy to this mightiest warrior might be accomplished "with speed and ease."

We see our own modern selves in those beautifully rendered lines. That may simply reflect the choices of translator Fagles. Consider this question, though:

How many lawyers have walked into a meeting with Donald J. Trump praying hard that they might be able to bring the proud heart of Donald J. Trump around to their views—that they might even be able to win him over with something like speed and ease?

We don't want to trivialize our undertaking by drawing simplistic comparisons. That said, first cousins to many events from our modern political era appear in The Iliad's first few pages, and many behaviors of the poem's characters may seem familiar to those of us who have followed the events of our own political age.

Here within our own blue tribe, can we come to see ourselves somewhere in these beautifully crafted human stories? Within the European tradition, they're the first such stories ever recorded, and as such they can also be numbered among the simplest and most clearly rendered.

Can we blue tribe members see ourselves in such a way as to help us improve our game? Especially if we lose November's election, we'll need to enter a period in which we wonder how that consequential sacking could possibly have occurred.

Can we see ourselves in this ancient war poem? If so, can that act of recognition possibly be of some use?

People needing people, the famous singer said. Can we contemporary people see ourselves in the fictionalized stories of the ancient people who conducted, and who opposed, the eventual sacking of the towering walls of the somewhat historic Troy?

Tomorrow: Agamemnon, lord of men, and his angry rebuke of Achilles