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of Bronze Age trade routes would invite raids and sack and account for the evidence at different levels of frequent demolition and rebuilding. Level VIIA, containing fragments of gold and other artifacts of a royal city, and exhibiting signs of having been violently destroyed by human hands, has been identified as Priam’s Troy and its fall dated near the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 B.C. It is quite possible that Greek mercantile and maritime ambitions came into conflict with Troy and that the overlord of the several communities of the Greek peninsula could have gathered allies for a concerted attack on the city across the straits. The abduction of Helen, as Robert Graves suggests, might have been real in its retaliation for some prior Greek raid.

These were Mycenaean times in Greece, when Agamemnon, son of Atreus, was King at Mycenae in the citadel with the Lion Gate. Its dark remains still stand on a hill just south of Corinth where poppies spring so deeply red they seem forever stained by the blood of the Atridae. Some violent cause, in roughly the same age as the fall of Troy but probably over a more extended period, ended the primacy of Mycenae and of Knossus in Crete with which it was linked. Mycenaean culture was literate as we now know since the script called Linear B found in the ruins of Knossus has been identified as an early form of Greek.

The period following the Mycenaean collapse is a shadowy void of some two centuries called the Greek Dark Ages, whose only communication to us is through shards and artifacts. For some unexplained reason, written language seems to have vanished completely, although recitals of the exploits of ancestors of a past heroic age were clearly transmitted orally down the generations. Recovery, stimulated by the arrival of the Dorian people from the north, began around the 10th century B.C. and from that recovery burst the immortal celebrator whose epic fashioned from familiar tales and legends of his people started the stream of Western literature.

Homer is generally pictured as reciting his narrative poems to accompaniment on the lyre, but the 16,000 lines of the Iliad and 12,000 of the Odyssey were certainly also either written down by himself or dictated by him to a scribe. Texts were undoubtedly available to the several bards of the next two or three centuries who, in supplementary tales of Troy, introduced material from oral tradition to fill in the gaps left by Homer. The sacrifice of Iphigenia, Achilles’ vulnerable heel, the appearance of Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, as an ally of Troy and many of the most memorable episodes belong to these poems of the post-Homeric cycle which have come down to us only through summaries made in the 2nd century A.D. of texts since lost. The Cypria, named for Cyprus, home of its supposed author, is the fullest and earliest of these, followed by, among others, The Sack of Ilium by Arctinus and the Little Iliad by a bard of Lesbos. After them, lyric poets and the three great tragic dramatists took up the Trojan themes, and Greek historians discussed the evidence. Latin authors elaborated further both before and especially after Virgil, adding jeweled eyes for the Wooden Horse and other glittering fables. Distinction between history and fable faded when the heroes of Troy and their adventures splendidly filled the tapestries and chronicles of the Middle Ages. Hector becomes one of the Nine Worthies on a par with Julius Caesar and Charlemagne.

The question of whether a historical underpinning existed for the Wooden Horse was raised by Pausanias, a Latin traveler and geographer with a true historian’s curiosity, who wrote a Description of Greece in the 2nd century A.D. He decided the Horse must have represented some kind of “war machine” or siege engine because, he argues, to take the legend at face value would be to impute “utter folly” to the Trojans. The question still provokes speculation in the 20th century. If the siege engine was a battering ram, why did not the Greeks use it as such? If it was the kind of housing that brought