The Idea of Troy.Twentieth century responses in England and Germany

Richard Stoneman

Gallipoli and TroyAlan Moorehead, in his classic book on the Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16,1 describes how the allied troops, to pass the time in the trenches, took up digging for antiquities. On Lemnos they had found a statue of Eros, and once they arrived at Cape Helles on the Asiatic shore their finds continued.

Two huge jars with skeletons in them were uncovered in a shell crater, and when the soldiers started to dig their trenches at Hissarlik they came on a series of large stone sarcophagi which resounded dully when struck with a pick. Through the centuries (and at once it was asserted that these finds were as old as Troy), soil had penetrated, grain by grain, into the interior of the tombs, but the soldiers managed to excavate many bones, as well as vases, lamps and statues in pottery of men and women. The French doctor wrote to his wife about one especially beautiful cup: ‘Its long handles, almost ethereal in their delicacy, give to this little thing the palpitation of wings’.

Compton Mackenzie wrote in Gallipoli Memories (1929, 189f):I forgot for a few moments all about the gun and fell to weaving shapes out of the haze that flickered over the wide green hollow land of Troy. I was thinking that Diomed and Odysseus might have started across the water like this and discussed the kind of expedition that Thompson and I were planning. One could not get away from the past out here; even from a trench somebody had turned up a small marble Aphrodite a week or two since.2

Troy, then, was in the minds of those who fought, and not only in those of the most highly educated and the poets. The very idea of excavation had been more or less invented at Troy. Before Schliemann’s campaign in 1870-73 only Charles Newton at Halicarnassus (in the 1850s) and J.T. Wood at Ephesus (in the 1860s) had dug with anything resembling a scientific purpose, as distinct from treasure-hunting. Schliemann is often criticised for the destructive nature of his approach to exploration, driven though it was by a basic understanding of stratigraphy. The contemporary excavations of Carl Humann at Pergamon were streets ahead of Schliemann in method. But Schliemann was a byword for archaeology; his first recognition had come in London; and it is not surprising that Schliemann and his Troy were the names that echoed in the minds of those who arrived on Cape Helles in April 1915.

It is surely more than coincidence that one of the battleships deployed for the invasion was the SS Agamemnon (Winston Churchill, the originator of the invasion plan, was a well-educated man). One Commander Unwin had also been reading his Iliad, for he devised a plan ‘inspired by the story of the wooden horse of Troy. He proposed to secrete

1 Gallipoli 1956; repr. 20072 At p. 65 his first thought on reaching the Dardanelles is of the Iliad; and at 229f he tells us he would read Homer, Virgil and Thucydides before going to sleep.

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2,000 men in an innocent-looking collier, the River Clyde, and run her aground at Cape Helles.’ Holes would then be cut in the ship’s sides so that the men could make their way to the beach in a matter of minutes.3

The strategic nature of Troy’s site was also apparent. Not only allied trenches were dug on Hissarlik: the Turks also had a trench and a machine-gun post right in among Schliemann’s excavations.4 In July 1915 severe diarrhoea infected the army and became more destructive than the fighting itself. It created an overpowering lassitude, of which general Hamilton wrote ‘It fills me with a desperate longing to lie down and do nothing but rest… and this, I think, must be the reason the Greeks were ten long years in taking Troy.’5

The presence of Troy in the minds of the poets who went to Gallipoli is familiar ground. The poet laureate, John Masefield, knew that the ancient gods were still in action there when he wrote his quatrain ‘Gallipoli 1915’:

Even so was wisdom proven blind;So courage failed, so strength was chained;Even so the gods, whose seeing kindIs not as ours, ordained.

Masefield was also the author of the first book to be written about the Gallipoli campaign, published in 1916. In this, however, the leitmotif is not the story of the Greek sack of Troy. By this time the Gallipoli campaign was known for a disastrous failure, and the epigraph to each part is provided by extracts from the Song of Roland, describing the heroic but doomed resistance by Roland and his troops in the pass at Roncesvalles.

The best known poem to come out of the Gallipoli campaign is the one for which Patrick Shaw-Stewart is famous. He had Walter Leaf’s Homer and History, published in the year of the invasion, by his side, and on a blank page of his copy of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad he wrote:

Achilles came to TroylandAnd I to Chersonese:He turned from wrath to battle,And I from three days’ peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,So very hard to die?Thou knowest and I know not –So much the happier I.

I will go back this morningFrom Imbros over the sea;Stand in the trench, Achilles,

3 Moorehead 121.4 Moorehead 2375 Moorehead 226

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Flame-capped, and shout for me.6

An anonymous poem by a member of the ANZAC forces who survived, ‘The graves of Gallipoli’,7 begins

The herdsman wandering by the lonely rillsMarks where they lie on the scarred mountain’s flanks,

and contains the lines‘Thrice happy they who fell beneath the walls,Under their father’s eaves,’ the Trojan said,‘Not we who die in exile where who fallsMust lie in foreign earth’. Alas! Our deadLie buried far awayYet where the brave man lies who fell in fightFor his dear country, there his country is.

