Myths Of The Greeks And Romans

by Michael Grant

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Ancient

Synopsis

Myths of the Greeks and Romans is an essential guide to ancient literature

The myths told by the Greeks and Romans are as important as their history for our understanding of what they believed, thought and felt, and of what they expressed in writing and visual art. Mythology was inextricably interwoven with the entire fabric of their public and private lives.

This book discusses not only the purely fictional myths, fairy-tales and folk-tales but the sagas and legends which have some historical grounding. This is not a dictionary of stories, rather a personal selection of the most important and memorable. Michael Grant re-tells these marvellous tales, and then explores the different ways in which they have appeared throughout literature.

It is an inspiring study, filled with quotations from literary sources, which gives the reader a fascinating exposition of ancient culture as well as an understanding of how vital the classical world has been in shaping the western culture of today.

Release date: September 1, 1995

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 512

Sample

THE MYTHS told by the Greeks and Romans are as important as history for our understanding of what those peoples, ancestors of our own
civilization, believed and thought and felt, and expressed in writing and in visual art. For their mythologies were inextricably
interwoven, to an extent far beyond anything in our own experience, with the whole fabric of their public and private lives.


And then without these myths we should be hard put to it to understand the arts and literature and ways of thinking of the
west, and of many other parts of the world as well, during the centuries that have passed since the classical world came to
an end. Time after time these products of ancient imagination have been used to inspire fresh creative efforts, which amount
to a substantial part of our whole cultural inheritance. Such renewals and adaptations have often seemed far removed, in character
and spirit, from the original tradition; yet they stem directly from it, and are unimaginable without it.


The intelligible forms of ancient poets,

The fair humanities of old religion,

The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,

That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,

Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,

Or chasms and watery depths: all these have vanished.

They live no longer in the faith of reason!

But still the heart doth need a language, still

Doth the old instinct bring back the old names…

And so even communities professing that quite different code of beliefs which is Christianity have, after various struggles,
found it impracticable to dispense with the classical stories. Today new political systems have fabricated their own myths
which Coleridge, writing those lines under the Graeco-Roman spell, had never imagined. Yet twentieth-century writers, from
tragic theatre to comic strip, have continued to employ the archetypes with renewed vigour. These dramatic, concrete, individual,
insistently probing ancient myths still supplement the deductions of science as clues to much in the world that does not alter.


The atmosphere to which they translate us is life-enhancing; for it gives us fresh strength by providing a route of escape.
The escape is from day-to-day reality, of which, as we know, it is not possible to endure very much. Yet this is not escapism
of any ordinary kind, for the road leads to another sort of reality, a more imposing sort, than the reality which dominates
our ordinary lives. At times, in receptive conditions, these myths generate and throw off potent, almost violent, flashes
of inextinguishable, universal truths. Those are not of course, as far as we are concerned, the religious truths which (among
much else) the Greeks and Romans saw in their mythology. However they are truths that still impinge, sometimes with ungovernable
force, upon the mind and feelings, and illuminate aspects of our human condition.


This particular brand of enlightenment is difficult or impossible to grasp by more logical and rational means, and would elude
non-mythical presentation. Yet it would be wrong to say that myths seem modern or topical; they are as relevant to our time
as to any other, no more no less. That is to say, they are not specifically antique either. They are ostensibly lodged, it
is true, within a certain framework of the remote past, but that does not impede their perpetual compulsive tenacity. Indeed,
their relevance to life’s basic, continuing situations is sharpened into high relief by this setting which, though ancient
in origin and form, remains unaffected by temporal circumstances.


For the images of myth, once they have stirred our perceptions, precipitate them into a new, unforeseen dimension outside
time.


The Greeks and Romans, although in different epochs they saw mythology in different lights, were by training and inclination
ready to enter this exciting, unearthly dimension of timelessness, this


Dark, illimitable ocean, without bound,

Without dimension, where length and breadth and height,

And time and place, are lost.

Heavy with unplumbed meaning is this ocean—beckoning, inviting immersion and obsession Perhaps after so long a time we can
only reach its shallows; yet we shall be losing an irreplaceable experience if we do not go as deep as we can. But we need,
for this enterprise, a more detailed preparation than the ancients needed.


