In Our Time - The Trojan War

Episode Date: May 31, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Trojan War, one of the best known events of Greek mythology. According to the traditional version of the story, the war began when a Trojan prince, Paris, eloped with the Spartan queen Helen. A Greek army besieged Troy for ten years before the city was finally overrun and destroyed. Some of the most familiar names of Greek mythology are associated with the war, including Achilles and Hector, Odysseus and Helen of Troy - and it has also given us the story of the Trojan Horse.The war is the backdrop for Homer's epic poem The Iliad, and features in many other works from classical antiquity. For centuries it was assumed to be a mythical event. But in the nineteenth century a series of archaeological discoveries provided startling evidence that Troy might really have existed, leading some scholars to conclude that there could even be some truth behind the myth. So does the Trojan War story have any basis in fact? And why has it proved such an enduring legend?With:Edith HallProfessor of Classics at King's College LondonEllen AdamsLecturer in Classical Art and Archaeology at King's College LondonSusan SherrattLecturer in Archaeology at the University of SheffieldProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, it began when a prince was asked to judge a beauty contest and ended with the great city of Troy burned to the ground. The Trojan War, a ten-year conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans,

is one of the best-known stories of ancient mythology. The names of its main characters, including Achilles and Hector, Cassandra, Helen of Troy and King Agamemnon, are still familiar today, almost 300 years later, 300 years after they were first written down. And the ploy that settled the conflict, the Trojan horse, remains the most famous piece of subterfuge in military history. For centuries, the Trojan War was believed to be nothing more than an ancient myth,

a story made famous by Homer's epic poem, The Iliad. But in the late 19th century, archaeologists and historians began to discover a surprising evidence suggesting there might be some truth behind the stories after all. So where does the tale come from? And should we be describing the Trojan War as myth or history? With me to discuss the Trojan War at Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King's College London, Alan Adams, lecturer in classical art and archaeology,

also at King's College London, and Susan Sherritt, lecturer in archaeology at the University of Sheffield. Edith Hall, can we talk first about the mythology of the Trojan War, how the whole thing began? The myth of the Trojan War is really the foundation myth for the ancient Greeks and the Roman world and therefore the west of the relationship between gods and men and between East and West.

It begins really with Achilles, the mightiest of all the Greek heroes who is half God and half man and the wedding of his parents. Pilius, who was a mortal, and Thetis, who is a goddess. But it was decreed that she was going to bear a son, mighty than herself, so Zeus decided

she must be married to a mortal or else she would make a super god, if you see what I mean. They have a wedding. The wedding is wrecked because the goddess of discord or conflict is excluded. Her name is Eris, and she is so annoyed that she tries to gate crash, throws in an apple, which just says,

for the fairest, for the most beautiful one. This leads to the competition, because all the goddesses want to be the most beautiful goddess. They ask Paris, who's immortal, interestingly, to adjudicate. He turns down Athena's offer of wisdom He turns down Heera Juno's offer Of an empire of both East and West

Which is very interesting, political power And he just goes for sex with the most beautiful woman in the world Who unfortunately, because he's a Trojan, is not only Greek but already married So this leads to the abduction or rape Depending on how you read certain words in Homer of Helen of Troy And the Greeks declare war on the Trojans, which leads to the first great international war between what we would call the West, Greece, and all the different Greek islands and cities and all of the Allies of Troy in Anatolia, Turkey.

Is there a sense in which the Iliad, we're going to talk quite a bit about the Iliad, so this is just an introduction, introductory question, was thought to turn that myth into history? It's about 700 BC. Yes. The date that we can put on this wonderful poem is about 750 years BC. However, it's been in the making. We know there are elements in it that are at least 500 years older than that.

