333. Bronze Age Apocalypse: The Fall of Troy (Ep 2)

0:00If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening, sign up to Empire Club to Empire Club to Empire Club to Empire. empirepoduk.com. We seem to be in the middle of a Homeric revival. The Odyssey is about to hit our screens and Stephen Fry's wonderful retelling of the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey is at the top of the bestseller list. We have him here with us. We are recording in Jaipur and he's going to tell us how much of the story in the Iliad and the Odyssey has a basis in reality.

0:51We know Troy and Mycenae from Homer and the ripple of novels and TV series and movies which have come from his work. But what was the actual history? What was the archaeology behind those stories? What happened in the Bronze Age collapse that led to Troy and Mycenae turning into empty ruins, just goat herds and olive trees. Today, we have none other than Stephen Fry, author of four spectacular books on the Greek myths and the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as all his other wonderful work in comedy and movies. And he'll be joining us to tell us what actually happened to inspire the works of Homer.

1:34Sing, goddess of the rage of Achilles. We are back. We're doing our Empire pod series on the Bronze Age collapse. I'm William Dalrymple. And I'm Anita Arnott. And we are absolutely thrilled. I'm going to tell you, we've got a secret weapon on this podcast today. But you know, this is part of our Bronze Age series. And we've already talked about this collapse that occurs. And it is the strangest thing. It feels like literally overnight, people forget how to read and how to write. But one thing that they don't forget is their stories. And to talk about the most famous of those stories. Stephen Fry, our secret weapon, is here live from Troy, reporting.

2:15From the ramparts. Thank you so much for being with us. I can't tell you what an honour it is to be summoned to the imperial court of Empress Anita and Emperor William. And it is a fascinating period that we're exploring, and it's a privilege to be talking about it. I'm not an archaeologist. I'm not a philologist. I'm not a scholar. I'm an enthusiastic amateur. So if I make errors of judgment or chronology, I hope I'll be forgiven. But then Homer makes the same mistakes, perhaps. Well, we'll see. It is one of my favourite subjects, the story of the Greeks and the siege of Troy and Odysseus' return home, of course.

2:51I say Greeks, Homer called them the Achaeans, the Danaeans, the Argives. The word Greeks is a much later one, but it refers really to the Mycenaeans, a warrior aristocracy, essentially, obsessed with honour and reputation that would give them an eternal glory, a kleos, as they called it. It's the kleos that's in the name of so many Greeks, you know, Cleopatra and all the Socrates, you know, all the Heracles, who's Hercules, you know, Hera's glory. He was actually named Heracles because she hated him because he was a love child of Zeus and she never liked Zeus' love child, her husband, her errant husband.

3:32And so as an attempt to placate her, Tiresias, because he was born in Thebes, suggested that he change his name, as a baby this was, to Heracles, the glory of Hera. But it didn't help much. It didn't help at all. Athena even put her on Hera's breast when Hera was asleep because it would bond them if he suckled her milk. But she woke and saw it and tossed him away and her breast milk spread across the sky to form the Milky Way. I didn't know that story. Because galaxy, of course, is from the Greek for milk. Galactic, as in lactic. Right. So the chocolate makers are right. Anyway, this is completely separate.

4:07Keep going. Don't stop. The Cleese in names, apart from John Cleese, or maybe he would claim it's the same, is that sense of glory. So a mortal can almost become immortal in memory by achieving this honour. And interestingly, that honour is not just their fighting, but it also means they have to be buried and burned. And that's why it's so important for Hector's body, for example, to be collected by his family, because just to be left on the bare earth would deny you that glory. And they wore these extraordinary boar's tusk helmets. They were beautifully carved into plates like sort of thin dominoes that layered.

4:43And the tower shield that is described that Ajax had, the sacos, which is almost a man's height, a huge thing with a great shoulder strap and that homer writes about accurately but in his day which was 400 years later these things had completely disappeared it's like us describing henry's eighth court or something like that yes that's right so so the great question which we will explore is how homer could have known about so much detail of the bronze age when his age sometimes called the archaic Greek age or the, of course, wider sense, the Iron Age as opposed to the Bronze Age. And by now they were using iron weapons.

