Eric Cline’s The Trojan War: a very short introduction (Oxford, 2013) is an appealing, charmingly written book, in a well promoted series. It is designed to be influential. But because it is a short popular book, it was not reviewed in academic journals.
Its influence warrants much greater scrutiny than its format suggests. This is no neutral introduction: it is a partisan argument, in favour of a historical Trojan War. Cline is one of two scholars to argue this since 2000 (the other is Latacz in Troy and Homer, 2004 [2001]). There is no consensus in favour of this position.
So Cline’s argument is not representative. But people’s perception of a complex topic is easily swayed by a single voice, if that voice talks loud enough. Scholars don’t write books arguing that a thing didn’t happen: if you go looking for an introduction to the myth of the Trojan War, Cline’s book is what you will find.
| Examples. National Geographic and a popular history YouTuber cite Cline, and only Cline, for scholarly opinion on whether there was a real war. |
The following is not a review, but an adversarial fact-check. I add some thoughts of my own in the conclusion. Cline’s book needs no advertising: it does need a checklist, so that the general reader can tell which of its many claims are unrepresentative or just false. I shall skip over points that are uncontroversial or tangential, and focus on inaccuracies.
Cline argues in favour of a historical war in Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3, ‘Homeric questions: Did Homer exist and is the Iliad accurate?’, claims that the Iliad contains many Mycenaean features and can therefore be taken as a portrayal of the Bronze Age to some degree of accuracy.
Composition and date of the Iliad (p. 42)
Cline presents two theories as equal competitors: (1) Powell’s idea that the Greek alphabet was invented specifically to transcribe Homer around 800 BCE, and (2) that other scholars ‘have suggested’ the epics were part of an ongoing oral tradition.
Powell’s idea is a fringe theory, not shared or taken seriously by Homer scholars. Aside from its absurd grandiosity, it requires that the Iliad cannot be any later than 800 BCE. Recent scholarship puts the Iliad in the 600s (see below).
The second position Cline mentions, the ‘oral tradition’ view, is the standard one in the anglophone world. I do not subscribe to it completely, but it is the overwhelmingly dominant theory. So Cline’s statement is a bit like saying ‘one scholar says the world is a cube, but others have suggested that it is round’, and taking both positions seriously.
Cline goes on to claim a ‘consensus’ date for the Iliad of 750 BCE. In reality, nearly all recent work on the subject puts the Iliad after 700 BCE, usually in the second quarter of the 600s. When scholars cite earlier dates without doing investigative work, they are reporting a ‘consensus’ based on nothing. Cline’s claim is of this kind. Only one investigative argument in the last fifty years argues for a date earlier than 700 (and that argument has been criticised more than any of the others).
| Note. Investigative research arguing for a 8th century date: Janko 1982: 228–231 (composition). 7th century: Burkert 1976 (composition); Nagy 1996: 41–42 (transcription); Van Wees 1994 (composition); West 1995 (composition and transcription); Burgess 2001: 49–53 (composition). 6th century: Jensen 1999 (transcription). |
Cline is unaware of this investigative research — something all too common with this kind of ‘consensus’ claim. A ‘consensus’ of around 750 may have been commonplace around 1980, but is simply disconnected from current research. Cline’s own bibliography for this chapter cites two items that argue for a later date.
The Catalogue of Ships (p. 44)
Cline claims ‘many’ scholars consider the Catalogue to be at heart a Bronze Age composition. In this case, ‘many’ actually means ‘two’ (if we confine ourselves to the last fifty years).
| Note. Latacz 2004: 219–228; Hope Simpson 2018: 519–524. Visser 1997 thinks only that there are a few Mycenaean elements within the Catalogue, not that the Catalogue as a whole is Mycenaean. |
Cline goes on:
Archaeological investigations have shown that many of the cities and towns listed in the catalogue as having sent men and ships were inhabited only in the Bronze Age and had long been abandoned by the time of Homer.
