‘Archaeologists claim they’ve discovered the Trojan Horse’

It’s been reported in a handful of news sources that ‘archaeologists claim to have found a Trojan horse in Turkey’. The story appeared first in Greek Reporter, and it’s been repeated in The Jerusalem Post, Illinois News Today, and IBTimes India in the last four days.

This is just a quick note to repeat what others have already pointed out, especially Spencer McDaniel at Tales of Times Forgotten, plus an update here (just in case anyone is reading this who doesn’t already follow Spencer!):

Every bit of the story is complete fiction.

Addendum, 15 August: It now turns out that the story originated on a satirical website. See Spencer McDaniel’s response below. The real Christine Morris found out the story’s actual origin (archived link provided by Twitter user AlCabbage045). It first appeared there on 29 September 2014. It popped up again on a couple of Greek-language blogs on 5 November that year (here and here), then Greek Reporter picked it up from one of those blogs the following day.

The wooden horse as it appears in A Total War saga: Troy (2020). This week, news sites are competing for historical realism against ... video games.

The real news here is that Greek Reporter is fine with publishing fictional stories, and that The Jerusalem Post, Illinois News Today, and IBTimes India urgently need to upgrade their fact-checking processes.

Even History.com, infamous for passing fiction off as history, didn’t fall for this nonsense. If you’re a news site editor and History.com has better fact-checking than you do, you’ve got a big problem.

(By the way don’t worry, the links in the first paragraph above are to snapshots on The Internet Archive, not to the news sites themselves. They don’t deserve the benefits of Google’s ranking algorithm.)

A few corrective points, as briefly as possible:

The ‘journalist’ repeated the story from an equally fraudulent piece that he made up in 2014. Here’s the original. The 2021 version has alterations in the first four paragraphs. At first Spencer McDaniel thought the two stories were identical, misled because the URL of the 2014 article redirects to the 2021 version of the article. But the November 2014 version is still available through the Internet Archive.

By the way, no one paid any attention to the 2014 story either. Because it was just as fake then as it is now.

Turkish or American? The headline claims that the ‘discovery’ was made by Turkish archaeologists; the article refers to archaeologists at Boston University.

Boston University has never been involved in excavation at Troy. All excavations since 1988 have been under the auspices of the universities of Tübingen, Cincinnati, and Çanakkale.

The archaeologists don’t exist. Here are lists of the faculty at Boston University’s archaeology department and classics department: they’re great people, but there’s no one there called Christine Morris or Chris Wilson. The names are completely made up.

There is a real classical archaeologist named Christine Morris at Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland, as Spencer McDaniel found. But Spencer got in touch with her, and over the last day she’s been kind enough to confirm that

she has never been affiliated with Boston University in any way, that she has never excavated at Troy or worked there in any capacity, that she has never claimed to have found the Trojan horse, and that the story that has been published by Greek Reporter and all these other news outlets is completely fabricated.

The source is fake too. The 2014 article claimed that the story came from Newsit.gr, a Greek-language news outlet. This sourcing was removed in the 2021 version of the article. Newsit.gr has never published anything on the subject. (The only appearance of the phrase Δούρειος Ίππος on Newsit.gr before the 2014 Greek Reporter article is a metaphorical use, in a piece about the racist group Golden Dawn.)

The ancient documentation is fake. Both the 2014 and 2021 versions of the article cite

a damaged bronze plate with the inscription “For their return home, the Greeks dedicate this offering to Athena.” Quintus Smyrnaeus refers to the particular plate in his epic poem “Posthomerica” ...

There was no writing in Greece between around 1150 and 800 BCE: the classical-modern Greek alphabet didn’t develop until the 700s. All Late Bronze Age documents in Greek would have to be written in the Linear B script, and classical-era Greeks weren’t even aware of the existence of that writing system. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that actual mycenologists — scholars who study documents written in the Linear B script — know perfectly well that this story is false. And Quintus of Smyrna, a poet who lived more than a thousand years later than Homer, has nothing at all to contribute to any conversation about these myths.

The lead image from the 2014 version of the Greek Reporter article. Annoyingly, I haven’t been able to track down where they swiped it from: it’s uncredited, and they stripped EXIF and other metadata.

Real archaeologists, real Homer scholars, and real mycenologists have been rolling their eyes at this story. It isn’t a big deal: as I mentioned, the vast majority of news sources have ignored it because it’s so obvious that it’s fake.

But it’s always worthwhile to have another voice pointing out that Greek Reporter and the ‘journalist’ Philip Chrysopoulos apparently feel free to spread misinformation and deceive their readers.

There’s very little reason to see anything historical about the wooden horse itself, or the Trojan War. But that’s a story for another day. I talked about it a bit back in 2016 here, here, and here. I’m planning to revisit the topic a bit more directly soon.

Medusa in Gibraltar

In September 2019 the Gibraltar National Museum announced the find of a fragmentary Gorgoneion, a Greek artistic representation of a Gorgon’s head, at Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar. It was made out to be a pretty big deal, and the find was formally published in PLoS ONE last month, in April 2021.

And it genuinely is the real deal. This Gorgoneion is a very significant find. But there are some extreme claims out there:

The location of the finds, in the deepest part of the cave, appears to give support to the myth and its location.

Government of Gibraltar, 19 Sep. 2019

Very rarely, archaeology confirms a myth. The discovery, in Gorhams Cave, Gibraltar, of fragments of a Gorgoneion ... is one example.

VisitAndalucia.com, 9 Jan. 2021

Left: fragments of a Gorgoneion found in Gorham’s Cave ‘over several archaeological seasons’ (dates unspecified). Right: a reconstruction of the Gorgoneion produced at the Gibraltar National Museum and unveiled on 18 May 2021. (Sources: left, Finlayson et al. 2021: Fig. 3; right, Gibraltar Chronicle 19 May 2021)

As so often, the problem isn’t the find itself — the Gorgoneion is for real — but the language used.

