The Idea of Troy.
Twentieth century responses in England and Germany
Richard Stoneman
Gallipoli and Troy
Alan Moorehead, in his classic book on the Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16,1 describes
how the allied troops, to pass the time in the trenches, took up digging for antiquities. On
Lemnos they had found a statue of Eros, and once they arrived at Cape Helles on the
Asiatic shore their finds continued.
Two huge jars with skeletons in them were uncovered in a shell crater, and when
the soldiers started to dig their trenches at Hissarlik they came on a series of large
stone sarcophagi which resounded dully when struck with a pick. Through the
centuries (and at once it was asserted that these finds were as old as Troy), soil
had penetrated, grain by grain, into the interior of the tombs, but the soldiers
managed to excavate many bones, as well as vases, lamps and statues in pottery of
men and women. The French doctor wrote to his wife about one especially
beautiful cup: ‘Its long handles, almost ethereal in their delicacy, give to this little
thing the palpitation of wings’.
Compton Mackenzie wrote in Gallipoli Memories (1929, 189f):
I forgot for a few moments all about the gun and fell to weaving shapes out of the
haze that flickered over the wide green hollow land of Troy. I was thinking that
Diomed and Odysseus might have started across the water like this and discussed
the kind of expedition that Thompson and I were planning. One could not get
away from the past out here; even from a trench somebody had turned up a small
marble Aphrodite a week or two since.2
Troy, then, was in the minds of those who fought, and not only in those of the most
highly educated and the poets. The very idea of excavation had been more or less
invented at Troy. Before Schliemann’s campaign in 1870-73 only Charles Newton at
Halicarnassus (in the 1850s) and J.T. Wood at Ephesus (in the 1860s) had dug with
anything resembling a scientific purpose, as distinct from treasure-hunting. Schliemann is
often criticised for the destructive nature of his approach to exploration, driven though it
was by a basic understanding of stratigraphy. The contemporary excavations of Carl
Humann at Pergamon were streets ahead of Schliemann in method. But Schliemann was
a byword for archaeology; his first recognition had come in London; and it is not
surprising that Schliemann and his Troy were the names that echoed in the minds of those
who arrived on Cape Helles in April 1915.
It is surely more than coincidence that one of the battleships deployed for the invasion
was the SS Agamemnon (Winston Churchill, the originator of the invasion plan, was a
well-educated man). One Commander Unwin had also been reading his Iliad, for he
devised a plan ‘inspired by the story of the wooden horse of Troy. He proposed to secrete
1
Gallipoli 1956; repr. 2007
At p. 65 his first thought on reaching the Dardanelles is of the Iliad; and at 229f he tells us he would read
Homer, Virgil and Thucydides before going to sleep.
2
1
2,000 men in an innocent-looking collier, the River Clyde, and run her aground at Cape
Helles.’ Holes would then be cut in the ship’s sides so that the men could make their way
to the beach in a matter of minutes.3
The strategic nature of Troy’s site was also apparent. Not only allied trenches were dug
on Hissarlik: the Turks also had a trench and a machine-gun post right in among
Schliemann’s excavations.4 In July 1915 severe diarrhoea infected the army and became
more destructive than the fighting itself. It created an overpowering lassitude, of which
general Hamilton wrote ‘It fills me with a desperate longing to lie down and do nothing
but rest… and this, I think, must be the reason the Greeks were ten long years in taking
Troy.’5
The presence of Troy in the minds of the poets who went to Gallipoli is familiar ground.
The poet laureate, John Masefield, knew that the ancient gods were still in action there
when he wrote his quatrain ‘Gallipoli 1915’:
Even so was wisdom proven blind;
So courage failed, so strength was chained;
Even so the gods, whose seeing kind
Is not as ours, ordained.
Masefield was also the author of the first book to be written about the Gallipoli
campaign, published in 1916. In this, however, the leitmotif is not the story of the Greek
sack of Troy. By this time the Gallipoli campaign was known for a disastrous failure, and
the epigraph to each part is provided by extracts from the Song of Roland, describing the
heroic but doomed resistance by Roland and his troops in the pass at Roncesvalles.
The best known poem to come out of the Gallipoli campaign is the one for which Patrick
Shaw-Stewart is famous. He had Walter Leaf’s Homer and History, published in the year
of the invasion, by his side, and on a blank page of his copy of A.E. Housman’s A
Shropshire Lad he wrote:
Achilles came to Troyland
And I to Chersonese:
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days’ peace.
Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest and I know not –
So much the happier I.
I will go back this morning
From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
3
Moorehead 121.
Moorehead 237
5
Moorehead 226
4
2
Flame-capped, and shout for me.6
An anonymous poem by a member of the ANZAC forces who survived, ‘The graves of
Gallipoli’,7 begins
The herdsman wandering by the lonely rills
Marks where they lie on the scarred mountain’s flanks,
and contains the lines
‘Thrice happy they who fell beneath the walls,
Under their father’s eaves,’ the Trojan said,
‘Not we who die in exile where who falls
Must lie in foreign earth’. Alas! Our dead
Lie buried far away
Yet where the brave man lies who fell in fight
For his dear country, there his country is.
