Books: In Search of the Trojan War

According to the Greeks, Troy stood on the Dardanelles, that romantic strait of water that along with the Bosprous connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. When I was a boy Troy and the Trojan War seemed very real to me, I never had a doubt. Homer said it and I believed it. I was easily caught up into the drama of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. It wasn’t until when I entered college that a skeptical professor of dubious credentials told me that the myth of the Trojan War was probably a bunch of rubbish, despite the discoveries of Schliemann. Professor Block, as in Block Head, went by the tenet of presuming that anything written in Homer was a fake until proven otherwise by archeology. Again I sited Schliemann. Block was not impressed. “Mere oral tradition coupled with Schliemann’s exaggerations” he said. I was disappointed. There must be at least a kernel of truth in the legend I thought. It seemed to me that the historical paradigm of the day was: if it wasn’t proven by archeology if wasn’t true. Then Michael Wood entered my life__well not exactly, but in 1998 he published the book, In Search of the Trojan War, which was a companion book to a PBS special. Wood audaciously seemed to be presuming that the legend was true until it could be disproved by archeology. At least to me that’s what he was saying. Looking at the book more soberly recently, however, what Wood was saying was that the story of the Trojan War had not been disproved by archaeology, a slight difference. Either way the book is a superb marshaling together of the archaeological and poetical evidence of Troy for those who want to believe in every detail of Homer’s grand account. Although not an archaeologist, Wood has the unique ability to pull a compelling story from the mass of archaeological, literary and mythological sources. He gives a well-rounded portrait of both the historical and the legendary city and then goes on to discuss Schliemann’s discovery at Hisarlik, the Homeric epics themselves, the Hittite empire and the importance of the legend in Western culture. Did the Trojan War actually happen? Disappointingly, Wood gives no definite answer, but he does provide a lot of hope for us believers.