The Trojan War in Homer and History - Recorded Books

Lecture 5:
Greek Literary Evidence for the Trojan War
and Its Sequence of Events
The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Michael Wood’s In Search of
the Trojan War.
The Greek literary sources for the Trojan War are, first and foremost, the
Iliad and the Odyssey, both usually attributed to the eighth-century BCE poet
Homer. There is also the Epic Cycle, containing fragments of other lost epics
dating to the same time or later, as well as treatments of the story by famous
playwrights of Classical Greece (fifth century BCE) and more modern times.
Of all these, the most helpful to us today are the Iliad and the fragmentary
pieces in the Epic Cycle.
But we must be careful and continually question the accuracy of Homer’s
account. Does his story reflect the real world of the Late Bronze Age or his
own period, living as he does some five centuries after the events he
describes? We shall see in a future lecture that these are valid questions, but
that they do not always have satisfactory answers.
One of the most immediate questions concerns Homer himself—did he
exist? The answer is a guarded “yes” . . . guarded because seven different
places in antiquity claimed that they were his birthplace—the island of Chios
off the coast of Turkey seems most likely—and because we are not certain
whether there was one Homer or many. One theory holds that “Homer” was
not a person, but rather a profession—that is, a “homer” was a traveling bard,
one of the many people literally willing to sing for their supper, as after-dinner
entertainers telling the stories of derring-do by heroes of long ago. Although
this is an intriguing idea, it seems more likely that Homer was indeed a person
rather than a profession, although it is by no means clear whether he
actually wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey—some computer analyses indicate
that the two books were written by two different people.
What most people don’t generally realize is that we have other Greek
sources, in addition to Homer, that talk about the Trojan War. We are especially
concerned with the information to be gleaned from the so-called Epic
Cycle, which consists of fragments from epics now long lost but which originally
included the Cypria, the Little Iliad, the Sack of Ilium, and the Returns.
Since the Iliad only deals with the last one hundred days of the final year of
the war, and ends before the final destruction of Troy, and the Odyssey is
only concerned with the travels and travails of Odysseus as he makes his
way home after the war, we are dependent upon these other lost epics for
more details that flesh out the story of the Trojan War, including the entire
episode and description of the Trojan Horse.
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