5:23And so their memory, as it were, a race memory, obviously hundreds of years ago, is fascinating. It can only have been passed down by poetry and conversation and stories. And the word from someone you love, you know, somebody you trust. And a certain amount of archaeology. I mean, you know, the palaces were there, the great palaces of Tyrians and Mycenae and Thebes and so on, and Pylos were there. And they have frescoes, which we can see today, which show the boar's tusk helmet and show some of the elements. So they would have seen them. But they would have been mysterious ruins. Exactly. And the world they were living in was less grand.

6:03They were in huts at the bottom of the hill. Who were these people who could build such palaces? Could move such stones. Exactly. They must be heroes. Yeah. I mean, we had Jo Quinn, who I know you know and have spoken with, in fact. And she painted this really sort of complicated, dissonant kind of thought in your head that you've got these interconnected, sophisticated civilisations, which they interweave like lace. And yet they are so fragile. Egypt, the Hittites, as well as the Greeks. So it's across the Mediterranean, all trading with each other, intermarrying, sharing gods occasionally. Yes.

6:44And then bang. It's remarkable, isn't it? That all this intercourse between these cultures and these cultures that were thriving all seem to collapse at the same time. And Homer is writing 400 years later, looking at the ruins, wondering what the hell went on in there. You have to imagine, for example, I think in the 14th century, Chaucer writing an epic poem about the collapse of Roman Britain. but without even the writing that there was in the dark ages of northern Europe, he just using folk memory. It's an incredible idea, isn't it? Can you imagine him doing that? It's a brilliant poet like Pomer, but how could he have done that?

7:22The only way is if there had been an active sense of this folk memory alive. And as I say, 400, 500 years, just think of our own history there. So how much history is actually buried in this poetry? Well, I mean, as I say, there are the mentions of the technology of the time, the weaponry, which is clear. They didn't have any writing as such in the time of Agamemnon other than Linear B, which was a bureaucratic language. And it's noticeable that Homer never uses writing or anything of the kind. The alphabet was just beginning when Homer was around. So he may or may not, if you imagine there was a person called Homer, may or may not have been literate or known about the writing.

8:13But so there is not a single moment in all of Homer where anybody gives a message that's written down. And so he's aware of that, I think. We are making this recording in Jaipur, in Rajasthan. And in the villages outside this town, there are still oral poets who know epics by heart. There's two local ones that are entirely local to the area of Jaipur and Jaipur, which is the story of Papuji, who's a hero who rescues cattle, and Gugaji, who's a snake king who gets up to all sorts of amazing stories. and I've interviewed the homers who recite these and they are father to son, father to son. They perform with their wives and the children are fed milk, which is a luxury in the villages of India, to improve their memory.

9:10So they're really sort of privileged and treated as kind of holy as it were. But it is a living thing here. Yeah, I mean, I know tracts of Sanskrit which pertain to some of the oldest scripts. I don't know what they mean exactly, but I know them from memory. You were taught them as a girl. Yeah, 100%. It's the one thing that you just said right now, I just want to unpack it because you said if you assume that Homer really was one man. Now, can we just examine that for a second? Yes. What else are we to assume if not one man called Homer? For many years, it was assumed that there was a man called Homer and he was regarded possibly as Ionian, which we would now call Anatolian.

9:48So actually from the same landmass as Troy, not from the Greek mainland or the Peloponnese or one of the islands. Which was a Greek colony. Yes, it was a Greek colony and was inhabited by Greeks. And not to be confused with the Ionian Sea, which is right the other side. It's all very confusing as a lot of Greek things are. He was reckoned to be blind. And there were mentions of blind Homer and this great man. And then an American called Milman Parry did a sort of tour of what was then Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia. And he found this living tradition of bards, I suppose we'd call them poets like the ones you've mentioned here in India, who recited long poems from memory and also improvised and added new parts to them.

10:37and he recorded them and noticed that there were extraordinary similarities to the way the poetry of Homer works. The epithets, the famous were the wine dark sea and the rosy-fingered dawn. Yes, really like the rhododactyl. Yeah, exactly. And the names having it always, you know, Agamemnon, Anax Andrum, king of men, and Nestor, tamer of horses and swift-footed Achilles. So on all these little memory landmarks that the poet needs to sort of leap from one to another and the genealogies, which is extremely important. I had the privilege of traveling in the Golden Triangle and the sort of border of Myanmar and Thailand where the Aki people live.

