Solomon2007 Article TheVacillationsOfTheTrojanMyth

DOI 10.
1007/s12138-008-0016-z
The Vacillations of the Trojan Myth:

Popularization & Classicization,
Variation & Codification1
JON SOLOMON
© Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008
Petersen’s Troy, claiming only to be “inspired by Homer’s Iliad,” contains more Iliadic
material than most works of art of the past three millennia. The archaic Greek cyclic
poets created popular and romantic prequels and sequels to the events of the war, of
which Homer’s Iliad comprises a relatively small part, so only a proportionally small
percentage of works by subsequent Greco-Roman poets and painters recast or illus-
trated events from the Iliad. Later antiquity questioned the authenticity of Homer’s ac-
count, and along with the medieval neglect of Greek this led to the dominance of the
accounts by Dares, Dictys, and Benoît de Sainte-Maure. The recovery of Greek in the
Renaissance relegated Homer’s epic to scholarly ventures, and Schliemann’s identifi-
cation of the historical Troy discouraged popular artists from transferring the Iliad to
new twentieth-century genres and media.
Introduction: Artists, Invention, Authenticity, and the Classical Tradition
W hen the mythological fantasy film, Clash of the Titans, premiered in 1981,
I had the opportunity to meet with Ray Harryhausen, who was re-
sponsible for realizing the film’s Dynamation effects, thereby bringing Pega-
sus to life by creating the visual images of a winged white stallion soaring
above the clouds with Perseus riding on his back. Harryhausen and I talked
1. The following article developed out of a paper presented at a conference on “The

Aesthetics of Power and the Classical Epic Traditon” held at Boston University
on November 19, 2004, to mark the completion of the first ten volumes of this jour-
nal, IJCT volumes 1 (1994/95) to 10 (2003/04). Articles based on the other four pa-
pers read at the conference have been published in IJCT vol. 13 (2006/07) 449-570.
– The author wishes to express his thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Haase, for his
numerous suggestions, and to Daniel Javitch (New York University, Department
of Comparative Literature) as well.
Jon Solomon, Department of Classics, University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign,

4080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 South Matthews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801-3676.
International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 14, No. 3/4, Fall 2007, pp. 482-534.
Solomon 483
about mythology and film for a few minutes, and when he, a filmmaker, asked
me, a classicist, what was not authentic about the film, the following exchange
took place, as best I can reconstruct it:
Solomon: “I was wondering how you came up with the idea to have
Perseus ride Pegasus—because in our ancient Greek sources it is
the lesser known hero Bellerophon who rides Pegasus; Perseus
is the hero who cuts off Medusa’s head which in turn causes her
to give birth to Pegasus, but he never rides Pegasus.2
Harryhausen: “Did you see the film? Did you think the scenes in
which Perseus rides on Pegasus above the mountains and clouds
were convincing?”
Solomon: “Yes, those scenes were quite imaginative and effective.”
Harryhausen: “So that’s why I did it!”
Solomon: “Well, you’re actually in good company: there is plenty of
historical precedent for doing it this way going all the way back
to the Renaissance.”3
I begin with this anecdote because, despite its apparent superficiality, it
confirmed for me what I had begun thinking in 1977 while writing The Ancient
World in the Cinema. There I allowed for an artist’s creativity and originality to
balance the authenticities required by a film set in antiquity.4 But as a result of
this encounter and others in which I had the opportunity to talk with artists,
I eventually developed something tantamount to a guideline: whether an
artist (filmmaker or otherwise) is faithful to the ancient sources or distorts his-
torical, literary, or iconographic authenticity, I, as a classicist interested in
studying methods of representing classical antiquity in the arts and the con-
tinuing development of the classical tradition, require myself at least to at-
tempt to understand the artist’s purpose in preserving, paralleling, adapting,
or even contradicting this authenticity.
This guideline applies in particular to a film like Wolfgang Petersen’s
Troy, which via camera and computer renders into drama what can be con-
sidered both a cycle of well-known ancient Greek myths and a significant
event in ancient history as well as one of the most important works of epic
poetry ever written, Homer’s Iliad.5 A myth is a fiction—at least in the rational
world—and lends itself to narrative variation and adaptation as well as in-
2. For a summary of the early sources, see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide
to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1993) 314-316.
3. For the late medieval sources of the conflation, and the ancient accounts that may
have led to it, see John M. Steadman, “Perseus Upon Pegasus and Ovid Moral-
ized,” Review of English Studies 9 (1958) 407-410. For a subsequent list, see Jane
Davidson Reid, The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) II, 876-883.