The Gorgoneion ‘confirms a myth’ ... um, what myth, exactly? That Gorgons are real? That Medusa actually lived at Gibraltar? Obviously not. But that’s what most of the language in the press tries to imply. A much more sensible summary was given by the project lead at the Gibraltar National Museum, Chris Finlayson:

It was a shrine, a place of worship for the ancient mariners. ... We thought it was only holy for the Phoenicians but now we know it was also holy for the Greeks.

Chris Finlayson, quoted in The Olive Press, 29 Sep. 2019

No one believes Gorgons are real. So when someone says this Gorgoneion ‘confirms’ a myth, that’s a real problem. The claim is so patently absurd that it poisons the legitimacy of the real story.

That seems like quite a stretch. How can they know that pair of eyes belonged to a gorgon instead of literally any other face?

‘Charyou-Tree’, Reddit, 5 Apr. 2021

It is an important find, to be clear, and those eyes are absolutely unmistakeable. But I fear sensationalism has done some damage to this discovery. Chris Finlayson has his feet on the ground, as I mentioned, but even he is subject to the sensationalistic impulse (Finlayson et al. 2021: 1):

The quest for sites and artefacts of classical mythology was the hallmark of archaeology at the end of the nineteenth century. Schliemann’s ... purported discoveries of King Priam’s treasure or the mask of Agamemnon are prime examples of attempts to link material culture to classical stories.

Oh, ye gods and little fishes. It’s bloody Schliemann again.

The authors go on to talk about Schliemann’s ‘controversial results’, and they compare these archaeological sites to the search for Atlantis. Oh help.

Now, ‘controversial’ is a word you could use for Schliemann’s methods (if you were being extremely generous). But the sites aren’t controversial. I’ve pointed this out before many times, but here it is again: Schliemann didn’t ‘prove’ Troy existed, and it never needed proving. The idea that it might have been a myth is itself a myth. The people who lived in Troy from around 700 BCE (the time of Hesiod) to 500 CE (after the fall of the western Roman Empire) would be very surprised to hear that there was such a ‘controversy’ over their bustling city.

Atlantis, by contrast, has nothing real about it whatsoever: Plato devised it around 360 BCE as an ad hoc allegory for Athens’ supposed potential to resist Macedonian conquest, and he based it on stories he had heard about the Atlantic Ocean being unnavigable — stories that were totally false.

Location of Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar (source: Google Maps)

The Gorgons’ link to Gibraltar is similar to the case of Troy. Not because the existence of the place was in doubt: no one ever thought the Pillars of Heracles, as the Greeks called the Strait of Gibraltar, were a myth. The similarity to Troy is because it’s definitely a real place, one that has always been known to be real, and which happens to have a myth attached to it.

New York and Nottingham are real, but that doesn’t mean Spider-Man and Robin Hood are. Real places don’t mean that myths actually happened. Nothing physical about a place ‘confirms’ a myth.

It is legitimate to say that this find confirms that ancient Greeks genuinely drew a link between the place and the myth, and that they did so as early as the Archaic period. Now, for Troy or Mycenae, that would be totally unsurprising. Of course they thought of the Trojan War as taking place at the contemporary city of Troy.

But when it comes to Gibraltar and Gorgons, this statement actually is interesting and significant. Before the Gorham’s Cave Gorgoneion was discovered, there actually was no material evidence that the ancients drew a link between the mythical Gorgons and the real Gibraltar. There wasn’t any particular reason to doubt it, mind: just that, as the April publication puts it (Finlayson et al. 2021: 3),

Until now the interpretation, based on a combination of material culture excavated, and the known presence of these people in the area at the time, has been that they were Phoenician and later Carthaginian mariners. Recent analyses have shown that the material culture found in this level has a broader international character ...

The team at the Gibraltar National Museum at the unveiling of their reconstruction of the Gorham’s Cave Gorgoneion, 18 May 2021 (source: Gibraltar Chronicle, 19 May 2021)

The Gorgoneion is significant, but not because it proves Gorgons were real. It’s because it’s the first material evidence that Greeks actually did visit Gibraltar. It’s because it’s the only Gorgoneion of its kind in the western Mediterranean. And it’s because it’s in a cave, not a temple. It is genuinely a unique find. There was no permanent Greek settlement at Gibraltar, so whoever put the Gorgoneion there — in a deep part of the cave, no less — made a special visit, and went to some trouble.

... and the Gorgons, who dwell beyond famous Ocean
at the edge of night, the same place as the clear-voiced Hesperides:
Sthenno, and Euryale, and Medusa who suffered evil things.

Hesiod, Theogony 274–276

Hesiod’s Theogony dates to around 700 BCE: it is very likely the earliest surviving piece of Greek literature. Already at the beginnings of Greek literature, we see the Greeks locating the Gorgons at the western boundary of the known world. ‘Beyond the Ocean’ suggests something even further afield, but even so, it’s pretty reasonable to interpret the labour taken over the Gibraltar Gorgoneion in light of this passage.

Gorgoneions are a reasonably common sight in ancient Greece itself. But the Gibraltar Gorgoneion genuinely is a big deal. My feeling is that its importance is only undercut by absurd claims of ‘confirming’ a myth.

Reference

• Finlayson, C.; Gutierrez Lopez, J. M.; Reinoso del Rio, M. C.; et al. 2021. ‘Where myth and archaeology meet: discovering the Gorgon Meduas’ lair.’ PLoS ONE 16.4: e0249606.

Thunderbirds in Atlantis

My young son has been on a Thunderbirds Are Go binge for the last several months -- he can articulate the differences between the 1960s and the 2010s models, he’s been on the Thunderbirds tour at Weta Workshop, and he often watches an episode over breakfast. Recently the episode of the day was ‘Lost kingdom’ (season 2 ep. 8), where the Thunderbirds visit Atlantis.

Adam Savage interviews Ben Milsom (Thunderbirds Are Go production designer) at the Thunderbird 2 launch strip, one of the highlights of the Weta Workshop tour.

Now, ‘Lost kingdom’ gave me pain at the time -- the kind of pain that a geneticist feels when watching Jurassic Park -- but my own love of Thunderbirds prevents me from doing a tear-down.

And of course a children’s cartoon (or animated show -- or miniature-and-CGI hybrid -- whatever) is allowed a lot of artistic licence. So what if Thunderbird 3 has to have its rockets firing to move around in space, or if Thunderbird 1’s canonical airspeed (Mach 19+) ought to make its nose as fiery as its rear ...

