Homer, the Trojan War, and History

Author(s): Kurt A. Raaflaub

Source: The Classical World , May - Jun., 1998, Vol. 91, No. 5, The World of Troy (May
- Jun., 1998), pp. 386-403
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Classical Association
of the Atlantic States

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4352106

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386 KURT A. RAAFLAUB

TIME TABLE (ALL DATES B.C.E.)

Bronze Age

ca. 2200-1450 "Minoan" palace culture in Crete

ca. 1700 Beginning of Troy VI
ca. 1600-1200 "Mycenaean" palace culture in Greece
ca. 1280-1240 Destruction of Troy VI
ca. 1220-1180 Destruction of Troy VII
ca. 1225-1200 Widespread destruction of Mycenaean sites in
Greece
ca. 1200 End of Hittite empire; "sea peoples" repelled
from Egypt

"Dark Ages" (Early Iron Age)

ca. 1150 Final destruction of the citadel of Mycenae

ca. 1100-1000 Gradual invasion or infiltration of Dorians into
mainland Greece
ca. 1050-950 Migration of Ionian and other Greeks
to islands and west coast of Anatolia
ca. 1050-900 "Protogeometric Period"
ca. 900-750 "Geometric Period"

Archaic Period (ca. 800-480)

ca. 750-650 "Orientalizing Period"

ca. 750-660 Composition of the Iliad

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 HOMER, THE TROJAN WAR, AND HISTORY

In 1963 Carl Blegen, the excavator of Troy in 1932-38, made

the following statement (Blegen 1963.20):
It can no longer be doubted, when one surveys the state
of our knowledge today, that there really was an actual
historical Trojan War in which a coalition of Achaeans, or
Mycenaeans, under a king whose overlordship was recognised,
fought against the people of Troy and their allies....
The internal evidence of the Iliad itself . . . is sufficient,
even without the testimony of archaeology, to demonstrate
not only that the tradition of the expedition against Troy
must have a basis of historical fact, but furthermore that a
good many of the individual heroes . . . were drawn from
real personalities as they were observed by accompanying
minstrels at the time of the events in which they played
their parts.
This statement drew a fierce response from Moses Finley, au-
thor of The World of Odysseus:
Whatever "the state of our knowledge today" may be
one must insist that there is nothing in the archaeology of
Troy which gives the slightest warrant for any assertion of
that kind, let alone for writing "it can no longer be doubted."
Blegen and his colleagues may have settled . . . that Troy
VIla was destroyed by human violence. However, they have
found nothing, not a scrap, which points to an Achaean
coalition or to a "king whose overlordship was recognised"
or to Trojan allies; nothing which hints at who destroyed
Troy . . . It needs to be reasserted . . . that all statements
of the order of Professor Blegen's "the tradition of the ex-
pedition against Troy must have a basis of historical fact"
are acts of faith not binding on the historian [and] that
there is evidence which, though far from decisive, at present
weighs the balance the other way (Finley 1964.1).

Finley later revisited the issue and concluded: "Homer's Trojan

War . . . must be evicted from the History of the Greek Bronze Age"
(1977.177). Blegen's and Finley's views represent extreme positions in
a debate that was already old in the 1960s and continues to this day.
Finley's uncompromising stand attracted harsh polemics: a voice
from behind the iron curtain blasted it as an expression of "late
bourgeois cultural theory" and continued: "[o]nly modern hypercriti-
cism is capable of doubting the historical core of these events [the
war] . . . , although the stones speak out clearly!" (see Cobet 1983.39).
A British scholar suggested that critics of the Trojan War's historic-
ity "have not always been actuated by a pure spirit of scientific
enquiry" and, "Only by an uncommon perversity could one prefer"
to doubt this tradition, "unless one's choice were influenced by powerful
external factors" (Hooker 1979.5, 15). I suspect that some of Finley's
followers might have said this precisely of the other side!
387

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388 KURT A. RAAFLAUB

Less extreme views are, of course, not lacking. For example, at

the end of a broad and thorough study, Denys Page concludes:
It adds something to the appeal of Homeric poetry, to know
not only that its subject is historical, but also that its leading
people are, for the most part, real people, remembered and
idealized figures of men and women who played no small
part on the stage of history, living brilliantly and richly
on the verge of the darkest night that was ever to fall
over ancient Greece. It is nevertheless to be emphasized
that the Iliad in its present form is substantially the work
of poets who lived during the Dark Ages (Page 1959.258).