11:29And we filmed there. I was doing a documentary about language and there was a man there who learned the genealogies of all of his people in his clan. And so when a boy came of age, this man would recite to him his genealogy and the boy had to learn it over weeks and weeks and weeks. And it was a list of names, begats essentially, because the Hebrew Bible does the same thing. And very possibly Isaiah and the others also were oral to begin with and uttered their prophecies in exactly that way. So-and-so begat so-and-so, little memory cues. and these Aki people, I mean, they go all the way back to their original Adam and Eve.

12:05So it can take a day to recite their genealogies. So these are memory systems for a people to cohere their culture, to feel who they are, their identity, as well as their stories. And this existed in Yugoslavia and as you say, it exists in India. In India, in this area, it's actually a healing thing. And the BOPAs are brought in if someone is ill or even if the cattle are ill in the case for the Papaji epic. And so if you suddenly have a sort of flu, your cows go down with something and they're not producing milk. You bring the boporan and he'll sing for 72 hours or you can pay him to do the whole thing over five days.

12:43Wonderful. And at the end, the lamp is extinguished. And at that point, the healing takes place. It's meant to be. We also have the baguette here. I mean, if you've ever been to the gats. You certainly do have a fair amount of baguette with one billion people. Yeah, a lot of baguette went on. But, you know, you have the... Not the ghat that you chew. No, no. The ghat, which is just near the ganjus. So they sort of built up platforms. Oh, yes, of course. I know what you mean. Yes. And if somebody dies, and it happened when my father died, you go to the pundit who has represented your clan for thousands of years.

13:16And you will sit before him. And he has before him this book of vellum with all of the names, begat who, begat who, begat who. And they're all men. And I think I'm one of the first women to insist on my name being written. It may not surprise you at all. No. A little bit of a row on the gad. But yes, I mean, and they can recite quite far back, but not as far back as your academic. No, and it's interesting, isn't it, that even in the modern Western tradition, my father's family, which was the non-Jewish side of my family, they kept the family, the Fry family tree, in the family Bible. Right. You opened it, and there it was.

13:48And that's quite common. I think a lot of families do that. There is this sense that your genealogy is somehow connected to your identity and even to your religion. But circling back to where we said, I love this. You so fit into this podcast. We love dog love on this podcast. Rabbit hole jumping up. But you so shaking your head into despair. What I should say, previously on this podcast, I was asking. So the evidence then, because of those linguistic patterns, because of the conventions, there may not have been just one blind man writing it down. It could have been different rhapsodes, as they were called.

14:20Demodocus in the Odyssey is the bard who starts to recite about the Trojan War when Odysseus, as an anonymous guest, interrupts him and says, whoa, wait, I was there. I know what I'm talking. And he starts then to take over. And you learn everything that happened to Odysseus in flashback from that moment. But the character of Demodocus, people have always said, that's a little self-portrait from Homer. Because there he is, this bard who's revered and whose job is to remind people of who they are and to be the keeper of the record of a people and their history. So these stories that had moved across time over the three or four, five centuries from the collapse of the Bronze Age had presumably been kept alive by a mixture of these bards, Ayoidoi they're called, or rhapsodes.

15:11And nonetheless, when we get to Homer and what Homer left us, there is something different. This moves from the kind of psychologically flat, repetitive poems, if you call them that, of the Yugoslavian tradition. I can't speak for the Indian, obviously. And it becomes something quite different. The psychology, the ambiguity of character, the point of view about war that comes through the Iliad. Homer is not, you know, he's not glorifying the Greek tradition and dissing the Trojan. It's very noticeable that Anyone who reads the Iliad ends up feeling far more sorry for and in line with Priam and Hector than with the tantrums of Achilles.

15:54He was a little boy. Yeah, exactly. And Agamemnon is a failed leader. He constantly makes mistakes. He's always wrong, in fact. And everyone sort of ignores him. He has that sort of miserable leader problem. I'm as strong as Ajax, but everyone thinks he's the hero. He's whiny and awful, but we'll come to him in a minute. He's simply whiny and awful. Can we head with Agamemnon to the real Troy and locate it on the map? Where is it and what's the story of its rediscovery? As with another great American who's about to arrive, as with Milman Parry, who was the one who gave us this new view of Homer as possibly a series of rhapsodes.

