Читать книгу Trojan Horse of Western History - Олег Матвейчев - Страница 3

It took us half an hour to get from Europe to Asia. This is the exact amount of time it takes for a car-ferry connecting the Gallipoli peninsula with the Anatolian coast to cross the Dardanelles. We got to our final destination in about an hour from the fishing town of Gelibolu. During this last part of our journey we were overtaken with a special feeling. The road to Troy! This phrase so full of solemnity put us into a poetic mood. We felt like echoing Homer’s Zeus:

For of all cities beneath sun and starry heaven wherein men that dwell upon the face of the earth have their abodes, of these sacred Ilios was most honoured of my heart.

Iliad. IV. 45–46.

The landscape outside the window, however, conflicted with the state of our mind. Scant vegetated low hills alternated with sunflower and small pine wood plantations. Only a thin blue band on the horizon reminded us that we were coming to the centre of what used to be a mighty marine state in ancient times. Behind a stunted cornfield, we turned to a rural road. In other five minutes we arrived in the village of Tevfikye. It was Ramazan, and Troy was opened for visitors only after 1 p.m. In a café near the souvenir shop we had the very Turkish tea in small glasses and stared at the Greek tourists, who arrived by a huge bus. Deciding not to wait for the opening, but to buy some wooden horses and fridge magnets instead, they finally got back on their bus and moved on to the places where Hellenes had won honor in battles.

Fig. 1. The Troad is the ancient name of the Biga Peninsula, where legendary Troy is located.

Pilgrimage to these lands is a very old tradition. Every such pilgrimage can become a plot of a book, and it often has been a key event in global history.

In 480 B.C., while marching against the Greeks, Persian King Xerxes stopped his troops on the Hellespont coast. Two boat bridges were built across the narrow strait. Suddenly a storm started, destroying the bridges kept together with papyrus ropes, after which the King commanded to lash defiant waters and behead the builders. Before a new ferry was built, Xerxes visited the legendary fortress. According to Herodotus, the King “ascended to the citadel of Priam, having desire to view it, and having viewed and inquired of all that was there, he sacrifices 1,000 oxen to Athena Ilias, while the Magi offered librations to the heroes”.[2] However, the generous hecatomb did not help Xerxes to break the Greek spirit down or to conquer Greece. Having suffered some crushing defeats from the Greeks, having ceded them some of his land and having reduced the country to famine with his military adventures, Xerxes was murdered in the bedroom of his own palace.

In 334 B.C. the flotilla of another great conqueror entered the waters of Hellespont. Having stopped his ship in the middle of the channel, Alexander the Great sacrificed an ox to Poseidon, the God of the Sea. Then he approached the Troad coast and threw a lance onto the dusty ground. For the young king, this was a sign as to the beginning of the conquest of Asia: the “lance conquered” lands were considered to be a gift from the Gods. He jumped off the ship and was the first to get ashore. Since Alexander believed Achilles to be his ancestor, he laid a wreath on the grave of his great grandparent. He took the shield and weapons from the Temple of Athena, and these items brought him luck on the battle field soon after that. The first battle with the Persians took place on the Granicus River near Troy. The army of 40 thousand Persian satraps was smashed with one attack, after which groups of Macedonians cut through the lands of Asian continent like a knife through butter…

Later, Alexander ordered to release Ilion from duties and to equip it with the necessary facilities, because it was his serious intent to find the capital of his global empire there. His early death ruined these plans, though. The great empire split into parts, and the Troad lands with a larger part of Thrace were passed to Alexander’s comrade Lysimachus. Lysimachus built high ramparts around the town, made people from adjacent villages settle there and named the town Alexandria.[3]

In 48 B.C. after the victory over Gnaeus Pompeius in the crucial battle at Pharsalia, Julius Caesar came to the Troad.

Just like Alexander, he believed to have descended from Aeneas and pondered moving the throne to the deserted Troy.