Whatever the preponderance of opinion today (see recently Giovannini

1995), the success of Michael Wood's television series and book In
Search of the Trojan War demonstrates that attempts to show that
Homer was right after all can count on a great deal of public enthu-
siasm. More than a century ago Schliemann went to Greece and Anatolia,
with Homer in his head and pocket, to prove that the epics were
about historical places and events-and his results were spectacular
beyond belief. He found Mycenae and Troy-but were these the Mycenae
and Troy described by Homer in his story of the Trojan War? And
what was the Trojan War-if there was one?
At a meeting in the early 1980s the great Hittite scholar Hans
Guterbock discussed some of the Hittite evidence that mentions names
of places, peoples, and kings reminiscent of those figuring in Homer's
Trojan War. Emily Vermeule, a lucid interpreter of the world and
art of Bronze Age Greece, thanked Giiterbock exuberantly, declaring
that his paper "has restored to us connections in history and archae-
ology that were needed, clicked the dislocated phases of east-west
exchange back into place, making sense of the archaeological scene
and giving us back parts of the poems in Homer" (1983.143, my
emphasis). Why such enthusiasm? Why is it important to believe
that at the base of Homer lies a tradition about an "actual and real
Trojan War" and that Homer describes the world of this Trojan War?
Why is this question so fascinating to scholars and amateurs alike?
In part, this is a sign of the remarkable appeal that great archaeo-
logical discoveries and mysteries have always had for scholars as
well as the broad public; in part, it shows the appeal of Homeric
epic with whose heroes young and old can identify even today. As
Robert Fagles' new translation of the Odyssey demonstrates, Homer
still makes headlines. Emily Vermeule writes (1964.x):
Homer is every Mycenaean scholar's passion. All the other
great ancient cultures have their quotable, instructive con-
temporary literature-Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites,
Canaanites, Egyptians. . . . From such texts in law, cult,
folktale, and historical narrative a far sounder, more lively
reconstruction of civilization can be made than for the
Mycenaeans unfairly deprived of Homer.
This reminds us that we are actually dealing with two problems.
One is the historicity of the Trojan War: an event. The other is the

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 HOMER, THE TROJAN WAR, AND HISTORY 389

historicity of what is often called "Homeric society." I have dis-

cussed the latter elsewhere (Raaflaub 1997, 1998). My topic here is
the event. I shall first summarize some of the evidence that might
encourage us to believe in the historicity of the Trojan War tradi-
tion, then present arguments that discourage us from doing so. As
will become clear, this is a complex, multifaceted problem.

II

Our question, then, is how-if at all-Homer's Iliad and the

ruins of Troy are connected. If they are, such a connection would
extend over five to seven centuries, depending on when we date the
Trojan War. This is a long time, though not necessarily unbridge-
able. For "Homer," the poet of the Iliad, stood at the end of a long
tradition of epic song. Some linguistic features of the extant epics
seem even to predate the language of the Mycenaean Linear B tab-
lets, and epic song may have originated at least as far back as the
mid-second millennium. From this perspective, Blegen's minstrel
witnessing the fall of Troy and immediately eternalizing it in song
is not as crazy as it may appear. To us, unfortunately, Homer is
nothing but a name; he may not even have been a real person. But
from all we can make out the poet or poets of the extant epics,
whom we call "Homer," performed in the late eighth or perhaps
early seventh century on the Aegean coast of Anatolia and the adja-
cent islands (see Latacz 1996.23-69). His epics are monumental
masterpieces of unique quality. Whether or not writing played a role
in their composition or immediate fixation, it is certain that down to
Homer's time epic song was oral poetry, composed iinperformance.
Such song probably was performed at festivaLs and, as the Odyssey
illustrates, at the men's feasts in the great halls of elite leaders.
Separated from Homer and the early archaic age by the destruc-
tion of the Bronze Age palace centers and the end of Mycenaean
civilization as well as the deep rupture of the so-called "Dark Ages,"
there lies Bronze Age Troy. As Manfred Korfmann and his team
have shown, it was located in an important place, the center of many
trade connections, and its harbor provided safe anchorage for those
ships that had to wait, sometimes for weeks on end, for favorable
winds to sail into the Hellespont and Black Sea. Archaeologically
speaking, the city's more than 4,000-year history comprises over forty
strata, overall more than twenty meters high. Many of these settle-
ments were violently destroyed by earthquake, fire or enemy, action.
No doubt, this city was involved in and destroyed by several wars.
To cite Manfred Korfmann:
Especially significant are the fortification systems of the
successive settlements with their battered walls interrupted
at intervals by bastions and gates. . . Where else north
of Tiryns and Mycenae does one encounter ruins of such
monumentality as early as the second half of the second
millennium? Such architecture must reflect not only the

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390 KURT A. RAAFLAUB

importance of the settlement itself, but a certain continu-

ous threat as well, felt by the inhabitants because of the
critical geographic location of the site. The wealth and
power of the settlement are attested over a long span of
time, most conspicuously in the fourteenth and thirteenth
centuries B.C. The conquest of such a city would have re-
paid the efforts of an invader many times over (Korfmann
1986.1).