Each myth means something different to everybody who reads and studies it. The stories are hard to forget; feelings about
them come unpredictably. Their underlying qualities do not readily yield to definition or classification—still less to weird
searches for mystic hidden meanings and anachronistic allegories. Above all, as I hope will become clear, they are varied.
No single theory, however valuably suggestive, will suffice to explain the whole range of Greek and Roman mythology, or even a major proportion
of its content. Indeed, such all-embracing theories (of which there are many), whether put forward by anthropologists or classicists
or psychoanalysts or scholars of religion, present the most dangerous hazard which students of this strange subject will encounter.
And in this field we are exceptionally vulnerable to hazards, since we almost all come to it after an education in which the
myths are neglected or, to the accompaniment of gutless illustrations, reduced to whimsical travesty.


So the only safe hope would seem to be the Horatian maxim:

Ask not, to what Doctors I apply;

Sworn to no Master, of no Sect am I.

Or, better, go to as many of the doctors as one can, and sit at their feet, and from all of them accept something—though (since
they contradict one another) obviously not everything. For each of these different kinds of scholar that I mentioned has during
the present century, in spite of these all too comprehensive theories, added to our realization that mythology is something far more serious
than the primitive, unreflecting, childish precursor of science or of developed religion that it was formerly believed to
be. Indeed, the revitalizing of the classical myths can be claimed as the most significant of all the impacts that the Graeco-Roman
world has made upon modern thought.


I have included in this book not only purely fictional stories which everyone would classify as myths, and the folk-tales
and fairy-tales which are their younger sisters, but also some of those sagas and legends which build imaginatively upon at
least a minimum of historical basis. However, there are thousands of these various tales, and rather than attempt a dictionary
I have wanted to say something about each one that I include. So I am selecting those which seem to me, for one reason or
another, the most important and necessary; though, once you leave agreed territory such as Homer and the Agamemnon, this is a subjective process in which everyone would provide a different list.


Before discussing each theme, I shall tell the story which it comprises: since the actual course of ‘events’ often tends to
be forgotten—eclipsed by other, high-lighted elements—when the myths are currently discussed. I was also encouraged by reading
a remark by C. S. Lewis that the significant something, the something of great power and moment, which each of the basic myths
seems to suggest, is communicable not only when a good ancient author tells them but even in the most atrocious modern summary.


Nevertheless, it would be misleading to ignore the principal ancient literary expressions of these stories—the sparks which
they ignited in writers of genius. I have, therefore, made my summaries of each myth follow the version (probably one of many
different versions) in which it was told by its most remarkable narrator; and I have included passages from among the best
modern translators that I could find. These Greek and Latin authors are taken in chronological order so as to give a general
survey of the changes in the ancient world’s ideas about myths. That is to say, the love-hate connection between myth and
literature having, in the course of time, become very intimate, I have tried to sum up that relationship by seizing upon the outstanding encounters
between the two. This will not satisfy a person who wants to look at the myths in a more primitive form than they assume even
in the earliest Greek literature. Yet it was only in the hands of great writers that the power of the stories achieved its
full realization, and was communicated to the world. However, the origins of a myth, although (especially in the classical
field) they are seldom fully understood, need to be thought about as well: and in the discussions which in each chapter follow
the narrative sections, I say something not only about the ancient author whose treatment of the theme I have chosen to describe,
but about these earlier stages too. I also refer to aftermaths and repercussions, in the ancient world and in later Europe
and elsewhere up to the present day.


Inevitably my debts to other writers are enormous. In addition I want to record my appreciation,
for help of various kinds, to Miss Martine Franck, Miss Veronica Lemmon, Professor Joseph Campbell; Dr R. A. Higgins and Dr
J. P. C. Kent of the British Museum; and officials of the London Library and the Hellenic and Roman Societies.