Besides, as mistreatments of archaeology go this episode isn’t very momentous. There are plenty of people out there pointing out bad archaeology where it really matters: like the way Indiana Jones habitually destroys archaeological context, or the barrage of lies in Ancient Aliens. The excellent David S. Anderson (@DSAArchaeology) is a bountiful source of sanity and good humour on the topic. High-profile stuff like that is where it’s really important to point out the nonsense.

How to ‘do’ Atlantis

I did a post on Atlantis nearly a year ago. That time, I was simply addressing the most popular misconceptions about the story, as told in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias. Today I’d like to talk about the adaptation of the Atlantis story in fiction.

There’s a bunch of ways you can approach Atlantis. My favourite fictional treatment, in fact, comes from Indiana Jones: he may be a terrible archaeologist, but he does have some good stories. I refer to the computer game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992). There, the writers realised that it’s futile to try and make Atlantis plausible. If you try to do that, you have to make excuses for the source material, because the Atlantis story is intrinsically silly. Instead, they collaborate with the source material. They create a story that unwinds both from Plato and from other Indiana Jones stories. Many details from Plato’s dialogues show up, like the use of orichalcum, the layout of Atlantis, and the canals surrounding its citadel; at the same time, Indy gets to swing on his whip, sneak aboard a U-Boat, and have fist-fights with Nazis. There’s also more actual archaeology in the game than in any of the films -- Indy visits archaeological sites on four landmasses, and a lost third Platonic dialogue turns up in a library. All this makes for a story that rewards Indy fans while at the same time rewarding engagement with Plato. (Plato genuinely did foreshadow the third dialogue, by the way, but it seems he never actually wrote it. I won’t spoil the title, as it’s part of a puzzle in the game ... but anyone who knows the real dialogues should be able to guess it.)

In most modern treatments, though, Atlantis isn’t the star. It’s just a hook. The implausibility of Atlantis is something that has to be redeemed: either by the plot, or the characters, or the visual design.

That’s certainly the case in the Disney version (Atlantis: the Lost Empire, 2004). The main character, Milo, goes on a journey of exploration and discovery, but the discovery of Atlantis itself is always secondary. The real interest lies in the characters that accompany Milo on the expedition, and the steampunk tech that they use. When they actually find Atlantis, it turns out to be a mash-up of other films, especially The Road to El Dorado (2000) and Castle in the Sky (1986). There, and in Stargate Atlantis (2004-2009), you could replace Atlantis with any old lost city and the story would work just as well.

The Tracy family hears about the discovery of Atlantis (Thunderbirds Are Go, ‘Lost kingdom’)

Thunderbirds lies somewhere betwixt and between. The writers throw in some ancient Greek things for flavour. There’s a colossal statue of Poseidon. There’s an Ancient Mystery in the ruins, an advanced mechanical computer whose controls are labelled with letters of the Greek alphabet. This version of Atlantis aims at being slightly more than just a convenient name for a lost city.

The mash-up effect

But there’s no interest at all in the details of Plato’s story. Plato’s Atlantis is in the Atlantic (hence the name!); in Thunderbirds it’s near Greece, in the Aegean Sea. Plato’s story is about Athens’ resistance to an overwhelming threat from outside; Athens doesn’t even get a mention in Thunderbirds. Plato’s Atlantis is flooded under shallow, muddy water; the Atlantis of Thunderbirds is hundreds of metres down.

I wouldn’t criticise this by calling it a hodge-podge. It’s obviously not meant to be systematic. What it is meant to be is a mash-up.

This Atlantis is a constellation of evocative gestures, not a creative expansion on the source material as in Indiana Jones. It points at themes and genres, rather than at a single story.

The first gesture is the colossal statue of Poseidon that the characters take as a sign that Atlantis has been found. This statue evokes Plato, and so it evokes an appearance of authenticity, without actually being a faithful representation of Plato’s story. Plato does say that the main civic cult of Atlantis is devoted to Poseidon -- but he also explains that ‘Poseidon’ is a translation of an Egyptian god’s name, which is in turn a translation of an Atlantean god. So it wasn’t really ‘Poseidon’, but an Atlantean equivalent. (By the way, there is no Egyptian god that ‘Poseidon’ might have been a translation of. The Egyptians didn’t have an equivalent to Poseidon. They had deities responsible for specific bodies of water, but none for the sea in general. This bit of Plato’s story never ... er ... held water.)

Another obvious gesture is the mechanical computer that the characters find in the ruins, called the ‘Solar Kythera’. The ‘Solar Kythera’ doesn’t appear in Plato’s Atlantis or any other ancient story. It’s added in by the writers. And it’s transparently an allusion to a real machine, the Antikythera device, a 2nd-1st century BCE astronomical computer found in an ancient shipwreck in 1902. ‘Antikythera’ isn’t the device’s actual name, by the way: it’s called that because the shipwreck is near the island of Antikythera. So the ‘Solar Kythera’ takes us away from Plato, but it still keeps us firmly in the realm of ancient Greek things under the sea.

A third gesture relates to the size of the ‘Solar Kythera’ and its role in the story. The real Antikythera device is the size of a toaster; the Solar Kythera in Thunderbirds is as big as an office building. Totally impractical as an astronomical tool. But useful as a gesture.

In the final act of the episode, the Solar Kythera’s controls have to be adjusted to avert a disaster, and so two characters climb up it, bounding from one level to the next, and rescuing each other from fatal drops as they go. At this point it becomes much more obvious what its real inspiration is: it’s a jumping puzzle out of a video game. It’s become a bit of a tradition in video games to have a gigantic orrery that the player has to climb and adjust. Real orreries, by contrast, are compact table-top devices, mostly dating to the Georgian era. I say ‘video games’, but the earliest example I can find of someone climbing a colossal orrery comes from the film Tomb Raider (2001). Still adapted from a video game, mind.

