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Review by Thomas R. Martin
For nearly three thousand years, the story of the Trojan War has been synonymous with Homer's Iliad and the Greek myths that complete the narrative before and after Homer's tales of heroic combat on the plains of Troy. As Homer tells it, even though mass fighting did take place, the war centered on duels between warriors of almost superhuman strength battling before the eyes of the besieged Trojans gazing down from atop their city's massive walls. Scholars have long recognized that this depiction of the Trojan War reflects Homer's unmatched flair for drama rather than a realistic account of Bronze-Age warfare. Archaeological excavation, topographical and geological analysis, comparative evidence about warfare in the Near East, and closer scrutiny of Homer's text for information on military history have all contributed to a new understanding of what happened at Troy and a new debate over its historical significance.
Beyond the Iliad
Barry Strauss, one of the most imaginative scholars writing today on ancient military history, has now produced a new history of the Trojan War that presents the latest evidence from the perspective of a researcher who has walked the terrain of Troy and analyzed the vast amount of recent scholarship on the topic. To top it all off, he presents the results of his investigation in an especially engaging fashion, enlivening his authoritative narrative with compelling passages recreating the war as vividly as a first-rate historical novel.
Terror and trickery
As he says, we now know that the Trojan War consisted not of spectacular matches between champions but “mainly of low-intensity conflict and attacks on civilians; it was more like the war on terror than World War II. There was no siege of Troy. The Greeks were underdogs, and only a trick allowed them to take Troy: that trick may well have been the Trojan Horse.” This last remark underlines the value of Strauss’s open-minded approach. It might appear at first glance that a scholar would discount the story of the Trojan Horse as a tall tale invented by ancient poets who cared more about enthralling their audiences than sticking to the truth. But, as Strauss lucidly explains, there are many reasons for believing that just the sort of deception implied by this famous trick was the only way for the Greeks to take Troy and that a statue of a horse was, for cultural reasons, the perfect choice for the stratagem.
Whether a nugget of truth about the Trojan War lies hidden in Homer or the arcane articles of modern scholars, Strauss unearths it and puts it together with myriad other details to give us a wonderfully readable picture of the most famous war of Greek antiquity. As he shows, despite what some scholars maintain, the Trojan War is indeed a conflict that matters, both for what it reveals about what was at stake as the relative prosperity of the Greek Bronze Age dissipated in violence, and for what it implies about the precariousness of the success of any society whose wealth provokes strong envy among its international rivals. 352 pages •
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