The poem contains echoes of Rupert Brooke and of Wilfred Owen, but the poet also
knew his Homer.
Troy = War
Troy does not evoke only the idea of archaeology; Troy is above all, the epitome of war.
The destruction of Troy is an emblem of the horror and the tragedy of war. Before the
twentieth century, what city had undergone such comprehensive destruction at the hands
of its enemies? The story of Troy is not only the beginning of European history, and of
European literature, but also the beginning of European warfare. Barry Strauss makes the
link very clear in the opening lines of his book, The Trojan War (Hutchinson 2007, 1):
Troy invites war. Its location, where Europe and Asia meet, made it rich and
visible…. Walls, warriors and blood were the city’s lot. People had already fought
over Troy for two thousand years by the time Homer’s Greeks are said to have
attacked it.
Barbara Tuchman’s book, The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam (Michael Joseph
1984) not only makes Troy the beginning of European war, but also uses it as the earliest
case of her thesis that governments frequently pursue policies contrary to their own
interest (4). The admission of the Wooden Horse to their city by the Trojans is an
example of this ‘wooden-headedness’ which ‘assesses situations in terms of preconceived
fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs’ (7).
Troy in antiquity was already a symbol of the horror and futility of war; from the Iliad
itself to Augustine, who in the City of God blamed the Trojans’ faith in their false gods
6
Cited in, for example, Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War(BBC 1985), 34-5; see N. Vance,
‘Classics and the Dardanelles Campaign’, Notes and Queries Sept 2006, 347-9.
7
E.g. in W.D. Eaton, Great Poems of the World War, electronic edition
3
for their doom.8 In the twentieth century the meaning remained the same: in C.P.
Cavafy’s poem of 1910, ‘Trojans’,
Our efforts are like those of the Trojans
We believe that with resolve and bravery
We’ll alter our fate’s malevolence
And we stand outside ready to fight….
Yet our fall is certain.
For the philosopher Simone Weil, writing in 1939, the Iliad was first and foremost ‘the
poem of force’. No one in the Iliad, indeed no one on earth is spared the domination of
force: ‘Whoever, within his own soul and in human relations, escapes the domination of
force, is loved but loved sorrowfully, because of the threat of destruction that constantly
hangs over him’.9 And for Jean Giraudoux, who had experienced the fighting at Suvla
Bay, Troy became the focus of his plea for an end to Europe’s march into the Second
World War in his La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu.10 (It was revived in London by
Harold Pinter in 1982, during the Falklands War).11 In our own generation, Christopher
Logue’s partial translation of the Iliad bears the title War Music. In short, Troy was the
war to begin all wars.
The idea of Troy thus provides a marked counterpoint to the idea of Minoan Crete that
was developed following the excavations of Sir Arthur Evans from 1900 to 1913. Cathy
Gere12 has brilliantly analysed the way in which Evans interpreted the ruins he
discovered, not least the ‘dancing ground of Ariadne’ famous from Homer’s allusion in
Book 18 of the Iliad:
A dancing place
All full of turnings, like the admirable maze
For fair-hair’d Ariadne made, by cunning Daedalus;
And in it youth and virgins danc’d, all young and beauteous,
And glewèd in another’s palms.13
This vision of peace was artfully counterposed by Homer to the maelstrom of war that
occupies the rest of his poem, and just so Evans found here an image of peace and
harmony to which he would have liked to give an originary force in Europe’s story at
least equal to the war that characterised Troy. The Minoan realm, where Ariadne was
queen, was a matriarchal paradise psychologically prior to the masculine world of war.
Homer did locate a similar oasis of peace outside the walls of Troy itself, by the springs
of the River Scamander which ran both hot and cold:
8
Augustine CD I.3, cf. III.2-3. Nero was performing his poem on the fall of Troy as he watched Rome
burn: Tacitus Annals 15.39.3.
9
Alberto Manguel Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey (Atlantic Books 2007), 221f
10
1935: strangely translated into English by Christopher Fry as Tiger at the Gates (1955). Peace has almost
been achieved by diplomacy between the leaders when an insult by the drunken Ajax destroys their efforts,
and the opposing sides are plunged into war.
11
Alberto Manguel, Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey (Atlantic Books 2007), 207f
12
Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago 2009)
13
Chapman’s Iliad, 18. 536-40
4
Near which were cisterns made,
All pav’d and clear, where Trojan wives and their fair daughters had
Laundry for their fine linen weeds, in times of cleanly peace,
Before the Grecians brought their siege.14
But the search for this ‘place of women’ in the midst of war has never occupied the
excavators of Troy except insofar as it might offer evidence for the location of Troy
itself. E.D. Clarke in 1801 took the temperature of the many springs at Pinarbaşi; finding
them all to be warm, he deduced that this could not be the site of Troy, and was among
the first to prefer Hisarlik.
