
Christoph Ulf |
Review of Barry Strauss, The Trojan War: A
New History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Pp. xxii, 258.
ISBN 978-0-7432-6441-9. |
In his "New History," Barry Strauss
tells the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning. Paris,
the "cosmopolitan prince" (22) from Troy, abducted the unhappy Helen
in Sparta, not for love but for political reasons. Strauss sees the
adulterous couple as "less like Romeo and Juliet than Juan and Eva
Péron." Helen escaped Sparta, and Paris "carried out a bloodless
raid on enemy territory" (17). The war ignited in this way between
two mighty powers, Troy and Greece, had been looming for a long time
because "Troy invites war." It is located where "Asia and Europe"
meet (1). "Western Anatolia was the Poland of the Late Bronze Age:
wealthy, cultured, and caught between two empires" (9). The Greeks,
"the Vikings of the Bronze Age" (2), were eager to attack this "gold
mine" (29). Agamemnon took advantage of this situation: he gathered
the Greeks at Aulis, crossed the Aegean Sea, and took a beachhead on
the shore in sight of Troy. Neither Troy's weak sea forces nor its
army was able to halt the disembarking Greeks. Three times the
Greeks attempted to seize the city walls, but the lower city with
its narrow streets hindered them from easily reaching the citadel,
and in any case the city's fortifications were too strong to break
through. In consequence, a dirty war began: Achilles and the other
Greek leaders attacked and plundered the country and towns around
Troy. Among the abundant booty was one Chryseis, the daughter of an
old priest of Apollo, who, at his priest's request, afflicted the
Greeks with a plague--Strauss compares it with anthrax or SARS. This
in turn brought about the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles.
Achilles' subsequent withdrawal from action together with his
Myrmidons entailed the loss of the elite troop of the Greek army. As
a result, the plain in front of Troy turned into "killing fields"
(title of chap. 7) and at the same time a place of honor for the
Greek and Trojan heroes. The chapters describing these parts of the
war--"Night Moves," "Hector's Charge," and "Achilles' Heel"--are the
closest to the narrative of the Iliad. To round out the Troy
story, Strauss adds a chapter, "The Night of the Horse," based, he
claims, on archaeological evidence. A final chapter is devoted to
the argument that Aeneas did not leave Troy but succeeded Priam as
ruler of the city.
Strauss, professor of history and classics at Cornell
University, has written and edited other military histories, about
the battle of Salamis[1]
and
the Peloponnesian War. In each case, he strives to compare ancient
and modern life in such a way as to make ancient history useful and
relevant to his readers. To that end, he re-interprets, at least to
some extent, the results of scientific research in order to make his
comparisons more convincing. For the Trojan War, he incorporates the
few extant fragments of the so-called Cyclic Epics as well as (much)
later ancient material on the war. In this way, he provides a
"complete" story, but in the end it is his story rather than
Homer's.
Reading on the dust
jacket that Strauss "[weaves] together fact and fiction in a
beguiling tapestry of blood, guts, gore--and terrible feminine
beauty," one naturally looks for the premises on which he bases such
a story.[2]
In fact Strauss makes many prerequisite
assumptions to create an easily readable story and connect it to
questions and problems in our own lives. The first such assumption
regards what may be construed historically from the ancient sources:
in particular, a consistent Bronze Age Era lasting from the third to
the end of the first millennium and comprising all known cultures of
that period. Strauss follows those scholars who incorporate Troy
into the history of Anatolia.[3]
Thus it is
not surprising that Alaksandu, Kukunni, and Walmu are presented as
kings of Troy, and some Hittite kings, like Shuppiluliuma I,
Hattushilish III, and Tudhaliya IV are mentioned to clarify the
Iliadic and Cyclic narratives where Strauss feels the need. But it
does come as a surprise to find him citing names not found in the
Hittite texts--to name but the most astonishing ones: the Akkadian
king Naramsin, the city of Ur, Iahdun-Lim and Zimri-Lim of Mari,
Thutmose III and Ramses II of Egypt, the Assyrian king Shalmanesar
I, the Canaanite ruler of Shechem and the mayor (!) of Megiddo. From
these it is clear that Strauss presupposes a discrete and coherent
Bronze Age Era allowing for the comparison of anything and
everything within it.
Furthermore, Strauss
extends his comparisons to later times without pausing to justify
them. Hence we find the Second Punic War, the barbarian threat to
Rome along the Rhine-Danube frontier in Late Antiquity, and, as
mentioned above, the Vikings enlisted as points of reference.
Moreover, this "new history" does not always adhere to the evidence
of the texts from which it is derived; Strauss rationalizes them
when it is advantageous for his argument, asserting that Homer is
prone to exaggeration or constrained by the traditions of heroic
story-telling, or that he, Strauss, is simply better informed.[4]
This may of course be the case, but such claims
must be based on careful explanations.
All this serves to fashion a story that
prefigures certain realities of modern times. Most notably, a
geopolitical dichotomy hovers over the Trojan War. Troy "stood
exposed on the blood fault line where two empires met" (8) between
Asia and Europe. From this statement it is a short step to compare
the Trojan War with the war on terror and to specific events in
World War II. For instance, the question whether the Greeks, that
is, the thirteenth-century Mycenaeans, could have attacked Troy
"with their own ruin looming" is answered by adducing the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor four years before most (!) of their "cities
were rubble in 1945" (10). Such examples are not used only to
illustrate single events in the run of the story but to buttress
Strauss's overall argument. The Greeks represent the western part of
a divided world, while Troy, as Strauss puts it, based on
"spectacular new evidence" (1) was an "Anatolian city." So it is
that from the very outset (see "Author's Note," xi) Strauss stresses
that the various names Homer uses for the attackers of Troy can be
identified as Mycenaeans (that is, Greeks) of the Late Bronze Age.