It's the product of an oral tradition of storytelling. It did get written down in the 6th century, but it's the product of an oral tradition, which clearly has some folk memories in it. It will have memory of re-examination. reality, whatever that is. I mean, the Greeks were already aware that some of it was true. Some of it was probably the invention of poets. But did it, when he wrote it down, are we any evidence at the time that it was received,

that people thought this is what really happened, that it had gone from the gods and goddesses frolicking after the, it's golden apple in all the versions, isn't it? Who was the fairest? And not frolicing, racing, competing. And it had become a historical document in the eyes of those who could, read or heard it at its oral, wasn't it to start with it were told? Well, actually, that's a difficult question because the distinction between myth and history had not been made intellectually in the muthos, is just the word, is what we have been told happened. It's only 200 years later in the 5th century that Herodotus and Thucydides,

the first historians, said, hey, is this really true or not? So actually the very first people really believe that it had happened. It was only in about the 5th century BC that people started to worry about whether it was fiction or not. That's what I wanted to hear. And you got it. Ellen Adams, can you tell us the important elements of what we'd later know about, the siege of Troy, we'll come back to what we know, whether we know what we know is true? Anyway, what important elements are not in the Iliad?

Well, the Iliad actually focuses on a very small window of the entire Trojan War myth. When the Iliad ends, Achilles is still alive. He needs to be killed by Paris, who shoots him with a... narrow through his heel. This gives us the Achilles heel. It means your weak spot. And then it's only at this point that the Greeks realise that they're never going

to defeat Troy using might alone, using the sword. So they resort to trickery. And Odysseus steps up to this challenge. He's the most cunning of the Greeks. And he comes up with this plan to fool the Trojans into

dragging this massive constructive wooden horse. into their citadel. So what the Greeks do is they pretend to flee, they pretend to go back home, and they don't, in fact, they sort of hide around the corner. The Trojans, after a debate against the better judgment of some, do drag this Trojan horse into the citadel.

The horse, of course, contains Greek soldiers hidden within it, and they simply let themselves out when the Trojans are asleep, open the gates of Troy and let the Greek army in. And that's it, Troy is completely sacked and she can't save herself. So that's the main thing. And there are other things that, 40 days in a siege that's supposed to, he covers 40 days, he's supposed to have gone over 10 years, any other important things that are not there in the Iliad?

Well, in events, I mean. The Trojan War myth itself is sort of nested within a whole network of other myths because all of the Greeks have to get home. And for some of them, that takes a long time. But others, it, like Agamemnon, that triggers off a whole, epic of revenge and sort of cycle of revenge. From our point of view, from the kind of historical point of view, we are looking, I think it's quite important to say that we're looking at the 13th century.

So when we're trying to think about whether there is a place in history for the Trojan War, we need to sort of rebuild a picture of what the 13th century looked like before doing it. so. Was there another account that has been lost, another written eventually written, has been lost of this? Well, Homer's two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have preserved remarkably well

in various forms, but they were part of an epic cycle and they have more or less preserved through other people referring to them later on. There are other accounts, I mean, one of them

talks about the origins of the Trojan War. Another one looks at the siege. And one of them looks at what Achilles did when he was attacking Pentheselaya, the Amazon Queen, and then the king of the Egyptians. So there's a whole host of other stories that are sort of out there that we can piece together. And these are in manuscript form,

or not manuscript form, these are to be read? Not so much, no. I mean, Homer, yes, but he was part of an entire epic tradition that we have fragments of via later authors. We've got a summary. We have a summary of the contents. We don't have the poems.

Can we just mark out the other areas of knowledge that we now have? It's not only the Iliad. Well, what we've been talking about so far are the literary sources about the myth, and just as importantly, we have the historical, sources and the archaeological sources about the 13th century. And with the archaeology, we can pinpoint

places. So we can point out Troy on the map, Mycini, Tehrins, Pylos, general places like that. And also with the archaeology, we can look at the material culture and we can vaguely track imports, exports,

imitations of styles from other places. So we know that there was contact across the Aegean world in the 13th century. You know that they were in some way interaction. And warfare, of course, is just a hostile form of interaction. So it sort of sets the scene for the Trojan War being possible. And the other form of information is historical. We've got two main bodies of text for that, both of which shed very different light on the whole 13th century picture. And one is the linear B evidence. This is the script that the Mycenaeans use to write down their Greek.

They did speak Greek, and also they had gods which share the same names as the Lacer classical Greek. So in Linear B we have Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus. And also the Linear B tablets tell us that this is a really sophisticated society in the Mycenaean world. They are very organized and they have a very good accounting system for the imports and exports of things going into the palace and out again. So could the 13th century Greeks have mobilised a massive force? Well, they were certainly very organised in other ways. And finally, there's the Hittite sources.