There are two traditional candidates for Homeric Troy: Troy VIh,
destroyed in the first half of the thirteenth century, and Troy VIla,
destroyed in the second half of the thirteenth or early in the twelfth
century. Emily Vermeule has recently proposed a much earlier date
in the fifteenth century, others a later date around 1100. Whichever
we prefer, nothing identifies the destroyer; many still think that Troy
VI was brought down by earthquake and fire. Finds of Mycenaean
pottery attest to trade connections with the Mycenaean world. The
fact that the Trojans chose to copy in their wares a number of very
specific Mycenaean pottery shapes and did so as much as, or even
more than, any other site in Anatolia or the Levant perhaps indi-
cates, as Susan Allen suggests (1990), that such connections were
rather close.
This brings us to Mycenae and the great fortresses and palaces
in mainland Greece, with their elegant frescoes depicting (among
many other things) feasting and a bard with a lyre, and with their
centralized economy, with scribes registering on clay tablets storage
and deliveries of foodstuffs, raw materials, products, arms and ar-
mor, and chariots. Much evidence suggests that this was a society of
warriors. However, nothing that was found in these mainland Greek
palaces gives a clue to power relations and, despite widespread cul-
tural homogeneity, nothing allows us to decide whether or not Mycenae
was the capital of a ruler whose power reached far beyond the Argolid.
Conversely, many finds attest to far-reaching connections, by trade
and perhaps diplomacy, to Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt. Nothing
confirms political, as opposed to economic, relations with Troy, whether
friendly or hostile.
Written documents from Egypt and the Hittite capital in Boghazk6y
add exciting but tantalizing information. For the year 1437 B.C.E.
the annals of pharaoh Tuthmosis III list a precious gift he received
from the lord of Danaya. Another inscription, from a statue base in
the temple of Amenophis III (who ruled 1390-1352) mentions a
country, Danaya, with place names, including Mycenae, Thebes, Messene,
Nauplia, Kythera, Elis and probably Amyklai. If the list begins with
the capital, then we may have here evidence for the existence, in
the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, of a kingdom of Danaya, centered
in Mycenae and controlling large parts of mainland Greece. Homer
indiscrimately calls the Greeks Achaioi (Achaeans) and Danaoi. The
Egyptian evidence confirms that Danaoi was a term used already in
the Bronze Age.

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 HOMER, THE TROJAN WAR, AND HISTORY 391

Now the "Danuna from the islands in the middle of the sea"
appear also in the documents of Medinet Habu, commemorating Ramses
III's victory over a mixed mass of invaders, often called the "sea
peoples," early in the twelfth century. These same documents men-
tion a people named Ekwesh whom some scholars identify with the
Ahhiyawa we know from Hittite texts and who, in turn, may well be
the Achaioi/Achaeans of Homer. The Hittite texts, few, fragmentary,
and dated variously from the fifteenth to the thirteenth century, of-
fer fascinating glimpses into the world of diplomacy and wars between
the Hittites and some of their neighbors. The king of Ahhiyawa is
sometimes treated as equal with, sometimes as inferior to the Hittite
king; the nature of relations varies from friendly to hostile. A sherd
found in Boghazkoy perhaps even preserves a picture of an Ahhiyawa
warrior (Bittel 1976). The location of this kingdom is uncertain: west
of Anatolia, including islands and cities on the coast, especially
Milawanda-Miletus; a naval power with interests reaching as far as
Cyprus and relations to Assyria. Some scholars conclude that this
kingdom must have been close to Asia Minor, perhaps centered on
Rhodes, and thus different from that of the Danaya on the Peloponnese,
especially since the name Achaea/Achaeans is attested in Greece only
in post-Mycenaean times and then north of Mycenae and the Argolid.
Others, including Donald Easton and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier, think
that the evidence permits the identification of Ahhiyawa and Mycaenaeans
and that the Hittite documents illustrate the expansion of their sphere
of power across the Aegean to the coast of Anatolia. Recently re-
sumed excavations seem to confirm that Bronze Age Miletus was a
Mycenaean settlement (Niemeier 1997). If all this proves correct we
have here a perfect confirmation of Homer's identification of Achaeans
and Danaans, and it would seem "legitimate to use the Ahhiyawa texts
to illuminate Mycenaean involvement in West Anatolia" (Easton 1985.192).
Or, to cite Machteld Mellink (1983.141), "[f]rom the archaeological
point of view the hypothesis [that the Ahhiyawa are the Achaeans] is
workable and stimulating, as is the equation Millawanda = Miletos
and the tentative location of the Ahhiyawa king at Mycenae, the prin-
cipal Achaian dynastic center, also referred to by Amenophis III."
The Hittite documents mention other names: Wilusa/Wilusiya is
perhaps Ilion, and Taruisa may be Troy. We even hear of an Alaksandus-
Alexandros, ruler of Wilusa, a vassal of the Hittite king Muwatallis
in the early thirteenth century; we immediately think of Paris-Alexandros,
Priam's son, Helen's seducer and the cause of the Trojan War. Was
Alaksandus perhaps his ancestor? All this is terribly exciting, I readily
admit. New evidence, mentioned in Manfred Korfmann's contribu-
tion in this issue, helps clarify the picture further. But linguistic,
geographical, and chronological problems remain. To cite Donald Easton
again, "given the present state of Hittite geography all such identifi-
cations must be regarded as uncertain" (1985.192); especially, there
still are doubts about whether Wilusa could have been located as far
northwest as Troy. Moreover, if I am not mistaken, with one excep-

