Why I Write...

The long and the short of it – but mostly long…

Welcome to my Classical Meanderings.¹ If you are doing me the honor of spending a few moments (or any finite amount of time) that you will never recover (absent a revolution of physics I do not anticipate), I thought it might be worthwhile to explain what I am about here.

Allow me to say upfront, I am not a trained classicist. My educational and professional background is in physics and engineering. After working for the US Navy as a missile systems engineer, I became a member of the intelligence community and spent the rest of my career there. One of the last generation of Cold Warriors, I worked on topics as diverse as satellites, IR semiconductors, telecommunications and C4ISR, with a particular focus on threat assessment and projection, and I did some groundbreaking work in IW/IO before it was cool.

Since retiring, I have worked as a photographer, written a series of sci/fi novels with a coauthor who is more gifted than I could ever hope to be and, for the last few years, indulged my lifelong passion for history. Historical analysis brings together many things near and dear to my heart, and I have taken the liberty of posting them here.

The topics I am currently most interested in are the Trojan War in general, and the Iliad in particular. At first blush, there would seem to be few things more futile that a non-classicist writing on these topics: the Iliad and the Trojan War are the subject of a vast literature stretching back to the likes of Herodotus, Thucydides and Aristotle. The sea of words written would swamp all but the most doughty scholar and what an amateur like myself might add could not amount to any more than a meager drop in the comprehensive ocean of all this assiduous analysis.

What therefore is the point, one might ask? That is an excellent question, which I leave to you, esteemed visitor. For myself, it has always come down to one question:

What is it about the Trojan War that has so captivated us for over three millennia?

Conclusions about it have varied all over the lot ever since the poet we (usually) call Homer (see note below) composed his epic back in the 8th century BC and launched Western literature. It has been believed to be everything from a cataclysm that caused the Bronze Age collapse to a minor fracas that was expanded into an everlasting legend by a poetic genius. The war itself has been considered an actual historical event by some and dismissed as mere fiction by others, answering the “naïve” question: “Did the Trojan War really happen?” with a pithy: “In a word, no.”

After roughly 2,500 years of dedicated scholarly effort, all that can be safely said is that everyone who has labored in the field of Homeric studies has an opinion, and the only thing lacking is consensus. The analyst in me observes this history and is forced to wonder why this story commands our attention so relentlessly while being so maddeningly elusive. Is there a story behind the story we know so well (and debate so exuberantly) that might account for this?

I think there may be and that is why I began my research: to explore the possibility of a story behind our most foundational story. Of course, I cannot prove there is and I certainly don’t claim that “everything we know is wrong.” Nothing could be further from the truth. All I hope to do is raise questions and present my guesses as to why there might be such a story, which became obscured when Homer took legends he knew and made one of his own.

I have another reason for posting my “meanderings”: for decades now, Homeric studies have been (as it seems to me) shrinking to an ever smaller group of academics, further and further removed from the reach of non-specialists. Woe betide the person who tries to access this domain without a working knowledge of ancient Greek (and Homeric Greek, which is its own thing) to say nothing of German, French and Latin. Books, articles and papers abound with untranslated passages and a ponderous overburden of footnotes (an affliction I have caught in full). Debates rage over what is a Homeric simile and what isn’t; existing texts are anatomized down to their syllables; a single word (such as mênis) inspires a monograph and a poem of which less than a dozen lines survive yields a book. Scholars remonstrate, over a gap of 2000+ years, with Aristotle and the librarians of Alexandria who – if their shades could speak – would no doubt weigh in with vigor. Both the esoteric particularity and the vaulting erudition of all this discourse boggles the mind.

And that’s just literature. In the realm of archaeology and history, we find an ancient king’s instructions on how to mix iced drinks for his summer guests (get all the twigs and dirt out first) and the question of why a Great King rejected a pair of expensive Minoan shoes. We peer over the (notional) shoulder of a merchant from Ugarit poring over his accounts in a script that may have led to what I’m writing in now. We wince and clench our teeth in pain for a princess who was probably consigned to a horrid death to avert a war. We wonder who first got the brilliant idea to write poems down, and who thought it was a good idea to engrave a saucy strophe about Aphrodite on a cup buried with a 10-year-old boy (seriously?).

We find richly adorned a woman buried like an Amazon, with sacrificed horses and a short sword in her possession, on a Greek island where the Iliad may have gestated, far removed from the central Asian steppes where similarly honored women warriors make up 30-40% of the burials so far unearthed. And then there’s the Etruscan warrior “prince” entombed with a cremated “consort” at his feet—except DNA testing reveals “he” is a princess and the consort is a man. (Oops! Didn’t see that coming, did’ya?)

And why did those patriarchal Greeks bury their daughters with articulated dolls of Amazon queens in armor with weapons at hand? Does this bear on the centuries old misreading of the Iliad’s passage about Amazons (our first literary reference to them)?

Why do the people of the Caucasus preserve their own versions of ancient Greek myths, orally transmitted to this day? Why are there hints of a Bronze Age Camelot? A Bronze Age Romeo and Juliet? Why were young elite Minoan girls specially selected to pluck saffron threads, sacred to the frisky Dawn goddess?

