Coming Home from War in Ancient Greece

(Host: Lucy)

The Iliad and The Odyssey dramatize not only war, but how challenging it can be to return from war, and how war separates those who fight from their families and communities — even when there aren’t angry gods involved. Figuring out the history behind these beloved poems has a long and complicated history of its own. Scholars have used archaeology to find cities and palaces made famous by Homer. And historians debate the cultural meanings of war and trauma in cultures far removed from our own. The Return (2024) engages with many of these debates as it portrays Odysseus and Penelope’s familiar human story.

 

For further reading suggestions and more, please visit: https://www.footnotinghistory.com

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
The siege of Troy, the massive horse, the wanderings of Odysseus — these are stories
that a lot of people know. But the history behind the literature is much less familiar.

(00:24):
Hello, and welcome to Footnoting History. I’m Lucy, and on this episode, I’ll be exploring
both some of the history behind the ancient epics of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the history of
how those epics have been understood and retold. The most recent of these retellings, The Return,
is a film I can’t find enough people to talk about with, so: if you’ve also seen it, dear listeners,

(00:44):
let me know! I will get to that, and my many feelings about Ralph Fiennes’ facial expressions,
but first, some background on the history… and how Homer’s poems themselves helped us
to discover it. Homer’s poems were written roughly around 800 B.C.E.,
describing a period around four centuries earlier, circa 1200 B.C.E. Not only do I think that these

(01:07):
are genuinely great works of literature, but also, they can tell us a great deal about
the Aegean-Mediterranean world. In the second millennium B.C.E., trade routes stretched from
Mesopotamia to Sicily. And in defense of these trade routes, cities might go to war. Moreover,
these poems tell us about what the peoples of ancient Greece thought human life and the

(01:28):
human mind were for, and what the human heart was like. They show us both parts of humanity
that we may recognize as in some way timeless, and emotional and intellectual responses that
may seem alien to us, because so decisively shaped by a foreign place, and a distant time.
Most modern scholars, to quote H.D.F. Kitto, have great faith in the “general veracity of

(01:53):
the traditions which survived into Homer’s poems.” So, archaeologists, for instance,
used the assertion of The Iliad that wise Nestor ruled over a strong and wealthy kingdom in “sandy
Pylos” as basis for archaeological investigation… and found an impressive temple complex in Pylos.
Part of what we see in The Odyssey and more recently in The Return is a dramatization of

(02:18):
a historical process that even experts know very little about: the transition, in ancient Greece,
from the dominant power of hubs like Mycenae and Troy to a more decentralized political
structure. Odysseus being King of Ithaca, in other words, matters, even though we might

look at it and say (02:36):
it’s only a small island. So, when and where was Troy? Well, historians
tended to disbelieve that it existed, until Heinrich Schliemann dug it up in
the mid-nineteenth century. It’s on the coast of what is now Turkey, across the Aegean Sea from the
Greek archipelago. The remains of 9 successive city settlements have been found on the site;

(02:59):
and it is the 6th that dates to the period of the Trojan War described by Homer — and it was in fact
destroyed by fire, as the legends tell. The city of King Agamemnon, described by Homer as “golden
Mycenae,” was not only built of golden sandstone, but archaeologists dug up gold bars at the site,
so both its appearance and its wealth appear to justify Homer’s description. Agamemnon’s city of

(03:24):
the broad ways was just that… and archaeological evidence also confirms the reality represented by

Homer (03:30):
that the culturally diverse kingdoms  and city-states of the ancient Aegean basin
were united under a single influential power… though perhaps tenuously so. Many scholars think,
in fact, that Homer’s epics were crafted around a time of transition in social norms,
when debates about who had power, and who should have authority, were particularly active.

(03:55):
The very, very short version of The Iliad — which I recommend to absolutely everyone,
if you haven’t read it already — is that representatives of all the powers of Greece follow
King Agamemnon to Troy, to avenge his brother’s dishonor. Paris, you see, a prince of the city of
Troy, had abducted Helen, the wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. Historically, scholars tend to

(04:21):
agree that the fact that Troy was an enormously wealthy trade hub mattered more to the reasons
it was besieged than the folly of Paris, the suffering of Helen, or the honor of the Greeks.
But the version that everyone knows, because it’s the version told by Homer, is this: the Greeks

(04:43):
besieged Troy for 10 years. Gods fought alongside mortals. But it was impossible to breach the walls
of the city… until Odysseus came up with a trick. Homer gets that war is a thing that breaks and
deforms people. This is not an action movie, in other words. We get, in Book 2 of The Iliad,

(05:09):
the image of a man falling like a clean-growing poplar, felled to be warped into a chariot wheel.
We also, often, get details about the parentage, birthplace, and personal histories of men in the
midst of battle. This can be surprising to the modern reader expecting linear narrative. With