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392 KURT A. RAAFLAUB

tion the texts that prove Hittite involvement with Wilusa do not mention
the Ahliyawa, and those dealing with the latter say nothing of Wilusa.
The exception is a letter written by an unnamed Hittite king (per-
haps Hattusilis III, who ruled about 1255-1230) to an unnamed Great
King of Ahhiyawa. Although the text is slightly damaged, Hans Guter-
bock (1986.37) accepts the reading that the king of Ahhiyawa is
asked to remind a third person of the fact that they (the two kings)
had been "at odds over the matter of Wilusa. He persuaded me in
that matter and we made peace." Giiterbock concludes: this sentence
"may indicate that it was only a diplomatic confrontation, but the
possibility of actual war is not ruled out. Whatever event is meant
here, it would be very different from the Trojan War of tradition!"
What does all this amount to? There is archaeological and, if
the Ahhiyawa are the Achaeans, textual evidence for Greek presence
and involvement on the west coast of Bronze Age Asia Minor, for
conflicts and battles between Ahhiyawa and Hittites, and at least one
such conflict about Wilusa, but there is no certainty that Wilusa is
Troy and that the Hittite texts refer to "the" or even "a" Trojan
War. Finally, there are great difficulties in fitting the end dates of
Troy VIIa and even of Troy VI, both much debated and quite uncer-
tain, together with the dates of the Hittite documents. But it is not
hopeless. I cite Easton once again: "While so many uncertainties of
dating and of political geography remain, there can be no grounds
for claiming that the historicity of the Trojan War has been proved.
But-for those who wish to believe-faith is once again possible"
(1985.195; see now Starke 1997). Emily Vermeule explains eloquently
what this means (1986.85):
Now that . . . Guterbock and Mellink have taught us more
about the situation in Anatolia in the fifteenth century B.C.,
and the Achaians exploring the southern river valleys of
western Anatolia with chariots and infantry, engaging the
Hittite army with one hundred chariots, fighting duels with
their chief generals, and playing power games with the
Minoans of Crete who were established at sites like Miletos
. . .the possibility that the Trojan War was one of these
engagements with an Anatolian dynast in his walled castle
at the height of the early Mycenaean age must at least be
considered.

As Vermeule's and Guterbock's statements make clear, however,

the Trojan War thus attested would have been very different from the
war described by Homer. Let us not forget that among all the Trojan
allies Homer does not once mention Hittites-unless the Keteioi, the
people of Neoptolemos' victim Eurypylos, mentioned in the Odyssey
(11.521), really are the Hittites (Heubeck and Hoekstra 1989.108).
In addition, Homer mentions no Greeks on the coast of Asia Minor,
and in the Iliad Agamemnon as lord of Mycenae is the overall leader
because he brings most ships and most men to the war and because
the other leaders are personally obliged to follow him but not be-

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 HOMER, THE TROJAN WAR, AND HISTORY 393

cause he rules over a large kingdom on the Greek mainland or the

islands. In other words, the states of the Danaya and Ahhijawa do
not have a correspondence in Homer. If we say, then, that faith in
the historicity of the Trojan War is not excluded by the extant evi-
dence, we do not mean a Trojan War largely as described by Homer.
Blegen's statement, with which I began, is definitely not tenable.
What is possible is, much more modestly, that there was a war of
Greeks against Troy that resulted in the latter's destruction, what-
ever the causes, details, and exact dates.
This would apply to many types of wars, and, indeed, what some
scholars have proposed has little to do with Homer. I already cited
the scenario given by Manfred Korfmann: a wealthy city located at
an important trading post and a point where many ships were forced
to put in for long times; hence its wealth and situation were well
known and it was a logical target for raiding expeditions. Another
scholar suggests, more specifically, that there was a shortage of cop-
per in Greece, while Troy continued to have access to sources of
copper in the Black Sea area; given Troy's highly strategic location,
this provided all the ingredients for a large-scale conflict at the Darda-
nelles (Bloedow 1988). This thesis, of an ancient "world war" about
economic resources, has not been received favorably. According to a
different opinion, seen "in its consequences, the tale of Troy was
the story of a sack of a sanctuary which precipitated the anger of
the gods and caused the trespassers the grief they suffered in at-
tempting to reach home or found in the dangers which greeted their
arrival" (Holloway 1981.102-6, with 49-54 on Troy II as a rich
sanctuary). Yet another thesis views the Iliad "as the record of all
the Mycenaean adventures overseas, telescoping and combining memor-
able episodes in epic song" (M. Jameson, cited approvingly by Vermeule
1983.142). If so, the historical core of the Trojan War tradition is
reduced to a minimum-which, of course, is unobjectionable: the
tradition preserved in epic song and used by Homer certainly may
have retained some vague memories about a war or wars between
Greeks and Trojans. Even so, this means essentially that by Homer's
time the highly elaborate and dramatic epic songs probably had little
to do with historical reality; they were dramatic fictions.
Let me be absolutely clear: I consider it likely that there were
wars about Troy, probably many, even involving Achaeans and thus
Greeks. I also think it possible that some historical memories are
preserved in the Iliad, and that its descriptions perhaps retain many
more scattered memories from the Bronze Age: fighting with chari-
ots and bronze weapons, the scope of international relations, raiding
expeditions overseas, and so on. Sarah Morris (1989) has recently
made a beautiful attempt to relate the Minoan miniature frescoes found
on the island of Thera to similar experiences and to link them to an
ongoing tradition of epic song. But I also think it possible that, de-
spite this tradition, Bronze Age experiences and the Iliad may be almost
completely unrelated. Let me explain why this might be the case.