The poem contains echoes of Rupert Brooke and of Wilfred Owen, but the poet also knew his Homer.

Troy = WarTroy does not evoke only the idea of archaeology; Troy is above all, the epitome of war. The destruction of Troy is an emblem of the horror and the tragedy of war. Before the twentieth century, what city had undergone such comprehensive destruction at the hands of its enemies? The story of Troy is not only the beginning of European history, and of European literature, but also the beginning of European warfare. Barry Strauss makes the link very clear in the opening lines of his book, The Trojan War (Hutchinson 2007, 1):

Troy invites war. Its location, where Europe and Asia meet, made it rich and visible…. Walls, warriors and blood were the city’s lot. People had already fought over Troy for two thousand years by the time Homer’s Greeks are said to have attacked it.

Barbara Tuchman’s book, The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam (Michael Joseph 1984) not only makes Troy the beginning of European war, but also uses it as the earliest case of her thesis that governments frequently pursue policies contrary to their own interest (4). The admission of the Wooden Horse to their city by the Trojans is an example of this ‘wooden-headedness’ which ‘assesses situations in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs’ (7).

Troy in antiquity was already a symbol of the horror and futility of war; from the Iliad itself to Augustine, who in the City of God blamed the Trojans’ faith in their false gods for their doom.8 In the twentieth century the meaning remained the same: in C.P. Cavafy’s poem of 1910, ‘Trojans’,6 Cited in, for example, Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War(BBC 1985), 34-5; see N. Vance, ‘Classics and the Dardanelles Campaign’, Notes and Queries Sept 2006, 347-9.7 E.g. in W.D. Eaton, Great Poems of the World War, electronic edition8 Augustine CD I.3, cf. III.2-3. Nero was performing his poem on the fall of Troy as he watched Rome burn: Tacitus Annals 15.39.3.

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Our efforts are like those of the TrojansWe believe that with resolve and braveryWe’ll alter our fate’s malevolenceAnd we stand outside ready to fight….Yet our fall is certain.

For the philosopher Simone Weil, writing in 1939, the Iliad was first and foremost ‘the poem of force’. No one in the Iliad, indeed no one on earth is spared the domination of force: ‘Whoever, within his own soul and in human relations, escapes the domination of force, is loved but loved sorrowfully, because of the threat of destruction that constantly hangs over him’.9 And for Jean Giraudoux, who had experienced the fighting at Suvla Bay, Troy became the focus of his plea for an end to Europe’s march into the Second World War in his La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu.10 (It was revived in London by Harold Pinter in 1982, during the Falklands War).11 In our own generation, Christopher Logue’s partial translation of the Iliad bears the title War Music. In short, Troy was the war to begin all wars.

The idea of Troy thus provides a marked counterpoint to the idea of Minoan Crete that was developed following the excavations of Sir Arthur Evans from 1900 to 1913. Cathy Gere12 has brilliantly analysed the way in which Evans interpreted the ruins he discovered, not least the ‘dancing ground of Ariadne’ famous from Homer’s allusion in Book 18 of the Iliad:

A dancing placeAll full of turnings, like the admirable mazeFor fair-hair’d Ariadne made, by cunning Daedalus;And in it youth and virgins danc’d, all young and beauteous,And glewèd in another’s palms.13

This vision of peace was artfully counterposed by Homer to the maelstrom of war that occupies the rest of his poem, and just so Evans found here an image of peace and harmony to which he would have liked to give an originary force in Europe’s story at least equal to the war that characterised Troy. The Minoan realm, where Ariadne was queen, was a matriarchal paradise psychologically prior to the masculine world of war.

Homer did locate a similar oasis of peace outside the walls of Troy itself, by the springs of the River Scamander which ran both hot and cold:

Near which were cisterns made,All pav’d and clear, where Trojan wives and their fair daughters hadLaundry for their fine linen weeds, in times of cleanly peace,

9 Alberto Manguel Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey (Atlantic Books 2007), 221f10 1935: strangely translated into English by Christopher Fry as Tiger at the Gates (1955). Peace has almost been achieved by diplomacy between the leaders when an insult by the drunken Ajax destroys their efforts, and the opposing sides are plunged into war.11 Alberto Manguel, Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey (Atlantic Books 2007), 207f12 Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago 2009)13 Chapman’s Iliad, 18. 536-40

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Before the Grecians brought their siege.14

But the search for this ‘place of women’ in the midst of war has never occupied the excavators of Troy except insofar as it might offer evidence for the location of Troy itself. E.D. Clarke in 1801 took the temperature of the many springs at Pinarbaşi; finding them all to be warm, he deduced that this could not be the site of Troy, and was among the first to prefer Hisarlik.

