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Troy: Truth and Fiction

Bill Eichenberger, in the Columbus Dispatch (May 9, 2004:

Let's get one thing straight: The Trojan horse is not mentioned in The Iliad and only alluded to in The Odyssey.

In fact, the bulk of the Trojan War -- which lasted 10 years -- isn't covered in Homer's epic poems.

Whether someone named Homer even wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey is open to debate.

So, in the upcoming film Troy, the words "based on" in reference to The Iliad are suspect.

"Loosely based on" or "barely based on" would be more fitting. (Homer does get a "writing credit," with the screenplay attributed to David Benioff.)

In any case, the movie -- classic or bomb? -- provides a good excuse to revisit Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, the Trojan War and Greek mythology.

The war took place, if it took place, roughly in 1250 B.C., half a century before Homer wrote The Iliad -- if he wrote it.

The Penguin Classics edition of The Iliad begins with a disclaimer: "The Greeks believed that The Iliad was composed by Homer. In our ignorance of the man, his life and his work, we are free to believe it or not. Received opinion dates him c. 700 B.C. and places him in Ionia."

The war was fought, according to Greek mythology, for the love of Helen, the world's most beautiful woman -- who was abducted by Paris of Troy from Menelaus, king of Sparta. (Whether Helen went willingly also is disputed.)

Agamemnon led the Greek forces; and Hector, the Trojan troops. Among the most famous warriors: Achilles and Odysseus.

The independent kings of Greece joined with Agamemnon and Menelaus and sailed to Troy, which they besieged. The war was eventually won by the Greeks, who sacked the city.

Historians have a more prosaic explanation for what caused the war: control of the Hellespont and trade in the region.

Which raises more questions: Did the city of Troy exist? Did a war occur?

The first excavator who searched for Troy -- thought to have been situated at the western entrance to the Hellespont in what has become northern Turkey -- was eccentric German businessman Heinrich Schliemann. He was followed by Wilhelm Dorpfeld, then Carl Blegen.

The three dug at the presumed site of Troy between 1870 and 1938.

Schliemann was so certain he had discovered Troy that he once exclaimed of a gold mask uncovered at the site, "I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon!"

According to the authors of The Lost World of the Aegean, "Scholars now agree that Homer's Iliad deals with real events, but, because it was handed down through generations of bards, the facts have been badly garbled and romanticized."

Whether Troy existed is the wrong question, said Bruce Heiden, an associate professor of Greek and Latin at Ohio State University.

"There may have been a real city called Troy," he said, "but, if so, its relationship to the Troy of The Iliad was something like the relationship between the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and the cartoon cathedral in Disney's Hunchback.

"The Iliad is a story about the past, but it's certainly not a believable story about the past in the sense that a historian would find it believable. Only a fool would go to Notre Dame and ask to see the bells that Quasimodo rang."

Would he describe the Schliemann search as quixotic?

"Quixotic isn't the right word," Heiden said. "Don Quixote looked at a real windmill and imagined adventures. But Schliemann took a fabulous story and imagined it was something you could find. He reduced the mythical to the parameters of the natural.

"Imagine if Schliemann had gone searching for Mount Olympus instead. You'd have said he was crazy."

Roman historian Herodotus also was skeptical of the Trojan War stories.

He insisted, for instance, that Helen (the "face that launched a thousand ships," according to Christopher Marlowe) couldn't have caused the conflict.

For starters, the Egyptians claimed they had banished Paris after demanding that he relinquish everything he had stolen from Sparta -- including his beautiful abductee.

Had "Helen been in Troy," Herodotus concluded, "she would certainly have been surrendered to the Greeks whether Paris liked it or not."

Isn't that just like a historian? Trying to make the impractical seem practical, he takes all the magic and majesty out of one of the greatest works of Western civilization.

"The Iliad and The Odyssey," Heiden said, "are mythical poems, absolutely fascinating and profound poems."

What about that horse?

"If you only read The Iliad," he said, "you'd never know there was a Trojan horse."

Some critics view the horse as a metaphor for earthquake damage, said Joseph Tebben, a professor of Greek and Latin on the Newark Campus of Ohio State University.

Poseidon, god of the sea and creator of horses, watched the war from a mountain, according to Homer.

"Those two images, of a violent cataclysm and of horses," Tebben sai