Trojan Horse of Western History. Oleg Matveychev
this trickery was managed. Despite protests of Cassandra, the sister of Paris, and admonition of the priest Laocoön saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!”, the Trojans dragged the monstrous thing into the city. To do that they even had to take a part of the fortress walls to pieces, as the Greek gift was so great. Everything was over that very day. Priam and Paris were killed, Helen was returned to Menelaus, and the city was wiped from the face of the Earth. Only few survived and, led by the Dardian King Aeneas, they left their native land in search for a new motherland, and, after many years of wandering and dangerous encounters, they ended up in Italy on the bank of the Tiber River.
This is the story told in fictional and documental films, articles in popular magazines, and even school textbooks – along with stories that every intelligent person should know, in particular, rumors about the gold of Troy (“that what’s-his name Schliemann”), and cunning Stalin having secretly removed the treasure from prostrated Berlin, plus stories of blind Homer with a lyre in his hands. However, the more intelligent audience tends to clarify the details of this picture basing on so-called scientific evidence.
It appears that the main books of Homer narrate only a small part of the above-mentioned events. Only fifty days in the ten years of the siege of Troy were worthy of the bard’s notice. The Iliad starts with a description of Achilles’ anger about being deprived of his legal prey – Briseis. The poem ends with Patroclus’ funeral, followed by Hector’s funeral. To a large extent, despite many battle scenes, this poem is not about war but about a quarrel between the leaders of two powerful tribes – the Mycenaeans and Myrmidons – and about the fatal consequences of that quarrel for the union of Achaean states.
Despite many battle scenes, the Iliad poem is not about war but about a quarrel between the leaders of two powerful tribes – the Mycenaeans and Myrmidons – and about its fatal consequences for the union of Achaean states.
The Iliad tells us about the whining nature of invincible Achilles, who couldn’t hold back his tears while complaining about Agamemnon to his mother; about cowardly Paris, who like a hare ran away from Menelaus on the battle field; about Helen being peevish and shaming her husband for being afraid of laying down his life in an uneven confrontation with one of the best Greek soldiers:
Thou hast come back from the war; would thou hast perished there, vanquished by a valiant man that was my former lord.
Homer told the story about the wooden horse in his another poem, the Odyssey. By the way, we can learn from it that the Trojans nearly fought, trying to decide,what to do with the horse.
Either to cleave the hollow timber with the pitiless bronze, or to drag it to the height and cast it down the rocks, or to let it stand as a great offering to propitiate the gods…
Apparently, the Trojans considered the horse to be not a gift to the city (why would that be, though?), but rather a sacrifice to Poseidon, that the Greeks left behind before departing from the battle field. Thus, they decided to drag their trophy (or a souvenir, to use the up-to-date language) in. Don’t tourists coming to Troy from Istanbul or Izmir do the same? What do the wooden horses that tourists let into their houses hold?
All other events of the Trojan War – from Helen’s abduction to the Exodus of Aeneas – are described in the surviving fragments and retellings of the so-called Cycladic poems, as well as in works of later writers such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Virgil, etc. From these additional sources we can learn that the fate of Iphigenia wasn’t too tragical: at the moment she was to be sacrificed, she was saved the goddess Artemis, who hid the girl in a cloud, took her to Tauris and made her a priestess. You can also learn that the wooden horse was made not by Odysseus, but by Epeius, and that there were three thousand men inside it. For instance, one can also learn that during the Trojan War there was only something like a holographic image of Helen in Troy, and that she herself stayed in Egypt and was faithful to her husband through all these years.[6]
Fig. 6. The souvenir shops in Tevfikia are full of Trojan horses.
By the way, not ten but twenty years passed since Helen had been abducted till the end of the Trojan War (the Greek troops were really delayed on their way to Ilion, but we’ll come back to this fact later). Helen herself recalls it, while mourning over Hector:
Fig. 7. The Iphigenia Rock in the Crimea (village of Castropol), where, according to legend, Agamemnon’s daughter was hidden.
For this is now the twentieth year from the time when I went from thence and am gone from my native land.
Thus, it appears that by the end of the war, Helen, “a person who set thousands of ships afloat”, was already quite an elderly lady then. And if Paris’ faithfulness is worth of delight in the light of the aforesaid, the patience of his compatriots is perplexing, on the contrary. Should they have suffered years of hardships for the sake of a fading foreign matron? For pity’s sake! Those Trojans were nearly saints!
Fig. 8. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Helen of Troy (1863).
This is how the legend of Troy is known to the most informed intellectuals, who are rather few! But those who went through the trouble of reading Homer’s poems in full and attentively, rather than looking them through are even fewer. “I’ve read the list of ships up to the middle,”[7] Osip Mandelshtam admitted. However, it should be noted that the relevant song “Beotia or the Catalogue of Ships” is a wonderful remedy for insomnia. The best known Russian translation of Homer’s Iliad is that of Nikolai Gnedich, the contemporary of Pushkin. Extremely beautiful, but heavy and archaic, this version has sent se veral generations of readers into sound sleep. Translations by Vikenty Veresaev and Pavel Shuisky are not as popular; they are more modern and better accord to the letter of the original, though, the spirit of the poem was lost. Therefore, maybe that is why these versions are not so popular.
For Homer’s contemporaries, the style of the Iliad and the Odyssey sounded as peculiar as the style of Gnedich is for us. It combines the dialectical features of the Aeolian language and that of the Ionic Greeks, who, by the 10th century B.C., began to colonize the Aegean Region and the North-Western part of the Anatolian coast, and the archaisms of rhapsodies of the Mycenaean epoch, poetic tradition of which reached Homer from the distant past. “That language was clear to listeners, who, since childhood, were used to the songs of Homeric bards – the creators and performers of Greek epos – although, in real life, nobody spoke that language. The unusual language emphasized the singularity of the events described and helped listeners to get transferred to the world of the heroic past, where people were in every respect considerably stronger and braver than people of that days. Even if an expression wasn’t clear to the public, this redoubled authority of the Homeric bards, who seemed to know things that simple people did not know of”.[8]
It is noteworthy that things in the West go as such: academic circles there still accept the old “classical” translations of Homer, although, for the purpose of public enlightenment, they issue cut versions of the Iliad and its brief narrations, or even comics. In due time, the novel by Alessandro Baricco An Iliad[9] became a box-office project. This Italian writer tries to interpret the classic poem in a new way, removing everything that had to do with Gods, fate and other empyreans from it, which a modern reader would be unable to understand.
Well, even in the book-concerned 19[[th]] century the Iliad was not considered to be entertaining reading. In 1884 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, maybe the greatest Homer specialist of that time wrote, “Now Homer is no longer a widely read poet… Even most philologists largely know him as poorly as Christers know the Holy Bible”.
Pseudo-Apollodorus,
Osip Mandelstam,
A.I. Zaitsev, “Ancient Greek Epos and the Iliad by Homer”,
Alessandro Baricco,