16:35There was another American called Heinrich Schliemann, a German name, but he made his fortune in America out of gold. He was a very rich man, and he had an idea that was revolutionary. One thing we ought to remember about the West is that Homer was really worshipped once he arrived towards the beginning of the Renaissance. But that throughout the Dark Ages and the medieval period, it was absolutely essential to believe that myth was fantasy. It was not rooted in truth. The idea that it was true was a kind of heresy because the only truth was Christian truth. and these were pagans with gods, multi-gods, you know, polytheistic religion.

17:17And therefore, everything about it was a fantasy and you could enjoy it. And some of the intellectuals at the very end of the medieval period were beginning to. And obviously, you know, Chaucer had written about Troilus and Crusade and so on. And, you know, you had to have a very sort of delicate view of how you presented Greek mythology. But certainly the idea that it was founded in absolute truth was just nobody believed that. Nobody. And suddenly this American says, I believe there really was a Troy and that there was a war there. And in 1870, he goes to the Dardanelles. Dardanus was a Turkish, sorry, was a Trojan founder king.

17:55And they called the mouth of the strait, these straits that lead to the Sea of Marmara that then goes to the Bosphorus, of course, and into the Black Sea. The same straits where Gallipoli is fought for the same reason. Where my father's father fought and for the rest of his days, he would always say, I always respected Johnny Turk. My wife, Olivia's grandfather's right testicle was shot off at Gallipoli. We've all got a little. And some people still blame Churchill. And some people still blame Churchill. And they all went and had a ball in Gallipoli. Because that part. The Gallipoli ball. Oh, they had the Gallipoli ball.

18:33Gallipoli's a little further in. It's further in. and it's a landmass at the north of the peninsula, but the actual mouth, the Greek's called the Hellespont. Hele was a Greek who fell off a golden ram that was flying over there, and where he landed was called the Hellespont, the Helles Sea, and the ram flew on to Colchis, which is now Georgia, and its fleece was guarded by a dragon, and of course, Jason and his Argonauts sailed through the Dardanelles, through the Bosphorus, to the Black Sea, or the Euxine Sea, as they called it, to get the golden fleece. But anyway, that point has always been vitally important for trade because it is the gateway to the east, cliche as it is, but the Bosphorus is.

19:14But from the Aegean, you have to get first through the Sea of Marmara, then to Constantinople, Istanbul, whatever you like to call it. The Trojans were taking a toll. It was like Singapore. Exactly. They were controlling the straits. It's a very good analogy, Singapore, yes. And it became a very rich city, taking its tolls from people travelling east or travelling west. and the gorgeous Troy became a sort of legend. And Schliemann said it's going to exist somewhere. And he found this place called Hisalik and began to dig. To dig in a way that still makes archaeologists shudder. I mean, they basically say he did more damage to Troy than the Greeks.

19:59I'm really interested, sort of 1870 is the date. If you have a world that has to change its view, that fantasy is real, I mean, was the world shook? It was. It was a world that was already being shaken. It had been shaken by another form of archaeology, if you like, geology, which had absolutely rocked the foundations of Victorian belief. Because the geology was starting to prove that the world was not just hundreds of thousands, not just millions, but billions of years old, which was horrifying. I remember Ruskin called it those damned hammers. Tick, bang, bang, bang, bang. They were, you know, all these archaeologists.

20:37And it was seismic. And then, of course, Darwin had his go. So it was a period in which the faith and the foundations of belief that had held for hundreds of years were really beginning to shake. And then this new kind of, as it were, geology, archaeology, was to show that there was truth to the Greek stories. Well, and what happens afterwards? I mean, you can certainly see that in the patterns of the politicians that we get. Everybody trips over themselves to be a classicist. I mean, it becomes the thing that the ruling class will study. Gladstone wrote an enormous book just on the subject of colors in Homer.

21:13I did not know that. Yeah, it's important linguistically, actually, because there was no color blue described by Homer, which seems insane because you look out at the Aegean and the sky. They've got a lot. Why is it wine dark? It's not wine dark. It's blue. Stephen, can we just, before we go to the break, just describe the Troy? Yes. There's an archaeological feature called a tell, as in William Tell or any other, which is like a sort of layer cake, essentially, that builds up into a mound. And that's what he found at his Salik. And there are a number of layers that are different instantiations of the city of Troy.

