TROY at the BRITISH MUSEUM on the 29TH of January 2020
TROY at the
BRITISH MUSEUM on the 29TH of January 2020
The British Museum’s exhibition Troy is a
history of the city and its conflict in a thousand objects. Through the words of Homer and, later,
Virgil, we first glimpse daily life in the city and the beginnings of a
conflict that will envelop the region, drawing in other, disparate forces.
The first window into Troy that we
encounter in the exhibition are Homer’s epics, The Iliad and The
Odyssey. The words of the poet are
read, both in Greek and in English. A
part of Virgil’s Aeneid is also read, since it deals with the founding
of Rome by Aeneas, a Trojan prince and survivor of the fall of Troy. Nothing about Homer is certain. We have no birthdate or a date for his/her
birthday. We do not know Homer’s gender,
sexuality, colour or even if he/she was one person or many. However, we do know about Homer’s religion. Homer believed in the gods who were thought
to reside atop Mount Olympus in Greece.
In, The Iliad (Homer calls Troy by the name Ilium. The German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann
who wrongly supposed that he had discovered Troy in the 19th
century, began his excavations at a site called Hisarlik in modern day Turkey.)
they perform a vital function as they initiate the abduction of Helen by Paris,
a prince of Troy and son of Priam, King of Troy. Zeus, chief of the gods, invites Paris to a
beauty contest where he must decide which of the three goddesses, Hera,
Aphrodite or Athena, is the most beautiful.
Paris chooses Aphrodite, goddess of love, and she responds by granting
Paris the hand of Helen in marriage as a reward. However, Helen is also the wife of the Greek
king, Menelaus. Helen’s origins are also
immortal. She is the daughter of Leda by
Zeus, who assumes the guise of a swan, in order to have sex with Leda. Helen is his daughter, born from an egg.
When did Homer compose his epic and when
did the events it depicts take place? It
has been suggested that Homer was writing in the 9th or 8th
centuries BC about events that happened possibly several hundred years before
in the 11th or 12th centuries BC. This is the period known as the Greek bronze
age. After the 10th century
BC and with the discovery of iron, this important alloy ceased to be used in
warfare except for decorative purposes or constituted the armour of poorer
warriors.
Here, in a nutshell, is the origin of the
conflict, we also learn what it is that men fight over. Paris has violated custom even though women
were known to be valueless in early Greek society. It is not Helen that matters, but the system
of kinship and rites of marriage and the families of Kings. The relationship that mattered to the early
Greeks (known to each other, not as Greeks, but as Achaeans, Greece itself was
called Achaea.) was the bond between warriors.
In, The Iliad, Achilles and Patroclus are bosom companions in
arms, but we are meant to understand that they are more than friends. Their ardour ultimately spills over into
violence. Their relationship is
typically homo-erotic, just as the Greeks of the classical age, which followed
Homer’s, bonded in battle as a matter of survival. Examples such as the Theban Sacred Band and
Alexander’s passion for Hephaestion abound.
The Iliad is about the relationship between Achilles and
Patroclus, it is about their fiercely jealous, complex relationship. The Odyssey, contrastingly, focusses
on the yearning of Odysseus for his home and its beautiful, romantic ending
establishes themes of harmony and resolution after Odysseus’s ten years of
conflict and ten years of wandering.
Achilles, a warrior and a product of the
coupling of a mortal and a god, is the focal personality of The Iliad. King Agamemnon of Mycenae, brother of
Menelaus, assembles a great fleet that includes other Greek Kings such as
Nestor, King of Pylos, the hero Ajax and Odysseus, son of Laertes, King of
Ithaca. The fleet crosses the Aegean Sea
known as ‘the wine dark sea’, (according to Homer). Achilles brings his personal warband known as
the Myrmidons, an elite force like modern day special forces. When Achilles reaches Troy his first act is
to kill Troilus, a Trojan prince. To do
so he must enter the Temple of Apollo, thus removing a vital obstacle to Greek
victory but also earning the enmity of the gods who begin to take sides. Poseidon, Apollo, Aphrodite and Athena (for a
while) favour the Trojans, Hera, Athena and Thetis favour the Greeks. The rest of the gods are uncommitted. Headstrong Achilles’ rash acts impact on the
war which develops into a stalemate.
After the initial skirmishes between the
two sides, the Greeks disembark and assemble before Troy. They are unable to sack the city at the same
time the Trojans are unable to land a decisive blow on the Greeks. The siege of Troy lasts for ten long
years. The warriors of Homeric times
were quite unlike the classical Greek hoplites of antiquity. Combat was usually the task of heroes who
rode in chariots and wore the famous Dendritic armour (discovered in Dendra, in
Greece.). This armour was fashioned from
bronze and was composed of hoops bound together with thongs. Their weapons were swords, javelins and
spears. The infantry, mostly unarmoured,
bore great figure of eight shields composed of wicker and wood and a long spear
known as a pike. If the personal combat
of heroes failed to reach conclusion, the infantry might then slog it out. Hoplite warfare was a later development,
chariots having gradually disappeared from warfare, as horsemanship and
equipment evolved. Most of the pictorial
depictions of scenes from Homer’s epics which are usually painted onto tripods
and jars, date from the classical period, roughly the 5th century
BC. The people of this time would have
regarded the Homeric period as quaint, archaic, legendary and heroic. The language of Homer would have been
comprehensible to Greeks of the 5th century but also archaic. Modern Greeks would fail to understand Homer
if he entered a bar in Athens today.