Moreover, having visited Troy, Constantine the Great had been considering founding a new capital there until 330, when he changed his mind and chose to establish Byzantium on the Bosporus, another channel, connecting the Black and the Mediterranean seas. The Troad seemed a more preferable site for the capital, as from there it would have been possible to control not only the narrow straits, but also the land roads of Asia Minor, facing all the Ecumene.[5] However, the sea was already far from Ilion, and the town lost the key element of its existence, which was the harbour. The Emperor gave the new city on the Bosporus a significant name of New Rome, as it was fated to become the centre of this thousand-year empire; however, while the Emperor was still alive, another city name was approved, Constantinople – ”the city of Constantine”.

In 354, Constantine’s nephew Flavius Claudius Julian made a pilgrimage to Ilion. Rejecting Christianity, which became the national religion of the Roman state in time of Emperor Constantine, Julian expected to find desecrated sanctuaries in Troy. He was surprised to discover that all the Pagan rites were still observed in the Hector’s tomb and in the Temple of Athena. Having become the sovereign emperor, he pursued the revival of Paganism and of the Hellenic spirit, due to which his contemporaries nicknamed him “Apostata”. However, Julian was bound to be the last Pagan Roman emperor.

On May 29, 1453, the Turkish Ottomans took Constantinople by storm, and Sultan Mehmet II made the city the capital of his state. Morea and Trapezus, the last vestiges of what used to be a great empire, fell under Turkish control in 1460 and 1461, accordingly. The Ottoman Empire was getting ready for further expansion; however, before sending his hordes to Christian Europe, Mehmet the Conqueror decided to visit Ilion. It happened in 1462. By then, the Troad had already been under Turkish rule for about a century.

Fig. 2. The Mehmet II memorial in Istanbul.

For half a millennium Turkish was spoken in the Troad. For new inhabitants of these lands Troy was a tourist attraction in the first place. As early as in the 16[[th]] and 17[[th]] centuries the enterprising Turks took Europeans, coming to the Eastern coast of the Dardanelles, to some randomly located ruins, claiming those to be remnants of the ancient Ilion. Nowadays, this tradition has been eagerly taken up by guides, who repeat ancient legends mixed up with the latest myths about the successful Heinrich Schliemann, King Priam’s treasures and the great victory of the Greek, allegedly confirmed by archaeological discoveries. The striking landmarks of the new tourist-oriented Troy include the false house of Schliemann in the village of Tevfikye and a large wooden horse built in 1975 for tourists to take pictures with. There are also fragments of antique buildings that the locals took away for their needs. Here or there you can see a bench made of a Doric column capital, or the fence supported with a piece of an ancient monument.

However, such a consumer attitude to ancient history is also typical for us, modern Europeans, used to being fed historical junk food from nice boxes.

Fig. 3. A bench made of Troy artifacts in the village of Tevfikye.

The consumer attitude to ancient history is typical for modern Europeans, used to being fed historical junk food from nice boxes.

If you asked a man from the street about his knowledge of the Trojan War, you would hear a quite confused story based on children books about the myths of ancient Greece, the song Cassandra by Vysotsky, a couple of films like the recent Hollywood Troy, or some clichés from block calendars about the heel of Achilles, the Trojan horse and the apple of discord. Even though these sources often contradict each other, the consumer’s mind still manages to put different facts together consistently.

So, the story goes that once upon a time there lived King Priam in the city of Troy. After his son Paris was born, the king heard a prophecy that Paris would bring the great empire to an end. Priam ordered to kill the baby, but the tender-hearted servants disobeyed him and left the boy on Mount Ida. A shepherd saved Paris and raised him, and taught him the basics of his trade. One day Paris, who was also called Alexander, was grazing, say, sheep in the mountain pasture, and there he saw three goddesses – Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. They asked the young shepherd to resolve their argument as to which of them was more beautiful. (An apple inscribed “for the fairest” was tossed in the midst of the feast, thus sparking a vanity-fueled dispute among the goddesses about who that apple was intended for). Hera promised Paris power over people, if he chose her; Athena promised him wisdom beyond other mortals had; Aphrodite promised him great love. After some consideration Paris selected Aphrodite, who showed him an image of the most beautiful woman in the water – his wife-to-be.

