In Search of the Trojan War (18 page)

But before we turn to the decipherment there is one aspect of the dating of the fall of Pylos which is of crucial importance in our search for Troy. It is worth re-emphasising that all Aegean dating depends on pottery styles. When Blegen wrote, the change between LH III B and III C pottery was thought to be around 1200 BC or a little earlier; as no III C pottery was found in the debris at Pylos, Blegen concluded that the palace had fallen in around 1200. But also on Blegen’s mind was the Trojan story, and the reader will recall that Blegen concluded that Troy VIIa – his Homeric Troy – also fell before III C pottery came in. But had Troy VIIa really fallen before Pylos? If not, there was clearly a problem in accepting the Homeric tale as fact, for Blegen’s Trojan War would have taken place when the Pylos of old King Nestor was already a ruin! As knowledge of the pottery styles accumulated in the post-war period, doubts started to emerge
that there had after all been III C pottery in Troy VIIa, and that it had fallen
after
the destruction of some of the mainland Greek palaces in around 1200 BC. But those doubts took a long time to materialise: Troy VIIa was still generally accepted as the Homeric Troy until the late 1970s, and the belief remains widespread.

In the meantime the most important of all discoveries in Aegean archaeology was about to take place: the decipherment of the Linear B script, which had been known to exist since Minos Kalokairinos had dug at Knossos in 1878, was available in quantity in tablets from Evans’ digs of 1900–10, and was now known from inscriptions from Thebes, Elefsis, Tiryns, Orchomenos and Pylos. Less than four months after Blegen’s first campaign at Pylos had ended, the Second World War broke out, to be prolonged in Greece by a more terrible aftermath, a bitter civil war in which 400,000 Greeks died, and in which a British army ended up fighting on Greek soil on the side of Greeks against Greeks. It was not until 1952 that archaeological work could be resumed at Pylos, and by then the world had changed. In that same year Evans’ beloved Knossos was handed over to the Greek government (Evans himself had died in 1941). The war had postponed the publication of the Pylos tablets – most of Evans’ Knossos tablets were still unpublished – but as soon as they were made available, in 1951, the efforts of the decipherers were crowned with success.

THE DECIPHERMENT OF LINEAR B

During the last few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that the Knossos and Pylos tablets must, after all, be written in Greek – a difficult and archaic Greek, seeing that it is 500 years older than Homer and written in a rather abbreviated form, but Greek nevertheless.

MICHAEL VENTRIS
, on the BBC Third Programme, reprinted in the
Listener
, 10 July 1952

Michael Ventris, the young man who cracked the Linear B code, was an amateur in the world of professional Greek scholarship, an architect who had been fascinated by the Linear B mystery since as a fourteen-year-old schoolboy he had heard a lecture by Sir Arthur Evans at Burlington House in 1936. He was not yet thirty when he made that famous radio broadcast, thirty-four when he died in a car crash on the A1 in 1956. We need not deal here with how the decipherment was achieved: this exciting story can be read in the compelling and affectionate tribute by Ventris’ collaborator John Chadwick,
The Decipherment of Linear B
, and in their great joint work,
Documents in Mycenaean Greek
.

That Linear B was Greek went against the previously held opinion of most linguists, and though some archaeologists had already put forward the idea that Greek speakers came into Greece as early as 1900 BC, such was the force of Evans’ Minoan theory that even Ventris had thought the idea out of the question, ‘based on a deliberate disregard for historical plausibility’. Now there was proof of the proposition Schliemann had cherished eighty years before: the world of the Bronze-Age palaces
was
a Greek one. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the tablets was that the world they revealed was not ‘heroic’ at all, but bureaucratic to the most extraordinary degree. Here were lists of flocks down to the last ewe or ram; the names of individual shepherds and tax inspectors; the minutest enumerations of equipment and war gear; individual thrones and chariots listed with their accoutrements and defects, including even broken or useless bits of equipment – chariot bodies or wheels, say, faithfully noted as ‘useless’ or ‘burnt at the end’. Here even individual oxen are named: ‘Blacky’ and ‘Spot’. But here too was an apparently feudal social order with (as most scholars agree) the king at the top – the
wanax
, the same word as Homer uses for Agamemnon, ‘king of men’; here were the lesser chiefs, the soldiers with their elaborate war gear, their body armour, greaves, shields, helmets, spears, swords, bows and arrows; here were lists of troop dispositions bearing more than a passing resemblance to Homer’s catalogue of the ships which the Greeks
took to Troy. Here, in sum, was an aristocratic, hierarchical and militarist class armed to the teeth, with massive expenditure on specialised war gear and palace ornament. The tablets also offered voluminous evidence (still being assessed today by economic and linguistic experts) for the staples which sustained the palaces: the wheat, wine, olives, flax and timber which were carefully noted down to the last litre or bale by the palace scribes. Lastly, at the other end of the social scale, there were the hundreds of slave women and their children who worked these estates, distinguished by names like ‘captives’, again the same word used by Homer.