(05:29):
spears being thrown and armor pierced, Homer wants to tell us about how, for example,
Simoeísios was conceived beside a river by a shepherdess? Well, yes. Because all this
noise and tumult will die away; it is brief; and the man cut down in this moment, by this chance,
in this protracted war, is a man from a place of peace, the son of a mother who remembers him

(05:55):
surrounded by the scent of sun-soaked grass. The Iliad is a poem about soldiers, but it
never allows us to lose sight of the families affected by war. One of Odysseus’ closest friends,
Diomedes, has his death foreshadowed in the midst of his greatest success. In Robert
Fitzgerald’s translation, the passage exhorts the warrior himself: “So let Diomedes pause,

(06:19):
for all his prowess, let him remember he may meet his match, and Aigialeia, Adrestos’ daughter,
starting up from sleep some night in tears may waken all the house, missing her husband, noblest

of Akhaians (06:33):
Diomedes.” It’s a gut-wrenching  passage. And we get this sort of thing,
crucially, for men on both sides of the conflict. Hector is the prince of Troy, the son of Priam.
His wife Andromache goes to the watchtower for a chance of seeing him — even if it is only to see
him die — and when he returns in bloodstained armor, she runs unhesitating into his arms.

(06:59):
They both make much of their toddler, Hector worries about his family’s fate if Troy falls:
will his son die, and his wife be forced to carry water as a household slave? Or will tiny Astyanax
grow up to be a proud warrior, taking on Hector’s own role, surpassing his father’s greatness? It’s
the first option. But Hector doesn’t know that. As the battles of The Iliad grow ever bloodier,

(07:24):
the metaphors get homelier, recalling women spinning wool, and young men guarding sheep;
deer glimpsed in lush forests, and snow on peaceful pastures. The armies, meanwhile,
become forces of nature, destructive and inevitable as fire in drought. Homer continues
to treat war with clear-eyed sorrow, calling it “heartbreaking”; or “dreary” from the lips

(07:46):
of Nestor. As the battles grow more intense, the parallels between the two armies likewise grow,
with nervous sentinels and funeral pyres mirroring each other. Doom would be clear even
if the gods didn’t keep talking about it. Simone Weil, in her work on The Iliad,

writes this (08:01):
“Perhaps all men, by the very act of  being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet
this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes. The strong are, as a matter of fact, never
absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this.” I think

(08:22):
this analysis gets at something very important about Homer’s vision of war, and certainly also
at how this vision is translated to the screen. Weil argues that those who exercise force, in
The Iliad, in acting without reflection, also act without justice or prudence. This is, crucially,
a story without heroes or villains in the sense modern audiences might expect. Incidentally, I

(08:49):
think this is also one of the many things that the film Troy gets wrong, although I’m not immune to
Peter O’Toole as King Priam. Sean Bean as Odysseus is also great — and he even survives for once!
Odysseus is a phenomenal character, and I adore him. He is also, in Emily Wilson’s translation,

(09:09):
“a complicated man.” He is, as readers of the Iliad and Odyssey know, a man responsible for
brutal violence, both at war and after his homecoming. And like his companions,
he is vulnerable. Hollywood may teach us to expect protagonists to survive because they’re the
protagonists. Ancient literature has no such guarantees. Both the fragility of life and the

(09:36):
ways in which war takes men far away from their communities are made constantly present to the
readers (or, originally, hearers) of The Iliad. We are, often, more keenly aware of this than
the characters themselves. But The Odyssey does not let us lose sight of the fact that Odysseus
is constantly barely escaping death. Always. As Ralph Fiennes observed in an interview, while

(10:01):
“the wrath of Poseidon is the main reason why, in Homer, Odysseus has not returned. In [the] film,
you don't know that. All gods and monsters are gone.” However we interpret the role of
the sea god in Odysseus’ desperate wanderings, by the time he gets home to Ithaca, he’s alone,
he’s twitchy, and he’s recognizably burdened by what we would call survivor’s guilt.

(10:22):
The question of the ways in which the aftereffects of war in the ancient world were similar to those
in our own has been much debated by scholars. This is part of an even bigger scholarly debate,
about how, when, and if we can apply the contemporary diagnostic label of PTSD to the

(10:43):
experiences of historical conflict. An important part of this debate is the argument that what
counts as a traumatic memory is not just highly individualized, but to some extent culturally
constructed. As a historian of medicine, I tend to be skeptical of retrospective diagnosis: the

(11:06):
practice of applying the labels of contemporary scientific and medical understanding to the past.
It presumes, for one thing, that a diagnosis would present with recognizably similar symptoms in very
distant and distinct historical cultures. In the case of post-traumatic stress disorder,
it also presumes that the mental and emotional experience of battle would be comparable for,

(11:32):
say, 21st-century American infantry and ancient Athenian hoplites.
Jason Crowley is one of the scholars who argues against this. Not only are the historically
specific circumstances of combat very different, but the norms and values of ancient Greece treated
war as a legitimate tool of negotiating diplomacy, not merely a last resort when diplomacy failed.