Gere shows how Evans was not above giving credence to works of art that have subsequently been shown to be fakes in order to bolster his view of the peaceful matriarchal Minoans. But the greatest act of fakery at Knossos is surely the reconstruction of the palace itself. In this Evans displays a complete contrast to Schliemann’s work at Troy. The ruins of Knossos as excavated offered few spurs to the imagination – the throne room, the dancing floor, the massive pithoi – but Evans was able to use them for a modernist reconstruction that has little to do with the ancient buildings. At Troy the ruins were perhaps even less inspiring – nothing but walls, though the sloping wall that so vividly evokes Patroclus’ assault on the walls of Troy catches everyone’s imagination:

Thrice to the prominenceOf Troy’s steep wall he bravely leap’d; thrice Phoebus thrust him thence,Objecting his all-dazzling shield, with his resistless hand.15

But the popular image of Troy as an archaeological site probably goes little beyond the awareness that there were seven cities there:

Unter Troja liegen sieben StädteUnd man grub den ganzen Haufen auf

wrote Bertolt Brecht in one of very few references to Troy:16 most of his other echoes of the subject-matter are focused on the theme of Odysseus and exile.

Schliemann himself never thought of any kind of reconstruction project. Nor did his predilection for fraud extend to the admittance of fake antiquities. The famous Treasure of Priam, though its provenance is dubious and the pieces may have been acquired by purchase and planted in the dig by the excavator himself, consists of authentic pieces of the right date and style for the location. When Schliemann did build, it was not a reconstruction of Troy but a mansion for himself in Athens, which he called Iliou Megaron.

Iliou Megaron is by no stretch of the imagination a Trojan building. Rather, it is Victorian Palladian with décor mostly in the Pompeiian style. Nevertheless, through it and through the published works of Schliemann, Troy came to have an impact in two marked ways on the twentieth-century imagination.

Troy and ‘Mythological Consciousness’

14 Chapman’s Iliad 22. 133-615 Chapman’s Iliad 16. 642-416 ‘Die kaledonische Markt’ in Gedichte 1933-38, Gesammelte Gedichte (Suhrkamp 1976), Band 2, 533

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The first of these is the discovery of the swastika as a pervading decorative motif in the arts of Troy.17 Schliemann used it as a leitmotif throughout the architecture of his mansion, for example on the wrought-iron gates to the property. Cathy Gere shows how Emile Burnouf, the director of the French School in Athens, enthusiastically seized on this symbol, already familiar in the arts of ancient India, as evidence of the Aryan origin of the Trojan people. Thus Schliemann’s Troja, published in 1884, contained a preface by A.H. Sayce of Oxford, in which he wrote that ‘we can hail the subjects of Priam as brethren in blood and speech.’

This was to say the least an exaggeration since absolutely nothing was known, or even now is known, of the Trojan language. But the conceit has provided one of the mainsprings for Peter Ackroyd’s suggestive novel of 2006, The Fall of Troy. This is an account of a fictionalised excavator of Troy named Heinrich Obermann, who similarly clings to a vision of a European Troy. ‘The people of Troy’, he insists, ‘have been celebrated by Homer and a thousand other poets from the first moment that poets ever sang. They have always been European, not Asiatic. The idea that they came from the east is preposterous’. The occasion for this tirade is a conversation with a British scholar, Mr Thornton, who has been working on a hoard of inscribed tablets that have been found in the ruins of Troy. Thornton has worked by structural analysis of the pictograms on the tablets, and has identified two endings which he asserts to be identical with Sanskrit tense-endings. The method is modelled on Ventris’ discovery of Greek terminations in Linear B. But the discovery that the Trojan language is akin to Sanskrit, though it might have delighted the real Schliemann, and Burnouf and Sayce, throws the fictional Obermann into a rage: ‘they were Greek, not Indian… You have decided to destroy me and my work. You have been set upon me by my enemies in England, who will never rest until I am ridiculed and silenced.’

The plot of the novel leads to the death of Mr Thornton and the destruction of the entire hoard of tablets by fire, so that the clash of fiction and history is not taken to the ultimate step. But we see Ackroyd cleverly taking themes from the great archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and creating a new synthesis which still – among many other things – reflects the political anxieties that are never far from archaeological interpretation.

Schliemann’s excavation of Troy has another, even more fundamental impact on the twentieth century imagination. In his seminal book, The Pound Era (California 1971), the critic Hugh Kenner argues18 ‘that Schliemann’s excavations were responsible for the rebirth of mythological consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century… According to Kenner, it was Schliemann’s revelation of the mundane materiality of Homer’s world of heroes that made it possible for an artist like James Joyce to render heroic the prosaic details of modernity: “Schliemann had been to Troy and a cosmos had altered”.’