And the Hittites were a culture broadly corresponding to modern-day Turkey, the central and eastern areas, certainly. And they have produced lots of texts which had been deciphered, and they give us insights to diplomatic relations of the Great Kings, of the Eastern Mediterranean of the time. And through them, we can try and work out the geography of who's who and how they're interacting. Thank you very much.

Susan Schott, can you give us some idea of how important this story has been over the last 2,800 years or whatever it is? Well, I think there's absolutely no doubt that the historical Greeks regarded this as an account of their very earliest history. and really did believe that. And of course, the Iliad and the Odyssey were also very fundamental in the Greek education system. So this was something that everybody was aware of.

When Alexander came along at the end of the 3rd century BC, on his way toward the east he called in at Troy, Eelion, and that is indeed where he cut the Gordian knot. and for him the whole story of the Trojan War was extremely important in his propaganda to make himself the emperor. How did he use it in his propaganda? Well, really by paying homage to the site of the Trojan War

and he then, it was after that during the Hellenistic period that they began to build temples Troy and to sort of generally fervish it up as a tourist tourist centre and after that the Romans having adopted Aeneas as the founder of the Romans used it even more

as a place of pilgrimage as a tourist centre Anius another half man half god who fled from burning Troy with his father on his shoulders Well I'm not sure he was ever supposed to be half god but by the time he'd founded the Roman race, he was pretty divine, I guess. So this is, we're talking about when the Greeks are in their great glory, they have taken this on board as something that, out of which they've come,

the Trojan War. Yes, I mean, they take this as a representation of their earliest history, of their past. And particularly, I think, of their collective past. I think that's one of the important things about the Trojan War, is it isn't the past of Athens or Corinth or Thebes or anywhere. It's the past of the Greeks collectively. Before the late 19th century and the...

But we come back to that, the discovery of Erdog was of the site of Troy. What evidence was there did they have for such a place and why did they think it was? Well, I think that, I mean, the ancient Greeks themselves were in no doubt where it was. Alexander. You say Azana called in. Did he call in the place that Schleiman later excavated? He did indeed, yes. Yes. It was really only in the second century AD that people like Demetrius of Skepsis started and after him Strabo started casting doubt on where Troy actually was. Demetrius of Skepsis in particular worried about, he was aware that the topography of the Trojan plane had changed, that there. that there had been alluviation and that it had once been much smaller and he worried about the plain

that the Trojans and Greeks were supposed to have fought on. Why did he worry about it? Because he thought it wasn't big enough or wouldn't have been big enough. And so he wanted to cite Troy a bit further to the east at a place which was then called

the village of the Elions. Did the names, and local place names, for instance, were they still around many hundreds of years later? So would they recognise that... Well, it depends how much further on you go, because once you have the Turks arriving in that part of Turkey, then local place names changed more or less completely.

But there would be a member of the previous place name, surely, aren't they? Oh, I don't know how long, you know, these doucify... I think a lot of this kind of traditional information was lost during the long Middle Ages. Then in the period after the Renaissance, we start to get West European travellers going to northwest Turkey to the Troad again. And in the 16th century, 16th and 17th century, particularly, people assumed it was the ruins of a Hellenistic, Roman city right up on the tip of the bit of the troad that sticks out at the end of the Dardanelles called Sigeum or Alexandria Troas. They assumed that was the site of ancient Troy at that point.

An interest moved on and intensified Eithol and grew in the 19th century. What brought it to such a head almost, let's call it that, in the 19th century? The first read investigations were actually interesting. 1822, which is precisely the point that the Greek world gets liberated from the Turks. The Greek War of Independence had something to do with it. But the crucial point is really the 1850s and the publication of Darwin's origin of species because the need to hang on to the historicity of myth became incredibly important in the case of the Bible and Genesis and the account of creation. So the

discussion about how far world myth in general, myth in general, whether biblical Greek or from Africa held kernel was the word that was often used, kernel of truth, like a nut, became absolutely frenetic.