Gere shows how Evans was not above giving credence to works of art that have
subsequently been shown to be fakes in order to bolster his view of the peaceful
matriarchal Minoans. But the greatest act of fakery at Knossos is surely the
reconstruction of the palace itself. In this Evans displays a complete contrast to
Schliemann’s work at Troy. The ruins of Knossos as excavated offered few spurs to the
imagination – the throne room, the dancing floor, the massive pithoi – but Evans was able
to use them for a modernist reconstruction that has little to do with the ancient buildings.
At Troy the ruins were perhaps even less inspiring – nothing but walls, though the
sloping wall that so vividly evokes Patroclus’ assault on the walls of Troy catches
everyone’s imagination:
Thrice to the prominence
Of Troy’s steep wall he bravely leap’d; thrice Phoebus thrust him thence,
Objecting his all-dazzling shield, with his resistless hand.15
But the popular image of Troy as an archaeological site probably goes little beyond the
awareness that there were seven cities there:
Unter Troja liegen sieben Städte
Und man grub den ganzen Haufen auf
wrote Bertolt Brecht in one of very few references to Troy:16 most of his other echoes of
the subject-matter are focused on the theme of Odysseus and exile.
Schliemann himself never thought of any kind of reconstruction project. Nor did his
predilection for fraud extend to the admittance of fake antiquities. The famous Treasure
of Priam, though its provenance is dubious and the pieces may have been acquired by
purchase and planted in the dig by the excavator himself, consists of authentic pieces of
the right date and style for the location. When Schliemann did build, it was not a
reconstruction of Troy but a mansion for himself in Athens, which he called Iliou
Megaron.
Iliou Megaron is by no stretch of the imagination a Trojan building. Rather, it is
Victorian Palladian with décor mostly in the Pompeiian style. Nevertheless, through it
Chapman’s Iliad 22. 133-6
Chapman’s Iliad 16. 642-4
16
‘Die kaledonische Markt’ in Gedichte 1933-38, Gesammelte Gedichte (Suhrkamp 1976), Band 2, 533
14
15
5
and through the published works of Schliemann, Troy came to have an impact in two
marked ways on the twentieth-century imagination.
Troy and ‘Mythological Consciousness’
The first of these is the discovery of the swastika as a pervading decorative motif in the
arts of Troy.17 Schliemann used it as a leitmotif throughout the architecture of his
mansion, for example on the wrought-iron gates to the property. Cathy Gere shows how
Emile Burnouf, the director of the French School in Athens, enthusiastically seized on
this symbol, already familiar in the arts of ancient India, as evidence of the Aryan origin
of the Trojan people. Thus Schliemann’s Troja, published in 1884, contained a preface by
A.H. Sayce of Oxford, in which he wrote that ‘we can hail the subjects of Priam as
brethren in blood and speech.’
This was to say the least an exaggeration since absolutely nothing was known, or even
now is known, of the Trojan language. But the conceit has provided one of the
mainsprings for Peter Ackroyd’s suggestive novel of 2006, The Fall of Troy. This is an
account of a fictionalised excavator of Troy named Heinrich Obermann, who similarly
clings to a vision of a European Troy. ‘The people of Troy’, he insists, ‘have been
celebrated by Homer and a thousand other poets from the first moment that poets ever
sang. They have always been European, not Asiatic. The idea that they came from the
east is preposterous’. The occasion for this tirade is a conversation with a British scholar,
Mr Thornton, who has been working on a hoard of inscribed tablets that have been found
in the ruins of Troy. Thornton has worked by structural analysis of the pictograms on the
tablets, and has identified two endings which he asserts to be identical with Sanskrit
tense-endings. The method is modelled on Ventris’ discovery of Greek terminations in
Linear B. But the discovery that the Trojan language is akin to Sanskrit, though it might
have delighted the real Schliemann, and Burnouf and Sayce, throws the fictional
Obermann into a rage: ‘they were Greek, not Indian… You have decided to destroy me
and my work. You have been set upon me by my enemies in England, who will never rest
until I am ridiculed and silenced.’
The plot of the novel leads to the death of Mr Thornton and the destruction of the entire
hoard of tablets by fire, so that the clash of fiction and history is not taken to the ultimate
step. But we see Ackroyd cleverly taking themes from the great archaeological
discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and creating a new synthesis which
still – among many other things – reflects the political anxieties that are never far from
archaeological interpretation.
Schliemann’s excavation of Troy has another, even more fundamental impact on the
twentieth century imagination. In his seminal book, The Pound Era (California 1971), the
critic Hugh Kenner argues18 ‘that Schliemann’s excavations were responsible for the
rebirth of mythological consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century…
According to Kenner, it was Schliemann’s revelation of the mundane materiality of
17
Again, Cathy Gere is an acute guide to the unfolding of the theme: The Tomb of Agamemnon (Profile
Books 2006), 89-93, 119-22.
18
I quote Gere, Knossos 142
6
Homer’s world of heroes that made it possible for an artist like James Joyce to render
heroic the prosaic details of modernity: “Schliemann had been to Troy and a cosmos had
altered”.’