Then Paris went to Troy, where he was recognized as the King’s son. One day Priam and his sons Hector and Paris went to Lacedaemon, the capital of Sparta, to meet Menelaus, the king of that place, to conclude a new trade agreement. Having reached an agreement, the kings arranged a sumptuous feast, and it was then that Paris saw Helen. Helen was the wife of King Menelaus, but Paris realized that she was the very beauty he had seen in the water and couldn’t have left without her. The circumstances were the best for his solution. The following day, Menelaus left for Crete on business. As they say, while the cat is away, the mice will play. Charmed by handsome Paris, Helen sailed with him to Troy, where the lovers legitimated their marriage.

In any epoch abduction of one’s wife has been an inconceivable insult. In the Trojan era, it was casus belli. Upon returning to Sparta, Menelaus became furious. He summoned the kings of friendly states, and they decided to attack Troy with all their joint military power. They outfitted one thousand ships. Tens of thousands of soldiers in copper helmets with horse-hair crests believed they would engage in a blitzkrieg and reap some good reward. Among them were the heroes Achilles and Ajax, the artful Odysseus, the old wise Nestor, and they were led by the brother of Menelaus, the ferocious King Agamemnon. Though, weather conditions did not favour their campaign. There was no leading wind, and thus, Agamemnon ventured upon an awful deed of killing his daughter Iphigenia to favour the gods. Upon spilling her blood on the sacrificial stone, the wind changed, and the vast Greek fleet headed towards the Trojan coast.

Counting on an immediate victory was a mistake, though, as the Trojans avidly defended their city tooth and nail, refusing to surrender the abducted queen. The siege of this city continued for nine years, with no side able to gain the upper hand. However, in the tenth year Achilles and Agamemnon had a row, and that became the turning point in the course of this war. During one of the raids to a suburb of Troy Agamemnon captured the daughter of the priest Chryses. The grieving father asked the King to release his daughter taken hostage, and having been refused, he pleaded with Apollo to curse the Greek army with pestilence, which Apollo did. The terrible illness took down the Achaeans, and Achilles on behalf of the public demanded that their leader returned Chryseis to her father. Chryses gathered his darling, and Agamemnon received Achilles’ prisoner Briseis for compensation. Achilles felt hurt, got angry and refused to participate in battles. He asked Zeus to take revenge upon Agamemnon for this loss by allowing the Trojans to score military success. Zeus met his request, and the Trojans led by King Priam’s son Hector managed to make their way to the Greek vessels and to start a small fire there. Patroclus, the best and only friend of Achilles, engaged in battle with Hector and was killed. Broken hearted, Achilles put aside all his pointless and minor villainous acts and went for revenge. Having taken out thousands of Trojans on his way, he forced his way towards Hector, challenged him to fight and killed him in view of Priam, watching the combat from the fortress walls. Then he tied the opponent’s body to a chariot and dragged it three times around the fortress walls.

Fig. 4. Lucas Cranach the Elder. The Judgment of Paris (1528).

Fig. 5. Franz Matsch. Triumph of Achilles (1892).

At night, Priam quietly came to Achilles’ camp and begged the Champion to return his son’s body. Shocked by the old man’s courage and torn by guilt for his friend’s death, Achilles agreed to his request.

However, the death of the best warrior of Ilion didn’t profit the Greeks at all, especially since they also lost their best fighter very soon after that. Paris managed to shoot Achilles with an arrow in his only weak point, his heel. Then Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, devised an artful trick. He proposed to make a huge wooden horse to be gifted to the Trojans, and to put the best Greek soldiers inside it, and to take the fleet from view of the fortress defenders. After the Trojans awoke, they would see the horse and drag it inside the city, after which the soldiers of that special squad would leave the horse, kill all men, have their way with all women and burn everything they see.