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394 KURT A. RAAFLAUB

III

To recapitulate, neither the archaeological evidence nor the con-

temporary documents tell us who destroyed Troy and why. The only
reason why Greeks should have been targeted as the culprits is the
Iliad. The main reason why the event is usually dated to the late
Bronze Age is the desire to reconcile destruction layers in Troy,
Homer's identification of Mycenaeans as destroyers, and the chrono-
logical calculations of ancient authorities. Herodotus dates the Trojan
War to about 1300, Eratosthenes, the third-century Alexandrian scholar,
precisely to 1183, and there are many other proposals, ranging from
910 to 1334. Although, amazingly, several of these calculations are
not more than one century off the mark (compared to modern dates
for the destruction of Troy VIh or VIla), unfortunately, upon close
inspection, they all turn out to be mere speculation, based mostly on
constructed king lists, both Greek and Near Eastern. As one eminent
scholar concludes (Burkert 1995.146),
The Greeks knew nothing about the dates [of the Trojan
War]. Serious genealogies led back to the . . . Ith/lOth
centuries. Beyond this there was a blank, in which the "he-
roes" as delineated in Homeric poetry could dwell at ease.
This would overlap somehow with what we call the end of
the Bronze Age. The precision of calculations should not
disguise the fact that they were nothing but guesses. ...
[T]hat one or the other figure should agree with the actual
destruction of Troy VI or VIla is . . . inescapable coinci-
dence.

But still there is Homer. Is it likely that he knew much about a

historical Trojan War in the Bronze Age because such knowledge
was transmitted with some precision over all those centuries? To
answer this question we have to look at the nature and tradition of
oral epic song and the characteristics of epic diction and composi-
tion in Greece and in other cultures.
Oral poetry is a craft, learned from childhood by singers who
grow up in a tradition that uses an elaborate system of formulae and
set pieces as well as mnemonic devices to recreate in performance
songs about memorable events and great individual exploits. Heroic
song used to be popular in many parts of the world. Comparative
analysis has revealed a surprising amount of shared characteristics.
Although the Homeric epics seem to be longer, more complex, more
carefully composed and integrated, and artistically more accomplished
than almost anything comparable, these epics too are the end pro-
duct of such an oral poetic tradition reaching perhaps back into the
Mycenaean period.
It has long been assumed that formulaic diction with its repeated
phrases and set pieces was inflexible and unadaptable, preserved from
a distant past by repetitive use of generations of singers. Hence it
seemed easy to believe that knowledge of events and social or po-

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 HOMER, THE TROJAN WAR, AND HISTORY 395

litical structures in the Mycenaean Age (such as the Trojan War or

the remarkable Catalogue of Ships in Book 2 of the Iliad, a veri-
table muster roll of the Achaean army), enshrined in fixed poetic
language, could be transmitted faithfully over centuries, eventually
to be shaped into Homer's great epic. This view is no longer ten-
able. Recent research has demonstrated, to the contrary, that all the
compositional units in the epic language are dynamic and flexible
and must have given the poet much freedom to expand, condense,
and vary any component of his story.
Moreover, except for very specific texts, such as king lists or
invocations recited at important ritual occasions when accuracy is
crucial and transmission must be precise, oral tradition normally does
not keep precise memories of persons and events beyond a limited
timespan of perhaps three generations. The past is not remembered
for its own sake but because it is meaningful to the present. Hence
oral tradition is highly adaptable; it constantly adjusts to changing
experiences and needs of the society involved. Equally, oral poetry,
thriving in an atmosphere of intense interaction between singer and
public, is successful as long as it is meaningful and attractive to the
audience. Entertainment value is essential, but so is the potential for
the audience's identification with the song's content. Hence oral poetry
prefers to focus on typical conflict situations and ethical dilemmas.
Under these conditions, the content of epic song tends to adapt to
changing conditions rather rapidly. Nothing is protected from such
change. On the one hand, the backbone of facts, the outline of the
epic story, itself constantly changes and develops. On the other hand,
the facts or events the singer (or his audience) chooses to perform,
are in each performance elaborated into a new full narrative with
detailed description of background, scenes, actions, and individual
items. Taking advantage of the flexible composition technique of
oral epic, each poet and each generation create a new song and with
it a new picture of the past with a story that uses old elements but
is meaningful to the present, using as filling or background material
conditions familiar to the audience and corresponding to its chang-
ing needs and expectations.
Epics in other cultures, where we do have independent histori-
cal information about the events in question, reveal how massive the
distortion can be, even over a short period of time. A case in point
is the Song of Roland. As we learn from contemporary chronicles, in
778, returning from a campaign in Muslim Spain, the rear of
Charlemagne's army was ambushed and massacred at Roncevaux in
the Pyrenees by the Basques, who were Christians. Count Roland,
one of the victims, soon became the subject of a heroic tradition
that spread all over Europe, and, as Finley puts it (1964.2),
a champion of Christendom against the infidel, a completely
unhistorical role. . . [Already in the earliest extant ver-
sion, dated about 350 years after the event,] the ambush at
Roncevaux had become an heroic battle of the paladins of