It is worth lingering on this insight for it takes us beyond a recreation of the material
world of ancient Troy. Consider what Troy had stood for in the preceding centuries of the
modern era. That Troy was a real place was not a completely new idea. Tom Coryate in
1612, at Alexandria Troas, had believed he was in the very spot, and that ‘one of those
goodly monuments might be the sepulchre of King Priamus’. E.D. Clarke (above)
believed it was possible to find the true site of Troy, and Lord Byron ‘venerated the grand
original’ as he stood on the Plain of Troy in 1810. But to turn belief into reality, and
furthermore into gold, was Schliemann’s staggering achievement. It was, as Alberto
Manguel suggests,19 like discovering the actual rabbit-hole through which Alice had
entered Wonderland.
But Troy’s reality had always been something different from its poetic meaning. Don
Quixote (143) though the story just a fable (unlike the romances of knight errantry which
gave meaning to his career). Warfare, indeed, was the meaning of Troy, as well as the
treachery and corruption which loomed large in the legend of Troilus and Cressida
exploited by Chaucer, Henryson and Shakespeare; but for the most part reflections of the
Greek myths in the arts up to the nineteenth century had been decorative, even Arcadian
in tone. Something like this is implied by Nietzsche’s characterization of opera (which he
regarded as a superficial art) as characteristic of the ‘Alexandrian’ world in which he was
living: ‘it was to such a consonance of nature and the ideal, to such an idyllic reality, that
the cultured man of the renaissance allowed himself to be returned by his operatic
imitation of Greek tragedy.’20 Nietzsche saw in the re-emergence of the Dionysiac force
in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner a step along the backward road from the
Alexandrian to the classic.
In addition to this, the demotion of God in Nietzsche’s philosophy allowed greater play to
the ancient gods. So he wrote in The Genealogy of Morals21 ‘What, in the last analysis,
was the meaning of the Trojan War and other tragic atrocities? There can be no doubt that
they were intended as festivals for the gods’. Free Will, he says, was invented ‘for the
express purpose of ensuring that the interest of the gods in the spectacle of human virtue
could never be exhausted.’ This quasi-Stoic judgment is a long way from Shakespeare’s
bleak ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport’. The story
of Troy is an aspect of the development of the human race.
The discovery of the reality of Troy meant that a writer like Patrick Shaw-Stewart could
identify with Achilles. James Joyce could recreate a modern Odysseus. Much later,
Christa Wolf could create a Cassandra through whom to explore the aftermath of war.
Almost at the beginning of this process stands Sigmund Freud with his exploration of the
character of Oedipus. No longer just a gruesome tale from the past, Oedipus could
19
Manguel 182
The Birth of Tragedy (Penguin edition), 91-93
21
Tr F. Golfing (Doubleday 1956), 201
20
7
provide an Ariadne’s thread (if I may put it that way) into the labyrinth of the human
psyche. The myths of the Greeks now become, not just a way of exploring the modern
mind, but also a constitutive element of modern consciousness.
Freud was explicit in making the connection. He compared the psychoanalyst’s procedure
of ‘clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer’ to ‘the technique of
excavating a buried city’. When he helped a patient to recall an important childhood
memory it was ‘as if Schliemann had once more excavated Troy’.22
A parallel exploration of ancient legend is also relevant here: Wagner’s recreation of the
world of the ancient Germans in The Ring of the Nibelung, on which he began work in
the 1840s, with the process of composition extending from 1853 to 1874. These musicdramas too showed the way in which deep psychological concerns and anxieties could be
probed through the medium of medieval legend. So it is not surprising that, following
Schliemann’s triumphant rediscovery of Troy, one German newspaper cartoon depicted
him, in top hat and frock coat, plunging into the River Rhine to seek the gold of the
Rhinemaidens.
Troy as a Symbol
Shaw-Stewart, to be sure, is unlikely to have understood the complex backdrop when he
composed his moving poem. But the use of Troy to explore the issues of war before and
between the two wars of the twentieth century is all-pervasive. One German writer has
calculated that something like 200 works of fictional art were created during the
twentieth century which drew directly on the theme of Troy, from high art to
Unterhaltungsliteratur.23 I have not attempted a count in English (and American)
literature, but I am sure the number would be equally great. At the very beginning of the
century Hugo von Hofmannsthal was producing dramas on themes of the Trojan War and
its aftermath. Elektra, Die ägyptische Helena and others from 1903 onwards recreated a
Greek mythology for the twentieth century and reached a musical public through Richard
Strauss whose indebtedness to Wagner is apparent. In 1916 Franz Werfel’s version of
Euripides’ Trojan Women spoke to the war-battered German public in the same tones as
Euripides’ original had spoken to its Athenian audience. In 1907 Gerhart Hauptmann
began a series of dramas on the Trojan war and its aftermath: Iphigenia in Aulis,
Agamemnons Tod, Elektra, Iphigenia in Delphi. The last of these was revived in Berlin in
1941, while Agamemnons Tod was produced in Berlin in 1947 and Elektra in Neuss in
1950. The productions by Erwin Piscator in 1962 made explicit what would not have
escaped the earlier audiences, the parallel between the fate of Troy at the hands of the
Greeks and the fate of Berlin at the end of the Second World War. Here again, and in
Dresden too, was a destruction the like of which was unexampled in history – except in
Troy.