And this trickery was managed. Despite protests of Cassandra, the sister of Paris, and admonition of the priest Laocoön saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!”, the Trojans dragged the monstrous thing into the city. To do that they even had to take a part of the fortress walls to pieces, as the Greek gift was so great. Everything was over that very day. Priam and Paris were killed, Helen was returned to Menelaus, and the city was wiped from the face of the Earth. Only few survived and, led by the Dardian King Aeneas, they left their native land in search for a new motherland, and, after many years of wandering and dangerous encounters, they ended up in Italy on the bank of the Tiber River.

This is the story told in fictional and documental films, articles in popular magazines, and even school textbooks – along with stories that every intelligent person should know, in particular, rumors about the gold of Troy (“that what’s-his name Schliemann”), and cunning Stalin having secretly removed the treasure from prostrated Berlin, plus stories of blind Homer with a lyre in his hands. However, the more intelligent audience tends to clarify the details of this picture basing on so-called scientific evidence.

It appears that the main books of Homer narrate only a small part of the above-mentioned events. Only fifty days in the ten years of the siege of Troy were worthy of the bard’s notice. The Iliad starts with a description of Achilles’ anger about being deprived of his legal prey – Briseis. The poem ends with Patroclus’ funeral, followed by Hector’s funeral. To a large extent, despite many battle scenes, this poem is not about war but about a quarrel between the leaders of two powerful tribes – the Mycenaeans and Myrmidons – and about the fatal consequences of that quarrel for the union of Achaean states.

Despite many battle scenes, the Iliad poem is not about war but about a quarrel between the leaders of two powerful tribes – the Mycenaeans and Myrmidons – and about its fatal consequences for the union of Achaean states.

The Iliad tells us about the whining nature of invincible Achilles, who couldn’t hold back his tears while complaining about Agamemnon to his mother; about cowardly Paris, who like a hare ran away from Menelaus on the battle field; about Helen being peevish and shaming her husband for being afraid of laying down his life in an uneven confrontation with one of the best Greek soldiers:

Thou hast come back from the war; would thou hast perished there, vanquished by a valiant man that was my former lord.

Iliad. III. 428–429.

Homer told the story about the wooden horse in his another poem, the Odyssey. By the way, we can learn from it that the Trojans nearly fought, trying to decide,what to do with the horse.

Either to cleave the hollow timber with the pitiless bronze, or to drag it to the height and cast it down the rocks, or to let it stand as a great offering to propitiate the gods…

Odyssey. VIII. 507–510.

Apparently, the Trojans considered the horse to be not a gift to the city (why would that be, though?), but rather a sacrifice to Poseidon, that the Greeks left behind before departing from the battle field. Thus, they decided to drag their trophy (or a souvenir, to use the up-to-date language) in. Don’t tourists coming to Troy from Istanbul or Izmir do the same? What do the wooden horses that tourists let into their houses hold?

All other events of the Trojan War – from Helen’s abduction to the Exodus of Aeneas – are described in the surviving fragments and retellings of the so-called Cycladic poems, as well as in works of later writers such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Virgil, etc. From these additional sources we can learn that the fate of Iphigenia wasn’t too tragical: at the moment she was to be sacrificed, she was saved the goddess Artemis, who hid the girl in a cloud, took her to Tauris and made her a priestess. You can also learn that the wooden horse was made not by Odysseus, but by Epeius, and that there were three thousand men inside it. For instance, one can also learn that during the Trojan War there was only something like a holographic image of Helen in Troy, and that she herself stayed in Egypt and was faithful to her husband through all these years.[6]

Fig. 6. The souvenir shops in Tevfikia are full of Trojan horses.