This time ‘many’ means ‘one’. The only town fitting this description is Eutresis, in the Boiotian contingent (Il. 2.502): the historical town was abandoned ca. 1200 BCE. Some other towns were abandoned by the time of Homer, but all after the end of the Bronze Age.
Even so, this is not much of an argument. First, because the language of the Catalogue is very obviously late. Its metre depends heavily on post-Mycenaean linguistic features, such as the word καί ‘and’, and a late Ionic form for ‘ships’, νέες. If we excluded lines with just these two features as post-Mycenaean, the Boiotian contingent would shrink from 17 lines to 9 lines, and most contingents would be lacking a number of ships.
Second: it is perfectly normal that place names linger for a long time after towns are abandoned. Eutresis itself was resettled in the 500s, still with the same name. That is, its name continued to be attached to the location in the intervening six centuries.
| Note. For a similar view (in more detail) see Kullmann 2001: 661. |
For reference, the same goes for Troy. The pre-Greek city, called Wilusa in 13th century Hittite, was abandoned in the 900s; but when Greeks resettled it in the 700s it preserved a hellenised form of the older name, Ilios (< *wilio-). It is totally normal for place names to remain in use after a site is abandoned.
The Catalogue of Ships and its proper historical context is a knotty problem, so it would be wrong to leap to the opposite of Cline’s position — that it is exclusively a 7th century composition — without a great deal of argumentation. For now, the key point is that it is unjustifiable to treat it as a Bronze Age artefact in any sense.
The boar’s tusk helmet (p. 45)
Boar’s tusk helmets are mainly associated with LHI–LHII Mycenaean culture (1500s–1400s BCE), though some were still being made as late as the 9th century. Cline claims that boar’s tusk helmets in Homer reflect a Mycenaean setting.
This is untrue on two counts. First, Cline claims there are boar’s tusk helmets, plural. There is one. It is described in Iliad 10.261–265.
Second, Cline doesn’t mention that Iliad 10 is a late insertion into the Iliad, probably dating to around 600 BCE (e.g. West 2011: 233–235). Wherever the description of the boar’s tusk helmet came from — whether it was transmitted orally (presumably not in verse), or a 600 BCE description of an old heirloom — we can be very certain that it was not transmitted as part of an Iliad.
‘Tower’ shields (pp. 45–46)
Cline claims that the shields used by Aias and Hector in the Iliad are Mycenaean ‘tower shields’.
There are no tower shields in Homer. Aias’ and Hector’s shields are a late type, dating to the 7th century.
‘Tower shield’ is one of a few modern terms for a particular type of Mycenaean shield: other terms are ‘body shield’ and ‘figure-of-eight shield’. We have no record of an ancient Greek term for this shield type. Yet the main reason for thinking Aias has a tower shield is that Homer says (Il. 7.219),
Aias came near carrying his shield like a fortress
Translating πύργος as ‘tower’ here misleads people into thinking Homer is using the modern term ‘tower shield’. Cline doesn’t make that mistake, to his credit. Yet without the misleading translation, there is no reason to link Aias’ shield to the Mycenaean type at all.
In Hector’s case, the idea that he has a tower shield comes from the fact that it reaches both his neck and his feet (Il. 6.117–118; similarly Periphetes’ shield, 15.645–646). Cline is not alone in this mistake, but this is not a tower shield either. For one thing, elsewhere Hector’s shield is circular and has a metal facing (Il. 13.803–804):
... in front he held his shield, circular all round,
thick with leathers, and it had a lot of bronze layered on it.
A bronze-faced shield reaching from the neck to the feet would be far too heavy to wield in real life. Van Wees points out that the description in book 6 is a common Homeric trope: heroes have superhuman strength, and they wield oversized weapons and armour that normal people cannot pick up.
All shields in Homer are circular so far as we know, without exception. Homeric shields come in at least two types: an older type with a leather body and metal boss; and a newer type, with bronze facing, which starts to appear in the material record after 700 BCE. (Shields with shoulder straps may represent a third type, or a sub-type.)
| Note. Van Wees 1994: 132–133, 2011. |
Aias and Hector both have shields with metal facing: that is, the newer post-700 type.