22
Gere, Agamemnon 135-6
Gerd Biegel, ‘Mythenwandel: Troia-rezeption im 20. Jahrhundert in Theater, Literatur und Kunst’, in
Troia: Traum und Wirklichkeit (exhibition catalogue: Archäologisches Landesmuseum BadenWürttemberg, 2001), 440-454
23
8
Troy was in the minds of thoughtful persons even before the outbreak of the Second
World War. I have already mentioned Jean Giraudoux’ vainly prophetic La guerre de
Troie n’aura pas lieu. Stefan Zweig in his diary for 22 May 1940 wrote: ‘Die alten
Cassandragefühle wieder wach’, though in his autobiography, Die Welt von Gestern,24 he
changed the allusion to a perhaps more universal one, to Jeremiah. Cassandra was,
however, the more appropriate model. Where Jeremiah uttered words of doom beyond
the promptings of the situation, what Cassandra foretold was always all too true; but no
one would listen to the intellectuals who foresaw the disaster that Nazism would bring
upon Germany.
Troy in such representations is a symbol of defeat. It is war in only one of its aspects.
The victors are elsewhere. This was in tune with the meaning that Troy had normally
borne in literature and art. Aeneas, it is true, had torn from the ashes of Troy a
foundation myth for a new and great(er) city, and in the English Middle Ages the idea
had become prevalent that the English kings were descended from Brutus, another Trojan
survivor; but never did Troy stand for a great building project. There was no Ariadne’s
dancing floor in Troy. It would have been foolhardy for anyone planning a great city to
describe it as a second Troy, for that would presage its downfall. Hitler’s and Speer’s
Germania was nothing like Troy (though it was something like Rome); Berlin only
became Troy when the forces of destruction were let loose on it.
The third act of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Iphigenie in Aulis ends with these lines spoken by
Agammenon:
Zyklopenmauern selbst zerbröckeln: mag
Es sein! Schutt meines Lebens bleibe hinter mir!
Doch lockend wieder seh’ ich Ilion
Mit goldnen Türmen und Palästen schimmern.
The golden towers of Ilium here glitter in the distance like the towers of Walhalla at the
end of Rheingold; and like the towers of Walhalla, they are doomed to destruction
(Cassandra)
The theme of perversity, of self-destruction let loose through blinkered attachment to old
realities, which Barbara Tuchman identified as one of the meanings of Troy, resurfaces in
the increased prominence of the figure of Cassandra. Stefan Zweig had made a fleeting
allusion to her in his despair before the war. Other German writers also adopted the
persona of Cassandra in the face of the coming war: Albrecht Haushofer, soon to be
murdered by the Nazis; Heinz Politzer, who went into exile; Max Herrmann-Niesse who
referred in a poem to his wife as Cassandra because she foresaw, listening to Hitler’s
radio speeches, that the destruction of the world was beginning. Richard Friedenthal’s
poem ‘Cassandra’ of 1940 was directed at a British readership.25
Zweig …
These examples are taken from Theodore Ziolkowski, Minos and the Moderns: Cretan myth in twentiethcentury literature and art (OUP 2008), 67
24
25
9
In 1983, the East German writer Christa Wolf’s novel, Cassandra, explored in retrospect
the doom that fell on Troy. This Cassandra’s feminist vision of the Trojan War, blaming
it all on the men, emphasises the despair inherent in her situation, in which her advice is
always rejected, and in which furthermore she knows it to be ‘wrong’: ‘They were right,
and it was my portion to say No’ (131). The position seems to contain echoes of the
contemporary situation in the DDR with its emphasis on the importance of thinking right;
the character Eumelos who runs the security services in Troy with an iron hand is Troy’s
answer to the Stasi. But Wolf’s book is far from being a political tract. It is an attempt to
evoke the ancient city, though perhaps it is of only limited success in this respect. Wolf’s
knowledge of the Mycenaean world was based on a brief visit to Greece in 1980. The
itinerary included Knossos but not Troy: Wolf speculates that the one may have been
pretty much like the other (192), a view that would not have found favour with the
archaeologists in either tradition. Cassandra utters her monologue beside the Lion Gate at
Mycenae. Wolf’s Cassandra, like most Trojan stories, is a creation out of literature not
out of archaeology.
Troy and Moral Collapse
W.H. Auden was similarly reflecting the text of the Iliad not the ruins of Troy when he
wrote his great poem, ‘The Shield of Achilles’. Here, that oasis of peace that is
represented by the idyll of the dancing ground on Achilles’ shield is replaced by images
that evoke the Second World War.
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighbourhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign….
There on the shining shield
His hand had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
Images of rape, orphans, casual murder, barbed wire and firing squads populate the
stanzas of this poem, whose last lines read
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
10
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
This is a vision of total war in which the peace that made war worth fighting has been
despoiled to appease the spirit of destruction represented by Achilles.