I am grateful to the following for quotations from copyright works: E. V. Rieu and Penguin Books for Homer: Iliad, Homer: Odyssey and Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica, Robert Graves and Penguin Books for Apuleius: Golden Ass, Philip Vellacott and Penguin Books for Aeschylus: Oresteia, W. F. Jackson Knight and Penguin Books for Virgil: Aeneid, A. de Selincourt and Penguin Books for Livy: Early History of Rome, E. F. Watling and Penguin Books for Sophocles: Theban Plays, F. Wood and University of Minnesota Press for Rainer Maria Rilke: The Ring of Forms, D. Grene, R. Lattimore, W. Arrowsmith, E. T. Vermeule, E. Wyckoff, J. Moore, M. Jameson and University of Chicago Press for
Complete Greek Tragedies, R. Lattimore and University of Chicago Press for Homer: The Iliad, Odes of Pindar, Greek Lyrics, Greek Tragedies, R. Lattimore and University of Michigan Press for Hesiod: Works and Days and Theogony, A. E. Watts and University of California Press for Ovid: Metamorphoses, J. B. Pritchard and Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press for Ancient Near Eastern Texts, D. Fitts and R. Fitzgerald and Oxford University Press for Sophocles: Antigone, D. Fitts and R. Fitzgerald and Dial Press for Greek Plays in Modern Translation, D. Fitts and R. Fitzgerald and Messrs. Faber and Faber for Oedipus at Colonus and Euripides: Alcestis, Messrs. Faber and Faber for Collected Poems 1931–1958 by Edwin Muir, L. P. Wilkinson and Cambridge University Press for Ovid Recalled, H. G. Evelyn-White and Loeb Classical Library for Homeric Hymns, F. L. Lucas and Messrs. J. M. Dent for Greek Poetry for Everyman, M. Balkwill, Sir Maurice Bowra, T. F. Higham, Gilbert Highet, G. Allen, J. Sterling and Clarendon Press for Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, Sir F. Fletcher and Clarendon Press for Virgil: Aeneid VI, J. B. Leishman and Hogarth Press for translations of R. M. Rilke, J. Mavrogordato and the Hogarth Press for Cavafy, Poems Translated with Notes, Rae Dalven, Harcourt Brace & World, and the Hogarth Press for Complete Poems of Cavafy, P. Green and Messrs. John Murray for Essays in Antiquity, R. Fitzgerald and Messrs. Wm. Heinemann and Doubleday for Homer: The Odyssey, Rolfe Humphries and Messrs. Scribner for The Aeneid of Virgil, A. R. Burn and Messrs. Edward Arnold for The Lyric Age of Greece, L. MacNeice and Messrs. Faber and Faber for Aeschylus: Agamemnon, R. Payne and Messrs. Heinemann for The Wanton Nymph, C. Day Lewis and Messrs. Jonathan Cape for The Georgics of Virgil, C. Day Lewis and the Hogarth Press for Virgil: The Aeneid, the late Professor T. A. Sinclair and Messrs. Routledge and Kegan Paul for History of Greek Political Thought, O. Kiefer, G. Highet and Messrs. Routledge for Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, R. Warner and The Bodley Head for Poems of George Seferis, R. Warner, S. O’Sheed and The Bodley Head for L. R. Lind’s Ten Greek Plays in Contemporary Translation, Mrs Yeats and Messrs. A. P. Watt and Messrs. Macmillan for Sophocles’ King Oedipus translated by W. B. Yeats, Richard Aldington and Messrs. Chatto and Windus for Euripides: Alcestis, H. T. Wade-Gery, Sir Maurice Bowra and the Nonesuch Press for The Odes of Pindar, Graham Hough and Messrs. Duckworth for Legends and Pastorals. Professor George Thomson and Cambridge University Press for Aeschylus: The Oresteia, Messrs. Thornton Butterworth for a translation in Gilbert Murray’s Euripides and His Age.

I am also grateful for certain passages to my fellow-author of Greeks and Romans, Mr Don Pottinger, and to the publisher Messrs. Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd.


I want also to thank Miss Jocelyn Burton for seeing this edition through the press.

MICHAEL GRANT

Note. See two headings in the Index (methods, theories; myth, divisions of) for some of the various ways in which the subject
can be approached.





THE POET begins his story, in the tenth year of Troy’s siege by the Greeks, with an invocation to the Muse.


Sing through me

That anger which most ruinously

Inflamed Achilles, Peleus’ son,

And which before the tale was done

Had glutted hell with champions bold,

Stern spirits by the thousandfold;

Ravens and dogs their corpses ate.

For thus did Zeus, who watched their fate,

See his resolve, first taken when

Proud Agamemnon king of men

An insult on Achilles cast,

Achieve accomplishment at last.1

The flowing rhythm of the Iliad was given this more abrupt, ballad-like shape by Robert Graves.


