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.