4. Jon Solomon, The Ancient World in the Cinema (South Brunswick NJ: A. S. Barnes
and Company, 1978) 10, 23; revised and expanded edition (New Haven and Lon-
don: Yale University Press, 2001) 25-31.
5. For Troy, see the recent Martin M. Winkler, ed., Troy: From Homer’s Iliad to Holly-
wood Epic (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007); and Gideon Nisbet,
Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture, ser. Greece and Rome Lives (Exeter:
484 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Fall 2007
novative thematic interpretation.6 Accounts of ancient historical events have

been recorded by only a few sources at best, rarely by eyewitnesses, and, in-
sofar as the details of bronze age events are concerned, are particularly diffi-
cult to reconstruct accurately. Even allowing for oral variants and the so-called
“wild papyri,”7 Homer’s Iliad offers the most monolithic narrative of the three,
but Petersen never claimed that his purpose was to dramatize Homer’s Iliad.
Petersen was “inspired” by the poem, but as an artist dramatizing an ancient
cycle of myths and an inaccurately documented historical event, Petersen re-
spected the required narrative and iconographical parameters but thereby ac-
quired in turn the authority to alter the internal details of mythical and
mytho-historical events.8 Many artists do not alter myths or historical events
drastically; they simply retell them in conformance with their source mate-
rial—irrespective of the reliability of their sources. But when independently
thinking artists do alter them in significant ways, they often make a notable
change of direction in the tradition.
This precedent begins with Homer and Hesiod and continues throughout
antiquity and beyond. Homer hardly describes the actual events of a thir-
teenth-century Mycenaean invasion of Wilusa, and his text confuses bronze
age and geometric elements.9 The Iliad itself seems to contain a number of nar-
University of Exeter Press, 2006) 78-86, along with my review, forthcoming in this
journal, IJCT 15.1 (2008).
6. For a recent discussion of the relationship between fiction and truth, fiction and
history including variation and contextualization of Homeric myth, see G. W.
Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian, Sather Classical Lectures 58 (Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994) 9-27
7. For a summary of recent scholarship in reevaluating the extent to which Homer’s
text was codified, recorded, and varied, see Margalit Finkelberg, “The Cypria, the
Iliad, and the Problem of Multiformity in Oral and Written Tradition,” Classical
Philology 95 (2000) 1-11.
8. Petersen had studied ancient Greek at the Johanneum Gymnasium in Hamburg
for at least six years. When he heard that Warner Brothers was developing a film
inspired by the Iliad, he “flashed back right away to schooltime.” See Winkler, ed.,
Troy (above, n. 5) 5.
9. On the historicity of the Trojan War, insofar as Petersen’s Troy is concerned, see
Manfred O. Korfmann, “Was There a Trojan War? Troy Between Fiction and Ar-
chaeological Evidence,” in Winkler, ed., Troy (above, n. 5) 20-26, after Manfred
Korfmann, Joachim Latacz and David Hawkins, “Was There a Trojan War?” Ar-
chaeology 57, no. 3 (May-June 2004) 36-41. Korfmann 2007 (26) concludes with the
working hypothesis “that we ought to take Homer seriously about the back-
ground information of a war between Trojans and Greeks that his epic provides.”
Carol G. Thomas and Craig Conant The Trojan War, ser. Greenwood guides to his-
toric events of the ancient world (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005; reprint:
Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007) 94 sum up their book by speak-
ing of “the tale of Troy – which we have argued seems to be built on a factual
base.” No clear stand on the matter is taken by Andrew Dalby, Rediscovering
Homer: Inside the Origins of Epic (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006)
31-63 (“The Iliad and History”). Radically skeptical about even the possibility of
specific recollections of a ‘Trojan War’ in the Homeric epic: Kurt Raaflaub, “His-
torical approaches to Homer,” in Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy and Irene S. Lemos, eds.,
Ancient Greece: From the Mycenaean Palaces to the Age of Homer, Edinburgh Leven-
tis Studies 3 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) 449-462, esp. 451-455
Solomon 485
rative and mythological inventions.10 Hesiod seems to have invented the char-
acter Epimetheus as a less foresighted foil to his forward-thinking
Prometheus,11 while Pindar in his First Olympian Ode (35-40) purposefully and
unabashedly announces that he is changing the myth of Pelops.12 Thucydides
observes this process in the works of poets (e.g. Homer) and chroniclers (e.g.
Herodotus),13
The conclusions drawn from the verbal evidence I have considered
should not be in error when compared to the poets who exaggerate
their songs or the chroniclers who collect information to make recita-
tions more pleasing than truthful, speaking of matters beyond the
reach of evidence, many of them rendered legendary by the expanse
of time.