While attacking Chryse not far from Troy, Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the invaders, had taken as his share of the plunder
Chryseis, daughter of Chryses priest of Apollo. Before the assembled Greek army, her father appealed to Agamemnon to release
her, but his plea was refused and the old man was dismissed from the camp. Chryses prayed to Apollo to punish the invaders, and Apollo, hearing his prayer, came down from Olympus, afflicting
the Greeks with a plague. ‘As he set out, the arrows clanged on the shoulder of the angry god; and his descent was like nightfall.
He sat down opposite the ships and shot an arrow, with a dreadful twang, from his silver bow. He attacked the mules first
and the nimble dogs, and then he aimed his sharp arrows at the men, and struck again and again. Day and night, innumerable
fires consumed the dead. For nine days the god’s arrows rained on the camp.’2

On the tenth day Achilles called for a council of war. The prophet Calchas declared that Chryseis must be given back to her
father. Agamemnon angrily agreed but seized, instead of her, the girl Briseis, who had been allotted to Achilles. And so Achilles
withdrew from the war, appealing to his immortal mother Thetis, who persuaded Zeus to right the wrongs of her son. Accordingly,
the king of the gods sent Agamemnon a deceptive dream assuring him that he can now capture Troy. Agamemnon tested his army
by suggesting that they should all return home. They took him too seriously and rushed for the ships, but the goddess Hera
dispatched Athene to stop the retreat. Odysseus summoned a council of war, at which, after beating the ugly demagogue Thersites
into silence, he induced the soldiers to fight. There follows a list marshalling the Greek and Trojan forces.


The Trojan prince Paris, who had brought about the war by abducting Helen from Sparta, challenged her husband Menelaus to
a duel on which the result of the war was to depend. The father of Paris, King Priam, came to the city walls, where Helen
pointed out to him the Greek chieftains. Though defeated by Menelaus, Paris was spirited from the battle-field by Aphrodite.
There was no pact because, while Hera was implacably opposed to Troy, her husband Zeus had promised satisfaction to Achilles:
so Athene, in disguise, tempted Troy’s Asian ally Pandarus to shoot an arrow at Menelaus. He was slightly wounded, and the
fighting broke out again.


In the battles that followed, the Greek hero Diomede performed glorious exploits, ‘like a winter torrent that comes tearing
down and flattens out the dykes’. The gods and goddesses entered the battle, and Diomede’s spear scratched Aphrodite’s wrist as she rescued from him Anchises’ son Aeneas. On the Trojan side, Hector was
supported by the war-god Ares himself, but even Ares received a wounding blow from Diomede. Returning to Troy to bid his mother
Hecabe sacrifice to Athene, Hector spoke with Helen and Paris and then with his wife Andromache, who had their little son
Astyanax with her.


Hector stepped out into no man’s land, and addressed the armies with a challenge. The gods, too, were present; for Athene
and Apollo were enjoying the scene, in the form of vultures perching upon a tall oak. Ajax responded to Hector’s offer of
a duel, which turned out slightly to the advantage of the Greek. But on the advice of the aged Nestor, the Greeks began to
fortify their camp. Zeus forbade the gods to intervene and heartened the Trojans.


Thus all night long they sat, across the corridors of battle, thinking great thoughts and keeping their many fires alight.
There are nights when the upper air is windless and the stars in heaven stand out in their full splendour round the bright
moon; when every mountain-top and headland and ravine starts into sight, as the infinite depths of the sky are torn open to
the very firmament; when every star is seen, and the shepherd rejoices. Such and so many were the Trojans’ fires, twinkling
in front of Troy midway between the ships and the streams of Xanthus. There were a thousand fires burning on the plain, and
round each one sat fifty men in the light of its blaze, while the horses stood beside their chariots, munching white barley
and rye, and waiting for Dawn to take her golden throne.’3

Agamemnon, discouraged, was now willing to make the fullest amends to Achilles, and dispatched Ajax, Odysseus and Phoenix
to his tent. They were to seek a reconciliation, so that the greatest of the Greeks could return to the battle. But Achilles
in tragic pride rejected their proposals. He would only come back, he said, if Hector actually threatened the ships of his
own men, the Myrmidons. Odysseus and Diomede raided the Trojan positions and killed the Thracian King Rhesus, capturing his
horses. But next day both these Greek leaders, and Agamemnon too, were wounded, and their army fell back to its fortified
camp.


There is an interlude while Nestor, returning to his hut with a casualty, Machaon, has a meal prepared for them by a maidservant,
captured from Tenedos. ‘She began by moving up to them a handsome polished table with enamelled legs. On this she put a bronze
dish with an onion to flavour the drink, some yellow honey, and sacred barley-meal, and beside these a magnificent beaker
adorned with golden studs, which the old man had brought from home. It had four handles. Each was supported by two legs; and
on top of each, facing one another, a pair of golden doves were feeding. Anyone else would have found it difficult to shift
the beaker from the table when it was full, but Nestor, old as he was, could lift it without trouble. In this cup their comely
attendant mixed them the pottage with Pramnian wine, and after making it ready by grating into it some goat’s milk cheese
with a bronze grater and sprinkling white barley on top, she invited them to drink.’4 And then Patroclus, sent by Achilles to ask who had been hurt, appeared in the doorway of the hut, ‘like a god’.