A similar mood pervades Zbigniew Herbert’s short poem ‘About Troy’:
Troy O Troy
An archaeologist
Will sift your ashes through his fingers
Yet a fire occurred greater than that of the Iliad…
They walked along ravines of former streets
They thought they would find some traces…
The poet is silent
Rain falls
This Holocaust has signalled the death even of poetry.
(Philoctetes)
Another Trojan theme that has had particular reverberations in the twentieth century is
the story of Philoctetes. Sophocles’ play dramatises the suffering that reduces Philoctetes
to a thing, while the needs of the Greek army justify, for Odysseus, every deceitful
measure to induce him to join the war at Troy which cannot be won without him. If
Achilles comes out of his great refusal because of personal anguish, Philoctetes does so
only as a result of treachery. The play had not been popular on the stage until 1968:
Helmut Flashar26 details only a few versions, by André Gide (1898), Karl von Levetzow
(1909) and Rudolf Pannwitz (1913). In 1968 Heiner Müller presented a substantially reformed version of the play, with no chorus and a prologue spoken by a masked clown
who insists: ‘was wir hier zeigen, hat keine Moral; furs Leben können Sie hier bei uns
nichts lernen.’ DDR critics interpreted the play as an anti-war piece that criticised the
situation in pre-socialist societies; but Flashar sees it as a play about the individual who is
excluded from his society and yet is made use of by it – not unlike Wolf’s Cassandra. At
the same time, Philoctetes (as Müller expresses it) learns to use his wound as a weapon,
to interpret himself as a ‘gap in the system’, and to conquer for himself the ‘vacuum
between beast and machine’. Odysseus, the unscrupulous, lying Realpolitiker, may be a
characteristic figure of the DDR, but he is also there in Sophocles’ original (and in
Pindar’s view of the hero), as the unscrupulous politician of democratic Athens.
Indeed, the nihilistic morality of the Greeks is a theme as much of Sophocles as of this
version. Seamus Heaney’s translation of the play, The Cure at Troy (1990), sticks closely
to the original though it puts the closing speech of Heracles, the deus ex machina, in the
mouth of the chorus:
26
Inszenierung der Antike: das griechische Drama auf der Bühne der Neuzeit (Munich 1991), 241-5
11
When the city’s being sacked
Preserve the shrines. Show gods respect.
Reverence for the gods survives
Our individual mortal lives.
Every member of the Athenian audience knew that the Greeks had shown no reverence at
all in the sack of Troy. Total, impious destruction held sway – a sentiment that could
easily find an echo in any of the wars of the twentieth century.
Another exploration of the moral destruction that accompanies total war is Jonathan
Shay’s remarkable book, Achilles in Vietnam (Touchstone 1994). Subtitled Combat
Trauma and the Undoing of Character, it uses the Iliad as a peg for a discussion of the
detrimental effects of the experience of warfare on the soldier’s psyche, not least the
‘berserk state’ that typifies Achilles. ‘I believe that once a person has entered the berserk
state, he is changed forever’. Shay notes that Kipling too had recognised this state in
World War I: ‘You went Berserk… you’ll probably be liable to fits of it all your life’.27
A curious instance of the theme is Michael Tippett’s second opera, King Priam (1962) .
A strange theme, perhaps, for a pacifist artist, the libretto - which as usual is by Tippett
himself – explores questions of moral choice and responsibility. A choice not made with
full self-knowledge bears within it the seeds of disaster. So the Judgment of Paris, and
even before that the decision of Priam to expose the boy, lead to disaster of the fall of
Troy. This is the reverse of an amoral view of the story. Tippett seems to be saying that
if we could realise our full humanity, war could be averted. As for Homer, the heart of
the opera is the encounter of Priam and Achilles, where the king kisses the hands that
have slain his son. This is not an episode that gets much consideration in other twentieth
century interpretations of the Trojan War, though it perhaps echoes the hopeful anti-war
positions of the 1960s’ counter-culture.
For Derek Walcott, even rediscovery of the destroyed city is a revelation of horror:
Gradually, Achille
found History that morning. Near the hedge, the tines
of the rake in the dad leaves grated on some stone,
so he crouched to uproot the obstruction. He saw
deep marks in the rock that froze his fingers to bone.
The features incised there glared back to his horror
from its disturbed grave. A face that a child will draw:
blank circles for eyes, a straight line down for the nose,
a slit for a mouth, but the expression angrier
as Achilles’ palm brushed off centuries of repose.
A thousand archaeologists started screaming
as Achille wrenched out the totem, then hurled it far
over the oleander hedge….
Instantly, like moles
or mole crickets in the shadow of History,
27
Shay 1994, 98.
12
the artifacts burrowed deeper into their holes.
The escape of the archaeological artefacts is an image of the past that must not be
resurrected. But it is of course the job of archaeologists to do just that, in the hope
perhaps of creating a greater wisdom and understanding which can influence the future.