17 Again, Cathy Gere is an acute guide to the unfolding of the theme: The Tomb of Agamemnon (Profile Books 2006), 89-93, 119-22.18 I quote Gere, Knossos 142

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It is worth lingering on this insight for it takes us beyond a recreation of the material world of ancient Troy. Consider what Troy had stood for in the preceding centuries of the modern era. That Troy was a real place was not a completely new idea. Tom Coryate in 1612, at Alexandria Troas, had believed he was in the very spot, and that ‘one of those goodly monuments might be the sepulchre of King Priamus’. E.D. Clarke (above) believed it was possible to find the true site of Troy, and Lord Byron ‘venerated the grand original’ as he stood on the Plain of Troy in 1810. But to turn belief into reality, and furthermore into gold, was Schliemann’s staggering achievement. It was, as Alberto Manguel suggests,19 like discovering the actual rabbit-hole through which Alice had entered Wonderland.

But Troy’s reality had always been something different from its poetic meaning. Don Quixote (143) though the story just a fable (unlike the romances of knight errantry which gave meaning to his career). Warfare, indeed, was the meaning of Troy, as well as the treachery and corruption which loomed large in the legend of Troilus and Cressida exploited by Chaucer, Henryson and Shakespeare; but for the most part reflections of the Greek myths in the arts up to the nineteenth century had been decorative, even Arcadian in tone. Something like this is implied by Nietzsche’s characterization of opera (which he regarded as a superficial art) as characteristic of the ‘Alexandrian’ world in which he was living: ‘it was to such a consonance of nature and the ideal, to such an idyllic reality, that the cultured man of the renaissance allowed himself to be returned by his operatic imitation of Greek tragedy.’20 Nietzsche saw in the re-emergence of the Dionysiac force in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner a step along the backward road from the Alexandrian to the classic.

In addition to this, the demotion of God in Nietzsche’s philosophy allowed greater play to the ancient gods. So he wrote in The Genealogy of Morals21 ‘What, in the last analysis, was the meaning of the Trojan War and other tragic atrocities? There can be no doubt that they were intended as festivals for the gods’. Free Will, he says, was invented ‘for the express purpose of ensuring that the interest of the gods in the spectacle of human virtue could never be exhausted.’ This quasi-Stoic judgment is a long way from Shakespeare’s bleak ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport’. The story of Troy is an aspect of the development of the human race.

The discovery of the reality of Troy meant that a writer like Patrick Shaw-Stewart could identify with Achilles. James Joyce could recreate a modern Odysseus. Much later, Christa Wolf could create a Cassandra through whom to explore the aftermath of war. Almost at the beginning of this process stands Sigmund Freud with his exploration of the character of Oedipus. No longer just a gruesome tale from the past, Oedipus could provide an Ariadne’s thread (if I may put it that way) into the labyrinth of the human psyche. The myths of the Greeks now become, not just a way of exploring the modern mind, but also a constitutive element of modern consciousness.

19 Manguel 18220 The Birth of Tragedy (Penguin edition), 91-9321 Tr F. Golfing (Doubleday 1956), 201

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Freud was explicit in making the connection. He compared the psychoanalyst’s procedure of ‘clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer’ to ‘the technique of excavating a buried city’. When he helped a patient to recall an important childhood memory it was ‘as if Schliemann had once more excavated Troy’.22

A parallel exploration of ancient legend is also relevant here: Wagner’s recreation of the world of the ancient Germans in The Ring of the Nibelung, on which he began work in the 1840s, with the process of composition extending from 1853 to 1874. These music-dramas too showed the way in which deep psychological concerns and anxieties could be probed through the medium of medieval legend. So it is not surprising that, following Schliemann’s triumphant rediscovery of Troy, one German newspaper cartoon depicted him, in top hat and frock coat, plunging into the River Rhine to seek the gold of the Rhinemaidens.

Troy as a SymbolShaw-Stewart, to be sure, is unlikely to have understood the complex backdrop when he composed his moving poem. But the use of Troy to explore the issues of war before and between the two wars of the twentieth century is all-pervasive. One German writer has calculated that something like 200 works of fictional art were created during the twentieth century which drew directly on the theme of Troy, from high art to Unterhaltungsliteratur.23 I have not attempted a count in English (and American) literature, but I am sure the number would be equally great. At the very beginning of the century Hugo von Hofmannsthal was producing dramas on themes of the Trojan War and its aftermath. Elektra, Die ägyptische Helena and others from 1903 onwards recreated a Greek mythology for the twentieth century and reached a musical public through Richard Strauss whose indebtedness to Wagner is apparent. In 1916 Franz Werfel’s version of Euripides’ Trojan Women spoke to the war-battered German public in the same tones as Euripides’ original had spoken to its Athenian audience. In 1907 Gerhart Hauptmann began a series of dramas on the Trojan war and its aftermath: Iphigenia in Aulis, Agamemnons Tod, Elektra, Iphigenia in Delphi. The last of these was revived in Berlin in 1941, while Agamemnons Tod was produced in Berlin in 1947 and Elektra in Neuss in 1950. The productions by Erwin Piscator in 1962 made explicit what would not have escaped the earlier audiences, the parallel between the fate of Troy at the hands of the Greeks and the fate of Berlin at the end of the Second World War. Here again, and in Dresden too, was a destruction the like of which was unexampled in history – except in Troy.

