THE TROJAN WAR: A New History by Barry Strauss

Hutchinson £20

The study of the Trojan war attracts geniuses and nutcases in almost equal measure — not to mention more than its fair share of charlatans. For the rest of us, it’s hard to decide where brilliant inspiration stops and woeful delusion (or sharp practice) starts. The dividing line between “I have found the actual site of Homer’s epic conflict” and “I have found a few paltry foundations and a handful of arrowheads that I am hyping for all they are worth” is hard to fix.

The 19th-century controversy over the remains of Troy is a familiar one. Heinrich Schliemann, an obsessive, self-promoting sales-man-turned-archeologist, claimed to have unearthed Homer’s city at the mound of Hissarlik in western Turkey. William Gladstone was among the enthusiastic converts who gave Schliemann plenty of the 19th-century equivalent of air-time. Many others remained vociferously unconvinced, partly on the dubious grounds that Schliemann’s mound didn’t match up to Homer’s picture of a grand metropolis.

Schliemann’s reputation has not done too badly since. True, he is acknowledged to have been, if not a simple crook, then at least a good candidate for investigation by an archeological ethics committee. That marvellous “treasure of King Priam”, for example, in which he famously dressed up his young wife, was never the single hoard he claimed. He put it together from all kinds of sources (inside and maybe outside his excavations) to make that publicity shot. On the other hand, his identification has stuck. If the city of Troy is anywhere (and that’s a big if), most people agree that it’s at Schliemann’s Hissarlik.

More than a century later, arguments about the archeology of Troy have erupted again, though outside Germany they have hardly fired the popular imagination. Schliemann’s late-20th-century successor was Manfred Korfmann. Returning to the old excavations, he claimed to have found evidence for a large city of 10,000 inhabitants (reassuring for those 19th-century doubters), a hub of Bronze-Age trade, a real commercial metropolis. Hence the Trojan war could be seen as a prehistoric trade war.

The archeological world degenerated into fisticuffs, almost literally, over these claims. Korfmann was called the “von Däniken of archeology” (a slur that almost landed its maker in court) and accused of pandering to his commercial sponsor (for a long time, DaimlerChrysler), which wanted some spectacular results for its investment. Almost every single piece of evidence has been contested. The supposed defences of Korfmann’s Homeric city are, says the opposition, just water channels. Hissarlik was no thriving hub, but a backwater even by Bronze-Age standards.

But Korfmann (who died in 2005) does have academic followers, among them Barry Strauss, professor of history and classics at Cornell University. His The Trojan War uses Korfmann’s findings to offer a full-blown history (sic) of the war that was immortalised by Homer. Strauss is too scrupulous a scholar to pass over the archeological doubts. “A considerable minority of scholars reject a number of the Troia project’s conclusions,” he grudgingly concedes to those readers who penetrate his appendix on The Sources. But for most of the book, he not only takes for granted the Korfmann view of the city, but assumes the historical existence of the Trojan war roughly as Homer describes it, and of its main cast of characters: Achilles, Cassandra, Helen and the rest.

To be fair, he does sprinkle caveats through the text. “Some sceptics deny the veracity of the Trojan war”; “the reader should keep in mind that the existence [of Homer’s characters] is plausible but unproven.” But these make little difference to the thrust of the argument: that, if you piece together Homer’s text, the recent archeology and some assorted Near-Eastern Hittite tablets (which mention a place that may, or possibly may not, be “our” Troy), you can write a straight historical narrative of the Trojan, as of any other, ancient war.

In Strauss’s account, Helen was probably happy enough to elope with Paris, because Bronze-Age women got a better deal further east than under the restrictive conventions of Mycenaean Greece. When she arrived in Troy, she “is likely to have formally divorced Menelaus” (“Hittite law” or not, does he believe we can reconstruct Bronze-Age “formalities” on divorce?). His boldest move is to suggest that even the Trojan horse “might just be true”. It may not have been full of men (merely an empty decoy), but Hittite tablets suggest that guile was important in wars of the period. “Unconventional warfare, Bronze-Age style.”

With believers such as Strauss, entertaining as they are, it is hard to know how to present the obvious counterargument: isn’t fiction best left as that, and not turned into history? I ended the book feeling regretful that Homer himself wasn’t getting his fair share of publicity out of all this. “A military epic of the first order” (as one of the jacket puffs runs) is perhaps a better description of The Iliad than of Strauss’s The Trojan War.

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