In poetry, too, the desire to escape the past is frequently counterposed to the need to face
up to it.
The Escape of Helen
The theme of escape is a constant in the story of Troy. Aeneas escapes to found another
Troy in Rome; Helen escapes to live out the Trojan War in Egypt, leaving a phantom in
her place. John Masefield’s long poem, ‘The Tale of Nireus’28 imagined that Troy’s
women somehow escaped and founded a new society on Mt Ida:
When Troy was sacked and all her towers
Blazed up and shook into the sky
Smoke like great trees and flame like flowers
And Priam’s bodyguard did die,
Then the Queen’s women snatched up spears,
And fought their way out of the gate;
Seized horses from the charioteers
And fled like mountain-streams in spate.
They would not stay for slavery
To some Greek lord until they died,
They rode the forest to be free,
Up on the peaks of snowy Ide.
And in the forest on a peak
They hewed a dwelling with the bronze,
And lived unconquered by the Greek,
Fierce, sun-burned women, neither tame nor weak,
The panther-women called the Amazons.
But the most complex exploration of the theme of escape is H.D.’s book-length poem,
Helen in Egypt, which revisits the theme of the phantom Helen that appears in Euripides’
Helen, and in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Richard Strauss, Die ägyptische
Helena. The experience of war is a constant theme of H.D.’s poetry, even in the early
‘And Pergamos’, and her translations and reworkings of plays by Euripides brought her
back repeatedly to Troy. Translation is for her a work of excavation – of meaning, of the
psyche – which she uses as a mode of self-psychoanalysis. Her short early poem, ‘Helen’,
makes the heroine an emblem of the misogyny of warlike men:
All Greece hates
The still eyes in the white face,
The lustre of the olives
Where she stands
28
Poems (Heinemann 1946), 594-5
13
And the white hands.
All Greece reviles
The wan face when she smiles,
Hating it deeper still
When it grows wan and white,
Remembering past enchantments and past ills.
Greece sees unmoved,
God’s daughter, born of love,
The beauty of cool feet
And slenderest knees,
Could love indeed the maid
Only if she were laid,
White ash amid funeral cypresses.
In the later, long poem, Helen, the hated above all, becomes, according to the reading of
Janice S. Robinson,29 an emblem of the poet herself. HD has betrayed herself by
marriage, and the Greek attack on Troy has destroyed Helen as well as her marriage. In
this allegorical reading, Paris is her deceitful husband Richard Aldington, and Achilles
her lover and alter ego D.H. Lawrence. Helen destroyed is regenerated outside Time
where she conducts what is in effect a psychoanalytic examination to excavate her own
past. The poet here builds on her own experience of being psychoanalyzed by Sigmund
Freud – represented in the poem by Theseus. As Eileen Gregory writes,30 HD’s Troy
‘expresses for her the obliterated sites of the past that must be recovered through a
painful archaeology. Not only Helen in Egypt but her translation of Euripides’ Ion and
her adaptation of choruses from Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis enact the descent and
recovery of a virginal, ‘oracular’ figure: HD descends into her past to become more pure
as poet. HD herself wrote of Helen and Iphigeneia,
These twins are companions to the Ion that I worked on for so many years. They
all deal with a defamed or ‘lost’ oracle, Helen herself being exiled to Egypt and
the Helen theme degraded through the mock-mysteries… She is lost, to be found
again.
The escape of the heroine leads to nostalgia: the nostoi of the heroes are a counterpoint to
the loss of the Troy to which they can never return. But nostalgia, ‘a war-borne disease’,
is also a psychic disease which must be cured in the interests of psychic wholeness. To
quote Gregory again,31
It is tempting to critics to collapse HD’s Hellenic nostalgia into a neurotic
sublimation finally resolved by Freud. However, as HD’s remarks in 1937
suggest, Freud did not dissolve nostalgia but instead allowed HD a way to deepen
and refine it, clarifying for her through the enactment of memory and dreams the
centrality of maternal longing and of incestuous configurations, the controlling
presence in her life of the phobia of war, and the spiritual longing associated with
the father.
29
H.D: the life and work of an American poet (Boston 1982)
HD and Hellenism (Cambridge 1997), 28.
31
Ibid 36
30
14
HD’s experience of psychoanalysis was a catalyst in her life and a confirmation of her
identity as a poet. The momentum of HD’s difficult and complex poem is the need to
leave Troy behind, to move on, to reconcile Trojan and Greek and to find some
grounding for herself beyond the desires of men and the vicissitudes of war, to return to
reality from the dream represented by Egypt. Psychoanalytic terminology like eidolon is
used to articulate her reflection on her experience, and Paris becomes an Oedipus figure
who hates not only Priam and Hecuba but sets out to kill both Achilles and Helen.32 A
few quotations must suffice to give the flavour of the spiritual journey represented by
Helen in Egypt.