Starting at top left: (1) a working model of the Antikythera device; (2) the colossal orrery from the film Tomb Raider (2001); (3) the ‘Solar Kythera’ from Thunderbirds; (4) and (5) colossal orreries from the video games Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time (2003) and Prince of Persia: the Forgotten Sands (2010).

Between them, this mash-up of gestures evokes authenticity (Plato’s Atlantis); the flavour of Atlantis in the modern imagination (Greek, ancient, underwater, sophisticated); and the excitement, rapid pace, and physicality of a video game jumping puzzle (the colossal orrery Solar Kythera). This episode doesn’t have as much space as usual for the Thunderbirds’ technology fetish, so the Solar Kythera acts as a substitute.

As archaeology, it’s hopeless. For a children’s programme -- well, I’ll take it.

Shout-out in closing to David Graham, the legendary British voice-actor. Some of his many roles: in Supercar (1961-1962) as Dr Beaker; in Doctor Who (1963-1966) as the co-originator of the Dalek voice; in Thunderbirds (1965-1966) as Kyrano, Gordon Tracy, and Brains; in Timeslip (1970-1971) as Controller 2957; in Doctor Who ‘City of Death’ (1979) as Dr Kerensky; in Moomin (1990-1991) as the Snork; in Peppa Pig (2004-present) as Grandpa Pig; in Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom (2009-2012) as the Wise Old Elf; and perhaps his most iconic role, unless that honour goes to the Daleks, in Thunderbirds (1965-1966) and Thunderbirds Are Go (2015-present) as Parker.

Volcano Day

‘Pompeii ... we’re in Pompeii! And it’s Volcano Day!’
Doctor Who, ‘The fires of Pompeii’ (2008)

Warning: this blog post is wrong!

After I posted it, the archaeologist Sophie Hay alerted me to an article, Abdy 2013, which entirely tears out the rug from the central piece of evidence discussed here. The coin which I refer to as ‘minted no earlier than September 79 CE’ actually comes from an earlier issue. The inscription, illustrated and reported below as containing the phrase Imp XV ‘(recognised as) general 15 times’, actually reads Imp XIIII ‘general 14 times’, and there is no PP at the end. The poor state of preservation of the coin misled some very skilled numismatologists ... and I am no numismatologist.

Coin struck from the same reverse die as the coin found at Pompeii. In the case of the Pompeii coin it was originally thought that the number after IMP must be XV, because the capricorn’s tail would block any longer number. In this better preserved coin, however, notice that the XIIII actually crosses the tail. According to Abdy 2013, the Pompeii coin actually dates to July or August 79 CE.(Source: Abdy 2013, Plate 18)

I shall leave the post up, unedited, as a monument to my capacity for being completely wrong!

-- PG, ca. nine hours after post first went up

---

The eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 CE, which wiped out the city of Pompeii, is famously recorded in an eyewitness report by Pliny the Younger, Letters 6.16. Pliny tells the story of how his uncle, Pliny the Elder, the famed collector of facts, factoids, and oddities, launched a rescue expedition, in the course of which he died from causes apparently related to poor respiration.

Let’s talk about the date of the eruption. According to mainstream tradition, it happened on the 24th of August, 79 CE. This is the date Wikipedia reports, and the date that appears in every edition of Pliny’s Letters. Wikipedia also adds a caveat, ‘(probable)’, and has a substantial section devoted to doubting the date. Still, it leaves a final impression that the evidence is inconclusive. Readers will probably come away feeling free to go on quoting the date as 24 August -- maybe with a ‘(probable)’ warning at most.

In fact the evidence is entirely conclusive: the 24 August date is very definitely wrong. It’s just that among all the discussion, it may be difficult to see what the really decisive piece of evidence is. That’s also the case in the only academic discussion that the Wikipedia discussion cites, Rolandi et al. 2007. Rolandi et al. present loads of information, but their aim isn’t to weigh up which piece of evidence is the most important. But here’s a hint: it’s not the one in the headline of the article (‘the southeast tephra dispersion’). Judging from the Wikipedia article, it looks like it isn’t easy for a layperson to make out the smoking gun amidst the clouds of volcanic sulphur.

The really decisive piece of evidence is this: a coin, which was found in a hoard belonging to victims of the eruption, and which was minted no earlier than September 79 CE.

That’s the one item of evidence that points unambiguously to a later date for the eruption. Everything else is supporting evidence. Climate conditions and the locations of pyroclastic fall deposits; textual evidence in manuscripts of Pliny’s letter; food items found at Pompeii; styles of dress found on the bodies of the dead ... those things are all well and good, sure. But they’re all secondary to the direct and nearly explicit evidence of that coin. They’re helpful to the extent that they make the coin’s evidence more plausible, not because they’re more important than that coin.

(For similar assessments see Beard 2008: 17-19; Lazer 2009: 79-80. They mention all the other evidence, but like me, they both conclude that the coin is ‘[m]ore clinching’ (Beard); ‘This contentious issue may well have been resolved by the ... silver denarius’ (Lazer). If you want another second opinion that’s easier to get at, you can also try this 2013 blog post by ‘Roma Invicta’.)

The traditional date

The traditional date comes from Pliny. Here’s the relevant bit in his letter:

erat Miseni classemque imperio praesens regebat. nonum Kal. Septembres hora fere septima mater mea indicat ei apparere nubem inusitata ...

(My uncle) was at Misenum, on duty in command of a fleet. On the ninth day before the kalends of September, at roughly the seventh hour, my mother pointed out to him that an unusual cloud was appearing ...

-- Pliny, Letters 6.16.4

‘The ninth day before the kalends of September’ is a standard Roman way of reporting the date. The ‘kalends’ were the first day of the month, so the ninth day before that (counting inclusively) was the 24th of August.

Pointing at the coin isn’t going to be enough: we also need to account for Pliny’s testimony. If he says it was the 24th of August, that’s always going to be more explicit than a coin, right?

Well, this is where the manuscripts come in. Looking at actual surviving manuscripts of Pliny shows that it’s extremely unlikely that nonum Kal. Septembres is what Pliny actually wrote. Most manuscripts of Pliny are pretty incoherent about the date, and only one manuscript gives a nice clear-cut text that actually makes sense, and that’s the one that reads ‘24th of August’. Some other manuscripts read novem, which could be either ‘nine’ (‘nine days before the Kalends of September’), which would be an unusual phrasing, or more probably an abbreviation for November, Novem(bres). It may well be that confusion between Novem(bres) and novem has produced nonum (ninth); the phrase hora septima ‘at the seventh hour’ could be responsible for the introduction of Septem(bres).