That was 1859. Gladstone had published various dissertations on Homer in the 1850s as well. You know, he sensed the way the winds were blowing and that we needed to try to settle this into proper archaeological history. So it's the 1860s that Schleeman, who's the man most associated with

the discovery of Troy, everybody goes and starts digging frenetically. But let's go back to it. I think listeners will be fascinated as I was that out of the blue almost, Darwin comes into the picture. We're talking about scholars, we're talking about Greece, we're talking about battles and then enter Darwin

and you say that causes an intense revision, intense re-examination. I'd like you to say tell a little bit more about that. Okay, it's deflected from the discussions of the historicity of the Bible. It's a sort of secondary arena of that. And what is that... The historicity of the Bible is very important

because does the Bible tell us any sort of truth at all in terms of the development of mankind? People want it to very, very much of their certain kind of fundamentalist Christian, but you're talking at that time of most extraordinary theological disputes in general all over the Christian world. But it's very much actually comes down to Genesis. Did God create man? Or is man an ape?

Okay. Whether you found Troy or not actually seemed to help solve that kind of issue. So can we switch to Troy? So what intensive, why, how come it switch to the Trojan? And we understand that about the Bible. Everybody knows that Darwin and so on, fine. Why did it switch to Troy so intensively? And Susan wants to come in, obviously.

Do you want to continue with this? I really don't mind. Troy is of crucial importance for all kinds of other reasons, which are much more geopolitical, is to do with sort of the West's descent from the Greeks and the cultural descent of the West from the whole Greco-Roman tradition. And the fact that the royal houses of Europe

had always claimed to be descended from Troy, it became a matter of huge anxiety to prove that it was real and it was really the ancestor of the West. And Jerome was founded by... Yes, I was going to say another very important development from the later 18th century onward is the whole ideology of the nation state and the harnessing of subjects like philology

and folklore studies and archaeology eventually in the attempt to find the earliest history or indeed prehist of particular peoples. The importance of the Iliad and the Odyssey in particular is that this has been internalised by Western Europe since really the Renaissance onwards. And the earliest history of Greeks is indeed the earliest history of Europeans. And this is why it is so particularly important then. So let's turn to Schliemann in about 1870, Ellen Anams, a wealthy German businessman, an amateur archaeologist who set off to find Troy and thought he found it.

Well, Henrich Schumann is a fascinating character, and he's especially interesting in the context of thinking about myth and reality, because he's quite difficult to pin down. He fabricated certain aspects about his life and work. We know that, but we don't know what he said that wasn't fabricated either. and there's a lot of debate about whether he made things up and to what extent if he did. But essentially, he wasn't born wealthy. He was self-educated, very, very smart. He became fluent in 14 different languages. And he was a very successful businessman,

not necessarily a very likable one, but he was successful. And he was able to retire in his late 40s. And he claimed at that point that, always, since a child, had an obsession about proving that the Trojan War had happened, whether that's true or not is open to debate. But he did go to the Ottoman Empire at that point and start looking for Troy. He can't be credited for finding Troy, but he can be credited for pouring his fortune into opening it up in massive excavations

and really putting it on the map. Who can be credited with finding Troy then? Well, there was a lot of guesswork in the area about where Troy might have been. They sort of pinpointed the area. I should explain that this is the northwest part of the modern-day Turkish coastal area. And it's very strategic because it's the route from the Aegean to the Black Sea. And there was a British person there called Frank Calvert, whose family owned a part of the mound, which we're not.

understand what we call Troy. And he didn't have the money to pursue his aims of trying to prove that this was Troy. So it began a sort of uneasy partnership, but that Schumer kind of took over. Susan Sherritt, what did he, he went into this side, by modern standards, he went in like a bulldozer. He did indeed. What did he find, and was he, he was obviously sure from the beginning, this man who's pretty sure of himself, everything, that's fine. What did he find that proved to other people that he'd found this? I think

To answer that last question First I think A lot of the way In which he proved to other people That he found it Was sheer publicity Bombardment

And strength of character In many ways There were a lot of sceptics Still when he So about the site itself How did he got the real place I'd like to know what the scepticism Well I'm not so sure

If there was so much scepticism about the site itself as the sort of leap of logic from having found a site which probably was called Eelian in antiquity to proving that there was actually a Trojan war yes. But it had a big war

which... Oh yes! Oh yes! So we must tell the listeners what... He wasn't a stupid man so he found a great wall, he found layers, he found all sorts of stuff there. What he did basically was he decided that if he was going to find Priam's Troy, it would be right at the bottom.

