5. The Trojan War
The Trojan War
There was a real war between the Greeks and the city-empire of Troy around 1200 BC. The archeologist Heinrich Schleiman discovered the remains of the famous lost city. His story is told in the historical fiction of Irving Wallace, The Greek Treasure. See also
www.allaboutturkey.com/troy.htm.
Another site that has many links and a good bibliography is
www.royalty.nu/legends/Troy.html.
The Iliad plunges in medias res, into the middle of the events, actually in the tenth and final year of the siege of Troy. The Odyssey tells the story of the long journey home of Odysseus (known to the Romans as Ulysses). Getting home proved to be more difficult than winning the war.
The events of the war and its mythical cause were known to the Greeks through oral tradition. Homer did not need to tell the whole story.
The Trojan Myth
The myth behind the war begins with the jealousy of three goddesses, Athena, goddess of wisdom; Artemis, associated with the moon; and Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The decide to have a beauty contest and choose the young Trojan prince Paris as their judge. Aphrodite bribes Paris to choose him by promising him the most beautiful woman on earth; so he chose the goddess of love. This is the famous “judgment of Paris” that ultimately led to the war.
The most beautiful woman was Helen (not originally of Troy), who happened to be the wife of a Greek king Menelaus. When Paris was a guest in the home of Menelaus and persuaded Helen to run away with him back to Troy. This was later referred to as the “rape of Helen,” rape meaning originally abduction, not forcible assault.
Hospitality was considered a sacred obligation in the ancient world. A host was to be gracious, to provide for his guest (legitimate) needs and to protect the guest. (See Genesis 19:1-8 for a biblical portrayal of the sacred obligation of a host, an episode that seems very strange to modern standards.)
The guest was obligated to honor and respect his host. Paris had violated this sacred trust and bond. Further, he had humiliated a great king and thereby all the Greeks. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon raise an army of Greek tribes to defend the honor of Greece by recapturing Helen.
So Helen became “the face that launched a thousand ships.” She also became the first woman in the story who serves as a trophy of the male honor code.
When the Greeks are ready to sail they languish on the beaches because the unfavorable winds will not allow them to sail; someone had offended Artemis by killing one of her sacred deer. She demanded the sacrifice of the daughter of king Agamemnon, he leader of the expedition. Clytemnestra, her mother, never forgave the king and murdered him on his return.
When the Greeks reflected later on the folly of war, they referred to the Trojan war as a war fought for one woman. They recognized that the causes of war were ultimately irrational but were also beyond the control of individuals. For this reason, attributing the ultimate causes of war to jealous gods and goddesses made some sense out of the madness of war.
The Stories
Another name for Troy was Ilion (Ilium in Latin); the name Iliad means “about Troy,” or the story of the Trojan war. The name was given later. If Homer gave a name to his epic, it would likely have been based on the first word “Wrath,” or “Rage” in Lombardo’s translation (following the ancient custom of naming works by their opening word or words). A fuller title might be “The Wrath of Achilles.”
As explained above, Homer did not need to tell the whole story of the Trojan war. He focuses primarily on the hero Achilles. Homer chooses individuals to mirror the larger story. The dispute between Paris and Menelaus is reflected in a dispute between the Greek king Agamemnon and his greatest warrior. Again a trophy woman and the male honor code is the source of the dispute.
You will see parallels between the character of Achilles and Gilgamesh. What will it take for Achilles to conquer his rage and become a member of the human community?
Like Gilgamesh, Achilles is the son of a goddess. At birth it was prophesied that he would have a choice of two destinies.
He could life a long and happy life and then be forgotten, or he could win lasting glory but die young.
To present his early death, his mother dipped him in the river Styx (the river of death), as a sort of immunization. But to the Greeks, even gods and goddesses cannot beat Fate. She held him by the heels as she dipped him in the river, leaving a dry spot that was unprotected. This is the origin of our term “Achilles’ heel.” Sure enough (in a story not retold by Homer), at the end of the war a stray arrow strikes him in the heel and causes his death.
The double prophecy and the dispute with Agamemnon are two motivations for Achilles in the early part of the story. What kind of glory would it be to die for a king who had dishonored him and deprived him of a brief source happiness in the meantime? The story also raises the theme of the quest for immortality and the meaning of life. What can an individual hope to accomplish if immortality is unattainable? What is the purpose and goal of our brief span of life?