This tendency to divide the world in
two is reflected in Strauss's depiction of the belligerents. But,
surprisingly, the portrayal of the participants is turned upside
down. The Trojan War should have been the conflict of two opposing
mighty powers, one being the united force of the Greek mainland
states. However, this huge army could not wage war like such a
power. Rather, the Greeks become terrorists who fight dirty, that
is, plunder cities, take booty, and enslave men and women, because
their military capability is inadequate to win a conventional,
"real" war. On the other hand, the Trojans, cultured people with
advanced military and strategic skills, successfully defend their
city so long as no treachery and/or betrayal occurs.
How to judge such a picture? Strauss's book is a
"good read" that meets the needs of non-specialist readers. But is
it a "new history" of the Trojan War or merely an arbitrary one?
Where does fiction end and fact start? A look at the appendix, "A
Note on Sources," shows that Strauss intends to do more than give
non-historians access to a special part of ancient history, thus
making it meaningful for as many people as possible. For Strauss is
clearly taking sides in the ongoing scholarly debates about how to
assess the impact of both new archaeological information about Troy
and Near Eastern literary parallels on our understanding of the
Iliad. He explains quite clearly why he locates the Trojan War
in the Mycenaean period and in so doing is in accord with many
scholars[5]
who think that oral tradition could have
transmitted a story of Mycenaean origin over several centuries in
the "memory of the Greek people" (228). Furthermore, he refers to
new evidence that he believes supports a date for the Trojan War
between 1210 and 1180. In this regard, he sides with the
"positivists" (as he calls them) who believe both in the length of
the Greek oral tradition and in the results of the German
excavations of Troy since 1988.[6]
Accordingly, Strauss
sees Troy as an Anatolian city and a city-map in the book duly shows
a "Lower Town" surrounded by a wall with four gates. But in fact the
most current archaeological reports indicate that this part of the
city was not densely inhabited
(the virtual reconstruction of the city-model is mainly pure
guesswork); moreover, proving the existence of the putative ditch
and wall is problematic.[7]
In addition, Strauss has not taken notice of
current research on "the Greeks," that is, the question of how a
distinctly "Greek" identity arose in the archaic and classical
periods.[8]
Nor is he sufficiently familiar with research on the impact of the
Ancient Near East on Homer.[9]
It is not enough merely
to label the scholarly work of others as persuasive or not without
indicating the reasoning for such judgments.
Apart from Strauss's
one-sided reading of the various scholarly debates, it is noteworthy
that he sees the Trojans as members of the Near Eastern world even
though the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Cyclic Epics
are written in Greek. Quite apart from the misleading supposition of
a coherent Bronze Age in a Near East that actually consisted of many
disparate cultures, languages, and states, each with a different
history, the impact of Near Eastern cultures on the Homeric world
deserves much more attention. For almost two decades, research
projects on the encounters between Near Eastern and Mediterranean
cultures have been under way at universities in Helsinki, Padua,
Innsbruck, Kiel, Durham (UK), and elsewhere.[10]
When
this ongoing work has demonstrated in detail the interconnections
between the relevant cultures, we may in fact be able to write a
"new history" of the Trojan War based on firmer foundations and
without the need to play down inconvenient scholarly opinions.
University of Innsbruck
christoph.ulf@uibk.ac.at
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[10]
Strauss cites M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon
(Oxford: Clarendon Pr, 1997) and Walter Burkert, The
Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek
Culture in the Early Archaic Age, trans. M.E. Pinder & W.
Burkert (Cambridge MA: Harvard U Pr, 1991), but is not aware of
the huge amount of literature that deals with the
interconnections of the Near East with the Mediterranean
published since the 1990s and earlier than 2005: in addition to
the works cited in note 8, see, to mention
only a small
selection of books of collected essays: Kurt Raaflaub, ed.,
Anfänge des politischen Denkens in der Antike: die nahöstlichen
Kulturen und die Griechen (Munich: Oldenbourg,
1993); Vassos Karageorghis & Nikolaos Stampolidis, Eastern
Mediterranean: Cyprus, Dodecanese, Crete, 16th–6th cent. B.C.:
Proceedings of the International Symposium, Rethymnon, 13-16 May
1997 (Athens: Univ. of Crete, 1998), and
Sea Routes …
From Sidon to Huelva: Interconnections in the Mediterranean
16th-6th
cent.
B.C.: Proceedings of the International Symposium, Rethymnon, 29
September–2 October 2002
(Athens:
Univ. of Crete,
2003); Sanna Aro & R.M. Whiting, edd., The Heirs of Assyria,
Melammu Symposia 1 (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project,
2000); R.M. Whiting, ed., Mythology and Mythologies:
Methodological Approaches to Intercultural Influences,
Melammu Symposia 2 (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project,
2001);
Robert
Rollinger, Christoph Ulf, & Kordula Schnegg, edd., Commerce
and Monetary Systems in the Ancient World: Means of Transmission
and Cultural Interaction, Melammu Symposia 5 (Stuttgart:
Steiner Verl., 2004); and Giovanni B. Lanfranchi, M. Roaf, & R.
Rollinger, edd., Continuity of Empire (?): Assyria, Media,
Persia (Padua: Sargon, 2003).
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