So he drove an enormous trench right through the Roman Hellenistic and First Millennium Lairs came down to what is now called the second city of Troy, Troy 2, which is where he found what he called Priam's treasures, various agglomerations of

jewellery and gold and silver cups and this kind of thing, including the very famous set of gold jewellery that you often see his wife, Sophia, wearing in old photographs of his excavations. So he's got that. Is he convincing people? What happens? He goes to Troy.

He goes to place. he decides his Troy. There's general consensus that if there was a Troy, this is the Troy that was. Yes? It's all a bit fudgy here. I need a lot of help. There is, no, there is a lot of, there is a lot of consensus. Right.

And so what does he find that matters, Delis? He, well, he is such a difficult character because people now think he actually fabricated some of the fines, in some of the actual metal work fines and masks and so on, that he dug up. What he was incredibly good at was actually harnessing the press. I mean, he had contacts all over the world and was able to get things in the illustrated London News

and in the American papers and in the German papers. And it became a sort of propaganda war. In terms of the actual concrete findings, I think I would rather you talk to our archaeologist friends. Okay. Well, Troy II, where the Priam's Treasure comes from, is third millennium BC. It's far too early.

Schumann doesn't realise this, so he's selling the idea of having found Troy based on completely inappropriate evidence. And not entirely his fault, well it is because he drove down through the ground far too quickly, but in the area he was looking at, which is the sort of most visible central part of the citadel, the Troy that we are looking for had been much destroyed in later antiquity. So the Romans had sort of cleared a lot of it away. It's only much later on when he's digging further down after he's done some excavations on the mainland

so he knows what Mycenaean pottery looks like that he gathers that what he's actually looking for is Troy 6 or possibly going into Troy 7 but let's say Troy 6. So he's there for a long time with a break in between because this is sort of part of his rather unpleasant character. He got banned from the author.

Empire by the authorities because he smuggled the treasure of Priam outside Turkey, took it to Greece, and there's now a very complicated battle about who has proper ownership of it. But he had to take a break and go to the mainland to do some excavations there. He did some more exploration there on what he called Miscini. He did, he went to Miscini. Again, Miscini was still known about because the amazing fortifications and, Lion Gate, where you have lions flanking a column, were still visible. So, again, he didn't discover the site, but he did conduct some important excavations there,

including some graves where he found some bodies that had been covered with gold armour or clothing and gold masks. And one of these bodies was very well preserved underneath the gold. And he's supposed to have sent off a telegram saying, today I gazed upon the face of Agamemnon and we don't know whether that's true it's all one of these wonderful myths that. Wonderful one-liners, I mean

the face of Agamemnon who's going to resist that? Priam's treasure, who's going to resist that? Absolutely right. Sorry. Yes, that's... Can we, so the archaeologist said it's generally thought that this was

the place if there was a place and there was a place and they're still excavating it very, very carefully. Metachap was doing that the other day actually. Still is there. It's wonderful. Right. Talk about the other evidence here, which came from the Hittite civilization. It did. In the 1920s, so about half a century

after the first frenetic digging, it's a Swiss scholar called Emil Fara found, decoded a lot of the tablets that had been found of the Hittite empire. The Hittites are the, extraordinarily civilised and rich culture of central Turkey in the 16th to 12th century

BC. They spoke into European but they wrote in cuneiform on clay tablets so it was possible to decode these and once they were read, their treaties, there's correspondence as diplomatic texts, once these were decoded certain very very interesting names came up including the place names Wailusa and Taruisa, which could easily be,

and he suggested were William, which originally had a W, Ileon and Troy. The name of a king, Alexandu, was found, which sounds very like Paris. His other name is Alexander in Homer. And most importantly, we discover a ethnic group called the Ahyawahua, who live over the sea to the west,

which sounds just like the name for the Greeks in the Iliada, which is not Greeks, it's Achians. So we think that, I mean, I am absolutely clear that that's the best guess we've so far got, that the people that the Hittites call the Achiawa who lived over the sea beyond Lesbos into the Aegean and are accused in one of these documents of having had some kind of conflict near Wailusa,

right, are the Hittites talking about the Greeks? Susan Sherrod, what archaeological evidence, what's the main points that have emerged since Schleeman's day in the last 130 years or so? The main extra evidence from that side. From the archaeology. Actually, I don't think there is anything terribly new that gets us any further.

