BOOKS.
TROY: A STUDY IN HOMERIC GEOGRAPHY.* Tam author of this noteworthy book is one of those men— unhappily very rare—who, like George Grote, are equally conversant with commerce and with the classics, and whose credit stands as high "in the City" as among scholars. Nor do we make this remark only for its interest but rather for its relevance. For it is as "a business proposition" that Dr. Leaf here deals with the Trojan war and its origin. He will have nothing to do with Helen. 2Eschylus, of course, believed in her when he called her " Hell to ships, hell to men, hell to cities" (Wpm's, gxasSpos, Ws-Toms), and we all know Marlowe's unequalled lines :-
" Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And fired the topless towers of Mum ?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss !"
But criticism to-day has become cautious, and leaves us only the cold comfort that " we need not even be too incredulous about her." People, we are told, like to go to war about "some point of honour "; and just as "the most sordidly commercial war which England ever waged was dignified by its point of honour, characteristically embodied, after the fashion of the eighteenth century, in Jenkins' ear," so the Greeks, who had more artistic tastes, may have found "the actual stealing of a queen " rather a pretty pretext for a war which was in itself wholly "economic" and for the command of trade. For three thousand years cannot change geography. Twelve centuries before Christ the command of the Dardanelles was as important as it is to-day, and Priam ensconced in his castle—Homeric Troy is only 200 yards in diameter—on the mound of Hissarlik was master of the Dardanelles. It is now " an inconspicuous little bluff " standing out from a background of hills on the edge of a small plain some nine miles long; and yet for ages before Priam that "little bluff" had been built upon and fortified. " Non semel Mos vexata," said Horace, and his words are true in a sense he never dreamed. For Homer's Troy rests on the ruins of city after city. From the Neolithic Age men had settled on this particular hillock, reared their ramparts, and then suffered sack and destruction, only to be followed by new occupants, until the successive strata of fallen buildings had doubled its height from 50 to 100 feet. And why P Not assuredly that it might afford a place of refuge to a few rustics pasturing their flocks on the plain below, but because of the exceptional importance of its position. For though " site value " is a, modern phrase, the thing itself is coeval with human history. Only to under- • Tray a Study in Homeric Geography. By Walter Leaf. London ; Macmillan mad Co. [12.9.]
stand what gave such value in antiquity to places on the edge of the Mediterranean it is necessary to study the conditions under which sea traffic was then carried on, as has recently been done by M. Perard in a work which Dr. Leaf calls "the most suggestive and fruitful" he has ever read, and in which the importance of Troy is ascribed to its command of a trade route and its consequent power to levy toll on traffic. It is probable, indeed, that M. Berard erred in supposing that ancient mariners found the difficulty of rounding Sigeum into the Dardanelles so great that they unshipped goods at Besika Bay and carried them by land to the mouth of the Scamander, thus having to pass directly under the walls of Troy, for the necessity of such transhipment is shown by Dr. Leaf to be doubtful (p. 258 seq.). But his error was half-way to truth. Troy did grow rich by tolls. It did so, however, not because it controlled a short and dubious land route, but because it dominated the one chief artery of traffic between East and West. The clashing rocks at the entrance of the Euxine were not more to be dreaded by the first adventurers who set out to win the Golden Fleece than was the Prince of Troy by the merchant who sought to pass the Hellespont on a not dissimilar quest. The passage of it "is easily closed to sailing ships by those who hold the land," for owing to the Etesian winds which " blow throughout the summer from N.W., N., and N.E. . . . every sailor making for the Propontis must perforce reckon on a delay at the mouth of the Hellespont, almost certainly for some days, perhaps for a fortnight or so." And what was he to do P " The heavy earthenware jars on which the Greeks depended carried only a poor supply of water," and to get water he must land either at Besika Bay or the mouth of the Scamander, and Troy stood over them both. There was no slipping past this watchful and well-armed fortress, set just where the lines of traffic between two continents had their natural meeting-place.
