Historicity of The Iliad - Status of The Iliad

Status of The Iliad

The modern dispute over the historicity of the Iliad has been very heated at times. Modern discourse has turned from questions of the historicity of the particular human events that transpire in the Iliad; Moses I. Finley, in The World of Odysseus (1954), which sets out a coherent picture of the society reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey, deflects the question as "beside the point that the narrative is a collection of fictions from beginning to end" Finley, for whom the Trojan War is "a timeless event floating in a timeless world", breaks down the question of historicity, aside from invented narrative details, into five essential elements: 1. Troy was destroyed by a war; 2. the destroyers were a coalition from mainland Greece; 3. the leader of the coalition was a king named Agamemnon; 4. Agamemnon's overlordship was recognized by the other chieftains; 5. Troy, too, headed a coalition of allies. Finley finds no evidence for any of these points.

The more we know about Bronze Age history, the clearer it becomes that it is not a yes-or-no question but one of educated assessment of how much historical knowledge is present in Homer, and whether it reflects a retrospective memory of Dark Age Greece, as Finley concludes, or of Mycenaean Greece, which is the dominant view of A Companion to Homer, A.J.B. Wace and F.H. Stebbings, eds. (New York/London: Macmillan 1962). The particular narrative of the Iliad is not an account of the war, but a tale of the psychology, the wrath, vengeance and death of individual heroes, which assumes common knowledge of the Trojan War to create a backdrop. No scholars now assume that the individual events in the tale (many of which centrally involve divine intervention) are historical fact; on the other hand, no scholars claim that the scenery is entirely devoid of memories of Mycenaean times: it is rather a subjective question of whether the factual content is rather more or rather less than one would have expected.

The extent of a demonstrable historicity for Homer's Troy faces hurdles that are analogous to the historical basis for King Arthur. With Plato's Atlantis the less comparable case is the extent to which myth has been manipulated or created, to illustrate philosophical generalizations. In all cases, an ancient body of culturally agreed-upon "facts" embodied in a crystallizing "classic" narrative version, is now seen by some to be true, by others to be mythology or fiction. It may be possible to establish connections between either story and real places and events, but these always risk being subject to selection bias.