21:50That's to say different civilizations built cities there that we use the word Troy of. but there are at least nine and they are called in roman numerals troy one troy two troy three in fact some of them are even seven a and seven b um and he thought troy two i think was the troy he found it there was treasure there so he dug down to the second sort of level of troys and he called it priam's treasure and everyone said my god it's priam's treasure archaeologists now know He was hundreds of years, almost a thousand years out. It was much, much older. And the Troy, we think, that was the one that must have inspired this series of legends, which eventually get told by home and come to us through that, is 7A.

22:34That's right. 7A, yeah, is the most likely candidate. There are sort of water jars and various other things that are still there and evidence of burning. And it's the right age. It's 1 ,200 years old, give or take. We met with Joe last time, this empire, which not many of us know much about, the Hittites. Yes. And it was on the periphery of that world. It was. The Hittite empire sort of certainly encroached on that. If you read Homer, of course, everybody speaks Greek, the Trojans included. Now they can't have spoken Greek of that period. They would have spoken a sort of Hittite tongue called Luwian, or Luvian, it's sometimes called L-U-W-I-A-N.

23:15and that was completely unrelated to Greek, really. But Homer was, you know, like a film, Troy, or I dare say Christopher Nolan's film. They'll all be speaking English in that, just so it's the similar thing. And we have in the Hittite archive references to a rebellion or something on this coast. A little local trouble. What they call the city is, might even be related to Ilium, mightn't it? Is it Wilusha? Wilusha, yeah, something like that. Okay, we're going to sort of take a break now, But join us after the break. We'll continue our odyssey with Stephen Fry.

23:59Welcome back. So we've talked about the places. We're going to talk about the people now. And we are going to get to the man who boils my blood, Agamemnon, in a little while. But we should first of all lay the landscape of this. The whole story of Helen of Troy, of Paris, of Agamemnon, of Phigenia, all of those people. Just give us a little Reader's Digest version of this story. Paris was a handsome young shepherd living on the slopes of Mount Ida outside the city of Troy when suddenly Hermes comes to him in the shape of another shepherd and says, would you do me a favor and judge a competition?

24:35And he leads him to a clearing and there are three beautiful women who are goddesses. They are Hera, the queen of heaven herself, Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warcraft, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. And he says, we've got to decide who's the most beautiful. The backstory of that is that there was an apple, which each of the goddesses wanted. Apple of discord. It was the apple of discord, awarded to the fairest. And they couldn't decide who the fairest was, and they decided that Paris, this shepherd, should do it. So he went to Hera, who said, I will give you powers and principalities and everything you want.

25:11Wow. Just like Indian politics. Exactly. And Athena says, I will give you wisdom. I will give you the understanding, the hearts of men. He thinks, wow, that's good. Surely, oh, she's one. And then Aphrodite opens a little scallop shell and shows her a face. And it's the face of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, the queen of Sparta. Says, give it to me and I will give you her. And he immediately says, you've won. The other two disappear in a puff of fury. And sure enough, and it turns out that Paris is actually a prince of Troy. And he'd been abandoned on the hillside because he was going to be the curse causing the downfall of Troy, which of course he does.

25:54So it's the typical wonderful prophecy. But he's welcomed back into his family as a prince when they discover who he is, not knowing what was going on. He then goes off to Sparta where Menelaus, who's the brother of Agamemnon, the two Atrean brothers from the house of Atreus, which is a cursed house. We might come to that later. It's quite interesting. And he basically steals Helen. Yes, because Aphrodite doesn't show the wedding ring in the shell. No, that's right. Helen's a little bit married, just slightly married at the time, right? And he carts her off with a lot of Menelaus' treasure as well by boat to Troy.

26:33And Priam and Hecuba, who are the king and queen of Troy, sort of welcome her and she stays. And obviously Menelaus is outraged and Agamemnon, who is the sort of boss brother, the chief of men, the Anax. Plot revenge. They plot revenge and they call, as it were, sound the hunting horn and call for all the kings, princes and chieftains of the Mycenaean world from Thebes to Ithaca and out come Odysseus and, you know, all these Domeneus and various other figures, Ajax, the two Ajaxes and all the famous heroes. And they gather on this huge number of boats and they sail off to Orlis in Boeotia, ready to get a fair wind to Troy.