Why Is Troy Still Burning?

18 Historically Speaking September/October 2006 Why Is Troy Still Burning? Barry Strauss Who owns history? Few subjects raise this question as vividly as the Trojan War. So I was reminded recendy while writing The Trojan War: A New History (Simon & Schuster, 2006), which looks at the war as an example of the state of the military art in the Late Bronze Age. For scholars, the Trojan War has generated centuries of philological , literary, archaeological, anthropological, and historical study. Troy ranks with Alexander, Cleopatra, Spartacus, and the fall of Rome as one of the rare topics in classical studies that grips the attention of the general public. Is history the preserve of the specialists, or is it open to everyone? That is the underlying question that makes the Trojan War so controversial . We might date die debate from the late 19th century (although F. A. Wolff had already begun researching the so-called Homeric Question nearly a hundred years earlier, to say nothing of scholarly debates in antiquity). In 1871 the German (and sometime American) businessman -turned-amateur-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, following the pioneering ideas of Calvert and McLaren, elbowed his way into digging at the hill of Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey. He uncovered what virtually all archaeologists now agree was the site of Troy. For his pains, Schliemann was sneered at by German academia, which saw a vulgar, self-promoting , and error-prone amateur—and they had a point, since Schliemann's vices matched his virtues. But then the Kaiser himself, Wilhelm II, championed Schliemann as a symbol of national prestige, and the professors relented. Fortunately, a series of professional archaeologists followed Schliemann and put the site of Troy on a firmly scientific footing. More recendy, a new storm over Troy hit Germany . In the 1980s die late Manfred Korfmann, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen, began excavating in and around Troy. He found a settlement and graves at the harbor, the first Bronze Age writing at Troy and, most important, the long soughtafter lower city. This spectacular discovery converted Troy from a half-acre citadel to a seventy-five-acre city—much closer to the mighty city of Priam that Homer describes. But in 2002 critics denounced Korfmann . They called him avictim of wishful dunking, a self-promoter, a treasure-hunting "IndianaJones," and someone who misled non-specialists. The German public is fascinated by Troy and has a taste for academic duels, the bloodier the better. So as Korfmann and his defenders replied to dieir detractors, a batde took shape not just in the usual scholarly journals and conferences but also in the mass media. Led by ancient historian Frank KoIb (also at die Illustration from John Ogilby, trans., Homer his Iliads (London, 1669). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. University of Tübingen), the critics questioned the evidence for the extent of the lower city and its defensive system, for the density of population at Troy, and for the existence of international trade between the Black Sea and die Aegean widi Troy supposedly at its hub. They accused the excavators of misleading the nearly 1 million visitors to a traveling exhibition (in Germany) about Troy by presenting their hypothetical reconstruction of the lower town as a certainty . Korfmann and his advocates defended dieir scientific mediodology, denied any intent to deceive die public, and accused KoIb and his side of misrepresentations of their own.1 The evidence for the extent of the lower town is good, if not ideal (in the absence of places to dig, it depends on surface and geophysical surveys and an assumption of soil erosion), as is the evidence for the existence of a defensive system in die lower city (it depends on limited excavation and magnetometric surveys). But the details of that defensive system are debatable, as is the size of the town's population. Meanwhile, die evidence of trade via Troy as well as the feasibility of Bronze Age ships navigating the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus are both questions requiring further investigation. These dry facts hardly reveal the invective, anger, and bad manners of the public debate over Troy in Germany. But there is more at stake than...