The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (38 page)

Two earlier Greek history scholars, Stolberg and Mure, had also been convinced that Mount Eryx fit the geography of the Cyclops episode. And the Greek historian Thucydides, writing around 403
BC
, had mentioned that Sicily was probably the home of the Cyclops and the Laestrigonians. In the
Odyssey
, of course, these episodes take place far from the home of Nausicaa. But what would be more natural than for a young authoress writing a kind of novel about Ulysses to use local scenery as its background?

The next step was to visit Trapani; this Butler did in 1892. Now he had the satisfaction of finding that everything confirmed his views. Admittedly, one of the two harbors was now silted up and contained a saltworks; but it was obvious that it had once been just such a harbor as “Homer” had described. A few miles away, on the lower slopes of Mount Eryx, was a cave that the locals still called the “grotto of Polyphemus”. Near the entrance to the northern harbor was a rock that looked not unlike a ship. Local legend said it was a Turkish pirate ship turned to stone by the Blessed Virgin – obviously a Christianized form of the ancient legend.

Now Butler no longer had any doubt that he was on the right track. He noted that the description of Ithaca in the
Odyssey
is quite unlike the real Ithaca: it is described as “highest up in the sea” with a clear view to the west, whereas the real Ithaca is completely masked by the much bigger island of Samos (now Cephalonia) to the west. But if the authoress of the
Odyssey
modeled her Ithaca on the little island of Marettimo, facing the harbors of Trapani, it would correspond to the description in the
Odyssey
.

A voyage around Sicily convinced Butler that his authoress had simply taken the island she knew and used its scenery as the geographical background for the voyage of Ulysses. Ulysses himself describes how he sailed down to the island of Cythera, just south of Greece, and then was prevented from turning northward (for Ithaca) by strong winds that drove him west to the land of the lotus-eaters, which must have been on the coast of north Africa. But after this, according to Butler, he made for Sicily, to the north, hunted goats on the island of Favagnana (known to the ancients as Goat Island – Aegusa), then landed on Sicily and had his adventure with the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus, whose eye he burned out with a stake. Then he sailed north to the island of Aeolus, the god of winds, which Butler identifies as the little island of Ustica. The town of Cafalu, on the north coast, he thinks is the site of the adventure of the man-eating Laestrigonians. The site of Scylla and Charybdis is off the east coast, near present-day Messina. Finally, on his way back, he encountered Calypso’s island, which Butler identifies as the island of Pantelleria. And so back to Trapani – or rather, to Marettimo, which is Homer’s Ithaca.

If Butler had lived a century later, he would have taken a good photographer with him to Sicily and published a series of colour photographs of the various sites of the adventures of Ulysses in a coffee-table book, together with Homer’s descriptions. In fact, in his book
The Authoress of the Odyssey
(finally published in 1897), Butler includes half a dozen or so photographs, but none are as convincing as they might be. Probably the best way for a modern reader to make up his own mind would be to go to Sicily with a copy of Butler’s book. It has to be admitted that Butler’s own sheer excitement and enthusiasm convey a great deal of conviction. But the section of the book that describes the various places is less thorough than it could be. My own suspicion is that Butler was disheartened by the general skepticism he encountered and by the total lack of response from the various scholars to whom he sent pamphlets about his theory. The famous Professor Jowett, an Oxford scholar and translator of Plato, admitted frankly that he had not even
glanced at the two pamphlets Butler sent him. A dozen publishers turned down Butler’s excellent prose translation of the
Odyssey
. So on the whole, it is not surprising that he failed to summon the necessary energy to argue the topographical part of the book as thoroughly as the rest.

The achievement is nevertheless considerable. At the time Butler was writing his book, most scholars took it for granted that Homer was the author of both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. Nowadays, very few take that position. Butler was admittedly wrong about the dates – he thought that at least a hundred years separated the two epics and that the
Odyssey
was composed around 1050
BC
But then, Butler lacked the tools – and the archaeological information – that have enabled later scholars to be far more precise. As to his essential thesis – that the
Odyssey
was written by a woman – few people who follow his arguments with the
Odyssey
in the other hand will fail to admit that he could be right. George Bernard Shaw attended a Fabian Society meeting at which Butler lectured on the female authorship of the
Odyssey
and admitted that, while initially skeptical about the idea, he took up the
Odyssey
and soon found himself saying, “Of course it was written by a woman”.

Robert Graves was another classical scholar who allowed himself to be convinced, and whose novel
Homer’s Daughter
is inspired by the theory. The story is told by Princess Nausicaa, who describes how her brother disappeared after a quarrel with his wife and was assumed to have gone off to foreign parts. In fact, he has been murdered by a treacherous friend. Her father, King Alpheides, sails off to look for him, leaving Uncle Mentor in charge. Nausicaa’s suitors then behave exactly like Penelope’s suitors in the
Odyssey
and move into the palace. But when Nausicaa and her attendants are doing the laundry near the sea, they are approached by a naked man who has been shipwrecked; he is a Cretan nobleman named Aethon, and it is he who eventually slays the suitors and marries Nausicaa. Nausicaa then goes on to write the
Odyssey
, in which biography and legend freely intermingle. The merit of the book is that it enables us to grasp the sheer plausibility of Butler’s theory.
Homer’s Daughter
is one of Graves’s most underrated books – a careful re-creation of Sicily around 800
BC
that deserves to be as widely read as
I, Claudius
.

Another interesting footnote to the Butler theory is that James Joyce used his prose translation of the
Odyssey
as the basis of
Ulysses.

To summarize this part of the argument: it is probably fair to say that
if
the
Odyssey
was indeed the work of one single person – and was not the collective work of many bards – then the contention that it was written by a woman is highly plausible.

