In honor of Kit Marlowe and National Geographic, here is the real Troy.
Things never were the way they were.
I wonder how much of that ancient story is true and how much was made up after the fact. I doubt that Helen was the cause of the strife and I'm not impressed with the way in which those ancient storytellers used a woman as a source of aggression. (The same theme was played out in several movies from Weimar Germany)
The ancient Greeks have been accorded a special place--too special--in the order of Western architecture. Their influence has been invented to a large extent by the Romans who admired them and then later by the Renaissance artists.
Marlowe and Shakespeare were prone to exaggeration, and while there is Homeric reference and archaeological evidence for a great tower along a portion of the walls of the ancient city, it certainly wasn't topless. But the Ilium of Dr. Faustus is no less real to us and I like to think that was on the minds of the people who planned and built the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
We like to think of Ancient Greece as "The Golden Age," but they had their own Golden Age (and so on, ad infinitum, I suppose.) The Greek culture that produced Homer and The Iliad and Odyssey were living surrounded by the ruins of the Minoan and Mycenean cultures that had collapsed a few hundred years before them, leaving impressive piles of stone. Seeking to explain the ruins in a way they could understand the Greeks created stories of a culture done to death by 1. the gods and 2. its own inexorable fate, couched in epic, heroic terms. And don't we all try to explain history through a lens we can understand?
ReplyDeleteThere is Minoan and Mycenean masonry in Greece known as "cyclopean walls," because the stones were so big, the Greeks thought the Cyclops (the one-eyed giant monsters) must have built them. They had lost the technology of creating such structures.
On a related literature/Giant monster note, there is a similar reference in Old English poetry to "enta geweorc," "the work of giants." The Angles and the Saxons reached Briton and found the old Roman stoneworks and thought they must have been built by giants.
What will the future alien archeologists think of our structures, our Three Gorges Dam?