But although Thucydides criticizes his predecessors for such artistic license
and attempted to be as accurate as possible, he (1.22) willingly admits that he
reconstructs the speeches of the politicians and generals he discusses, and
these are the speeches of contemporary historical figures, not of legendary
figures from the bronze age. Plato manufactured a number of myths, at least
two of them—the myths of Er (Rep. 10.614b-618b) and Atlantis (Ti. 24e-25d;
Criti. 108e-109a)—having considerable influence for centuries and, in the case
(“The Trojan War”). Stefanie Jahn, Der Troia-Mythos: Rezeption und Transformation
in epischen Geschichtsdarstellungen der Antike (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag,
2007) rightly speaks of “Der Troiamythos als Geschichtsfiktion” (pp. 25-27). For
the debate on Troy from Heinrich Schliemann to Manfred Korfmann and the af-
termath see also below, p. 529 f. with n. 197
10. See, for example, Wolfgang Kullmann, “Gods and Men in the Iliad and Odyssey,”
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 89 (1985) 17 (= id., Homerische Movtive. Beiträge
zur Entstehung, Eigenart und Wirkung von Ilias und Odyssee, ed. Roland J. Müller
[Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992] 257); and M. M. Willcock, “Ad Hoc Inven-
tion in the Iliad,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 81 (1971) 41-53. For the prob-
lem of differentiating what Homer inherited and what he invented, see Mabel L.
Lang, “Reverberation and Mythology in the Iliad” in Carl A. Rubino and Cynthia
W. Shelmerdine, eds., Approaches to Homer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983)
140-164; Lang, “War Story into Wrath Story,” in J. B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris,
eds., The Ages of Homer: A Tribute to Emily Townsend Vermeule (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1995) 149-162; and Lowell Edmunds, “Myth in Homer,” in Ian Mor-
ris and Barry Powell, eds., A New Companion to Homer, Mnemosyne Suppl. 163
(Leiden, New York, Köln: Brill, 1997) 428-434.
11. Cf. M. L. West, Hesiod Theogony; Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1966) 307, 309-310; and Gantz, Early Greek Myth (above, n. 2) 164.
12. See Adolf Köhnken, “Pindar as Innovator: Poseidon Hippios and the Relevance of
the Pelops Story in Olympian 1,” Classical Quarterly 24 (1974) 199-206 (repr. in id.,
Darstellungsziele und Erzählstrategien in antiken Texten [Berlin and New York: Wal-
ter de Gruyter, 2006] 259-267); Douglas E. Gerber, Pindar’s Olympian One: A Com-
mentary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982) xi-xv, 89-90; and Gordon
Kirkwood, Selections From Pindar (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982) 43.
13. Thucydides 1.21: e0k de\ tw~n ei0rome/nwn tekmhri/wn o3mwj toiau~ta a1n tij nomi/zwn
ma/lista a4 dih~lqon ou0x a9marta/noi, kai\ ou1te w9j poihtai\ u9mnh/kasi peri\ au0tw~n e0pi\
to\ mei=zon kosmou=ntej ma~llon pisteu/wn, ou1te w9j logogra/foi cune/qesan e0pi\ to\
prosagwgo/teron th~| a0kroa/sei h2 a0lhqe/steron, o1nta a0nece/legkta kai\ ta\ polla\
u9po\ xro/nou au0tw~n a0pi/stwj e0pi\ to\ muqw~dej e0knenikhko/ta.
of the latter, even being accepted as historical.14 These are just a few notable
examples of a creative process that innovative ancient artists intuitively mas-
tered, and the same process continues through the intervening centuries to
the modern period.
This would not be an important point to make since it has been such an
artistic commonplace throughout Western history and is a sine qua non of
film adaptation.15 But several shocking sequences in Troy demand its restate-
ment here. The specific sequences to which I refer take place within the space
of four minutes (1’16”-1’20”), wherein at the climax of a battle scene Petersen
has Hector kill first Menelaus and then Ajax. When that happens, much to the
astonishment of classical scholars—including myself at first viewing—this
version of the Trojan myth becomes Petersen’s version of the Trojan myth. Pe-
tersen establishes membership among the impressive list of notable artists
who have made major revisions to the Troy tale, a list which, as we shall see,
is considerable in size and which, we should not forget, includes Homer.