But what of our second question: did the siege of Troy really take place, or was it simply a myth? After all, it is obvious that the
Odyssey
, with its one-eyed giants, wandering rocks, and enchantresses who turn men into pigs, is basically a fairy tale. And the action of the
Iliad
is even more mythical, with the gods playing as important a part in the action as the heroes.

Let us review the story again. According to Greek legend, mostly based on the works of Homer, a prince named Paris (or Alexandros), son of King Priam of Troy, was a guest of King Menelaus of Sparta when he fell in love with Menelaus’s wife, Helen, who was a famous beauty. She was the daughter of the god Jove (or Zeus) and a princess named Leda, whom Jove seduced by turning himself into a swan. Many princes had sought her hand before she accepted Menelaus. So when Paris carried her off – with or without her consent – the indignant Menelaus went to ask for help from his brother, King Agamemnon, in Mycenae (he would have had to travel by sea, for roads were almost nonexistent), and an armada of ninety ships sailed for Troy. These included contingents led by many of Helen’s rejected suitors.

Troy – or Ilion – was a town whose wealth was founded on trade (like Mycenae, which was so rich that it was known as “golden Mycenae”). Its main industry seems to have been horse breeding. It is important for us to realize that in those days, the Mediterranean was swarming with pirates, so that no town could afford to be on the sea unless it had mighty defenses. Troy was a mile inland, but it had mighty defenses anyway, including immense walls with defensive towers. It is also important to realize that in the ancient world, peace was a rare commodity. The first thing man seems to have done when he began to live in settlements was to wage war on his neighbours, so that in the ancient world, the words “peaceable nation” were virtually a contradiction in terms. It was not until relatively modern times – about 1700 or so – that the rules of history changed and it became such a costly and highly destructive business to go to war that long periods of peace became the norm.
⁸

So the Greeks attacking Troy found themselves in the position of a hawk trying to attack a tortoise. This was no ordinary siege – no town could hold out for ten years, as Troy did, if it was surrounded. The plain of Troy was notoriously windy – it still is – so the Greeks camped in a sheltered spot between two headlands and built a rampart to protect themselves. The Trojans had allies in other parts of Asia Minor, who sallied out to help them periodically. So it was less a siege than a spasmodic series of engagements.

But in the tenth year of the war something happened, and Troy fell and was destroyed; all its men were massacred, and its women and children were carried off into slavery. According to Ulysses in the
Odyssey
, it was he who suggested the stratagem of building a wooden horse and filling it with armed men, then pretending to sail away. But of course, this could well have been an invention of the author (or authoress) of the
Odyssey.

The story of the search for Troy is one of the most fascinating in the history of archaeology, and its conclusions are more satisfyingly positive than those in the case of the search for Homer’s identity.

One story concerning the search for Troy begins in 1829, when a seven-year-old boy named Heinrich Schliemann received a copy of Jerrer’s
Universal History
for Christmas. When he saw the picture of Troy in flames, he was struck by the thought that nothing could possibly destroy such mighty walls. The young Schliemann resolved that he would one day go and investigate the matter for himself. His father was a country parson in Neu-Buckow, Germany, who was dismissed after being falsely accused of misappropriating church funds. Heinrich had to become a grocer’s assistant at the age of fourteen. Tuberculosis led him to give up his job and embark for South America as a cabin boy. After a shipwreck he drifted to Amsterdam, where he became a clerk and learned English. At the age of thirty-two he learned that his brother had died in California and sailed for America to claim his estate. It was a good time to go; the gold rush made him rich, and in 1863 he was finally able to realize his ambition to search for Troy. Together with a sixteen-year-old Greek schoolgirl, whom he married, he sailed for the northern coast of Turkey to begin his search.

Most scholars accepted the notion that the remains of Troy would be found on a mountain near Bunarbashi, about three hours from the sea. Schliemann, using the
Iliad
as a guide, disagreed – Homer’s heroes rode between Troy and the coast several times a day. Schliemann concluded that a more likely site was a mound called Hissarlik in present-day Turkey, about an hour from the sea. (And in ancient times, the sea came much farther inland.)

It was an inspired guess, typical of Schliemann’s incredible luck. When he had obtained permission to dig there, Schliemann began excavations – in 1871 – with a large gang of workmen. They soon encountered the remains of a town, but it dated from the Roman period, and it was a mere hundred yards in diameter. Below this was another ruined town. And then another. And then another. Eager to find Homer’s Troy, Schliemann ordered his men to slice a great trench
through the middle of the mound and keep going until they reached bedrock. All told, there proved to be the ruins of nine cities, one on top of the other.

Twelve years later, Schliemann announced that he had found the treasures of King Priam – treasures that, for some odd reason, he had always been convinced would still be there. (He never explained why the conquerors had not simply stolen them when they destroyed Troy and massacred its inhabitants.) In his autobiography he tells a remarkable story of how he had glimpsed a copper vessel through a hole in the wall and waited until his workmen had gone to lunch – he was afraid they might be tempted to steal – before he and his wife removed a treasure of drinking vessels and jewelry. The finds were to make him world famous.

There is, in fact, a disappointing postscript to this story. When, in 1972, Professor William Calder, of the University of Colorado, decided to start checking on Schliemann’s biographical information, he soon discovered that the great archaeologist was a mythomaniac of the first order. His story about being received by the president of the United States on his first visit to America was pure invention; so was his tale of being present in San Francisco on the night of the great fire in May 1851. It became clear that his fortune was founded on cheating the bankers to whom he sold gold dust and that the story of the finding of the Trojan treasure was also an invention – it had actually been found over a considerable period and concealed from the eyes of his partners in the enterprise, a Turkish pasha and an American named Frank Calvert. Calder’s research proved that Schliemann was a crook. Yet there can be no doubt that, in spite of this, he was an inspired archaeologist.