Homer's Achilles Heel

No epic has so thoroughly captured the imagination of men through the ages as blind Homer's tale of the siege and sack of Troy. Yet many classical scholars and archaeologists have long suspected that the Iliad and the Odyssey are far more laudable as poetry than as history. The latest skepticism about the poet's recounting of the Trojan War comes from a distinguished German classicist, Dr. Helmut Berve, who has spent most of his life studying ancient Greece. Disturbed by what he calls a "readiness to believe in the historical core behind all myths, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world," Berve argues in a current series of lectures that this great war of antiquity never took place at all.

A Dozen Troys. Berve, of course, does not deny that a city named Troy once existed. Yet he maintains that none of the archaeological findings to date even remotely supports anything like the Homeric account of Helen's abduction and the Greeks' revenge. To begin with, says Berve, there is the site of Troy itself. Shortly after the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann began digging into an 85-ft.-high mound called Hissarlik (Turkish for palace) in the northwestern corner of Turkey in 1870, he decided that he had unearthed the remnants of Priam's palace and the Trojan King's treasure.

Schliemann's hill was situated near two springs and a river, and he knew that Homer had written in the Iliad that, when the Greek warriors reached

Troy, they "came to the two fair-flowing springs, where two fountains rise that feed deep-eddying Skamandros." As it happens, Berve notes, Schliemann's excavations revealed not one Troy but a city that had been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt over a period of more than a thousand years.

By now archaeologists have identified at least a dozen different layers within Schliemann's hillside. None of these historic Troys, Berve savs, would in any way be familiar to the Iliad's readers, except that they overlooked a plain near the Aegean Sea. In fact, the layer that most closely coincides with the date suggested by Homeric scholars for the Trojan War (circa 1200 B.C.), and that is known as Trov VI to archaeologists, seems entirely improbable as the battle site. Berve gives two reasons: 1) the fortifications enclose an area where no more than a few hundred people could have lived, whereas Homer said Trov had 50,000 inhabitants, and 2) Troy VI apparently was destroyed not by attackers but by an earthquake.

Berve exposes even more serious Achilles heels in Homer's account. At the time of the war, Troy was a neighbor of the Hittite empire. Yet the Hittite royal archives, consisting of thousands of clay tablets discovered in central Turkey in 1907, make no mention of a major campaign against the city. More damning perhaps is the absence of any reference to the war in ancient tablets found within Greece and written in the recently deciphered Linear B script. Berve points out, moreover, that only a few hundred years after Homer, the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides were already Questioning his accuracy: their writings about Troy are studded with phrases like "as far as poets can be believed" and "there have been some exaggerations."

Like Arthurian Legends. Just as they do not accept the Arthurian legends or the Chanson de Roland as historic fact, many classicists agree with Berve's thesis that Homer's poems are far from literal truth. But few are quite so willing to reject Homer entirely. Simply because Troy seems to have been much smaller than Homer's description of it in the Iliad, says British Archaeologist James Mellaart, does not preclude the possibility that Homer may have patterned his story on an actual event. Because Homer wrote 400 years after the war, adds U.S. Archaeologist Rhys Carpenter, he probably could be forgiven lapses on particulars. Berve does not think that Homer should be treated so charitably as a historian, but he concedes that, while the Trojan War is probably the "figment of the poet's imagination," that should not detract from the literary value of Homer's epic. When he ends his lectures, Berve quotes Schiller's poem, "To My Friends":

Only fantasy has eternal youth. What happened nowhere and never Can never age.

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