Why does Petersen (or writer David Benioff) have Hector kill Menelaus
and Ajax?16 I do not know for certain, of course, but in the dramaturgical sense
Petersen’s innovation establishes Hector as a more worthy opponent of the
invincible Achilles, setting up the climactic duel between the two of them. In
the Iliad Homer does not have Achilles perform in battle at all until late in the
epic, but Petersen, seeking some significant action at the outset of his action
film, has already made sure to establish the prowess of Achilles in battle long
before: near the opening we see a duel between Achilles and the Thessalon-
ian Boagrius, which serves to establish the former as swift of foot and sure of
hand.17 These subsequent twin-killings by Hector thereby help to establish the
14. On the tradition of Plato’s Myth of Er, see, for instance, Isidore Silver, “Ronsard’s
Reflections on the Heavens and Time,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Associ-
ation 80 (1965) 344-364; and Josephine Waters Bennett, “Milton’s Use of the Vision
of Er,” Modern Philology 36 (1939) 351-358. For Plato’s mythological invention of
Atlantis in a socio-political context, see Kathryn A. Morgan, “Designer History:
Plato’s Atlantis Story and Fourth-Century Ideology,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 118
(1998) 101-118; for a historiological reading, see Gerard Naddaf, “The Atlantis
Myth: An Introduction to Plato’s Later Philosophy of History,” Phoenix 48 (1994)
189-209; for an annotated translation of Plato’s texts on Atlantis (from the Timaeus
and Critias), see Diskin Clay and Andrea Purvis, Four Island Utopias, being Plato’s
Atlantis, Euhemeros of Messene’s Panchaia, Iamboulos’ Island of the Sun, Sir Francis
Bacon’s New Atlantis, ser. The Focus Classical Library (Newburyport, MA: Focus
Publishing/R. Pullins Company, 1999) 53-97 (with “Introduction,” 36-41). For a
modern account of Atlantidean history, see Charles R. Pellegrino, Unearthing At-
lantis: An Archaeological Odyssey to the Fabled Lost Civilization (New York: Random
House, 1990).
15. Even high-profile, best-selling novels which have attracted legions of devoted
readers, e.g. the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter series, necessarily
undergo significant omissions and rearrangement of episode as well as confla-
tions of character. For the application to films set in antiquity, see Martin M. Win-
kler, “Gladiator and the Traditions of Historical Cinema,” in Winkler, ed., Gladiator:
Film and History (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004) 16-30.
16. Queries to Petersen and Benioff by correspondence have not yet merited a re-
sponse.
17. The name of Boagrius (Hom. Il. 2.533) is that of a river in Locris; Strabo (9.4.4)
says this river is also known by the name Manes.
Solomon 487
final duel between Achilles and Hector as indeed a grand championship. In

terms of cinematic tradition, there is the time-honored Hollywood require-
ment of killing villains, as the Atreidae are characterized in the film. Movie vil-
lains must be punished, or at least it is quite rare that they are not, and in a film
which is filled with heroes and villains, many villains must die, as we see at
the end of the film when both Agamemnon and Achilles are executed by Bri-
seis and Paris, respectively. This helps account for the slaying of Menelaus at
least. Also, by killing off Menelaus, Petersen releases Helen from her marital
obligation so she can flee from Troy with Paris at the end of the film—with-
out jumping through absurd narrative hoops, as Stesichorus (fr. 192) was
forced to do with his Egyptian Helen.18 And then there is the powerfully ef-
fective shock value of the moment: could anyone who has read the Iliad,
whether as student, teacher, or lay reader, be anything but stunned by this un-
expected sequence in which both Menelaus and then Ajax fall in battle at the
hands of Hector?
This is precisely the type of cinematic moment that forces the scholar of
the classical tradition to ponder more thoroughly and at least consider alter-
native narrative tracts. To do so it helps to keep in mind that Menelaus and
Hector were not historical characters, certainly at least not to the extent that
we have any reliable information about individual events in their lives or the
cause or place of their deaths. Even if one or both were originally historical
bronze-age kings or warriors, insofar as their roles in the Iliad are concerned,
they are mere fictional characters, and, equally important, they were in all
likelihood not fictional characters invented by Homer. Homer’s Menelaus and
Homer’s Hector do not have anything resembling an authentic history other
than what is found in the Homeric narrative. In Troy Petersen and Benioff are
the artists treating the fictional characters and narratives of the Trojan War, so
now Menelaus and Hector are their characters, the story of the Trojan War is
their narrative, and they make their artistic choices accordingly. Our function
is to consider why they change the fiction and how this fits into their cine-
matic conception and realization of the Trojan War and into the entire tradi-
tion of the Trojan tale. Our function is certainly not to say, simply, that Homer
18. Stesichorus retracted his (lost) poem denigrating Helen—which caused him to go
blind—by writing a palinode (quoted in Plato Phdr. 243A; R. 586C) claiming that
she never went to Troy, which regained him his eyesight. See David A. Campbell,
Greek Lyric III: Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and Others, Loeb Classical Library 476
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) 92-97. For recent work and
doubts about the authenticity of the story, see Alexander J. Beecroft, “‘This is not
a true story,’: Stesichorus’s Palinode and the Revenge of the Epichoric,” Transac-
tions of the American Philological Association 126 (2006) 47-69; and W. S. Barrett, Greek
Lyric, Tragedy , and Textual Criticism: Collected Papers (M. L. West, ed.) (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2007) 1-37. Nonetheless, the variant that Helen spent the
war in Egypt inspired subsequent works of art, including Euripides’ Helen and,
centuries later, H. D.’s canto epic, Helen in Egypt; see the recent Brittany Hughes,
Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Michèle
Broze, ed., Le mythe d’Hélène, ser. Mythes et Religions (Brussels: Ousia, 2003); Mau-
rizio Bettini and Carlo Brillante, Il mito di Elena: immagini e racconti dalla Grecia ad
oggi (Torino: G. Einaudi, 2002); and Matthew Gumpert, Grafting Helen: The Ab-
duction of the Classical Past (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001) esp. 18-
19.
