Troy and Homer
Joachim Latacz
Kevin Windle (translator)
342 pages including index
published in 2004
My first encounters with Troy, Homer and The Illiad came through one of those ubiquitous Time-Life books on Classical Greece and more memorably, through the serialisation of an adaptation of both the Illiad and the Odyssey in the Dutch Donald Duck weekly comic that ran in the early eighties. The story of how that Teutonic romantic Schliemann had found the remains of Troy and the city of Agamennon, Mycene where everybody had always thought these were just pleasant myths, was of course part of the mythology. The recieved wisdom at the time I first got to learn about all this was that though Schliemann had indeed found something where nobody had expected there to be anything, but that it would be wrong to think that this was indeed the Troy of Homer. The experts supposedly all agreed that at best, Homer had been inspired by half remembered stories of a golden age, that any attempt to answer the question of whether the Trojan War had “really happened” was pointless. That at least was the impression I got reading pop history books.
As Joachim Latacz makes clear in Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery that impression was wrong. It is not only possible to answer the question of whether Troy really had existed, whether the city Schliemann had discovered was the Troy of the Illiad and therefore whether this meant it too was based on historical fact, but these questions have been answered, and answered in the affirmative. The Troy Schliemann dug up was the Troy of legend, the Illiad is based on historical fact and there was in all likelyhood a Trojan War similar to the war Homer uses as the background to his epic poem.
As you’d expect from a German scholar, Latacz is very thorough in laying the foundations for these conclusions. He divides the problem into two parts. First, he attempts to establish the historical truth of Troy itself: was the city discovered at Hisarlik in Turkey really Troy and how can this be proved from historical sources other than Homer? The problem being that without independent confirmation, you can’t use the ruins at Hisarlik to prove that Homer was right, nor Homer to prove that these ruins were Troy. Fortunately, that independent confirmation exists, as Latacz shows, in the diplomatic texts found in Hititte archives. What’s more, not just the names of “Illios” and “Troy” as used by Homer can be traced back to historical records, so too can the names he used for Troy’s enemies, the Greeks. The conclusion Latacz therefore is able to reach is that the historical background to the Illiad was real.
The second problem he tackles goes into the opposite direction: given that this historical background to Homer’s poems existed, how much can we say about the historical truth of the Illiad itself? Was it still only just mythology inspired by ruins of a once great city still visible hundreds of years after its fall, visited by a particularly inventive bard? Or does it contain a kernel or more of historical truth transmitted through the ages until the time Homer put it to use, just when the reinvention of writing in Greece meant it was preserved in this form forever?
This is a question that for its answer depends on a lot of complicated, multidisciplinair historical research, hard to sum up in a book that’s intended as a synthesis accesible to a lay audience. Though Latacz does his best to illuminate this research with carefully chosen examples, you have to take a lot on trust as a reader, more so than in the first part of Troy and Homer. Despite this, the general outlines of how this question can be and is answered are made clear. Latacz starts with the discovery of the setting of Homer’s story, then looks back at the historical debate about the reality of the tale itself, before moving on to the new evidence having been discovered in the last two decades that ended the debate. He looks at the Tale of Troy as it can be found independent of Homer, as it can be found in other sources, at the question of when exactly the story was conceived and how it reached Homer, to reach the ultimate conclusion that there probably was a war over Troy.
It’s always difficult as a lay person to make up your mind about these sort of complicated questions based on having read just one book on the subject, no matter how convincing. I want to be convinced by Troy and Homer and am, if tentatively, but reserve the right to change my mind. Ultimately, as Trevor Bryce argued in The Trojans and their Neighbours, the question of how real the Homeric Troy was is an interesting question, but even a negative answer does not diminish the splendour of the historical city found at Hisarlik.