Realising that this piece of testimony doesn’t actually have much of a leg to stand on is an important component of this argument. It’s still not the decisive point, though. The manuscript readings just remove evidence for the 24 August date; it’s the coin that proves the eruption didn’t happen on 24 August.

Mount Vesuvius looms over the remains of Pompeii

Weighing up the evidence

Here’s the break-down of reasons for doubting the 24 August date, and the different ways in which each reason matters. I’ll give the evidence in the order that Wikipedia mentions it:

1. Manuscript readings in Pliny Letters 6.16.4 show that the traditional date is poorly supported. They are not in any sense contrary evidence: they don’t disprove the 24 August date. Their role lies in making the positive evidence for 24 August decidedly weak.
2. Evidence of heavy clothing found on casts of some eruption victims is mildly supportive of an autumn date. This is very far from compelling, since there are plenty of other explanations (there’s always variation in seasonal weather; the people were fleeing their homes, and may have planned for being without shelter). But it is mildly interesting supporting evidence for doubting the August date. Not remotely in the same league as the next two items, however ...
3. Archaeological finds of autumnal crops, including fruits, hemp, etc., suggest an autumn date for the eruption. These are historically the reason why the traditional date was first doubted, by Carlo Maria Rosini, who excavated Pompeii in the late 1700s. They were decent evidence, and somewhat compelling, but not quite strong enough to counter the Pliny manuscripts that do read ‘24th of August’. Now that stronger evidence has come along, these finds are demoted to being high-quality supporting evidence.
4. The coin mentioned above, found in 1974, and with a detailed argument published in 2006 by Grete Stefani, director of the Office of Excavation of Pompeii. This coin is the first unambiguous evidence that Pompeii was not buried before September at the very earliest. It is clear-cut, absolutely decisive, and extraordinarily difficult to refute.
5. Dispersal of pyroclastic deposits. An article published by Rolandi et al. (2007) relies on seasonal wind patterns to argue against the August date. As with item 2, above, this isn’t decisive (I’m not aware of a place that has no variation in seasonal winds ... but then, I live in Wellington), but it is still interesting supporting evidence.

The Wikipedia article demotes the most compelling piece of evidence to fourth place, and devotes more than half of its discussion to the least compelling ones, items 1 and 5. It’s not surprising people are confused.

On the other side we have the evidence in favour of the 24 August date:

• Pliny Letters 6.16.4: though the manuscript tradition is inconsistent, we do have the date 24 August supported there. Just not strongly.
• Cassius Dio 66.21.1 states that the eruption took place ‘in the very time of summer-waning’, or late-summer/early-autumn. This would normally put the event between ca. 6 August (the setting of the constellation Lyra, to Pliny the Elder Natural history 18.59) and 25 September (the autumn equinox). Well, it’s consistent with the 24 August date, at least. On the other hand, Cassius Dio also reports that the eruption was preceded by omens of giants stalking the countryside and flying overhead (66.22.2) ...

Yeah, these points are pretty weak. They certainly don’t stand up to the overwhelming evidence of the coin, and the supporting evidence from archaeological finds of seasonal crops.

The coin

Two coins of emperor Titus, one (top) showing Titus recognised as imperator (‘general’) fourteen times, the other (bottom, outlines enhanced) the coin discussed by Stefani 2006, showing Titus recognised as imperator fifteen times, and therefore dating no earlier than September 79 CE.
Top: Heads side reads Imp Titus Caes Vespasian Aug PM, ‘Gen(eral) Titus Caes(ar) Vespasian(us) Aug(ustus), p(ontifex) m(aximus).’ Tails reads TrP VIIII Imp XIIII Cos VII PP, ‘Tr(ibunician) P(ower) 9th time, (hailed as) gen(eral) 14th time, cons(ul) 7th time, f(ather of his) c(ountry).’
Bottom: Heads side same as above. Tails reads TrP VIIII Imp XV Cos VII PP, ‘Tr(ibunician) P(ower) 9th time, (hailed as) gen(eral) 15th time, cons(ul) 7th time, f(ather of his) c(ountry).’

The bottom coin is the important one. It was found in 1974 next to the so-called House of the Golden Bracelet, along with about 200 other coins that victims of the eruption took with them as they fled. No, it’s not the most beautiful coin ever designed. Titus has quite the neck there, doesn’t he? But it’s neatly unambiguous: as the inscription on the tails side says, when it was minted (or, arguably, just about to be minted), Titus had been recognised as imperator (‘general’) fifteen times.

How does it have a bearing on the date? It’s because we know that as late as 8 September 79 CE, official Roman documents were still referring to Titus as imperator for the fourteenth time. In particular, the emperor’s own office was still calling him imperator for the fourteenth time on 7 September.

This is not something that can be chalked up to news travelling slowly: changes in who was emperor and the emperor’s status were circulated around the empire very promptly. For example, we have papyri from Egypt reporting on new emperors within a month or so of their taking the position. And Pompeii is a lot closer to Rome than Egypt is. And with a coin, you also have to add in extra time for it to be minted and get into circulation and into someone’s purse.

The documents in question are two inscriptions. One is a military diploma found in Egypt dating to 8 September (line 17: a(nte) d(iem) VI Idus Sept(embres)); that could be blamed on communication delays between Rome and Egypt. The other is much more compelling: it is a letter on a bronze tablet sent from the office of the emperor himself and dating to 7 September (line 16: dat(um) VII Idus Septembr(es)). So unless we’re going to argue that the emperor’s own secretarial staff had somehow forgotten there had been a fifteenth acclamation as imperator, we have absolutely rock-solid evidence that Pompeii was still unburied when the letter was sent on 7 September.

---

Endnote

As noted at the beginning of this post, this post is wrong! The coin highlighted as the central piece of evidence here was misidentified, and the misidentification was only realised in 2013. See Abdy 2013, and some further details at the beginning of this post.