It is one thing, Helen, to slay Death,
It is another thing to come back
Through the intricate windings of the Labyrinth;
The heart? Ember, ash or a flower,
You are Persephone’s sister. (157)
My Psyche, disappear into the web,
The shell, re-integrate,
Nor fear to recall
The shock of the iron-Ram,
The break in the Wall,
The flaming Towers,
Shouting and desecration of the altars; you are safe here;
remember if you wish to remember,
or forget… (170f)
The proximity of Love and Death, Eros and Eris, are both represented in Paris:
Eris is sister of Ares,
His unconquerable child is Eros;…
O flame-tipped, o searing,
Destroying arrow of Eros;
O bliss of the end,
Lethe, Death and forgetfulness,
O bliss of the final
Unquestioned nuptial kiss. (183)
Death is not the escape from the burden of the war-torn past. Psychic wholeness is to be
found through Love, not Death.
So the dart of Love
Is the dart of Death,
And the secret is no secret;
The simple path
Refutes at last
32
Robinson 391
15
The threat of the Labyrinth,
The Sphinx is seen,
The Beast is slain
And the Phoenix-nest
Reveals the innermost
Key or the clue to the rest
Of the mystery…
The seasons revolve around
A pause in the infinite rhythm
Of the heart and of heaven. (302-3)
But this is a reconciliation that happens, perhaps, only in the heart of a poet. The meaning
of the poem is less important than the ‘method’, introspection as excavation. The poem is
the apogee of the kind of ‘mythical consciousness’ that uses myth to investigate the
poet’s own consciousness. But the warfare of the world goes on.
Troy Today: reality and fantasy
Now the treasure of Priam is almost as much fought over as the original Helen. Given by
Schliemann to the Museum für Früh- und Vorgeschichte in Berlin, it disappeared at the
end of the Second World War. In 1994 it was revealed that it had been taken by Russian
troops and held in secret at the Pushkin Museum throughout the period of the Cold War.
All in good condition, it was exhibited in Moscow in 1996, and though some plans were
mooted for a travelling exhibition, this has not taken place because of uncertainty as to
whether it would ever return. Berlin lays claim to the treasure, but a return to that city
was blocked in 2004. Athens also believes it has a right to the gold, while Turkey’s claim
should not be neglected as the ultimate origin of the pieces in the treasure. And the heirs
of Frank Calvert, who owned the hill of Hissarlik from which it was allegedly excavated,
have also staked a claim to its ownership.33 If the gold of Priam were to become as much
fought over by archaeologists as Helen was by the participants in the war, that would
truly be a revenge of the gods. At least there seems no chance that the treasure was
merely a phantom. Quite the contrary, its authenticity and provenance have been
confirmed by recent examination.
More important than the movement of the treasure of Priam has been the resumption of
archaeological activity at Hisarlik since 1988.34 Excavation has shown that the Hisarlik
site was not some pirate castle, but a major city. Its appearance in Hittite texts, contested
on their first discovery in 1975, is now accepted as new texts indicate clearly the location
of the city the Hittites called Wilusa. We can say with confidence that this site is the Ilion
of the Trojan War, situated in a region called Taruisa. Its king Alaksandu may have ruled
from 1290-72 BC. As Latacz puts it, the Iliad can now be treated as a ‘source text’: one
can discuss seriously whether the Trojan War actually took place. As a corollary, there
is no need to spend a moment’s serious attention on the fantasies of those who argue that
33
34
Caroline Moorehead, The Lost Treasures of Troy (Orion 1994), 278-9
See the summary in Joachim Latacz, Troy and Homer (OUP 2004), esp. 75-6, 91, 167.
16
Troy was actually in Croatia, for example, or even in Cambridgeshire;35 nonetheless, the
popular imagination, ever uncritical, is prone to believe what suits it or tickles its fancy
rather than what can be shown to be the case.
It remains to be seen whether this development will have an impact on the popular
response to Troy comparable with that attributed by Kenner to the original discovery of
the city by Schliemann. Perhaps there has not been much opportunity so far. But the
movie, Troy, has not shown any particular awareness of the archaeology of the site. The
movie’s city is adorned with statues that vaguely recall the style of 8th century Cyprus;
the dead are laid on their pyres with coins placed on their eyes, eight hundred years
before the invention of coinage; the Greeks sail in triremes. Orchomenos is located in the
middle of the Peloponnese. Nick Lowe in the TLS36 called the production ‘a trolley-dash
round the British Museum, jumbling millennia and cultures in a historical mishmash
surpassing even the original poem’. The story is remodelled to fit the plot requirements of
cinema, and the gods are completely absent (except for Thetis, paddling in a rock pool to
show her watery origins). What still remains is the hideous conflagration that destroys the
city, the blasphemy of murder in the temples, and the monstrous human suffering
involved. The image of Troy remains the same while archaeology changes around it.
Whether that is a criticism of the scholarship of movie-makers, or a testimony to the
overarching power of myth, is a question that has no easy answer.
35
Roberto Salinas Price, Homeric Whispers (2006), locates Troy at the mouth of the River Neretva; Iman
Wilkens, Where Troy Once Stood (2005), puts it in the Gog Magog Hills of eastern England.
36
TLS June 4, 2004.
17