Book Review
From Myth to Bloody Reality
THE TROJAN WAR: A New History
By Barry Strauss
Simon & Schuster
New York, 2006
ISBN 074326441X
258 pp.
$26.00 (Member $23.40)
reviewed by Paul Westermeyer
Bronze Age warfare was diverse and gritty. Formal battles occurred alongside night raids, street fighting, civilian casualties, and desecrated holy sites. Despite thousands of years between us, the scenes are disturbingly familiar to the modern observer. This is especially true of that most famous Bronze Age conflict, the Trojan War.
The Greek poet Homer left us the two epic poems describing the conflict and its aftermath—the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Trojan War was further described in plays and stories that sketched out Homer’s work into a full-fledged struggle of East versus West. This image inspired the Greek Hoplites, Alexander’s Macedonian warriors, and in our own century, images of the “eternal warrior” while considering the notion of “Achilles in Vietnam.” While Homer’s work has remained an essential part of Western literature, its role in history has been far less certain; many modern scholars have viewed Homer’s war as a dramatic tool employed to connect various tales, rather than a historical account of the conflict.
According to legend, the Bronze Age Greeks, who called themselves Achaeans, fought a war against the Asian city of Troy and its allies that lasted for 10 years. The war was fought to return the beautiful Helen, Queen of Sparta, to her husband Menelaus after she fled to Troy with her new lover, the Trojan Prince Paris. On the Greek side the war was fought by an all-star team of heroes, with the deadly Achilles and clever Odysseus in pride of place. The Trojans were led by the tragic hero Hector, Paris’ married, serious brother. The gods interfered often, occasionally taking a direct hand in the fray.
When it was over, Achilles had slain Hector and been slain in turn by Paris, and Odysseus used the famous Trojan horse to pierce Troy’s impenetrable walls. In an orgy of violence the men of Troy were slain, their children hurled from walls, and their wives and daughters taken back to Greece as slaves and concubines of the victors. Helen, seemingly forgiven, again sat the throne in Sparta alongside Menelaus. For later Greeks, Homer’s epics presented the bedrock lessons in manhood and honor they wished to instill in their young, as well as a defining myth of nationality.
Barry Strauss pulls the Trojan War from the shadows of mythological ambiguity and restores it firmly to bloody historical reality. His imaginative work is founded on the most recent archaeological work at Troy, as well as the latest in scholarship on the Hittites. He compares Homer’s descriptions of battle with contemporary Bronze Age descriptions from around the Near East and concludes that while Homer may not be a literal account, the war he describes is quite plausible. That plausibility lies at the heart of the book’s appeal to the nonscholarly reader. His primary goal is to prove there is little anachronistic in Homer’s account, and he succeeds.
His secondary goal is to illicit strategic and operational lessons from the conflict. Although Strauss does not attempt to draw direct comparisons between the Trojan War and current events, such comparisons inevitably arise. While the Greek warriors enjoyed strategic and operational mobility, their logistics were always uncertain, and they were torn by internal dissent. Troy enjoyed remarkable solidarity (given that allies provided a significant percentage of their forces) but was forced by circumstance into a defensive strategy. Strauss argues that had Troy pursued an unconventional war of attrition the city-state could have likely defeated the Greeks. Instead, the invading Greeks pursed the unconventional strategy of raid and stratagem, and thus Troy fell to either treachery or the infamous Trojan horse.
Strauss’ lively prose and inspired scholarship make this book an excellent read. It is especially well suited to newcomers to classical historic studies. For Marines, especially noncommissioned and company grade officers, his examination of Bronze Age warfare provides great insight into war in general and fighting men in particular. My final suggestion is that although Strauss’ discussion of sources is clear and well written, readers not overly interested in such minutiae should skip directly to the first chapter and his chronological examination of the war.
>Mr. Westermeyer is a historian in the History Division of the Marine Corps.