References

• Abdy, R. 2013. ‘The last coin in Pompeii: a re-evaluation of the coin hoard from the house of the Golden Bracelet.’ Numismatic Chronicle 173: 79-83.
• Beard, M. 2008. Pompeii. The life of a Roman town. London: Profile Books.
• Borgongino, M.; Stefani, G. 1999. ‘Intorno alla data dell’eruzione del 79 d.C.’ Rivista di studi Pompeiani 10: 177-215.
• Lazer, E. 2009. Resurrecting Pompeii. London/New York: Routledge.
• Rolandi, G.; Paone, A.; Di Lascio, M.; Stefani, G. 2007. ‘The 79 AD eruption of Somma: the relationship between the date of the eruption and the southeast tephra dispersion.’ Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 169: 87-98.
• Stefani, G. 2006. ‘La vera data dell’eruzione.’ Archeo 206: 10-13.
• Stefani, G.; Borgongino, M. 2007. ‘Ancora sulla data dell’eruzione.’ Rivista di studi Pompeiani 18: 204‑6.

Off limits: these theories aren't for debunking (not here, anyway)

Initiation scene at Eleusinian Mysteries. Left: Demeter is shown sitting on the sacred kistē (basket) containing secret initiation paraphernalia. The basket is wound about by a snake. Demeter looks back at Persephone, who is holding a burning torch. Right: thronōsis scene. An initiate, veiled, sits on a ramskin; a priestess, approaching from behind, holds a burning torch close to his hand. (Relief on a Roman-era sarcophagus from Torre Nova; composite image)

Not all modern myths about antiquity come from misunderstandings. People at the centre of the academic discipline, too, sometimes come up with theories that I for one regard as 'myths', in the popular sense of theories that are widely believed but untrue. Some of these people are tenured professors in university departments, surrounded by eminent colleagues.

Sometimes these theories go unrefuted by their peers, in spite of or maybe because of their idiosyncrasies. In these cases, I won't be doing any kind of debunking. This is partly out of professional respect, but mainly because of the limitations of blogs. Even if I am dead sure that these theories are untrue, this isn't the right place to do so -- unless I'm just supporting an existing published refutation. The right place is in the pages of an academic journal. The catch is that writing an academic article is generally a tad harder than debunking myths in a blog, even if some blog posts involve nearly as much work and research.

A debunking in an academic journal requires, or should require, an absolutely masterful command of both the primary evidence and the modern scholarship. Now, for some topics, that's actually achievable in a blog format. For example, I think this post on irrational numbers covers all the relevant testimony in existence, and there won't be any real controversy among specialists in the field. For some topics I have to settle for a lower goal: I can cite ancient testimony about broad beans as well as anyone, but that doesn't mean my coverage of the epidemiology of G6PD deficiency is good enough for a journal. Yet here, again, I don't think there'll be any controversy among scholars of ancient religions.

And then there are topics that are controversial, and which have no dedicated counter-arguments in scholarly journals. (Or at least, not yet.) These are the ones I've decided not to touch.

This policy decision came about after I had already done a fair amount of work on one of the topics I'll mention below. I think I have the broad outline of a compelling debunking of it. But

• the principal living proponent deserves some professional respect;
• there is no dedicated debunking of the idea in any academic publication;
• what would be the point of doing the one and only debunking, if it's in a place that can't realistically be cited by any future studies?

So I won't offer any comment on the following theories. But I will offer them up in their authors' own words. I think they don't have enough support to stand up. You judge them on their own terms, and see what you think:

• Do you get a sense of what evidence they are relying on? If so, do they deal with that evidence in a balanced fashion, or selectively?
• What competing theories can you think of? How would you expect the authors to deal with those competing theories?

Drugs at Eleusis

The ancient testimony about Eleusis is unanimous. Eleusis was the supreme experience in an initiate's life. It was both physical and mystical: trembling, vertigo, cold sweat, and then a sight that made all previous seeing seem like blindness, a sense of awe and wonder at a brilliance that caused a profound silence since what had just been seen and felt could never be communicated: words are unequal to the task. Those symptoms are unmistakably the experience induced by an entheogen ...

-- Carl Ruck, Sacred mushrooms of the goddess. Secrets of Eleusis (Berkeley, 2006) p. 14

(Note: the above is rephrased from Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, The road to Eleusis: unveiling the secret of the Mysteries (1978), chapter 3, also by Ruck.)

Suggested bibliography:

• Burkert, W. 1983. Homo necans. The anthropology of ancient Greek sacrificial ritual and myth. U. of California Press. (Orig. publ. in German as Homo necans, 1972.) pp. 265-293.
• Richardson, N. J. 1974. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 344-348.
• Sourvinou-Inwood, C. 2003. 'Festival and Mysteries: aspects of the Eleusinian cult.' In: Cosmopoulos, M. B. (ed.). Greek mysteries. The archaeology and ritual of ancient Greek secret cults. London: Routledge. pp. 25-49.
• Walcot, P. 1979. Review of Wasson et al., The road to Eleusis. Greece & Rome 26: 104.

Fossils and mythical monsters

Herakles (left) fights the monster Kētos (right) to rescue Hesione (centre). (Corinthian black-figure kratēr, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Monsters of Greek myth were perceived in the popular imagination and portrayed by artists either as huge beasts or as giant humans. The artist of the Copenhagen vase has opted for the latter. The Perseus vase and the Copenhagen vase therefore illustrate the two branches of mythical interpretation of monsters. But the unparalleled depiction of the Monster of Troy as a large fossil animal skull on the Boston vase points to a natural basis for the two branches of monster and giant images in art and literature. Here is powerful evidence that fossil remains of prehistoric animals influenced ancient ideas about primeval monsters!

-- Adrienne Mayor, The first fossil hunters. Paleontology in Greek and Roman times (Princeton, 2001) p. 163

Suggested bibliography: I know of none, other than Mayor's own book.