did not do this and that therefore it is not authentic, or worse, that it is wrong,
and that therefore the Petersen/Benioff version is inaccurate or inauthentic,
and ergo poor or ineffective. There is no right or wrong here, only what exists
artistically.
Beyond the linguistic play on multi-syllabic Latinate nouns, the reason I
use the term “vacillations” and the pairs of opposing terms “popularization
and classicization” and “variation and codification” in the title of this paper
is that they apply quite fittingly to the unique tradition of the myths sur-
rounding the Trojan War. And I use the word “surrounding” here specifically
as well, for the traditions of myths involving the Trojan War are indeed sur-
rounded by a large corpus of myths generally known as the Cyclic Epics (or
“epic cycle”) that precede and follow the events of the Iliad and the entire Tro-
jan War.19 The compass of these myths both before Homer and after vacillated
in that they were transmitted orally and greatly varied in popular epics, then
they were turned into literary works that became regarded as classics that
were in turn segmented, imitated, and varied again, being subsequently cod-
ified as classics, which were then imitated, varied, and again popularized.
This process began in bronze-age Greece, continued throughout iron-age,
geometric, archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greece and from contemporary
Republican Rome well into the Empire, went through a second cycle in late an-
tiquity continuing into the middle ages and Renaissance, and has gone
through still another cycle in the modern period. This is a repetitious, cyclical
process, one which contradicts thoroughly the received assumption that
Homer‘s Iliad, because of its considerable reputation as a literary classic, be-
came and persisted as the exemplar for subsequent artists to imitate and re-
cast as “slices of Homer.”20
19. See M. L. West, Greek Epic Fragments from the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, Loeb
Classical Library 497 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Malcolm
Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle2 (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd., 1989). West
(12-19) discusses authorship, content, and other difficulties. The poems are dated
to the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. and attributed variously to Homer, Sta-
sinus of Cyprus, Hegesinus of Salamis, Eumelus of Corinth, Arctinus of Miletus,
and others. Although the poems were arranged chronologically in the third cen-
tury BC, perhaps by the first Homeric scholar of note, Zenodotus of Ephesus, the
texts were lost in the ensuing centuries. The unidentified late-ancient grammar-
ian Proclus summarized them in his Chrestomathy, and then the ninth-century pa-
triarch Photius in his Bibliotheca wrote a synopsis of Proclus’ work; Photius’
synopsis is preserved in Venetus A—a Venetian manuscript containing a copy of
the Iliad (Venetus gr. 239). For an early discussion, see D. B. Monro, “On the Frag-
ment of Proclus’ Abstract of the Epic Cycle Contained in the Codex Venetus of the
Iliad,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 4 (1883) 305-334. For the text and transmission of
Proclus’ Chrestomathy, see Albert Severyns, Recherches sur la Chrestomathie de Pro-
clos, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège
78, 79, and 132 (Paris: E. Droz, 1938, 1938, and 1953). On dating Proclus, who was
either the well-known fifth-century Neoplatonist or a later grammarian, see West
(12) and Michael Hillgruber, “Zur Zeitbestimmung der Chrestomathie des
Proklos,” Rheinisches Museum, Neue Folge 133 (1990) 397-404.