Now, however, desperate fighting broke out again, and the Trojans, led by Hector, stormed the Greek battlements. Yet Hera
planned to rescue the Greeks. Obtaining from Aphrodite (although they were on different sides) a charm which would make herself
irresistibly attractive, she enticed Zeus into her arms. He made love to her, and then fell asleep. Posidon, who had intervened
on the Greek side, drove back the Trojans, and Hector was stunned by a stone. But Zeus woke up, and ordered Posidon to leave
the battle, and Apollo to revive Hector. The Greeks were driven right back to the ships.


In this emergency, Patroclus persuaded Achilles to allow him to intervene. And so Patroclus fought Hector, and was killed;
and Hector transferred the immortal armour of Achilles from the dead man’s body to his own. As a violent battle raged round
the corpse, Achilles, maddened by revengeful grief, demanded new armour from his mother, and the god Hephaestus made it. Though
forewarned that he would not live long after Hector, Achilles was now determined to go into battle at once. After a formal
reconciliation, he received Briseis back from Agamemnon.


Led by Achilles, the Greek troops rushed from the ships. On either side the gods ranged themselves. With the Greeks were Hera,
Athene, Posidon, Hephaestus and Hermes. On the Trojan side stood Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Aphrodite and the river god
Xanthus who was also called Scamander. Before the terrifying advance of Achilles, the Trojans gave ground. Divine intervention
saved Aeneas and Hector, but many others met their end at his hands. As even god fought with god in this greatest of battles,
Achilles raged with his spear like a driving wind that whirls the flames this way and that, when a conflagration rages in
the gullies on a sun-baked mountainside, and the high forest is consumed. He chased his victims with the fury of a fiend,
and the earth was dark with blood. At their imperious master’s will the horses of Achilles with their massive hooves trampled
dead men and shields alike with no more ado than when a farmer has yoked a pair of broad-browed cattle to trample the white
barley on a threshing-floor, and his lowing bulls tread out the grain. The axle-tree under his chariot, and the rails that
ran round it, were sprayed with the blood thrown up by the horses’ hooves and by the tyres. And the son of Peleus pressed
on in search of glory, bespattering his unconquerable hands with gore.’5

When the resisting river was choked with corpses until its waters rose and nearly engulfed him, he moved towards the walls
of Troy itself. Outside the city gates, Hector was waiting alone for him. But as Achilles leapt forward, Hector’s courage
failed him and he ran before his enemy three times round the walls. Then, however, Athene tricked him into making his fatal
stand. As he fell, his throat pierced by Achilles’ lance, he called with his dying breath upon the knees and life and parents
of the slayer, begging that his own father and mother should be allowed to ransom his body. ‘You cur,’ replied Achilles,
‘don’t talk to me of knees or name my parents in your prayers. I only wish that I could summon up the appetite to carve and
eat you raw myself, for what you have done to me.’ And in full view of the walls, and of Andromache looking out from them,
he dragged Hector’s corpse back to the camp behind his chariot.


Visited at night by the ghost of Patroclus demanding burial, Achilles arranged for him a splendid funeral, sacrificing twelve
captured Trojans on the pyre; and the funeral was followed by athletic sports. But Hector was still unburied. For eleven days
his body, kept whole by Apollo, was dragged each day round the tomb of Patroclus by his killer. But compassion now came upon
the gods, and Zeus intervened. Instructing Thetis to bid her son accept ransom for the corpse, he ordered Priam, through his
divine messenger Iris, to take the ransom by night to the camp of the Greeks. Led by Hermes, Priam passed through the Greek
lines. With his own aged father Peleus in mind, Achilles received the old king with courtesy and granted his plea for the
body of Hector, calling upon the ghost of Patroclus not to resent the restoration of his enemy’s corpse.


Priam slept in the forecourt and left before dawn. There was a truce of eleven days for Hector’s funeral. Then the battle
began again.