Herakles and Kētos: here, Kētos is depicted as he usually is, as a giant snake's head attached to a fish's body. (Caeretan black-figure vase, Stavros S. Niarchos collection)

The alphabet was invented in order to write down the Iliad

Homer's floruit falls within the first half of the eighth century [BCE]. He is pehaps an exact contemporary of the adapter [of the Phoenician alphabet]. At the very least, he lived within fifty years of the invention of an idiosyncratic writing that cocks the ear to fine distinctions of sound and is used in its earliest remains to record hexametric verse. If the alphabet was fashioned to record the poet Homer and no other, we can account for the coincidence in time. If we believe that the adapter restructured Phoenician writing not in order to record Homer specifically, but in order to record 'hexametric verse in general,' meaning a poet or poets of whose existence and achievement all memory has been lost, we must admit that at the same time, or within a generation and a half at most, the new writing was also used to write down Homer.

-- Barry Powell, Homer and the origin of the Greek alphabet (Cambridge, 1991) p. 221

Suggested bibliography:

• Graziosi, B. 2002. Inventing Homer. The early reception of epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 90-98.
• Svenbro, J. 1993. Phrasikleia. An anthropology of reading in ancient Greece. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (Orig. publ. in French as Phrasikleia, 1988.) pp. 26-43.
• Van Wees, H. 1994. 'The Homeric way of war: the Iliad and the hoplite phalanx.' Greece & Rome 41: 1-18 and 131-155, at pp. 138-146.

You too can own a 'Nestor's cup' coffee mug! Only NZD$27.85 plus shipping from Zazzle. Just be aware that line 1 contains a very doubtful supplement.

The Mahābhārata was based on the Iliad

I have, in effect, been attempting to prove that the author(s) of the Mahābhārata, based on their fervor for the Homeric epics and interest in other mythological figures such as Heracles, utilize very diverse Greek sources and put them into play in very versatile and creative ways all throughout their story built around the massacre of the Pāṇḍavas and Kauravas. ... We are not talking about minor details, motifs, or loose elements. The creative genius behind the work is articulated from within an extensive blueprint inspired by the one which underlies the Iliad. Accordingly, those chronological frameworks, situations and characters are changed or inverted at will, and, amongst numerous other possibilities, some stories are embedded in larger, more central ones or components of all sorts are mixed to form fascinating amalgamations.

-- Ferdinand Wulff Alonso, The Mahābhārata and Greek mythology (Delhi, 2014) pp. 446-447

Suggested bibliography:

• Watkins, C. 1995. How to kill a dragon. Aspects of Indo-European poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Entire book, but esp. pp. 12-27.
• West, M. L. 2007. Indo-European poetry and myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Entire book, but especially pp. 19-24.

Heroes take part in bow contests to win a bride. Left: Arjuna shoots at a fish's eye to win Draupadi (source: a 19th century edition of the Mahābhārata). Right: Odysseus shoots through twelve axes to win Penelope (source: Ulysses (1954), starring Kirk Douglas).

On the ‘losing’ of Troy

In Greek legend, the Trojan War ended with the Greeks using a colossal wooden horse to burn the city, sack it, and raze it to the ground. Men and boys were killed, women and girls were enslaved and transported. There were no survivors and no remains. Troy was utterly destroyed.

Many modern people are under the impression that the same thing happened to the historical city of Troy: that Troy ceased to exist at the end of the Bronze Age; that it was destroyed by the Greeks at the end of the Bronze Age, so that even the location of the city was lost; and that the ruins of the real Troy lay undiscovered until Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in the 1870s-80s.

Everything in the above paragraph is unequivocally false.

We won’t focus on Schliemann today — his activities at Hisarlık (the modern name for the hill of Troy’s citadel) offer more than enough material for a lengthy debunking all by themselves. Today we’ll focus on the ‘loss’ of Troy. When was Troy ‘lost’?

Early Greek epic certainly gives us ample reason to think of Troy as a city that has been destroyed utterly. At one point in the Iliad, a defeated Trojan begs the Greek Menelaos for mercy. Menelaos is considering taking him captive instead of killing him, but his brother Agamemnon pops out of nowhere and says (Il. 6.55-60):

‘Menelaos, my dear, why do you care so much
about these men? Have you and your house been treated so finely
by the Trojans? Let none of them escape sheer destruction
at our hands, not even any boy that a mother carries
in her womb: let none escape, but let all the people
of Ilios be utterly destroyed, unmourned, wiped to oblivion!’

(Ilios/Ilion is an alternate name for Troy.) And here’s a fragment from the Little Iliad, a poem from the lost Epic Cycle, which uses one family as an emblem for the massacre of the children and enslavement of the women (fragment 21 ed. Bernabé = fr. 29 ed. West):

But Achilleus’ great-hearted shining son
led Hektor’s wife in captivity back to the hollow ships,
and he took her son from the embrace of his lovely-haired nurse,
grabbed him by the foot and threw him from a tower. As he fell,
a bloody death and hard fate snatched him up.

Sack of Troy: Neoptolemus kills king Priam,
bludgeoning him with the corpse of his grandson.
(Attic, ca. 520-10 BCE; Louvre)

Euripides’ play the Trojan Women (415 BCE) gives another angle on the sack of Troy. There the narrative focus is firmly on the survivors, the women of the city, who are about to be carted off into slavery while still mourning for their husbands and sons, in an act of destruction that was not caused by any of them. (Euripides’ picture of the destruction wrought upon Troy is especially thorough because he was using the legend as an allegory for current events: the previous summer, the Athenians had decided to commit genocide on the island of Melos, slaughtering the entire male population and enslaving all the women, rather than allow the Melians to remain neutral in the Peloponnesian War.)

That’s the legend. What about the reality?

Archaeological evidence is the most reliable way of corroborating or disproving the stories. And one piece of archaeological evidence is popularly linked to the legend. There are traces of a large fire on the citadel of Troy dating to the end of the level called ‘Troy VIIa’, that is, ca. 1190 BCE. The archaeological layers are numbered Troy I, II, III, etc. starting from the lowest and earliest level: the higher the number, the shallower and more recent the archaeological remains are. The fire of Troy VIIa is popularly equated with the legendary war especially thanks to Michael Wood's BBC TV documentary series and book In Search of the Trojan War (1985). For what was known at the time, it’s an extremely competent piece of work. The entire series can be watched on YouTube here.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that, among ancient historians who believe the Trojan War actually happened, they gravitate more towards Troy VIh as the best candidate for a historical war. That would put the ‘fall of Troy’ about a century earlier. Very few ancient historians nowadays would opt for Troy VIIa. But that’s neither here nor there. As another incidental by-the-way, some archaeologists involved in excavation at Troy would now refer to that layer as ‘Troy VIi’, not VIIa (for reasons that don’t matter just now).