20. The phrase, attributed to Aeschylus (Ath. Deip. 8.39.347e), later echoed by Eu-
stathius (Ad Iliadem 23.256), has in modern scholarship been interpreted variously
to suggest that Aeschylus believed Homer to have composed the entire epic cycle,
or that it serves as an erudite joke by juxtaposing Aeschylus’ slices of fish (in the
Solomon 489
Because the subject of authenticity in contemporary popular cinema, in-

sofar as it attempts to recreate ancient settings and narratives, is of consider-
able complexity, this paper addresses only the specific but widely repeated
criticism that Petersen’s Troy, which, again, claims in the credits only to be
“inspired by Homer’s Iliad,” does not accurately represent Homer’s Iliad.21
This particular criticism became common enough among movie critics, few of
whom know the Iliad well at all, but it also seemed to be ubiquitous among
comments made by many of my colleagues in classical studies, whether these
comments were made to me personally or via an intermediary, or whether I
heard them in sessions at regional or national meetings.22 To the contrary, dra-
matic representations of the Trojan War have traditionally followed the Ho-
meric version, which covers at most only a few months of the conflict, only in
part and expanded upon it because the Iliad includes no account of the causes,
beginning, or conclusion of the war. Indeed, by the end of the following sur-
vey we will see that Petersen’s Troy, hardly a film version of Homer’s Iliad,
belongs entirely to and fittingly within the tradition of the Troy myth.
This survey will place Troy at the end of the artistic tradition associated
with Homer’s Iliad and within the mythological context of the general Troy
tale, which is one of the longest continuous narrative traditions in all of West-
ern culture. As a survey it is by nature incomplete. I make no pretense of ad-
dressing every work derived directly or indirectly from the Iliad, let alone
associated with the corpus of myths surrounding the Trojan War. Such a com-
prehensive survey is beyond the scope of this paper. The purpose of the sur-
vey is to examine general trends, and as the survey proceeds it will become
clear, 1) that the tradition has always been at least bifurcated and has usually
context of Athenaeus’ banquet) and Homer’s meat eaters. See John A. Scott,
“Athenaeus on Aeschylus and Homer,” Classical Journal 16 (1921) 302-303; and
Max Radin, “Homer and Aeschylus,” Classical Journal 17 (1922) 332-334.
21. Martin M. Winkler, “The Iliad and the Cinema,” in Winkler, ed., Troy (above, n. 5)
43-67, addresses this issue by discussing literary structures, e.g. similes, and Ho-
meric themes in the cinema.
22. See my comments in Jon Solomon, “Viewing Troy: Authenticity, Criticism, Inter-
pretation,” in Winkler, ed., Troy (above, n. 5) 85-98. Of all the professional film crit-
ics’ cleverly crafted comments regarding the film’s lack of fidelity to Homer, that
by Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times stands out: “Homer’s estate should sue.”
But he subsequently reveals his lack of familiarity with Iliadic battles: “the movie
shows perhaps 100,000 men in hand-to-hand combat, and then completely for-
gets them in order to focus on the Patroclus battle scene, with everybody stand-
ing around like during a fight on the playground.” For the review, see:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040514/REVIEWS/405140
30/1023. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times (http://www.fandango.com/troy
_ 84171/criticreviews) wrote: “For those viewers familiar with The Iliad—not ex-
actly a key demographic—Troy‘s script is a strange combination of accurate small
details and major departures. ... The most interesting change from the ancient
sources (except for a brief cameo by Julie Christie as Achilles’ mother, Thetis) is the
complete absence of the Greek gods. Their names are mentioned frequently but,
very different from The Iliad and The Odyssey, they do not physically appear and
involve themselves in the world of flesh and blood.” Also common were com-
ments like those of Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle: (http://www.film
spot.com/pages/tracking/index.php?tid=10&ref_id=303329): “Troy is all Holly-
wood and no Homer.”
consisted of multiple branches, making accuracy and authenticity a matter of

choice, 2) that the processes of classicization, popularization, codification, and
variation have worked within these various branches of the tradition, and 3)
that the Trojan War tradition has been relatively un-Homeric and even anti-
Homeric for a large portion of the 2700 years since Homer seems to have com-
posed the Iliad. In the survey it will also become apparent how rare it has been
for an artist of any era to construct an accurate and/or successful representa-
tion of the Iliad.23
I. Ancient Greece
We begin within Homer’s Iliad itself and a feature as quintessential as the
characterization of the protagonist Achilles. In the first book (1.415-418) Thetis
laments that Achilles has but one destiny, whereas in the ninth book (9.410-
416) Achilles claims to have a choice of two destinies. These two concepts of
destiny are incompatible.24 Externally, Homer’s Achilles conflicts with several
well known literary variants. Romance, fear, and cowardice are not charac-
teristic of the Homeric Achilles, but before the Trojan conflict the Achilles of
the cyclic Cypria sailed to the island of Skyros and married Lycomedes’ daugh-
ter Deidameia.25 By the fifth century this myth had developed into the very
23. For comprehensive surveys and anthologies, see Margaret Scherer, The Legends of
Troy in Art and Literature (New York: Phaidon Press for the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1963); Andrew Erskine, Troy Between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and
Imperial Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Martin Zimmermann, ed.,
Der Traum von Troia (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006); Heinz Hofmann, ed., Troia von
Homer bis heute (Tübingen: Attempto Verlag, 2004). See also, Georg Danek, “The
Story of Troy Through the Centuries,” in Winkler, ed., Troy (above, n. 5) 68-84; and
Ernst A. Schmidt, “Achill,” in Heinz Hofmann, ed., Antike Mythen in der europäi-
schen Tradition (Tübingen: Attempto Verlag, 1999) 91-125.