The possibilities opened up by the decipherment were immense, and are still being explored. Though hard evidence about social order and religious belief was lacking – so much was inevitably allusive in these laconic notations – the evidence for the economies and local organisation of these Bronze-Age kingdoms was rich, and as more places are identified doubtless more evidence will be provided. Some general conclusions about the tablets and the Mycenaean kingdoms will be presented in
Chapter 5
. First, though, it will be obvious that the decipherment had the most dramatic effect on the study of Homer. Now it was known that the inhabitants of the Bronze-Age palaces at the time of the Trojan War actually spoke Greek, the language of Homer. Here in some cases were the same words, the same grammatical constructions (like the archaic ending
oio
); proof of lost features of early Greek which scholars had already deduced (for instance the loss of
w
, the digamma, as in
W
ilios = Ilios, Troy). The Linear B tablets now put the history of the Greek language back at least 500 years and opened up a new perspective on Homer. Could the Bronze-Age elements in Homer – the descriptions of artefacts like the boar’s-tusk helmet, for example – now be paralleled by linguistic evidence to
prove
that the Homeric tale in essence went back to the Bronze Age? Had Ajax’s great body shield, for instance, been handed down from the
Mycenaean
epic? Could Homer’s ‘silverstudded swords’ have their parallel in the two swords ‘with gold studs on either side of the hilt’ from the
Pylos tablets? How were scholars to explain the appearance of so many Homeric personal names – including Hector and Achilles – as ordinary people’s names in the tablets? Could Homer’s catalogue of ships be derived from an actual Bronze-Age list like those on the Pylos tablets, or at least from a Mycenaean epic on the Trojan expedition? In short, was it possible that the story of Troy had already been sung by Mycenaean bards in the royal halls of Pylos, Mycenae and Tiryns, sung by bards like the lyre player painted on the Pylos fresco? What
was
‘Homer’, and where had his tale of Troy come from? All these questions will be examined in
Chapter 4
.

FOUR

HOMER: THE SINGER OF TALES

How could Homer have known about these things?

When all this happened he was a camel in Bactria!

LUCIAN,
The Dream

They [the Greeks] were late in learning the alphabet and found the lesson difficult … it is a highly controversial and disputed question whether even those who took part in the Trojan campaign made use of letters, and the true and prevalent view is rather that they were ignorant of the present-day mode of writing. Throughout the whole range of Greek literature no disputed work is found more ancient than the poetry of Homer. His date, however, is clearly later than the Trojan War; and even he, they say, did not leave his poems in writing. At first transmitted by memory the scattered songs were not united until later; to which circumstance the numerous inconsistencies of the work are attributable
.

JOSEPHUS
,
Against Apion

THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY
are by common consent the beginning of European literature. It is an extraordinary paradox – unique in culture – that the beginnings should be unexcelled masterpieces; not inchoate ‘primitive’ works, but great poems of enormous length and sophistication. We can safely assume that there had been earlier and cruder Greek epic poetry before Homer, but we know nothing of it. Instead, here, ‘leaping out of the head of Zeus fully armed’ are representations of a heroic age so vividly and powerfully realised that, ever since, their audience has been unable to resist the idea that they are in some way ‘true’. In the classical world it was generally accepted that their author was a poet of genius called Homer, of whom virtually nothing
was known: even the name suggests a pseudonym (
homeros
= hostage). In the ancient world it was also accepted that Homer composed without the aid of writing – that is, he was an oral poet.

