The Mask of Troy by David Gibbins Read Free Book Online Page B

replied quietly. ‘All of my instinct puts this text no later than 1000 BC. It may even be a century earlier. I can barely believe I’m suggesting it, but this text could have been written by a bard who actually witnessed the fall of Troy, who actually saw those arrows being fired, who felt the heat of that beacon fire burning into the night sky, above these very ramparts where we are now.’
    Rebecca whistled, then looked at the bronze arrowheads embedded in the trench, and at the solidified mass of ash. ‘That’s awesome. Seriously awesome.’
    ‘And that,’ Jeremy announced, ‘is also a triumph of textual scholarship, because our radiocarbon result for the papyrus has just come through.’ He had been quickly checking his BlackBerry, and passed it to Dillen, who read the screen and broke into a smile. Jeremy turned to Rebecca. ‘The problem was getting a sample of the papyrus that wasn’t impregnated with later ink and glue from when it was reused, but the IMU dating lab seem to have done it.’
    Dillen handed back the BlackBerry. His voice was quavering. ‘Eleven fifty BC, plus or minus seventy-five years. I knew it . I just knew I was reading poetry written in the Bronze Age.’
    ‘That’s so cool,’ Rebecca said, putting her hand on his shoulder. ‘Remember when you were my age, dreaming of finding something like that.’
    Dillen looked at her, his eyes welling up. ‘I’m always that age. It’s what I told your dad. Never give up on those dreams.’
    ‘And one day they may come true,’ Rebecca said, leaning over and kissing him gently on the forehead.
    ‘One question,’ Jeremy said, putting away his BlackBerry. ‘The Ilioupersis . The destruction of Troy. That’s the biggest event in the whole Trojan epic cycle. Why do we only now have this text? Why is the destruction only hinted at in the Iliad and the Odyssey ?’
    Dillen took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, then put them back on again, swallowed hard and looked at Jeremy. ‘The Trojan cycle represents the end of the bardic tradition,’ he said. ‘It’s art mirroring history, myth mirroring reality. Before the Trojan War, the Bronze Age was a world of heroes and demigods, a world ruled by the gods, always fickle, often cruel, where contests between men were the contests of heroes, not the wholesale carnage of war. Epic poetry grew up around those contests: violent, bloody for sure, but noble and thrilling, part of everyday life. They existed in a world of peace and stability that allowed civilization to flourish, that didn’t eclipse it. But then something happened. Something calamitous, which overturned that world. The ambition of one man, perhaps, one king. The age of heroes and gods gave way to the age of men. Duels between heroes gave way to total war.’
    ‘And nobody wanted to hear about that,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘Not a good fireside story.’
    Dillen stared at the fresco. ‘People seated at the feet of a bard want to hear an uplifting story. They want to hear about noble deeds, about chivalry, about violence and cruelty to be sure, but not about apocalypse. So the Iliad is about the time before darkness swept over the plain of Ilion, when the war was still a contest of heroes: Achilles and Hector, Ajax and Telemachus. But Homer knew of coming darkness. He knew what men could do. He hints at it, in the Iliad . And the audience knew. They had been part of it, the survivors, their parents, their grandparents. It was an unspoken truth, a common experience of all humanity, like the Holocaust.’
    ‘Maybe the truth was just too awful to contemplate,’ Rebecca said. ‘Maybe Homer was a seer, just as you said. Maybe he gazed over the Dardanelles and somehow saw the future horrors of war, that mankind would go to the brink again.’
    Jeremy looked hard at Dillen. ‘So maybe when the Ilioupersis was written down, it was a private expression by a poet who knew he had to tell himself the truth. He puts it away, but then - almost by