More than five thousand years ago, Greece was inhabited by people who ground and polished their stone tools, made painted
pottery, and scraped a living in villages near the scarce arable land where there was a river or a spring. About 3000 BC their dwellings were destroyed by invaders, possibly from Asia Minor. These were people, probably of non-Indo-European tongue,
whose bronze tools made their lives rather easier; though civilization was much further advanced in more fertile countries
such as Egypt, Sumeria and Crete. That island, with its good soil and climate, produced ship’s timber and a surplus of wine
and oil. Its non-Greek inhabitants (again perhaps from Asia Minor) united in about 2000 BC into a single kingdom, based on
sea-power, with its capital at Cnossus. These prosperous Cretans developed an imaginative, lively civilization and a flowing,
curving, naturalistic art very different from the hieratic style of their teachers the Egyptians.


Meanwhile on the Greek mainland, people speaking a language somewhat resembling Greek, and perhaps originating from the South
Russian steppes, began to arrive during the first centuries of the second millennium BC. Intermingling with other racial strains, they developed a culture partly indebted to Crete—and revealing common ground with the Hittites of inland Asia Minor (page 34)— but partly novel. This reached its climax in the royal fortresses
of southern Greece, such as Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos. The monarchs of those places, whose luxury caused a sensation when
the German archaeologist Schliemann disclosed the royal Mycenaean graves in 1876, possessed powerful new armaments—bronze
rapiers, shields and chariots. By 1500 BC the Mycenaeans were influencing Cretan civilization in their turn, and ruled the whole island for about fifty years. Thousands
of clay writing tablets found at Cnossus, dating apparently (though this is contested) from c. 1400 BC—and others of c. 1200, still strangely similar, at the mainland centres—are written in a script known as ‘Linear B’, which has been shown
to be an early form of the Greek language.


Mycenaean Cnossus seems to have fallen in c. 1400, but during the next two hundred years the cities of the mainland, and especially Mycenae, were at their height as powerful
land empires and Mediterranean trading centres. The thirteenth century was a time of great upheavals throughout the near east;
Mycenaean exports to Egypt and the Levant ceased abruptly, and in about 1250 BC, as archaeology confirms, invaders (of whom there were many at this time, in Asia Minor and in Egypt) besieged and burnt the
key-city of Troy near the Hellespont (Dardanelles). Then in the twelfth century not only did great hordes of invaders again
inflict terrible destruction upon Syria and Egypt but the holocaust, of whatever origin (page 35), spread to Greece itself.
For excavation shows that the palaces of Pylos, Mycenae and Tiryns came to grief in their turn.


Almost all the principal Greek myths are connected with centres of this Mycenaean civilization, which provided many a subject
and hero. However mythical their exploits, the names of the Iliad’s great warriors are likely enough to be the real names of men who lived in Mycenaean Greece—and fought the Trojans; another
‘Hector’ appears on a Linear B tablet. Moreover, the catalogue of contingents in the Iliad seems to go back to an historically true Order of Battle of that period. There may well be some historical truth (though
coloured by his own time, page 39) in the picture the poet gives of the Greek besiegers as a loose confederacy, under their
overlord Agamemnon, of proud, recalcitrant, meat-fed chiefs, jealous of their reputations. Possibly, too, the invading army
already believed in the Olympian gods as a similar loose confederacy under Zeus—who may conceivably appear with his scales
of destiny upon a Mycenaean amphora. At any rate, Homer’s knowledge of Mycenaean objects came from a poetic tradition going
back to those days. The huge shield of Ajax like a tower, Hector’s bronze helmet, the cup of Nestor, the silver-studded swords,
and the only reference to writing, 6 are traceable to the Mycenaean age.


One of its last and culminating efforts must have been the siege of the horse-rearing, textile-fabricating city of Troy, in
its strategic position on the Hellespont, That city, where there had been at least six earlier successive settlements, was
already at this epoch, as archaeologists have shown, somewhat beyond its prime (‘Troy VIIa’); Homer’s tales of its grandeur
rather fit the immediately preceding fourteenth century BC (‘Troy VI’), in which there had been a great rise in the importance
of the town. Excavators have also proved that ‘Troy VIIa’ fell to a violent fire, probably by human agency. There was nothing
new about sieges in the ancient world, nor were they new to near eastern story-tellers. From the Hittites, for example, who
had ruled until the thirteenth century on the Anatolian plateau and display resemblances to the peoples across the Aegean
(page 93), we have a tolerably preserved account of the siege of Urshu (somewhere in northern Syria) by their army; while
the epics of Ugarit, in the same area, tell of a siege of Udum (page 50).


‘And so,’ says the geographer Strabo (himself from Asia Minor) in the days of Augustus, ‘Homer took the Trojan War, an historical
fact, and decked it out with his fanciful stories.’7 According to one convenient definition of terms, this makes hi