After Schleiman and his young collaborator, William Wilhelm Dorp felt, who was very largely responsible for sorting out the basic chronology of these various levels that Schleiman had excavated. Carl Blagin started, an American archaeologist, started excavating at Troy in the 1930s. And Schleeman and Dorpfelt in particular had originally, well, had in the end decided that Troy's, the sixth city of Troy,

Troy 6 must have been Homer's Troy. Blagin came along and conducted more excavations on the edge of the citadel where the sixth and seven cities of Troy were still preserved, at least to some extent, and decided that Troy 7A was the best candidate for a siege of Troy. this was because he found lots of little cramped rooms inside the walls full of large storage jars, which suggested to him that this was a city that had suffered a siege. Do you agree not much new has come out since Schleiman,

not much dramatically new? Troy, I mean, that's absolutely correct. I think we know much more about the Mycenaean Greeks themselves. And, I mean, the decipherment of linear braes, be in 1952 changed everything because people were surprised and it may be surprising to us but people were very surprised that the Mycenaean Greek spoke Greek. That was not a given and so that meant that if you are looking for an historical Trojan War involving Greece then at least you've got a people in the Greek area speaking Greek and they're again worshipping Greek gods.

So that is an element, I think, to bear in mind. And basically the work in some of the other seats of Greek kings, such as Pylos and Tyrrins and ongoing work in various places, is helping to fill in the picture about contact. Let's go back to the Iliad Edith Hall, because most people will know this story through the Eliad and the honest of it, Eliad. Can we tell us a little about how you now think it was put together

and by whom was Homer a man or a lot of people. Was it a lot of men? Okay. I think that there were versions, proto versions of the Iliad songs sung in Knozos. I really do. I think that we had very, very early epic poem. I think so, yes. We've got pictures of people holding liars.

We've got certain words in the Iliad, which we know, for example, from this strange W that drops out, but we know was there because of the way the meter works that are incredibly ancient. But I think we're really talking about a 500-year process development from about the 13th century, which is when the actual Troy, Trojan War, is supposed to have taken place,

to about the 8th century. Many, many different contributors groups of people. I do personally believe that you've got the aesthetic touch of a master hand towards the end. There's incredible elements in it like ring composition and echoing and, unfortunately, It's aesthetically too good not to have had some writing involved, I think. So that's how I see it.

The most important point of it for me is that there are 28 contingents of Greeks from 28 different places in mainland Greece, the Peloponnese, the islands, Ithica and Crete. It's a poem about how they did something together. That is the crucial thing, is that ideologically it was about creating a sense of Greek identity in the 8th century BC, which is also when the Olympic games are invented for all the Greeks, and the Pan-Hellenic idea is born at that point. Have you anything to add to that, to that? Yes, well, I think excavations have told us a lot more about Troy. I think they have not told us anymore about a Trojan war in a literal sense in the late Bronze Age. But what archaeology has steadily been giving us is kind of ideological contexts.

And one of the most interesting things that happens around the middle of the second millennium BC, around 1600, 1,500 or so BC, long before the traditional supposed date for a Trojan war, if you believe in one, is the appearance in the Aegean of what have been called siege motifs, illustrations, pictures on various media of what seemed to be sieges of walled cities. Now this is a very old motif that goes back in Mesopotamia to the 3rd millennium BC. You also find siege scenes in Egypt in the 3rd millennium BC.

And it seems to be at this point in the middle of the 2nd millennium that the whole ideology of a siege, the idea of a siege, the motif of a siege, as something that if you are anybody, you have to have taken part in, takes root in the Aegean. And I think that has some interesting implications for the whole idea for Trojan War.