Troy was in the minds of thoughtful persons even before the outbreak of the Second World War. I have already mentioned Jean Giraudoux’ vainly prophetic La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu. Stefan Zweig in his diary for 22 May 1940 wrote: ‘Die alten Cassandragefühle wieder wach’, though in his autobiography, Die Welt von Gestern,24 he changed the allusion to a perhaps more universal one, to Jeremiah. Cassandra was, 22 Gere, Agamemnon 135-623 Gerd Biegel, ‘Mythenwandel: Troia-rezeption im 20. Jahrhundert in Theater, Literatur und Kunst’, in Troia: Traum und Wirklichkeit (exhibition catalogue: Archäologisches Landesmuseum Baden-Württemberg, 2001), 440-45424 Zweig …

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however, the more appropriate model. Where Jeremiah uttered words of doom beyond the promptings of the situation, what Cassandra foretold was always all too true; but no one would listen to the intellectuals who foresaw the disaster that Nazism would bring upon Germany.

Troy in such representations is a symbol of defeat. It is war in only one of its aspects. The victors are elsewhere. This was in tune with the meaning that Troy had normally borne in literature and art. Aeneas, it is true, had torn from the ashes of Troy a foundation myth for a new and great(er) city, and in the English Middle Ages the idea had become prevalent that the English kings were descended from Brutus, another Trojan survivor; but never did Troy stand for a great building project. There was no Ariadne’s dancing floor in Troy. It would have been foolhardy for anyone planning a great city to describe it as a second Troy, for that would presage its downfall. Hitler’s and Speer’s Germania was nothing like Troy (though it was something like Rome); Berlin only became Troy when the forces of destruction were let loose on it.

The third act of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Iphigenie in Aulis ends with these lines spoken by Agammenon:

Zyklopenmauern selbst zerbröckeln: magEs sein! Schutt meines Lebens bleibe hinter mir!Doch lockend wieder seh’ ich IlionMit goldnen Türmen und Palästen schimmern.

The golden towers of Ilium here glitter in the distance like the towers of Walhalla at the end of Rheingold; and like the towers of Walhalla, they are doomed to destruction

(Cassandra)The theme of perversity, of self-destruction let loose through blinkered attachment to old realities, which Barbara Tuchman identified as one of the meanings of Troy, resurfaces in the increased prominence of the figure of Cassandra. Stefan Zweig had made a fleeting allusion to her in his despair before the war. Other German writers also adopted the persona of Cassandra in the face of the coming war: Albrecht Haushofer, soon to be murdered by the Nazis; Heinz Politzer, who went into exile; Max Herrmann-Niesse who referred in a poem to his wife as Cassandra because she foresaw, listening to Hitler’s radio speeches, that the destruction of the world was beginning. Richard Friedenthal’s poem ‘Cassandra’ of 1940 was directed at a British readership.25

In 1983, the East German writer Christa Wolf’s novel, Cassandra, explored in retrospect the doom that fell on Troy. This Cassandra’s feminist vision of the Trojan War, blaming it all on the men, emphasises the despair inherent in her situation, in which her advice is always rejected, and in which furthermore she knows it to be ‘wrong’: ‘They were right, and it was my portion to say No’ (131). The position seems to contain echoes of the contemporary situation in the DDR with its emphasis on the importance of thinking right;

25 These examples are taken from Theodore Ziolkowski, Minos and the Moderns: Cretan myth in twentieth-century literature and art (OUP 2008), 67

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the character Eumelos who runs the security services in Troy with an iron hand is Troy’s answer to the Stasi. But Wolf’s book is far from being a political tract. It is an attempt to evoke the ancient city, though perhaps it is of only limited success in this respect. Wolf’s knowledge of the Mycenaean world was based on a brief visit to Greece in 1980. The itinerary included Knossos but not Troy: Wolf speculates that the one may have been pretty much like the other (192), a view that would not have found favour with the archaeologists in either tradition. Cassandra utters her monologue beside the Lion Gate at Mycenae. Wolf’s Cassandra, like most Trojan stories, is a creation out of literature not out of archaeology.

Troy and Moral CollapseW.H. Auden was similarly reflecting the text of the Iliad not the ruins of Troy when he wrote his great poem, ‘The Shield of Achilles’. Here, that oasis of peace that is represented by the idyll of the dancing ground on Achilles’ shield is replaced by images that evoke the Second World War.

She looked over his shoulderFor vines and olive trees,Marble well-governed citiesAnd ships upon untamed seas,But there on the shining metalHis hands had put insteadAn artificial wildernessAnd a sky like lead.A plain without a feature, bare and brown,No blade of grass, no sign of neighbourhood,Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,Yet, congregated on its blankness, stoodAn unintelligible multitude,A million eyes, a million boots in line,Without expression, waiting for a sign….

There on the shining shieldHis hand had set no dancing-floorBut a weed-choked field.