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396 KURT A. RAAFLAUB

Charlemagne against a Saracen host of 400,000 led by twelve

chieftains, some of whom had Germanic or Byzantine names.
The courtly atmosphere of the poem is not that of Charlemagne
but rather that of the First Crusade, whereas the political
geography fits neither period but the tenth century. In sum
the poem seems to have retained precisely three historical
facts about Roncevaux: . . . that Charlemagne led an ex-
pedition into Spain, that the expedition ended in disaster
and that one of the victims was named Roland.
The distortion of history in the German Nibelungenlied is even
more drastic. Similar examples can be cited from former Yugoslavia
and, very instructively, from post-World War II Crete, where a fa-
mous episode, the abduction of the commander of the German forces
by Cretan guerillas and two British officers, was mythologized in
heroic song only nine years later.
The Nibelungenlied shows us another trait typical of oral epic:
its ability to combine into one narrative figures that were actually
separated geographically and chronologically and have nothing to do
with each other or with the events "narrated." In this case, the epic
weaves together Attila the Hun, who died in 453, Theoderic, the
king of the Ostrogoths whose rule began forty years later, and a
bishop of Passau in Germany who lived 400 years later. The Iliad
reveals a similar pattern: at least some of the figures and fights it
describes originated in local stories scattered throughout the Hel-
lenic world and originally unconnected with Troy. For example, the
duel between the Lycian Sarpedon and the Rhodian Tlepolemos in
Iliad 5 reflects a local story concerning attempts of Rhodians to set
foot in Lycia (in southwestern Anatolia). The fight of the Cretan
Idomeneus against Phaistos (a telling name, eponymous of the Cretan
city Phaistos) obviously comes from a Cretan legend. Hector turns
out to be fighting mostly against opponents from central Greece and
Thessaly; a tomb of Hector was shown in Thebes; hence it is likely
that these fights originally figured in central Greek traditions and
Hector was located there long before he became the leader of the
Trojans. In short, heroic epic functions as a magnet for myths and
tales and has an almost unlimited ability to integrate and adapt originally
separate stories.
Let me add two more observations. First, the discovery that the
Mycenaean Linear B tablets contain a number of names familiar from
the epics was initally welcomed as proof that the epics had retained
the memory of historical personalities. This is possible but not nec-
essary. Several of these names are attested in parts of the Greek
world as old divinities; for example, Helen is a tree goddess on
Rhodes and has a connection with vegetation cults in Laconia and
the Argolid. Like Menelaos, she also had a hero cult in Sparta from
the archaic period. Her human role in the Iliad thus probably is the
result of a transformation: an ancient goddess of fertility became, in
the epic tradition, a mortal counterpart to Aphrodite, fully human
but still endowed with considerable magic powers.

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 HOMER, THE TROJAN WAR, AND HISTORY 397

Second, representations of sieges and battles on Mycenaean arti-

facts have encouraged scholars to interpret the prominence of such
themes in the extant epics as reminiscences of Bronze Age condi-
tions. Again, this is possible, but the same themes were familiar to
eighth-century lonians from actual experience (Gauer 1996) and ex-
tremely popular in the Near East at the time of Homer. We know
that just about then a massive movement of cultural interaction be-
tween the ancient Near East and Greece began (hence we talk of the
"Orientalizing Period"), that the Greeks borrowed generously from
their eastern and southern neighbors in all spheres of life, and that
Homer's epics show many traces of such eastern influences (West
1997). For example, a plausible case has been made recently that
the motif of the destruction of the Achaean camp at Troy by divert-
ing the rivers and flooding the plain (which happened by divine
intervention after the war but is announced twice in the Iliad) was
prompted by reports of the conquest of Babylon by the Assyrian
king Sennacherib in 689 B.C.E. who diverted the Euphrates against
the city's mudbrick walls (West 1995). Similarly, the motif of the
Trojan horse may well be based on knowledge of siege machines on
wheels, as we see them on Assyrian reliefs of the ninth to seventh
centuries (S. Morris 1995). Not very romantic, I'm afraid.
Let us return to the question of long-term oral epic traditions and
assume for a moment that a large-scale war about Troy in the fif-
teenth century (the time preferred by Emily Vermeule) soon became
the subject of heroic song and that such song was performed regularly
at the courts of the Mycenaean nobility. Already during these two or
three centuries the story would probably have undergone considerable
elaboration and transformation. The crucial question is, what happened
to it after the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces and kingdoms?
For a while it might have survived, now representing a nostalgic memory
of great times that were quickly receding into a remote past. The
world was changing rapidly, however; the elite, whatever its nature,
was no longer that of the Mycenaean palaces, and relations to the
outside world, though never completely interrupted, were much more
limited and in most places local and regional rather than international
or "intercontinental." In short, soon conditions became so different
that such ancient songs had no relation anymore to the world in which
singers and their audiences were living. Mycenologist John Bennet
thinks that for tenth- to eighth-century Greeks the disjunction caused
by the collapse of the Mycenaean palace societies and the subsequent
period of instability was an unbridgeable gap; in all essential respects,
the Bronze Age simply was inaccessible to them (1997). Hence bards
entertaining the chieftains and their men in the apsidal houses found
in some villages of the "protogeometric period" more likely sang about
heroic exploits in local wars and raids than about great and complex
wars in a distant past and in distant lands. The earlier songs conse-
quently would be forgotten or adapted to the new realities and thus
transformed beyond recognition.

