James Baquet We’re talking about the great epics and sagas of various civilizations, and the earliest-known Western epic (until the discovery of “Gilgamesh”) was Homer’s “Iliad.” The story is briefly told: Aphrodite, goddess of love, had promised Paris, prince of Troy, that he could have “the world’s most beautiful woman” if he chose her over two other goddesses in a kind of beauty contest. He did, and then kidnapped Helen — the said beauty — from her husband Menelaus. Menelaus then led a coalition of Greeks in a siege of Troy to get his wife back. But Homer tells neither of the beginning of the war — a story already known to his audience — nor of its end, which included the famous “Trojan horse” episode. Instead, like the movie “Titanic,” he set a smaller, human story (though still involving the gods) against a larger historical event. “The Iliad” tells of only a few weeks in the 10th and last year of the war. It is not so much about the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans as it is about the behavior — and anger — of one man, the Greek hero Achilles, who was angry about the distribution of rewards in battle. As Homer opens the poem, “Sing, Goddess, of the rage of Achilles...” For centuries it was assumed that the war and the site were real. With the rise of critical history, however, that assumption changed; it was thought that the entire affair was legendary, and that Troy (or Ilium, as it was also called, giving “The Iliad” its name) was nowhere on this earth. All that changed when Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman and amateur archaeologist, began excavating at a Turkish city named Hisarlik, believing it to be the site of Troy. When Schliemann claimed success, the world was convinced: Troy was real. As it turns out, Schliemann was correct vertically, but not horizontally. He claimed that one of the lowest levels he reached (dubbed “Troy I” and “Troy II”) was the location of the war. More recent scholarship suggests it was more likely Troy VII — a layer Schliemann had largely destroyed in his haste to reach the lower levels. One wag has declared that Schliemann achieved the task of destroying Ilium in ways the Greeks never could! Vocabulary Which word above means: 1. a scientific study of the past 2. prolonged attack on a city 3. up and down 4. side to side 5. clever person, joker 6. named, called 7. careless speed 8. non-professional 9. temporary alliance 10. digging | 