24. See, for instance, Bryan Hainsworth, The Iliad: A Commentary; Volume III: Books 9-
12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 116. Christopher H. Wilson,
Homer Iliad Books VIII and IX (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, Ltd, 1996) 236, in
demonstrating that Iliad 9 has several inconsistencies with the rest of the poem,
contrasts the latter passage as well with 16.36. See also, James V. Morrison, “Al-
ternatives to the Epic Tradition: Homer’s Challenges in the Iliad,” Transactions of
the American Philological Association 122 (1992) 61-71; Bruno Currie, “Homer and
the Early Epic Tradition,” in M.J. Clarke, B.G.F. Currie, R.O.A.M. Lyne, eds., Epic
Interactions: Perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the Epic Tradition presented to Jasper
Griffin by former pupils (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 30.
25. Proclus Chr. 1. On the basis of linguistic elements in the remaining fragments of
the Cypria, West, Greek Epic Fragments (above, n. 19) 13, assumes the Cypria were
written later than the Iliad. See also, Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neo-
platonic Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1986) 177-179. For the poetic account in the “Epithalamium of
Achilles and Deidameia” attributed to the second-century B.C. Bion of Smyrna,
see J. M. Edmunds, The Greek Bucolic Poets, Loeb Classical Library 28 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1912) 397-401; on the attribution, see also, J. D. Reed,
Bion of Smyrna: The Fragments and the Adonis (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997) 29. For a modern poetic “sequel,” see Henry Harmon Chamberlin,
Last Flowers: A Translation of Moschus and Bion (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1937) 37-42. That Homer omits this myth does not necessarily mean
that he was unfamiliar with it; there is also the possibility that he consciously omit-
Solomon 491
un-Homeric tale that Thetis had put Achilles on the island of Skyros and dis-
guised him in woman’s clothing to avoid war duty; he was discovered only
when Odysseus sounded a trumpet, or offered weaponry amidst wares usu-
ally targeted for women, which lured Achilles into revealing himself.26 Sub-
sequent writers tried to flesh out Homer’s brooding warrior by describing his
passion for the Amazon Penthesileia,27 and by giving him the Trojan princess,
Polyxena, as either a sacrificial victim after his death28 or the object of traitor-
ous congeniality.29 Then there is the myth of his invulnerability, his mother
Thetis treating him in fire30 or dipping him into the River Styx to make him so,
except for the heel by which she held him.31 Surely the Achilles of the Iliad is
vulnerable, and we have no literary evidence for this strange variant until the
Roman period.32 But there is some visual evidence, for instance, the now lost,
sixth-century Chalcidian amphora attributed to the Inscription Painter, which
suggests that Achilles’ heel, or more precisely his ankle, was a spot of vul-
nerability, whether the rest of him was vulnerable or not..33 In an attempt at
some clarity, we can say that either there were at least two variants for the na-
ture of Achilles from the time of Homer, or earlier, or, there were at least two
variants that developed from the time of Homer through the Roman period.34
In either case, there was no single physical characterization of Achilles. An-
other possibility is that the literary tradition concerning Achilles was not ob-
served by visual artists. There are a number of ancient Greek graphic
illustrations of myths and events which do not match up with correlating nar-
ted mention of it from his epic, or, less likely, that it has been left out in the trans-
mission of our text.
26. It is Pausanias (1.22.6) who reports that already in the fifth century Polygnotus
had painted some aspect of this episode in the Athenian Pinacothece. Cf. Apol-
lodorus Bibliotheca 3.174; Ov. M. 13.162-170; Hyginus Fab. 96; Statius Ach. 1.198-396.
27. In addition to later ancient accounts, the Aethiopis (Proclus Chr. 2; West, Greek Epic
Fragments [above, n. 19] 14-15) reports that Achilles slew Thersites for taunting
him about his love for Penthesileia, suggesting that there was already at least the
appearance of love between the two warriors. For the relationship between the
Iliad, the Aethiopis and a hypothetical separate Memnonis see Bruno Currie,
“Homer and the Early Epic Tradition,” in Clarke, Currie and Lyne, eds., Epic In-
teractions (above, n. 24) 24.
