Slowly, however, attitudes were changing. Already by the 1950s, among those who devoted most attention to the details ofthe relationship between the archaeological record and the Homeric epics, Hilda Lorimer and Dorothea Gray were consistently stressing the extent to which Late Bronze Age material cultural references were closely interwoven with (and actually outnumbered by) those belonging to later periods, especially to the Early Iron Age of the tenth to ninth centuries. It became increasingly difficult to regard these as mere inadvertent ‘‘anachronisms,’’ introduced into an original ‘‘core’’ by later bards, and instead the epics had to be seen as effectively composite products of several periods.
From around this time, too, a more general anti-fundamentalist backlash gradually began to make itself felt. To some extent, this was led by classical literary scholars and ancient historians, many of whom had always been skeptical of Schliemann’s credulous approach (and who, it might be added, often harbored grave doubts about archaeology as a serious academic subject). In 1954, the ancient historian Moses Finley published The World of Odysseus, in which he argued that it was necessary to take the implications of the oral nature of Homeric epic seriously (see Chapter 13, by J. Foley). Emphasizing one of the characteristics of the techniques of oral-composition-in-performance - the propensity to create something new and different on every occasion - and using comparative epic analogies, such as the Chanson de Roland, he argued that, while there might be some vague historical reminiscences behind some of the stories and characters recounted by Homer, the contents of the epics as such were essentially creations of a period no earlier than the tenth to ninth centuries, no more than a century or so before the time conventionally assigned to Homer. Any vague echoes of much earlier historical events or characters, like the Chanson’s account of Roland and the skirmish at Roncevaux, were bound to be so distorted as to be unrecognizable. Drawing on comparative anthropology (though with little archaeological argument), he further argued that the society and values portrayed in the epics were consistent ones, entirely in accord with the fragmented world of the Greek ‘‘Dark Age,’’ which lay between the civilization of the Mycenaean palaces and the beginning of literate, historical Greece. The decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris in 1952, which revealed the palaces as administrative bureaucracies with complex hierarchies of officials and land-holdings and characterized by obsessive record-keeping, for him provided further conclusive evidence that Homer's epics preserved no trace of memory of Late Bronze Age Greece.
Finley returned to this theme in the early 1960s with a full frontal attack, on both archaeological and comparative grounds, on the whole idea of the historicity of Homer's Trojan War, which, he argued, ‘‘had best be removed in toto from the realm of history and returned to the realm of myth and poetry’’(Finley 1964: 9). The comparative examples he cited, which included the Chanson de Roland, the Niebelungenlied and the still-living South Slavic traditional songs about the Battle of Kosovo, made clear that, while such epics could contain the names of historical characters or be centered nominally around historical events, they were essentially ahistorical, in that characters who lived centuries apart and in quite different regions could be mingled together, and events transported in time and space or distorted beyond all possible recognition. This was a point of view which, in the case of the Homeric epics, few would have disputed before Schliemann's powerful appeal to a popular willingness to believe in the Greeks’ own belief in their earliest history, and before the tangible evidence for an Ilion much older than Homer coaxed them into a faith in the apparently magical powers of archaeology. Since then, at least among Englishspeaking classicists, historicity in the case of the Homeric epics has not been an issue, and much more effort has gone into analyzing the social, ideological, and philosophical contents of the epics in their own terms, with little reference to archaeology.
Among archaeologists, too, a more determined backlash arose from the later 1960s onwards, partly as a result of the influence of processual archaeology, invented in the New World but increasingly also practiced in the Old. An important component of this was not only the bid to establish archaeology as an independent, entirely free-standing discipline, with its own coherent Problematik, but also a rejection of the view that it was a poor relation of ancient history, compelled, in the absence of contemporary historical records, to create forms of pseudo-politico-military narrative out of the remains of walls, potsherds, and anonymous graves. In the Aegean the creation of such pseudo-history, with (or indeed without) the aid of legendary material recorded in literature many centuries later, came to be seen as entirely illegitimate, the product of an unhealthy and uncritical privileging of the written word and of a traditional ancient historians' mindset. Archaeology could show that important centers existed at Mycenae and Troy many centuries before the conventional date of Homer, and that Troy suffered destruction or damage many times in its long history, but it could not possibly tell who (or often even what) caused destruction in any given instance, or in what circumstances. It was also quite clear that a chronology dependent on pottery could never provide the kind of resolution that would allow interpretation in terms of this kind of narrative history, and that might have given weight to Blegen's otherwise meaningless juggling with the dates of Troy VIIa. Archaeology could give us a clue to long-term processes of an economic, social or ideological nature, but unless it also produced contemporary historical records which could be specifically tied to a particular context, it could not give us event-centered history, let alone the personae behind such events. The result was that, increasingly, any attempt to relate the archaeological record to the Homeric epics began to be seen as, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, downright misleading. The role of ‘‘Homeric’’ archaeology, insofar as it continued to exist, was thus reduced to providing “illustrations’’ for epic texts, in the form of boar’s tusk helmets, different types of weapons and the like; or in the words of Peter Levi in his preface to the 1984 edition of Leonard Cottrell’s The Bull of Minos (1984: 13), it became merely ‘‘the strange subject.. .which attempts to relate Homer to physical monuments, and which is used, at least at Oxford, as an excuse to introduce young classical scholars to archaeology and to open their minds to the tradition of Schliemann and Evans.’’ ‘‘Today,’’ Levi adds, ‘‘most archaeologists set little store by the Homeric poems as evidence for the material culture of Mycenaean Greece.’’
Only in Germany has the idea that archaeology has the ability to shed light on real historical events of the Mycenaean palatial period as a basis for Homer’s epics really survived, as much for reasons to do with German national and political psyche as anything else. The results of renewed German excavations at Troy and identifications of names in Hittite texts have been used in an attempt to give Homer’s Trojan War some real thirteenth-century basis. It was probably no coincidence that the publication of this argument occurred at about the time of the emotive return to Berlin, as a temporary exhibition, of Schliemann’s long lost Early Bronze Age Trojan treasures, which had been discovered in the stores of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The principles and methods behind this attempt differ little from those used by Schliemann and his fundamentalist followers. The argument is that, because a city known to the first-millennium Greeks as Ilion and to the late second-millennium Hittites as Wilusa actually existed from 3000 bce to sometime around the end of the second millennium, because it was destroyed or damaged several times during its long history, and because between the late fifteenth and thirteenth centuries successive kings of a land called Ahhiyawa operated on or near the Anatolian coast in a manner more or less irritating to the Hittite rulers, Homer’s account of the Trojan War must therefore have some real and recognizable historical basis. Equally, however, as Finley pointed out, we know that there were battles at Roncevaux and Kosovo in the eighth and fourteenth centuries CE respectively, and we know that Gunther was king of the Burgundians in the fifth century. Nevertheless, these facts do not provide any basis for believing that there is genuine ‘‘history’’ in the twelfth-century Chanson de Roland, the thirteenth-century Nibelungenlied, or twentieth-century Serbian epics, any more than digging up Carthage or recognizing in Dido the Elissa who figures in that city’s Tyrian foundation legend proves the historicity of Virgil’s Aeneid.
World History