The important thing, and it really is worth emphasising, is that Troy was not destroyed at that time. On the contrary: after the fire of Troy VIIa, the citadel was promptly rebuilt. It continued to be occupied without any pause for another 250 years or so. The population dwindled — not an exceptional thing: that also happened at many other sites in Greece and Anatolia in the early 12th century BCE — and the site was finally abandoned ca. 950 BCE.

Did I say abandoned? Well, yes... but the story doesn’t end there. Troy was not ‘lost’ in 950 BCE either. In fact, Greek colonists settled the site once again starting in the early 8th century BCE. It became a Greek city, and a part of the Greek world.

There were probably other ethnic groups already living in the region, who would account for references in Homer to Lelegians and other peoples living with and allied to the legendary Trojans. These peoples are not part of the history of Bronze Age Troy: there is no evidence to put these groups there in the 12th century, in spite of large quantities of Hittite textual evidence about the regional and ethnic divisions of Anatolia. In the Greek city of Troy, the main state cult was to Ilian Athena. And again, this Greek cult, dating to the time of Greek colonisation, accounts for the references to a cult of Athena in the legendary Troy: in Homer, the only cult inside the city walls that is mentioned is the shrine to Athena on the citadel (at Iliad 6.269-70 and 6.297-311), even though Athena is vehemently opposed to the legendary city.

Greek Troy continued to be inhabited for another two thousand years.

It went on to have a colourful history. Xerxes visited Troy on his way to invade Greece in 480 BCE, and made offerings to Ilian Athena as a propaganda gesture: it made it look as if he had come to avenge king Priam. When Alexander captured Troy from the Persians in 334 BCE, he too made offerings to Ilian Athena, gave Troy special legal privileges, and ordered the construction of a new temple to Athena. From 306 BCE Troy enjoyed still more status as the capital of a league of cities in the Troad.

Coin of Antiochus III, 197 BCE

The Seleucid king Antiochus III joined Xerxes and Alexander on the list of leaders who honoured Ilian Athena and Troy. So too did the Roman general Cornelius Scipio, when he overthrew Antiochus.

In the Roman era, Troy came to be more important still, as a emblem for Roman-Greek relations. There was already a long-standing legend that Romans had Trojans in their ancestry, so Troy took on great symbolic importance. There may have been one bad hiccup in 85 BCE: there’s a story (not corroborated) that a mutinying Roman commander, Fimbria, sacked the city and boasted that he had done in ten days what Agamemnon had taken ten years to do.

But afterwards Julius Caesar, as dictator of Rome, continued the tradition of honouring the city with tax breaks and other privileges. Caesar’s family claimed descent from the goddess Venus via the Trojan Aeneas, so Caesar tried to shift the emphasis of Trojan religious life away from Athena (Minerva) towards Aphrodite (Venus), and he issued coins showing Venus on one side and Aeneas’ flight from Troy on the other. To some extent this stuck: Aphrodite continued to appear on some later Trojan coins. Suetonius, a gossip-mongering biographer, claims that there was even a rumour floating around just before Caesar’s assassination that he had been planning to abscond with the city’s armies and treasury and set himself up as king of an eastern empire, with his capital in either Troy or Alexandria. That rumour is certainly untrue. But it may just be true that the rumour did exist.

Under the Principate, another new temple to Ilian Athena was built in the reign of Augustus. Many other public works followed, and Troy reached the pinnacle of its historical size and importance. In the 4th century CE, when the emperor Constantine was planning to establish a second capital city for the eastern half of the empire, he was seriously considering Troy as an alternative to Byzantium. It would never have made sense to actually choose Troy ahead of Byzantium — a tourist trap ahead of a major economic power with major strategic significance — but it shows that Troy still had huge symbolic importance.

Its importance only began to fade after around 500 CE, when it was badly damaged by a major earthquake. Increasing urbanisation around Constantinople must also have leeched people and money away from Troy. Even so, in the 10th century it became the seat of a minor Byzantine bishop. But it must have been badly hit by the Byzantine-Turkish wars in the 11th century; by the time the Ottomans finished conquering the region in 1308, it had probably been abandoned for some time.

At that point, and only at that point, does it begin to make any kind of sense to speak of Troy as ‘lost’. And even then, it was only ‘lost’ in the sense that people in the Latin west no longer had any direct knowledge of it because they didn’t travel in the region very much.

Edward Daniel Clarke, 1769-1822

Pretty much as soon as western visitors started writing memoirs of their tours in the area, the location of Troy became ‘known’ again. Five hundred years later, in 1801, the English traveller Edward Daniel Clarke became the first modern westerner to write about the site. In the 1850s, when British forces were stationed in the region during the Crimean War, an engineer named John Brunton carried out some brief excavations and uncovered a Roman mosaic, as can be read in his memoirs. As far as Brunton was concerned, there was no particular doubt or controversy about the identification of the site as Troy. Frank Calvert and Johann Georg von Hahn were the first people with archaeological expertise to visit the site, in 1863-65.

Schliemann was neither the discoverer of Troy nor the first person to identify the site as Troy (in fact he doubted Calvert's word on the matter at first). He was just the first excavator to get down to Bronze Age material, and he liked to pretend that there was an entrenched orthodoxy against him for rhetorical reasons. In reality, Troy didn’t need to be ‘discovered’: it was never lost in any meaningful sense.

---

Further reading. Trevor Bryce, The Trojans and their neighbours (Routledge, 2006), chapter 7 is an excellent brief summary of the history of Greco-Roman Troy (VIII, IX, and X). On the city’s cultural and political signifiance in the same age, see Andrew Erskine, Troy between Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2001).