In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood Read Free Book Online Page A

have always been regarded as the greatest English translations of Homer; Pope’s in particular is still a classic (‘a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal,’ said Samuel Johnson, though as the scholar Richard Bentley said, ‘It is a pretty poem Mr Pope but you must not call it Homer’).
    But it was in the nineteenth century that Homer came into his own as a popular ‘classic’, the most influential of all the attempts being William Morris’s Odyssey (1887), part Norse saga, part Tennyson, and Andrew Lang’s strangely effective late Victorian Iliad , which was reprinted eighteen times between 1882 and 1914. It was in the minds of the ruling class that Homer was pre-eminent. Typically, on the Albert Memorial itself it is Homer who is enthroned in the place of honour among the great artists of the world at Albert’s feet.
    The unrivalled popularity of Homer in the late Victorian and Edwardian imagination perhaps reflects the role of the Iliad in the English public-school system. At the height of the British Empire Homer was perhaps the poet who spoke most feelinglyto the British imperialists, for his ‘gentlemanliness’ and his ‘stiff upper lip’ in the face of death (not forgetting his emphasis on athletics and hardiness) as much as for his glorification of courage in war. Whether it was on the South African veld, in the trenches of Flanders or even in the skies above Picardy, Homer evoked the most powerful images in those brought up to see themselves as the new Athenians. During the First World War, Maurice Baring wrote of:
Such fighting as blind Homer never sung,
No Hector nor Achilles never knew;
High in the empty blue.
    But inevitably it was at Gallipoli that Homer most struck home, for Troy and Cape Helles face each other across the Dardanelles. There it was impossible for the young poets and writers of the British Empire – John Masefield, A. P. Herbert, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Compton Mackenzie – not to think of the Iliad . For the young Frenchman Jean Giraudoux, too, seeing his friends die in the trenches at Suvla, himself badly wounded, the trauma gave terrible inspiration for his art ( The Trojan War will not take place ): ‘Why against us?’ says Hector. ‘Troy is famous for her arts, her justice, her humanity.’ Rupert Brooke died before he heard the guns, but as he sailed to his fate he promised to recite Homer through the Cyclades and ‘the winds of history will follow us all the way’. Fragments scribbled on that last voyage show how Brooke imagined it:
They say Achilles in the darkness stirred. …
And Priam and his fifty sons
Wake all amazed, and hear the guns.
And shake for Troy again.
    Patrick Shaw-Stewart, who reread the Iliad on the way to Gallipoli, felt a dreadful sense of déjà vu at the sight of Imbros, of Troy and these ‘association-saturated spots’:
O hell of ships and cities
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?
Achilles came to Troyland
And I to Chersonese:
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days’ peace.
Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest and I know not –
So much the happier I.
I will go back this morning
From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and fight for me.
    So for the young public-school chaps who sailed to Gallipoli – ‘the youth whom to the spot their schoolboy feelings bear’ as Byron had so keenly put it – associations of the place produced overwhelming nostalgia: the islands, the plain, the hill of ‘holy Ilios’. Perhaps the experience of the war destroyed all that. After 1915 memories of a more terrible war took their place, of the common heroes who died, from ‘wide-wayed Liverpool’ and ‘hundred-gated Leeds’. (Homer’s world is predominantly aristocratic, it must be remembered.) And now, ninety years on, the intense identification of the English ruling class with the stern morality of Homer strikes us as oddly obsessional. In