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the Iliad

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product of an oral tradition, as with the the Odyssey

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composed over 500 years after the events they describe

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most scholars believe there is some historical kernel that got preserved in the memory of the Greeks

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was handed down from one generation to another

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maybe the war didn't last 10 years

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maybe it didn't involve the entire Greek world

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maybe Achilles was just an insubordinate officer who caused a lot of trouble and went on a rampage

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in any case, the event was sufficiently momentous and traumatic never to be forgotten

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Mycenaeans

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the Greeks who kept the memory of the war alive were very different from the heroes of Homer's poem

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Mycenaean sites and palaces began to be destroyed around 1200 BC, about a generation after the fall of Troy

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it is unclear way

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there was a recovery but it didn't last

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it could be that the Mycenaean destruction was done mostly by the Dorians who invaded Greece from the north shortly after the Trojan War

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Greeks that composed the poems

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when the poems were being composed, Greece had become a cultural backwater

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a place of little consequence to other parts of the world

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the arts had virtually died out

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little evidence of communication with the outside world

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Linear B, a script that the Myceneeans used for administrative purposes, was forgotten

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these Greeks of the Dark Period, so to say, looked back on a former Greece which could send out a huge force to wage a war

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"The Trojan War may have had the appeal of an event in which a people is indeed victorious but so exhausted itself in victory that this was its last achievement."

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the story is shaped by this period of decline

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had lost all its unity

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today we may question the historicity of the Trojan War, but the Ancient Greeks did not

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wrote history of Persian wars

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wrote at history of the Peloponnesian War

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saw the poems at their supreme literary achievement

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studied and learned by heart

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recited in public and private

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we have more scraps of Homer preserved on papyrus than we have from any other Greek writer

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provided the Greeks with an image of the gods but were not religious texts as e.g. the Old Testament texts were for other cultures

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first written down in Athens around the middle of the sixth century BCE

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from then on the texts of both poems were essentially fixed

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a number of surviving, and no doubt many lost Greek tragedies, were focused around the theme of the war

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Aeschylus [Αἰσχύλος]

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Oristia [Ὀρέστεια]

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Sophocles

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Ajax

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chronicles the fate of the warrior Ajax after the events of the Iliad, but before the end of the Trojan War

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Philoctetes [Φιλοκτήτης]

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describes the attempt by Neoptolemus and Odysseus to bring the disabled Philoctetes, the master archer, with them to Troy

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one of the seven tragedies of Sophocles to have survived in its complete form

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Euripides

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Hecuba

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takes place after the Trojan War, but before the Greeks have departed Troy (roughly the same time as The Trojan Women, another play by Euripides)

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central figure is Hecuba, wife of King Priam, formerly Queen of the now-fallen city

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depicts Hecuba's grief over the death of her daughter Polyxena, and the revenge she takes for the murder of her youngest son Polydorus

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Andromache [Ἀνδρομάχη]

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dramatises Andromache's life as a slave, years after the events of the Trojan War, and her conflict with her master's new wife, Hermione

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Trilogy

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1. Alexandros

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the recognition of the Trojan prince Paris who had been abandoned in infancy by his parents and rediscovered in adulthood

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2. Palamedes

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Greek mistreatment of their fellow Greek Palamedes

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3. Trojan Women

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the fates of the women of Troy after their city has been sacked, their husbands killed, and as their remaining families are about to be taken away as slaves

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often considered a commentary on the capture of the Aegean island of Melos and the subsequent slaughter and subjugation of its populace by the Athenians earlier that year

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the Greeks could never lay the Trojan War to rest, as it raised deeply troubling questions about

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warfare in general

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the treatment of the defeated

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returned to questions Homer raised

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how can such a war be justified?

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is the cost of military victory worth it to the victors?

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as Achilles asks: why do young men sacrifice themselves in war?

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it may not be in their mind when they set out for war, but once they see what war really means, that question is going to come up

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Trojan War has been an inspiration for modern Greek writers

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Constantine P. Cavafy

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Nikos Kazantzakis

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Giorgos Seferis

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poem: The King of Asini

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in Book II of the Iliad there is a catalog of ships

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contingents of ships that sailed to Troy under Agememnon

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1186 ships

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50 men per ship

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60,000 men in total

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shouldn't be taken literally, of course

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one contingent came from Asini

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Homer said only of it "and Asini" which meant they were part of the war as well

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about the search for someone, something long forgotten

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"Shieldbearer, the sun climbed warring, and from the depths of the cave a startled bat hit the light as an arrow hits a shield: ‘’Ασíνην τε. . .’Ασíνην τε. . .’. If only that could be the king of Asini we've been searching for so carefully on this acropolis sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon the stones.

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extends out from the Trojan War conquest

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to all those who have laid down their lives and are unremembered