(11:57):
Moreover, the city-states of Greece didn’t have standing armies in the modern sense; so war could
and did come to anyone, as a disruption, or a rite of passage, or both. Also, campaigning in
ancient Greece didn’t typically entail the kind of long-term absence from family and community that

(12:18):
modern warfare so often does. Crowley argues that the Greeks saw bravery on the battlefield as both
an individual and a social good, that defined a man’s character. And I am saying a man’s character
deliberately here because of the very gendered question of who fights in ancient Greece. Homer’s
epics show men both performing and narrating these deeds. But there’s also the counterargument:

(12:44):
that authors like Homer and Xenophon show the devastating emotional consequences of war, on both
an individual and a social level, in ways that we can recognize as comparable to those in our own
society, and those that we can understand through the lens of labels like post-traumatic stress

(13:08):
disorder. Despite the limitations of retrospective diagnosis, I do think it’s absolutely possible
to read ancient literature through this lens. Homer shows us warriors sleepless, or woken by
nightmares; he shows us social relationships deteriorating under the effects of long-term
stress on campaign. I’m not going to resolve this scholarly debate in one podcast episode,

(13:33):
obviously. But I think it’s worth noting. In The Odyssey — and in The Return — we see
Odysseus, his family, and his whole community grappling with the question of what a homecoming

means (13:53):
for a survivor, for those who didn’t  survive, and for those who made choices shaped
by the absence of those at war. The Return, understandably, tends to the argument
that while individual responses to war vary, it can hardly fail to be profoundly
damaging. Simone Weil, in her analysis of The Iliad, put it more succinctly: “violence
obliterates anybody who feels its touch.” In the film, one of the herdsmen gathered in

(14:17):
Eumaeus’ hut says that, until the end of time, the ghosts of Troy will haunt the act of war.
My immediate reaction, sitting in the theater, was twofold. First, I thought: yes, the ghosts
of Troy will come and watch all wars till the end of time. And then I thought: is that echoing
something I’ve already read? I think the answer to that question is no, not in a direct sense.

(14:42):
But in the Western world, certainly, the ghosts of Troy have been invoked again and again.
Alexander the Great, on his campaigns, slept with a copy of The Iliad under his pillow.
Virgil wrote an entire epic poem about Aeneas’ flight from Troy, and attempts to found a new

civilization. Spoiler alert (15:01):
it’s the Roman  Empire. Medieval romances told and retold
this story. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most famous Arthurian romances,
defines its own narrative as beginning “after the siege and assault on Troy had ceased.”
In the sixteenth century, with Europe ravaged by bloody conflict over inheritance

(15:24):
or religion or both at the same time, Christopher Marlowe wrote about Helen’s
as the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium. It’s that line,
I would argue, that results in the moment of Helen’s gaze being invoked in The Return. It
also gets quoted a lot, obviously. Approximately 10 years after Marlowe wrote that, in Dr. Faustus,

(15:47):
Shakespeare’s Hamlet hired a bunch of actors… and talked about the Trojan War. And that gets even

more nested (15:53):
the speech Hamlet asks the players  to repeat for him is one given by Aeneas to Dido:
in other words, by one of the most famous survivors of the Trojan War, recounting its
horror to the woman he’s falling in love with. I know, Aeneas is really bad at romantic small

(16:15):
talk. But as Corinna Pache has pointed out, telling one’s story can itself be an important
part of recovering from trauma. An idea that also recurs, in The Return, is that people love
stories. Stories help us make sense of ourselves, of our communities, and of our shared past. In The

(16:39):
Odyssey, Odysseus himself tells his story — or avoids telling it — in a variety of ways. Homer
himself, like those who have adapted his works, asks: What stories do we choose to believe? Which
do we understand as true, and in what ways? In some ways, The Odyssey itself is unresolved;

(17:02):
a prophecy relates that Odysseus will have to leave the home he fought so long to return to.
But when he embraces his wife Penelope, it is she, says Homer, who was as relieved as
a shipwrecked sailor, his skin crusted with salt, cast up at last on the land he longed

for. It might be my favorite image of the poem (17:23):
a  homecoming that ends the separation of a husband
and wife by making his past hers as well. This and all of our Footnoting History
episodes are available captioned on our YouTube channel. Thanks for listening,

and until next time, remember (17:40):
the best  stories are always in the footnotes.