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 398 KURT A. RAAFLAUB

Then, in the ninth and eighth centuries, the world changed again;
the horizon widened, the population increased, the economy improved,
and new social and political structures emerged, including the city-
states, predominant in the archaic and classical periods, and panhellenism,
a belief in common traits, values, and customs shared by most Hellenes
and visible in the emergence of great "panhellenic" sanctuaries, fes-
tivals, and games, in the nature of poetry, and in the society's outlook.
Again, epic song would adjust to such changes, and new concerns
and interests would continue to prompt the transformation of tradi-
tional themes and the integration of new ones. Hence what we should
expect to find in the extant epics are stories and conditions that,
perhaps not immediately, but fairly closely reflect the outlook and
circumstances of the poet's own society. We are not surprised, therefore,
to see that the poet has Achilles, Agamemnon, and Odysseus live
and act in a world of city-states and the Achaeans undertake a panhellenic
expedition to Troy.
Similar tendencies are attested widely in oral epic poetry that is
or was still alive in our own century. Recall that in the Odyssey we
learn that people always want to hear the latest song (1.350-52) and
the bard is praised for describing the events "as if you had been
there yourself or heard it from one who was" (8.488-92). The Tro-
jan War and the sad returns of the leading Achaeans, recent events,
have become subjects of fame and song. In the Iliad (books 9 and
11) old Phoenix and old Nestor tell stories about "old" events that,
however, lie back only one generation and deal with heroics in raids
for booty and wars between neighboring cities, that is, in wars of a
type which would have corresponded precisely to the experience of
an eighth-century poet's audience.
In fact, even the fortified Achaean camp on the beach resembles
a typical city, although an improvised and temporary one, without
wives and children. Hence the description of the Trojan War-a war
between two cities at opposite ends of a large plain, a war that re-
sulted from and is combined with raids for booty, and a war that is
motivated largely by considerations of status, revenge, and personal
obligations-fits a pattern typical of the eighth century. The same could
be said more generally of "Homeric Society" (Raaflaub 1997, 1998).

IV

What results, then, from our brief discussion of the nature of oral
epic is that, even if the poetic technique of heroic song and the mythical
traditions which Homer used to create his large and complex poems
had existed for generations if not centuries, even if they originated in
the Bronze Age, a thousand years before Homer, the extant epics may
have little, if anything, to do with events and conditions in the Bronze
Age. Let me introduce here yet another line of research which is broadly
comparative and concerned with mythopoesis (the way myths are formed),
with historical memory and historical consciousness. It suggests that

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 HOMER, THE TROJAN WAR, AND HISTORY 399

the stories themselves, like their elaboration and social background

and the historical dimension in which they were couched, may be
much younger than is usually believed (see Patzek 1992). Although
this is not my own field of expertise, the insights offered by these
perspectives are relevant to our present question; hence I shall present,
with due caution and probably in vastly over-simplified terms, a few
of the pertinent arguments. I emphasize two points.
First, collective memory, especially in early societies without museums
and historiography, is neither comprehensive nor automatic. It is in-
terested in the past, however great it may have been, not for its own
sake but only insofar as this past is relevant to the present. The past
therefore is never fixed; it is constantly re-shaped and re-interpreted.
Events that have receded beyond the period of direct memory (span-
ning about three generations) and entered the "mythical" sphere are
likely to bear little resemblance to their historical origins.
Nor is historical consciousness automatic. By historical conscious-
ness I mean that a society is collectively aware of the existence of a
long-term historical dimension and that this dimension is relevant to
society and culture; such historical consciousness goes far beyond
the awareness of a short-term past that is tied to memories of the
individual and his immediate ancestors. It emerges only at relatively
advanced stages of social development, requires a strong sense of
community, and serves to further integrate the community. Its rele-
vance, again, is tied to the meaning of the past for the present.
Furthermore, myths and oral traditions are important to society
because they help explain and legitimize present conditions. They can
transmit historical memories; they can also be constructs that are retrojected
into the past without having any grounding in the past. Especially in
societies that have developed historical consciousness, such "traditions"
or myths can be provoked by remarkable historical objects, monu-
ments, or ruins. For example, the "myth" of a war between Trojans
and Greeks led by the king of Mycenae could have been prompted
simply by the fact that Troy and Mycenae were the most famous
monumental ruins existing in Dark Age and archaic Greece.
Now a society which has developed historical consciousness will
not be able to retrieve memories that were lost in previous genera-
tions that lacked such consciousness. In other words, unless the memory
of certain events or conditions of a distant past remains constantly
and essentially important to all successive generations, it will be
lost. Hence if a society, having developed historical consciousness
after an interval without such consciousness, boasts a rich array of
myths dealing with events of a distant past, such myths are likely to
reflect historicizing fiction rather than genuine historical memories.
At the end of the Bronze Age the Greek world experienced deep and
widespread ruptures; conditions during most of the Dark Ages were
hardly favorable to fostering historical consciousness. In mostly small
and scattered villages, myths, traditions, and songs must have been
concerned not with an increasingly remote past, however memorable