And the result was, Dr. Leaf holds, that the merchants made the plain of Troy their mart, and its princes won their wealth by offering them security for holding annual fairs beneath its walls ; and this is his own admirable description:-
" One can reconstruct the scene. It begins in July when the Paphlagonians have had two good months for their long coasting voyage. The actual fair takes place on the low, nearly level ridge on which stands the castle of Troy. The lord of the castle is the presiding genius of the scene ; his vassals from the surrounding country gather to provide horses and mules for carriage, to build wooden booths for the merchants, and to render the thousand little services which bring in reward at such a time. He has a strong garrison—hardly an army, but a force large enough to keep order, and to carry out what is his primary task, the exaction of tolls on every convoy. The shore of the Hellespont is busy with the arrival and unloading of the ships of the Thracians. There, too, or to Besika Bay, if the wind serves better, come the Greeks, running in from Lemnos day by day. Over the hills from the east and south come the caravans of local country produce, and the valuable cargoes of the Lykians and Maeonians, windbound at Assns. Wine from Thrace is bartered against stuffs and leather- work from Caria. Wool, hides, wheat from the rich plains of Phrygia are going south and west, and the neighbouring farms of Mysia are driving a busy trade in fodder, oxen, and food for the assembled crowd. But the great point of interest is the arrival of the Euxine fleet, with its freight of timber, silver ore, cinnabar, and, of course, a plentiful store of the most marketable commodity of all, slaves. No doubt they bring with them, too, specimens of worked iron—still unfamiliar to the men of bronze—knives and arrow-heads and other small things, costly but eagerly bought up. And among them the Greek traders are walking, curious to learn all about the lands whence the things come, and muttering that where Paphlagonians could come down Greeks could go up ; why should they pay toll to Priam for the privilege of trading with these rich and unknown lands ? They must have glowered at those great walls, holding the wealth wrung from their hands, and still worse, sheltering the garrison which so effectively blocked any attempt to run the gauntlet of the Hellespont."
Nor is this attractive picture the work only of imagination. Dr. Leaf has, indeed, something of the art of Defoe, and can pass from the description of a bay taken from "The Mediter- ranean Pilot," p. 155, to a statement that " Achilles, having used only ten hours of daylight, would not stop there, and would go on at least to Khelidromi," with the easy assurance of a novelist. But his brilliant conclusion is based on a full statement of all the known facts about Homeric Troy, and more particularly on a careful examination of what is known as "the Trojan catalogue" (II. ii. 816-8;7).
These sixty-two lines—on which, however, a certain Demetrius of Scepsis " wrote thirty books "—are hardly known to the ordinary reader, for they seem to offer only a list of names. But careful study shows that this apparently tedious list is
in fact of the highest interest. For not only does the first half enumerate the population of the Troad in such "correct geographical order" that it could only have been written by someone "personally acquainted with the country," but the second half, which records the names of the Trojan allies, is shown to arrange them accurately in four groups along "the four trade-routes" from Thrace, from the Euxine, from the hinterland of Asia Minor, and along its sea-coast northward from Lycia, which converge on Troy as their common centre. And Dr. Leaf seems to put a very pertinent question when be asks whether so remarkable a catalogue does not indicate that Troy had sought her allies "among the nations who had a vested interest in the main- tenance of existing trade against an aggressive and growing people," which " saw in the capture of the Hellespont the critical point of national expansion, the step which brought Greece out of the limit of little local tribes into the atmosphere of the large human world, and opened that career of coloniza- tion which made the Greeks the creators of modern Europe P " A struggle for trade is, perhaps, a less romantic theme than the launching of a fleet by heroes resolute to recover the fairest among women, but it has assuredly in it more ele- ments of probability. Nor, we think, can there be any doubt that Dr. Leaf, by his exact inquiries, does establish the fact that the Iliad has for its basis some "real record of real events." How much is Dichtung and how much Wahrheit we can never finally determine, and the saying of Byron, which he quotes, that "the Troad is a fine field for conjecture and snipe-shooting," applies equally to the tale of Troy. There must always remain in Homer's immortal epic much that will provoke inquiry and speculation. " The magic veil of Poesy" can never be wholly withdrawn—nor could anyone so desire—from the "truth it lovingly enfolds," but students like Dr. Leaf, while they destroy some old illusions, give us a new and invigorating feeling of life and reality, of something that has for us a stronger human interest because what is imaginative is everywhere intertwined with what once had solidity and substance. Nor must we fail to add that, though many of the details with which Dr. Leaf has to deal are often dry and technical, he yet never fails to interest. With rare consideration he asks "the over- taxed reviewer" not to consider himself "bound to begin before page 310 or thereabouts," and then "kindly to read" the next twenty pages. But the reviewer or the reader who takes its author's advice and begins with those twenty pages will assuredly be tempted to study the whole book, as it deserves to be studied, in its careful and scholarly completeness.
Previous page