Bronze weapons and armour (pp. 47–48)
The argument here is: Homeric weapons are made of bronze; real 8th–7th century weapons are iron; therefore Homer depicts a Bronze Age setting. My rebuttal below is perhaps disputable, but it should at least show that there is nothing straightforward about the inference ‘bronze weapons, therefore Bronze Age’.
In Homer, the default material for metal objects is iron — except in the case of arms. Everyday metal tools are iron; it is prestige items that are bronze, tin, silver, or gold.
Bronze isn’t there because the Iliad is a faithful record of the Bronze Age, it’s to make aristocratic objects sound fancier. As Van Wees puts it (1994: 134),
while iron weapons are deadlier, bronze weapons are more glamorous.
It’s perfectly clear that iron is the default metal, because Homer talks about iron a lot. Iron is used for weapons; arrowheads; the shoeing for a club and a spear; protection against weapons; axes; a sacrifical blade; a chariot axle; ploughs; shepherds’ tools; a throwing weight; a trade good used for storing value (similarly to the obeloi used for payment at early classical communal sacrifices); and poetic imagery, where iron regularly symbolises inflexibility and harshness. One passage shows an awareness of some aspects of iron production.
| Note. Iron weapons: Il. 18.34; Od. 16.294, 19.13. Arrowheads: Il. 4.123. Shoeing for club/spear: Il. 7.141–143, 16.802. Protection: Il. 4.510. Axes: Il. 4.485, 23.850-851; Od. 19.586, 21.3, 21.97, 21.114, 21.127, 21.328, 24.168, 24.177. Sacrificial blade: Il. 23.31. Chariot axle: Il. 5.723. Ploughs and shepherds’ tools: Il. 23.834–835. Throwing weight: Il. 23.31. Trade/storing value: Il. 6.48, 7.473, 9.366, 10.379, 11.133, 23.261; Od. 1.184, 14.324, 21.10, 21.62. Poetic imagery: Il. 17.424, 20.372, 22.357, 23.177, 24.205, 24.521; Od. 1.204, 4.293, 5.191, 12.279–280, 15.329–330, (17.565), 19.211, 19.494, 23.172. Iron production: Od. 9.393. |
This exactly mirrors the choice of prestige materials in real-life grave goods in the material record. Studies by Anthony Snodgrass and Ian Morris (2000: 208–211) have shown that there was a time when iron was a prestige material, from around 1025 to 900 BCE; but after that point, iron lost its place as a prestige material.
So the epic tradition could only depict prestige objects as made of bronze but not iron after 900 BCE. That is: bronze prestige items indicate a relatively recent context.
| Objects in grave goods made of materials (%): | ||||
| Period | Iron | Bronze | Gold | Silver |
| Submycenaean (1075–1025 BCE) | 6 | 89 | 4 | 1 |
| Protogeometric (1025–900) | 41 | 48 | 11 | — |
| Early-Middle Geometric (900–760) | 27 | 45 | 27 | 1 |
Other myths about Troy (pp. 50–51)
Cline points to the existence of multiple myths about Troy — as represented in the post-Homeric Epic Cycle — and infers that they indicate a long-standing tradition of stories about Trojan wars.
He claims this conclusion was reached by neoanalytic scholars. I don’t think this is true. In Homeric scholarship, neoanalysis is about detecting places where Homeric narrative has adapted material from prehistoric oral forms of the Cyclic epics. But Cline’s claim isn’t in the usual treatments of neoanalysis (e.g. Kullmann, Davies, Willcock). I won’t say that he has made it up out of thin air, but it is not mainstream.
Aside from neoanalysis matter, Cline’s argument doesn’t hold water. If many myths focus on a given city, there’s no reason to think that implies those myths are old. On the contrary: the myths point to a deep contemporary interest in the city and its past.