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400 KURT A. RAAFLAUB

it once was, but with the exigencies of survival and the challenges
or excitement of competitive relations in a small world.
Moreover, to the archaic Greek city-states the centuries after
the end of the Bronze Age, not the Bronze Age itself, were the
formative period. Similarly, the core of the German heroic sagas
seems to have been formed soon after the end of the tribes' migra-
tions and settlement. It is possible, therefore, that the great Greek
myth cycles emerged during the Dark Ages, after the convulsions at
the end of the Bronze Age and the so-called Dorian and Ionian mi-
grations. Their attachment to the great Bronze Age ruins thus would
again appear artificial, not necessarily reflecting a historical connec-
tion. In addition, as we noted before, heroic sagas are virtual magnets
of myths: they tend to incorporate migrating stories, materials con-
nected with etiologies and rituals, and local legends. All this is well
visible in the Homeric epics as well. Conceivably, therefore, the mythical
material of which they are composed emerged in the timespan of
only two or three centuries before Homer and was combined to form
the outline of a grand war story centering on the site of Troy not
too long before Homer himself.
The second point concerns heroic traditions-that is, traditions
which explicitly refer to great deeds and events in a distant age of
heroes. They are often built around a core of historic persons and
events. These, however, are grouped together and interpreted in completely
unhistorical ways. What triggers heroic song is not interest in his-
tory per se but in human conflicts and drama: situations that are
generally valid, though heroically exaggerated, and with which the
audience can identify. The historical facts are incidental; the human
deeds, decisions, and concerns are primary. This suggests that the
extant epics should be understood as historical documents of the
time in which they were created, informing us not least of the audi-
ences' concerns.
It is significant, therefore, that several new phenomena docu-
ment the emergence of historical consciousness precisely at the end
of the late Dark Ages, among them hero cults at sites of earlier
burials, and sanctuaries connected with ancient sites and objects. The
creation of a heroic age, dramatized in the Homeric epics and con-
ceptualized in Hesiod's Theogony, fits well into this context. It is no
less significant that some of the seemingly oldest objects in the Iliad
occur in parts of the poem that have always been recognized as
showing especially "young" or "modern" linguistic features. The fa-
mous boar's tusk helmet is described in such a section (book 10, the
"Doloneia") and, according to a recent study of the technique of
epic verse making, the catalogue of ships, often thought to be of
Mycenaean origin, is a product of the eighth century and shows an
eighth-century outlook throughout. Such examples betray a conscious
historicizing or antiquarian intent. Possibly, therefore, many other
seemingly old elements in the cultural and social picture are the
result of deliberate archaizing rather than genuine survivals of early
traditions embedded in an old formulaic language.

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 HOMER, THE TROJAN WAR, AND HISTORY 401

Finally, the focus of heroic epic on problems of general human

interest helps explain its spreading over wide areas and assuming
supra-local or supra-regional significance. In the case of Greek epic,
this focus is responsible for its panhellenic appeal which, however,
requires a corresponding perspective in the culture producing the
epic a perspective which, in all likelihood, was lacking earlier in
the Dark Ages. Both Greek epics betray a wide horizon and world
view. In the Iliad, a joint venture of a panhellenic army opposes the
combined forces of the eastern non-Hellenic world, while the Odys-
sey elaborates a homecoming story in a broad Mediterranean context.
The latter seems typical of the age of colonization beginning in the
eighth century (which has left specific traces especially in the Cy-
clops and Phaeacian stories). The conception underlying the Iliad
clearly is tied to other panhellenic and supra-regional phenomena
emerging in the eighth century, when the Greek pantheon was ho-
mogenized and Greeks from many cities began to collaborate in religious
federations and participate in large-scale joint ventures, such as fes-
tivals and games at great sanctuaries. Conceivably, therefore, the grand
idea underlying the elaborated Trojan War myth-a war waged by a
coalition of leaders and contingents from all over the Greek world
against a coalition of peoples from all over the eastern world-is
itself the product of the panhellenic worldview of elite society in or
shortly before Homer's time, artificially connected with an especially
suitable site and retrojected into the heroic age. Homer then elabo-
rated and reshaped this story in a highly refined and dramatic way
that was aesthetically pleasing and ethically meaningful to widespread
contemporary and later audiences.
All these observations point in the same direction. We have no
way of finding out what kind of traditions may have survived from
earlier periods. There is no evidence to confirm the existence of
genuine historical traditions about a Trojan War that may have taken
place in the fifteenth century or at the end of the Bronze Age, and
reason to believe that few, if any, such traditions survived. If we
accept these conclusions, we have to resign ourselves to the fact that
Homer is no guide to a Trojan War and that the events he describes
and the combination of persons participating in these events, what-
ever their individual background, are historicizing fictions. In every
respect, despite the prehistory of myth, traditions, and epic song-
no matter how far back they reach the epics are the product of and
grounded in the time of their creation. They reflect the outlook, ide-
ology, and culture of the eighth century.

In conclusion, I have presented both the reasons that-still or

again-make faith in the historicity of at least a core tradition on an
historical Trojan War possible, and the reasons that militate against
such a belief. In fact the two views may not be as incompatible as it
seems. What seems more significant to me, however, is that ulti-

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402 KURT A. RAAFLAUB

mately this question, though fascinating, is purely academic and of

secondary importance. The human greatness, sensitivity, and drama
of the Homeric epics remain meaningful to us, as they were to all
ages ever since they were created-quite independently of their his-
torical value. Let me end by citing once more Emily Vermeule:
Why has the western world such powerful memories of an
old, old fight far away? Why does the Trojan War stand
in some way for all wars, and supersede many more re-
cent wars in interest? Of course it is the power of Homeric
poetry, the Iliad the first poem that gives equal dignity to
Trojans and Achaians and shows the "enemy" in a com-
passionate and noble light. In its long celebration of heroic
death the Iliad may be an especially Greek contribution to
human ideas of what poetry was for, that the attackers
could be just as greedy and short-tempered as the defend-
ers could be frivolous and luxurious, and that we are all
caught up in the same short life under the sun and face
disasters in the same ways, gallant in failure (1986.77).

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Centerfor Hellenic Studies and Brown University KURT A. RAAFLAUB

CW 91.5 (1998) kr44@umaiI.umd.edu

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