Images of rape, orphans, casual murder, barbed wire and firing squads populate the stanzas of this poem, whose last lines read

The thin-lipped armorer,Hephaestos, hobbled away,Thetis of the shining breastsCried out in dismayAt what the god had wroughtTo please her son, the strongIron-hearted man-slaying AchillesWho would not live long.

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This is a vision of total war in which the peace that made war worth fighting has been despoiled to appease the spirit of destruction represented by Achilles.

A similar mood pervades Zbigniew Herbert’s short poem ‘About Troy’:Troy O TroyAn archaeologistWill sift your ashes through his fingersYet a fire occurred greater than that of the Iliad…They walked along ravines of former streetsThey thought they would find some traces…The poet is silentRain falls

This Holocaust has signalled the death even of poetry.

(Philoctetes)Another Trojan theme that has had particular reverberations in the twentieth century is the story of Philoctetes. Sophocles’ play dramatises the suffering that reduces Philoctetes to a thing, while the needs of the Greek army justify, for Odysseus, every deceitful measure to induce him to join the war at Troy which cannot be won without him. If Achilles comes out of his great refusal because of personal anguish, Philoctetes does so only as a result of treachery. The play had not been popular on the stage until 1968: Helmut Flashar26 details only a few versions, by André Gide (1898), Karl von Levetzow (1909) and Rudolf Pannwitz (1913). In 1968 Heiner Müller presented a substantially re-formed version of the play, with no chorus and a prologue spoken by a masked clown who insists: ‘was wir hier zeigen, hat keine Moral; furs Leben können Sie hier bei uns nichts lernen.’ DDR critics interpreted the play as an anti-war piece that criticised the situation in pre-socialist societies; but Flashar sees it as a play about the individual who is excluded from his society and yet is made use of by it – not unlike Wolf’s Cassandra. At the same time, Philoctetes (as Müller expresses it) learns to use his wound as a weapon, to interpret himself as a ‘gap in the system’, and to conquer for himself the ‘vacuum between beast and machine’. Odysseus, the unscrupulous, lying Realpolitiker, may be a characteristic figure of the DDR, but he is also there in Sophocles’ original (and in Pindar’s view of the hero), as the unscrupulous politician of democratic Athens.

Indeed, the nihilistic morality of the Greeks is a theme as much of Sophocles as of this version. Seamus Heaney’s translation of the play, The Cure at Troy (1990), sticks closely to the original though it puts the closing speech of Heracles, the deus ex machina, in the mouth of the chorus:

When the city’s being sackedPreserve the shrines. Show gods respect.Reverence for the gods survivesOur individual mortal lives.

26 Inszenierung der Antike: das griechische Drama auf der Bühne der Neuzeit (Munich 1991), 241-5

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Every member of the Athenian audience knew that the Greeks had shown no reverence at all in the sack of Troy. Total, impious destruction held sway – a sentiment that could easily find an echo in any of the wars of the twentieth century.

Another exploration of the moral destruction that accompanies total war is Jonathan Shay’s remarkable book, Achilles in Vietnam (Touchstone 1994). Subtitled Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, it uses the Iliad as a peg for a discussion of the detrimental effects of the experience of warfare on the soldier’s psyche, not least the ‘berserk state’ that typifies Achilles. ‘I believe that once a person has entered the berserk state, he is changed forever’. Shay notes that Kipling too had recognised this state in World War I: ‘You went Berserk… you’ll probably be liable to fits of it all your life’.27

A curious instance of the theme is Michael Tippett’s second opera, King Priam (1962) . A strange theme, perhaps, for a pacifist artist, the libretto - which as usual is by Tippett himself – explores questions of moral choice and responsibility. A choice not made with full self-knowledge bears within it the seeds of disaster. So the Judgment of Paris, and even before that the decision of Priam to expose the boy, lead to disaster of the fall of Troy. This is the reverse of an amoral view of the story. Tippett seems to be saying that if we could realise our full humanity, war could be averted. As for Homer, the heart of the opera is the encounter of Priam and Achilles, where the king kisses the hands that have slain his son. This is not an episode that gets much consideration in other twentieth century interpretations of the Trojan War, though it perhaps echoes the hopeful anti-war positions of the 1960s’ counter-culture.

For Derek Walcott, even rediscovery of the destroyed city is a revelation of horror:Gradually, Achille

found History that morning. Near the hedge, the tinesof the rake in the dad leaves grated on some stone,so he crouched to uproot the obstruction. He sawdeep marks in the rock that froze his fingers to bone.The features incised there glared back to his horrorfrom its disturbed grave. A face that a child will draw:blank circles for eyes, a straight line down for the nose,a slit for a mouth, but the expression angrieras Achilles’ palm brushed off centuries of repose.A thousand archaeologists started screamingas Achille wrenched out the totem, then hurled it farover the oleander hedge….

Instantly, like molesor mole crickets in the shadow of History,the artifacts burrowed deeper into their holes.