The poets and playwrights of this later
period sought to re-shape Homer’s source material. The Athenian playwright Aeschylus (523-456
BC) wrote of the homecoming of King Agamemnon in The Oresteia. Agamemnon returns from Troy but not to a
hero’s welcome. Instead, his wife
Clytemnestra and her lover murder Agamemnon in his bath, they also murder his
Trojan concubine, Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, a prophetess whose
declarations are doomed to be disbelieved.
Agamemnon is avenged by his son Orestes.
Orestes flees pursued by the Eumenides (Furies), goddesses who avenge
crimes like matricide, symbolising Orestes’s guilt. The story culminates in the deus ex machina
descending, the goddess Pallas Athena who dispenses justice, the restoration of
peace and the cessation of the curse on the House of Atreus.
Just as Homer is a trope rather than a
person, possibly signifying many people who embellished the poem which was
intended to be recited and passed down orally.
The Homeric epics were written down eventually, intended to be used as
models for children to learn from, just as Roman children recited Virgil. By Aeschylus’ time authorship was a more
concrete, less speculative, profession, we therefore know much more about him
and his fellow Athenian playwrights, Sophocles, Euripides and
Aristophanes.
The Iliad culminates with
Agamemnon taking away Achilles Trojan concubine Briseis. Achilles refuses to fight, and Patroclus dons
his armour and goes into battle instead.
Patroclus is slain by the Trojan Prince Hector. Achilles is furious and slays Hector in
turn. Desecrating Hector’s body,
Achilles ties his heels to his chariot and circles Troy’s walls. Later, King Priam leaves the city to beg
Achilles for his son’s body. Achilles
relents and permits Hector’s burial.
Adequate funeral rites and proper mourning were essential to the peoples
of the Aegean. Refusal to release the
body of a high-ranking person like Prince Hector was a significant breach of
convention but Achilles is not afraid to defy the gods. He knows that a prophecy has foretold that he
must die soon after the death of Hector.
Although his mother Thetis dipped Achilles in the waters of the river
Styx, intended to confer invulnerability, his heel is still vulnerable. According to later myths not included in The
Iliad Achilles is killed with an arrow shot by Paris.
Troy is finally sacked, a consequence of
Odysseus’ famous ruse of the wooden horse.
The story of Odysseus homecoming is told in The Odyssey, the
Greeks called it the Nostos from which we gain our word
‘nostalgia’. Odysseus defeats a variety
of monsters such as the Cyclops Polyphemus, Poseidon’s son, thus attracting the
malice of the sea god but he is also protected by the goddess Athena. The Odyssey provides the romantic
ending that The Iliad failed to provide, resolution and harmony are restored
when Odysseus is King once again in Ithaca.
The exhibition seeks to examine the
archaeological work of Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) who thought that he had
discovered the ancient city of Troy. We
now know that he was mistaken but had instead found a much older city
incompatible with the people that Homer describes. There was evidence to suggest that this city
had been burnt to the ground and Schliemann therefore called it the Burnt City. His finds there included ‘Priam’s
Treasure’. Items from this hoard were
worn by his wife Sophia and known as “the jewels of Helen”. Schliemann was a pioneer of archaeology, in
his day archaeology was in its infancy and Schliemann made many mistakes in his
excavation of Troy. His methods were
brutal, blasting with dynamite down to the city he thought was Troy. This site, however, may have been one
thousand years too early. In doing so he
destroyed many valuable antiquities and failed to catalogue his finds
properly. Although he made mistakes his
work was undoubtedly one of the first attempts at modern archaeology. However, his work set the world on fire with
interest in the events of The Iliad and The Odyssey. King Agamemnon, Ajax, Helen and Achilles
were no longer characters in mythology but living, breathing people who had
once lived and felt the gamut of emotions, suffered and died under the sun that
we happen to share.
Homer’s epics were influential to the
Greeks of the classical era but also to Roman culture. In, The Aeneid Roman poet Virgil
describes the voyage of Aeneas from the destruction of Troy to Carthage and
then to Italy where he becomes the putative founder of Rome. Oddly, there seem to be several foundation
myths pertaining to Rome since the famous story of Romulus and Remus also
account for the beginnings of the city.
Later artists sought to embellish and re-interpret Homer’s account of
the fall of Troy and the aftermath of the war.
One of these was The Judgement of Paris, 1530-35 by Lukas Cranach
the Elder (1472-1553) and workshop. Cranach
depicts Paris in the armour of the time.
The three goddesses represent different spheres of human activity. Another remarkable image The Trojans
Bring the Wooden Horse into Their City, about 1544 by Jean Mignon (active
1537-1552) after Luca Penni (after 1504-1557) demonstrates that Troy fell as a
result of cunning not the traditional chivalric virtues of arms and
courage. The image is cluttered yet also
direct and lucid as King Priam kneels to welcome the treacherous gift. Re-imaginings of Helen were not confined to
literature (Christopher Marlowe had written about Helen in his play Doctor
Faustus ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burned the
topless towers of Ilium.’). Antonio
Canova (1757-1822) sculpted Helen in his work Helen of Troy (about 1812). Canova renders a neo-classical Helen with
austere form and features and flowing locks.
John Collier (1850-1934) re-imagined Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra as an
androgynous figure who acts with the violence usually reserved for men. She wears a diadem thought to be based upon
the jewellery Schliemann discovered at Troy while the architectural decorative
motifs are those found by Schliemann at Mycenae. Reality and realism are beginning to coincide
as curiosity about the origins of the legend, modern archaeology and scientific
developments such as carbon dating combine.
Troy is an exhibition that you must see if
you happen to be in London and you don’t even have to be interested in ancient
Greece for it to grab you!
Paul Murphy, The British Museum, January
2020
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