Conclusions
I’ll close by developing on the last point, above, with my own thoughts on the matter. Many myths do not imply great age. The real implication is that they originated in a time when those myths were topical.
And it is not hard to tell when that was. Greek stories about Troy were most topical at the time that Greeks colonised Troy, in the 700s BCE. That is when we should imagine the myth starting to come into existence. And some decades later, the Iliad pops up — composed within a long-standing tradition of epic formulae, but not itself a long-standing story.
Aspects of Troy as depicted in the Iliad corroborate that line of thought. Troy’s main civic cult is the Greek cult of Ilian Athena (Il. 6.87–96, 269–279, 297–311), first introduced at the time of Greek colonisation. Nearly all Trojans in the Iliad have Greek names, or at least names with Greek affixes (exceptions: Priam, Paris, Assarakos, and names derived from the city’s names Troiē and Ilios). Troy is surrounded by a melting pot of non-Greek ethnic groups — Mysians, Lelegians, Carians — all of whom pin the setting to the Archaic period.
It is very easy to find motivations why Greeks would have developed the Trojan War myth at that time. The story is about the site being sacked in the distant past, destroyed, and overcome by Greek forces. It tidily explains why there was an abandoned city there, and it rationalises contemporary Greek claims to the site.
As Van Wees and others have shown, many aspects of the Iliad point specifically to a post-700 BCE context. The bronze-faced shields (Il. 7.219–223, 7.244–248, 11.295, 12.294–297, 13.405–407, 13.803, 16.636, 17.492–493, 20.274–281); Geometric art such as the Gorgoneion shield device and the ekphrasis of Achilles’ shield (Il. 5.741–742, 11.36–37, 18.478–607); the wealth stored at Egyptian Thebes (post-663 BCE: Il. 9.381–384) and Pytho (post-700: 9.404–405); shields leaned with a double grip (post-690: 11.593, 13.488, 22.4). For further points see the bibliography cited under ‘Composition and date of the Iliad’, above.
In part 2 we shall turn to Chapter 4 of Cline’s book, where he argues for a Greek conflict in Anatolia — though not against Troy — from Bronze Age documentary and material evidence. Cline’s claims in Chapter 4 are not so straightforwardly false as those in the Homer chapter; but they are still tendentious, selective, and have a number of logical holes.
References
- Burgess, J. 2001. The tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. Baltimore.
- Burkert, W. 1976. ‘Das hunderttorige Theben und die Datierung der Ilias.’ Wiener Studien 89: 5–21.
- Hope Simpson, R. 2018. Mycenaean Greece and Homeric tradition. Private publication.
- Janko, R. 1982. Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns. Diachronic development in epic diction. Cambridge.
- Jensen, M. S. 1999. ‘Dividing Homer: when and how were the Iliad and the Odyssey divided into songs?’ Symbolae Osloenses 74: 5–91.
- Kullmann, W. 2001. Review of Latacz 2004 [2001] (German version). Gnomon 73.8: 648–663.
- Latacz, J. 2004 [2001]. Troy and Homer. Towards a solution of an old mystery. Tr. K. Windle and R. Ireland. Oxford. Orig.: Troia und Homer. Der Weg zur Lösung eines alten Rätsels (Munich/Berlin, 2001).
- Morris, I. 2000. Archaeology as cultural history. Words and things in Iron Age Greece. Oxford.
- Nagy, G. 1996. Homeric questions. Austin (TX).
- Visser, E. 1997. Homers Katalog der Schiffe. Stuttgart/Leipzig.
- van Wees, H. 1994. ‘The Homeric way of war.’ Greece & Rome 41: 1–18 and 131–155.
- —— 2011. ‘Shields.’ In: M. Finkelberg (ed.) The Homer encyclopedia. Oxford. 792–793.
- West, M. L. 1995. ‘The date of the Iliad.’ Museum Helveticum 52: 203–219.
- —— 2011. The making of the Iliad. Oxford.