Can you give us some notion of the artistic evidence from the classical era? To do the Trojan War? Well, you have lots of illustrations of various aspects of the myth. It's very popular just to, illustrate. You also get some sort of political uses of the Trojan War as well. And one, probably the best example of that is the Parthenon, which is on the Athenian Acropolis.

And this has a very well-developed, sophisticated sculptural programme. And if you go to the British Museum now, you can see the metapes, the panels of the lapis, which are a type of Greeks, versus the centaurs, which are these half-man. half-horse creatures. And that symbolises a contrast between the civilised world and the barbarians. They are on the south side of the Parthenon, and opposite them, on the north side,

were a series of metaphors of the Trojan War. And here you have a contrast of the Greeks, the upright Greeks, versus the slightly decadent east. and here Troy is standing for the Persians, the great enemy of all Greece at the time. And the important background here is that a generation before, a few decades before, the Persians had succeeded in sacking the Athenian Cropolis itself. So this is turning that around and saying, well, actually, at the end of the day,

the natural order of things is that the Greeks beat the East. We beat the Trojans, we will beat you, and we are on. top, so it's very political. So there's a strong layer of history as propaganda, history as I was there always, history as I, John. Can you give us some indication, Edith Hall, of the,

how soon and how importantly began to feed into literature and help to define certain areas of literature? Classical literature and then right through to today. Immediately are the archaic poets between the 8th and the 5th century BC constantly used Trojan themes.

What changes, it's, in the way that Trojan War is thought about is precisely that the Persian wars in 490 and 480 BC when the Persians invaded Greece and were fought off. That is the point at which the Trojan War is invented as the foundation myth of Greek supremacy over the East. That is why Alexander the Great wanted to go there. He wanted to say, I am the new Achilles. He called himself Achilles. He carried a copy of the Iliad on a papyrus role around with him.

So he did that. So did Julius Caesar. So did Augustus. So did the late pagan emperor Julian. And actually, during the Second World War, it became a very, very vicious point of contestation as to who owned Troy, was it? You know, the Germans who did. You had large German corporations pouring money into the idea of a dig there. And the most recent conference in 2002 on, on, you had large German corporations pouring money into the idea of a dig there. And the most recent conference in 2002 on, the Trojan War, the guy who's digging it up or has been, is Manfred Kaufman at two big. And they actually had a conference and an exhibition that nearly a million people visited called Troy, Dream or Reality, when they tried to prove that it was an entrepo. It was a proto-capitalist place where lots of trading went on. So it became the foundation myth of the reunification of Germany,

the victory of capitalism over communism. You can make it mean anything you want. Finally, it'll have to be briefly. I'm hopefully sorry about this. It's supposed to have taken place over 10 years in that place. Could you confidently say you believe that, or you think that? I cannot confidently say I believe it. Heads been shaken all around the table.

I think Homer's War is very much a creation, as Edith says, off its own time, sometime towards the end of the 8th century. The whole idea of a united, Greek expedition against Troy, in which all Greeks are involved, is very much an ideological constructive. But you can get so much out of it, that's the wondrous. When God shade into people,

when myths shade into history, but still myths containing truths that history has to take over and maybe cracks open and find it inside the colonel as you talked about, it is your word, there's history inside that. I think if the Trojan War didn't happen and it probably didn't,

And it didn't happen at all? It had to be invented. I think several hundred years of conflict, including siege warfare, economic interests in the Aegean between proto-Greek speakers and others, got concentrated or crystallized into this particular myth. There is a truth in it, but it's not the literal truth that people wanted it to be. Alan, how much, what sort of truth is there in it? Well, I think, as I was saying, in the 13th century,

you've got a world where it's believable enough to take root. I think that you have the contact, you have the places, and you have certain texts. But the thing about the Trojan War is that it is, at the end of the day, an idea that's been carried from era to era over millennia now. And it changes. That's why it's given a new lease of life every time. it's adapted to new cultural environments.

And it's still going on today. The wheels are turning. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Susan Sherritt, Edith Hall and Ellen Adams. And next week we'll be talking about King Solomon. And thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to this Radio 4 podcast. If you've enjoyed it, you might like to try others like it,

such as Start the Week or Thinking Aloud, which are both available from the Radio 4 website.