The escape of the archaeological artefacts is an image of the past that must not be resurrected. But it is of course the job of archaeologists to do just that, in the hope

27 Shay 1994, 98.

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perhaps of creating a greater wisdom and understanding which can influence the future. In poetry, too, the desire to escape the past is frequently counterposed to the need to face up to it.

The Escape of HelenThe theme of escape is a constant in the story of Troy. Aeneas escapes to found another Troy in Rome; Helen escapes to live out the Trojan War in Egypt, leaving a phantom in her place. John Masefield’s long poem, ‘The Tale of Nireus’28 imagined that Troy’s women somehow escaped and founded a new society on Mt Ida:

When Troy was sacked and all her towersBlazed up and shook into the sky

Smoke like great trees and flame like flowersAnd Priam’s bodyguard did die,

Then the Queen’s women snatched up spears,And fought their way out of the gate;

Seized horses from the charioteersAnd fled like mountain-streams in spate.

They would not stay for slaveryTo some Greek lord until they died,

They rode the forest to be free,Up on the peaks of snowy Ide.

And in the forest on a peakThey hewed a dwelling with the bronze,

And lived unconquered by the Greek,Fierce, sun-burned women, neither tame nor weak,

The panther-women called the Amazons.

But the most complex exploration of the theme of escape is H.D.’s book-length poem, Helen in Egypt, which revisits the theme of the phantom Helen that appears in Euripides’ Helen, and in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Richard Strauss, Die ägyptische Helena. The experience of war is a constant theme of H.D.’s poetry, even in the early ‘And Pergamos’, and her translations and reworkings of plays by Euripides brought her back repeatedly to Troy. Translation is for her a work of excavation – of meaning, of the psyche – which she uses as a mode of self-psychoanalysis. Her short early poem, ‘Helen’, makes the heroine an emblem of the misogyny of warlike men:

All Greece hatesThe still eyes in the white face,The lustre of the olivesWhere she standsAnd the white hands.All Greece revilesThe wan face when she smiles,Hating it deeper stillWhen it grows wan and white,

28 Poems (Heinemann 1946), 594-5

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Remembering past enchantments and past ills.Greece sees unmoved,God’s daughter, born of love,The beauty of cool feetAnd slenderest knees,Could love indeed the maidOnly if she were laid,White ash amid funeral cypresses.

In the later, long poem, Helen, the hated above all, becomes, according to the reading of Janice S. Robinson,29 an emblem of the poet herself. HD has betrayed herself by marriage, and the Greek attack on Troy has destroyed Helen as well as her marriage. In this allegorical reading, Paris is her deceitful husband Richard Aldington, and Achilles her lover and alter ego D.H. Lawrence. Helen destroyed is regenerated outside Time where she conducts what is in effect a psychoanalytic examination to excavate her own past. The poet here builds on her own experience of being psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud – represented in the poem by Theseus. As Eileen Gregory writes,30 HD’s Troy ‘expresses for her the obliterated sites of the past that must be recovered through a painful archaeology. Not only Helen in Egypt but her translation of Euripides’ Ion and her adaptation of choruses from Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis enact the descent and recovery of a virginal, ‘oracular’ figure: HD descends into her past to become more pure as poet. HD herself wrote of Helen and Iphigeneia,

These twins are companions to the Ion that I worked on for so many years. They all deal with a defamed or ‘lost’ oracle, Helen herself being exiled to Egypt and the Helen theme degraded through the mock-mysteries… She is lost, to be found again.

The escape of the heroine leads to nostalgia: the nostoi of the heroes are a counterpoint to the loss of the Troy to which they can never return. But nostalgia, ‘a war-borne disease’, is also a psychic disease which must be cured in the interests of psychic wholeness. To quote Gregory again,31

It is tempting to critics to collapse HD’s Hellenic nostalgia into a neurotic sublimation finally resolved by Freud. However, as HD’s remarks in 1937 suggest, Freud did not dissolve nostalgia but instead allowed HD a way to deepen and refine it, clarifying for her through the enactment of memory and dreams the centrality of maternal longing and of incestuous configurations, the controlling presence in her life of the phobia of war, and the spiritual longing associated with the father.

HD’s experience of psychoanalysis was a catalyst in her life and a confirmation of her identity as a poet. The momentum of HD’s difficult and complex poem is the need to leave Troy behind, to move on, to reconcile Trojan and Greek and to find some grounding for herself beyond the desires of men and the vicissitudes of war, to return to

29 H.D: the life and work of an American poet (Boston 1982)30 HD and Hellenism (Cambridge 1997), 28.31 Ibid 36

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reality from the dream represented by Egypt. Psychoanalytic terminology like eidolon is used to articulate her reflection on her experience, and Paris becomes an Oedipus figure who hates not only Priam and Hecuba but sets out to kill both Achilles and Helen.32 A few quotations must suffice to give the flavour of the spiritual journey represented by Helen in Egypt.