By the way, not ten but twenty years passed since Helen had been abducted till the end of the Trojan War (the Greek troops were really delayed on their way to Ilion, but we’ll come back to this fact later). Helen herself recalls it, while mourning over Hector:

Fig. 7. The Iphigenia Rock in the Crimea (village of Castropol), where, according to legend, Agamemnon’s daughter was hidden.

For this is now the twentieth year from the time when I went from thence and am gone from my native land.

Iliad. XXIV. 765–766.

Thus, it appears that by the end of the war, Helen, “a person who set thousands of ships afloat”, was already quite an elderly lady then. And if Paris’ faithfulness is worth of delight in the light of the aforesaid, the patience of his compatriots is perplexing, on the contrary. Should they have suffered years of hardships for the sake of a fading foreign matron? For pity’s sake! Those Trojans were nearly saints!

Fig. 8. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Helen of Troy (1863).

This is how the legend of Troy is known to the most informed intellectuals, who are rather few! But those who went through the trouble of reading Homer’s poems in full and attentively, rather than looking them through are even fewer. “I’ve read the list of ships up to the middle,”[7] Osip Mandelshtam admitted. However, it should be noted that the relevant song “Beotia or the Catalogue of Ships” is a wonderful remedy for insomnia. The best known Russian translation of Homer’s Iliad is that of Nikolai Gnedich, the contemporary of Pushkin. Extremely beautiful, but heavy and archaic, this version has sent se veral generations of readers into sound sleep. Translations by Vikenty Veresaev and Pavel Shuisky are not as popular; they are more modern and better accord to the letter of the original, though, the spirit of the poem was lost. Therefore, maybe that is why these versions are not so popular.

For Homer’s contemporaries, the style of the Iliad and the Odyssey sounded as peculiar as the style of Gnedich is for us. It combines the dialectical features of the Aeolian language and that of the Ionic Greeks, who, by the 10th century B.C., began to colonize the Aegean Region and the North-Western part of the Anatolian coast, and the archaisms of rhapsodies of the Mycenaean epoch, poetic tradition of which reached Homer from the distant past. “That language was clear to listeners, who, since childhood, were used to the songs of Homeric bards – the creators and performers of Greek epos – although, in real life, nobody spoke that language. The unusual language emphasized the singularity of the events described and helped listeners to get transferred to the world of the heroic past, where people were in every respect considerably stronger and braver than people of that days. Even if an expression wasn’t clear to the public, this redoubled authority of the Homeric bards, who seemed to know things that simple people did not know of”.[8]

It is noteworthy that things in the West go as such: academic circles there still accept the old “classical” translations of Homer, although, for the purpose of public enlightenment, they issue cut versions of the Iliad and its brief narrations, or even comics. In due time, the novel by Alessandro Baricco An Iliad[9] became a box-office project. This Italian writer tries to interpret the classic poem in a new way, removing everything that had to do with Gods, fate and other empyreans from it, which a modern reader would be unable to understand.

Well, even in the book-concerned 19[[th]] century the Iliad was not considered to be entertaining reading. In 1884 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, maybe the greatest Homer specialist of that time wrote, “Now Homer is no longer a widely read poet… Even most philologists largely know him as poorly as Christers know the Holy Bible”.[10] We hope to refer to Mr. Wilamowitz again and again in our work. Now we simply state that most of the people living today, just like the generation of our grandparents, have not read Homer thoroughly and thoughtfully enough to ask the essential questions:

1. Did Troy really exist or was it only a myth, and is it useless to look for it on the perishable Earth?

2. Did the Trojan War really take place, or is it a poetic fabrication intended to make people think about the nature of force and weakness, bravery and cowardice, anger and generosity, about boredom of immortality and greatness of death?

3. Did the Greeks win that war, as Homer and the whole antique tradition insisted, or have we been for a few thousand years captivated by false ideas, unintentionally or intentionally formed for us by writers of the distant past?

4. And above all, what lessons can we learn from this story for our up-to-date life, and more specifically, what lessons can be derived for us, the Russians?

Now we are in Troy to try and answer these questions.