Recently detailed studies of oral epic poetry have been made in different parts of the world – Serbia, where it survived in a debased form until recently; Ireland, where the last (prose) epic performer lived long enough to be recorded, in the 1940s;Albania and Armenia, where shreds of the bardic tradition still hang; Zaïre, where until recently the full-blown thing itself could still be witnessed. All these have taught us a great deal about how great poems – and exceedingly long ones – can be orally composed and transmitted without the aid of writing. The characteristics of such works – notably the so-called formulas, or repeat phrases – show that the Homeric poems are, as Josephus and the ancients thought, characteristically oral poems. But in what sense were they composed? Was there one act of composition, or a gradual accretion of a poetic tradition? Did Homer exist? When were the poems written down, and what relation does the written text we have bear to that first written text, let alone to the orally composed poem(s) which may have preceded it? These are the problems which for the last two centuries have been at the centre of what scholars call the ‘Homeric Question’.

Though we assume that ‘Homer’ was orally composed, we only know his poems through writing – through written texts. In the last century our knowledge of the text has increased with the discovery of over 600 papyrus fragments from Egypt which preserve parts of the Homeric text, but essentially they have not meant any real change in what we call Homer. In the case of the
Iliad
this means a manuscript tradition which starts in the tenth century AD in Constantinople: our two best and earliest manuscripts were produced at that time (the bulk of 200 surviving MSS of Homer are from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD).

Though Greek studies had largely died out in the Latin west during the Dark Ages, ‘Homer’ continued to be studied in Byzantium where it remained part of the school curriculum
despite its pagan ethos. In the great period of the AD 860s a new revised edition of Homer was prepared by Byzantine scholars in the imperial university, and subsequent work on the manuscript traditions led to the famous book, now in St Mark’s in Venice, known as Venetus A, the most authoritative edition of the
Iliad
. As always, the bulk of the early and rare texts did not survive because of war: in this respect the sack of Constantinople in 1204 must have been a great disaster, if not on a par with the loss of the library at Alexandria by fire in the first century BC. Even before the final sack of Constantinople, in 1453, the tradition was taken up in the west by Italian humanists who brought back a large number of manuscripts from the Byzantine Empire in the last century of its existence. After 1453 manuscripts were taken from surviving Greek monastic libraries; today such places are virtually denuded of classical texts, but their plundering has ensured the survival of Greek literature.

The tale of Troy, as we saw earlier, never lost its interest, being part of the intellectual currency of the Latin west. Homer’s text itself was already attracting attention in the mid-fourteenth century when the Italian poet Petrarch took Greek lessons, though he did not acquire enough to read a copy of Homer given him as a present by a Byzantine ambassador. In the 1360s the Italian scholar Pliato, a friend of Boccaccio, attempted translations of part of Homer into Latin, and by the end of the century you could attend lectures on Homer in Italy.

The idea of establishing a text scientifically took longer to come about, and it was not until the new art of printing was being practised that we find a spate of editions, first of Latin classics and then of Greek, in the last decades of the fifteenth century. In their way these were the most important element in the west’s rediscovery of Greece, which earlier in this book we viewed from the point of view of the travellers, the
physical
rediscovery. The first printed text of Homer appeared in Florence in 1488, its editor a Greek. However it was in Venice – which was to be the centre not only of the printing trade as such, but of the Greek publishing trade for three centuries – that the great printed edition of Homer
was brought out in 1504 by the Aldine press, founded by Aldus Manutius with the express idea of printing Greek texts; the editorial work was again done by a Greek, the Cretan scholar Musurus. The dissemination of the printed text (seven major European editions were brought out in the sixteenth century) opened up modern critical discussion of the text, and as scholars compared Homer with other classical Greek literature it quickly became obvious that it could not be analysed on the same basis. He was evidently not a writer at all, but an oral composer, and ancient authority could be found to corroborate this idea.