It is one thing, Helen, to slay Death,It is another thing to come backThrough the intricate windings of the Labyrinth;The heart? Ember, ash or a flower,You are Persephone’s sister. (157)

My Psyche, disappear into the web,The shell, re-integrate,Nor fear to recallThe shock of the iron-Ram,The break in the Wall,The flaming Towers,Shouting and desecration of the altars; you are safe here; remember if you wish to remember, or forget… (170f)

The proximity of Love and Death, Eros and Eris, are both represented in Paris: Eris is sister of Ares,His unconquerable child is Eros;…O flame-tipped, o searing,Destroying arrow of Eros;O bliss of the end,Lethe, Death and forgetfulness,O bliss of the finalUnquestioned nuptial kiss. (183)

Death is not the escape from the burden of the war-torn past. Psychic wholeness is to be

found through Love, not Death.

So the dart of LoveIs the dart of Death,And the secret is no secret;The simple pathRefutes at lastThe threat of the Labyrinth,The Sphinx is seen,The Beast is slainAnd the Phoenix-nestReveals the innermost

32 Robinson 391

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Key or the clue to the restOf the mystery…The seasons revolve aroundA pause in the infinite rhythmOf the heart and of heaven. (302-3)

But this is a reconciliation that happens, perhaps, only in the heart of a poet. The meaning of the poem is less important than the ‘method’, introspection as excavation. The poem is the apogee of the kind of ‘mythical consciousness’ that uses myth to investigate the poet’s own consciousness. But the warfare of the world goes on.

Troy Today: reality and fantasyNow the treasure of Priam is almost as much fought over as the original Helen. Given by Schliemann to the Museum für Früh- und Vorgeschichte in Berlin, it disappeared at the end of the Second World War. In 1994 it was revealed that it had been taken by Russian troops and held in secret at the Pushkin Museum throughout the period of the Cold War. All in good condition, it was exhibited in Moscow in 1996, and though some plans were mooted for a travelling exhibition, this has not taken place because of uncertainty as to whether it would ever return. Berlin lays claim to the treasure, but a return to that city was blocked in 2004. Athens also believes it has a right to the gold, while Turkey’s claim should not be neglected as the ultimate origin of the pieces in the treasure. And the heirs of Frank Calvert, who owned the hill of Hissarlik from which it was allegedly excavated, have also staked a claim to its ownership.33 If the gold of Priam were to become as much fought over by archaeologists as Helen was by the participants in the war, that would truly be a revenge of the gods. At least there seems no chance that the treasure was merely a phantom. Quite the contrary, its authenticity and provenance have been confirmed by recent examination.

More important than the movement of the treasure of Priam has been the resumption of archaeological activity at Hisarlik since 1988.34 Excavation has shown that the Hisarlik site was not some pirate castle, but a major city. Its appearance in Hittite texts, contested on their first discovery in 1975, is now accepted as new texts indicate clearly the location of the city the Hittites called Wilusa. We can say with confidence that this site is the Ilion of the Trojan War, situated in a region called Taruisa. Its king Alaksandu may have ruled from 1290-72 BC. As Latacz puts it, the Iliad can now be treated as a ‘source text’: one can discuss seriously whether the Trojan War actually took place. As a corollary, there is no need to spend a moment’s serious attention on the fantasies of those who argue that Troy was actually in Croatia, for example, or even in Cambridgeshire;35 nonetheless, the popular imagination, ever uncritical, is prone to believe what suits it or tickles its fancy rather than what can be shown to be the case.

It remains to be seen whether this development will have an impact on the popular response to Troy comparable with that attributed by Kenner to the original discovery of 33 Caroline Moorehead, The Lost Treasures of Troy (Orion 1994), 278-934 See the summary in Joachim Latacz, Troy and Homer (OUP 2004), esp. 75-6, 91, 167.35 Roberto Salinas Price, Homeric Whispers (2006), locates Troy at the mouth of the River Neretva; Iman Wilkens, Where Troy Once Stood (2005), puts it in the Gog Magog Hills of eastern England.

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the city by Schliemann. Perhaps there has not been much opportunity so far. But the movie, Troy, has not shown any particular awareness of the archaeology of the site. The movie’s city is adorned with statues that vaguely recall the style of 8th century Cyprus; the dead are laid on their pyres with coins placed on their eyes, eight hundred years before the invention of coinage; the Greeks sail in triremes. Orchomenos is located in the middle of the Peloponnese. Nick Lowe in the TLS36 called the production ‘a trolley-dash round the British Museum, jumbling millennia and cultures in a historical mishmash surpassing even the original poem’. The story is remodelled to fit the plot requirements of cinema, and the gods are completely absent (except for Thetis, paddling in a rock pool to show her watery origins). What still remains is the hideous conflagration that destroys the city, the blasphemy of murder in the temples, and the monstrous human suffering involved. The image of Troy remains the same while archaeology changes around it. Whether that is a criticism of the scholarship of movie-makers, or a testimony to the overarching power of myth, is a question that has no easy answer.

36 TLS June 4, 2004.

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