We even wonder at the discovery of a “Homeric” cheese grater and scour the Iliad to divine what it might have been used for. (There may be traces of goat cheese on it – putting grated goat cheese in your afternoon tipple as Old King Nestor may have done? Is that a thing?)

All this and more comes at the student of Homeric literature from all sides. It’s bewildering. But when we dig out from all of this – as fascinating as it as, and it’s really fascinating! – we come face to face with a greater truth:

Homer was not—and was never meant to be—the property of just scholars. For nearly 1000 years, he was the most popular poet of two civilizations: Greek and Roman. No educated person was not conversant with the Iliad, (it was essentially a prerequisite for being educated) and even those who had no smattering of learning—who flocked to festivals to hear their favorite parts performed—considered Homer their own. Perhaps nowhere else in history has a poet—not a prophet or seminal religious figure—commanded the devoted attention of so many for so long.

This towering epic genius was never meant to be confined to the rarefied realm of academia—he belongs to everyone. We should shudder to lose sight of the one who played such a great role in making us who we are. In recent years, there has been an uptick in the popularity of Classical myth retellings; a hopeful sign. The story of the Trojan War, of course, has featured in this revival (if I may call it that) although there may be a sense that it has been “done to death,” as it were. Certainly, anyone who embarks on such an undertaking faces very stiff competition.

But what if there is a story behind the story? And what if it is a true story, not merely a myth or legend? And what if it is every bit as grand, every bit as romantic, every bit as epic as the story we know—or even more so?

Would you be interested? If so and you’re curious what I’ve come up with, read on and decide for yourself. The best I can hope to do is inspire a useful notion in someone who knows more than I do. (I cannot claim to have reached the point where I can stand on the shoulders of giants; crouch in their shadows is more like it.) Perhaps I shall do no more than barely scratch at this well-plowed ground with all the futility some Homeric scholars warn against. Time will tell.

Therefore, in the spirit of “nothing ventured, nothing gained” and “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” or maybe even “a day late and a dollar short,” I herein present my thoughts. I beg the indulgence of those more learned than myself (and those are many) for any unforced errors, inconsistencies, oversimplifications, missing words and other typos I have committed.

With utmost gratitude for sharing some of your most precious resource with me—there is no greater gift.

PS: If anyone is wondering why I chose that particular image for this introductory post, the guy with the pen and the bad haircut represents me; the onlookers are my imagined audience, chortling and guffawing as they exclaim: “Dude! What is this s— you’re scribbling!?”

For those who may not be familiar, the painting is “The Reply of the Zaporizhian Cossacks” by Ilya Jefimowitsch Repin, illustrating one of the great (if perhaps apocryphal) moments in Russian literature.

NB: The personage we call “Homer” has proved harder to get a grip on than the epic he gifted us with. All we can say is Homer was certainly Greek, very likely Ionian, probably male, probably not blind, and almost certainly not named Homer. The preeminent Homeric scholar Martin West rejected Homer as the name of the poet who composed the Iliad (he refers to this person as ‘P’), while his distinguished colleague, Gregory Nagy, argues Homer was a fiction created to explain the poems’ origin. Or as another Homeric scholar put it, “Homer didn’t make the poems, the poems made Homer.”

I shall offer my thoughts on this debate elsewhere (spoiler alert: I’m Team West), and use this space to make two points (although some will find them controversial):

1) The Iliad and the Odyssey were not composed by the same person, nor in the same period or the same place. The Iliad originated in the west coast of Anatolia in the latter half of the 8th century BC. The Odyssey was composed in mainland Greece around a century later. That the same name has been applied to both epics is a historical accident which has caused a deal of confusion down to the present day.

2) Using the name Homer therefore risks furthering this confusion, but I balk at calling this person ‘P’ and constantly referring to the composers of these two epics as the “Iliad poet” and “Odyssey poet” (whom West dubbed ‘Q’) feels unnecessarily clunky. Therefore, out of respect for tradition and because most people will be more familiar with it, I shall risk the confusion and use Homer to designate the composer of the Iliad, and “Odyssey poet” for the composer of that epic, when he comes up. I’ll also repeat this notice where needed for those who have not seen it here, and beg your pardon for the repetition and any confusion I engender.

1. As most visitors will likely be aware, “meander” derives from the Büyük Menderes River in the southwest of modern Turkey, known to the ancient Greeks as the Meander (Μαίανδρος; Maíandros) in what was historically Anatolia (later Asia Minor). Its source lies in west central Turkey from which it wends its winding way westward before emptying into the Aegean near the ancient city of Miletus (Greek: Μῑ́λητος; Hittite: Millawanda or Milawata). Miletus is a storied place; it was established as a Minoan colony around 1600 BC and the Greeks were settled there by about 1450 BC. Much of the history I will herein relate concerns Miletus in one way or another, so its association with the Meander makes the name doubly meaningful: first in the historical context, and second in my peripatetic manner of pursuing my projects. So consider this fair warning that I do not promise that the path between any two points will be a straight line (anything but), but there will be useless alliteration at times, and also occasional bad puns.

Proceed with all due caution, and again, many thanks for your time.