28. E.g. in Euripides’ Hecuba. The paintings in the Athenian Pinacothece, described in
Pausanias (1.22.6), also included a depiction of Polyxena about to be sacrificed on
the tomb of Achilles.
29. E.g. Hyginus Fab. 110.
30. E.g. Apollodorus Bibliotheca 3.171. (See Robin Hard’s note in: Apollodorus, Library
of Greek Mythology, transl. with an Introd. and Notes by R. H., ser. Oxford World’s
Classics [Oxford: University Press, 1997] 237.)
31. Statius Ach. 1.133-34, 268-70, 480-81.
32. Hyginus Fab. 107; Servius Aen. 6.57.
33. For a discussion and drawing of the lost painting, see Jonathan Burgess, “Achilles’
Heel: The Death of Achilles in Ancient Myth,” Classical Antiquity 14 (1995) 217-43.
Burgess observes that a second arrow has pierced Achilles’ back, suggesting that
this Achilles is not therefore invulnerable either.
34. For additional discussion, see William Hansen, Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to Inter-
national Tales Found in Classical Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002)
483-485.
rative texts.35 But again, that idea, too, supports the idea that there were mul-
tiple and/or developing traditions.
As we have seen, Helen was another bifurcated character from the myths
surrounding the Trojan War: the Homeric Helen remains at Troy for the entire
span of the war, while the Stesichorean Helen never went to Troy.36 Reliable
sources for these variant traditions of Achilles, Helen, and many other char-
acters and events associated with the Trojan War were not nearly as obscure
or unimpressive in the pre-classical period as they are today. Even in Homer’s
day, or shortly after or before, there was the assortment of epics, many of
which were attributed to Homer and therefore seemed to have his imprimatur,
completing the rest of the Trojan mythological cycle from Paris’ abduction of
Helen in the aforementioned Cypria, to Paris’ slaying of Achilles and the death
of Penthesileia in the Aethiopis, the episode of the Trojan Horse in the so-called
Little Iliad, and the sacking of Troy in the Iliu Persis. It is important to note that
all of these events, except for the death of Penthesileia, are found in Petersen’s
Troy.37
35. R. Glynn, “Herakles, Nereus and Triton: A Study of Iconography in Sixth Century
Athens,” American Journal of Archaeology 85 (1981) 121-132, discusses the absence
of contemporary literary sources for the depiction of Heracles wrestling the sea
monster Triton, which became popular in both Attic vase painting and sculpture
in the late sixth century. Descriptions of the Panathenaic procession fail to describe
even the sculpted Parthenon frieze to such an extent that R. Holloway, “The Ar-
chaic Acropolis and the Parthenon Frieze,” Art Bulletin 48 (1966) 233, claimed that
the former is not the subject of the latter; see also, Susan I. Rotroff, “The Parthenon
Frieze and the Sacrifice to Athena,” American Journal of Archaeology 81 (1977) 379.
Similarly, even the brief accounts of Heracles carrying off Apollo’s Delphic tripod
in Plutarch (De E apud Delphos 6.387D), Pausanias (3.21.8), and Apollodorus (2.6.2)
all post-date a proliferation of late geometric and archaic relief sculpture and
black-figure vase depictions of the myth by more than six centuries.
36. See above, n. 18. In the first half of the second century A.D. the grammarian
Ptolemy Chennos (“the Quail”) in his New History created the fiction of a Helen,
daughter of an Athenian man named Musaios, who lived in the time before
Homer and had “written a work on the Trojan war ..., from whom Homer is said
to have taken the story” (h9 pro\ 9Omh/rou 9Ele/nh, h9 to\n 0Iliako\n suggrayame/nh
po/lemon ... par’ h[j kai\ Omhron
3 le/getai labei~n th\n u9po/qesin, Ptol. Chenn., Kaine
Historia IV 15, ed. Anton Xhatzis, Der Philosoph und Grammatiker Ptolemaios Chen-
nos. Leben, Schriftstellerei und Fragmente etc. I, Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur
des Altertums VII, 2, 1 [Paderborn: Druck und Verlag von Ferdinand Schöningh,
1914; repr. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1967] 29). On Ptolemy’s New History
in literary-historical context see G. W. Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian
(above, n. 6) 24-27 and 35.
37. For a brief orientation, see Ken Dowden, “The Epic Tradition in Greece,” in Robert
Fowler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2004) 188-205, esp. 197-204. See also, Michael J. Anderson, The Fall of
Troy in Early Greek Poetry and Art, ser. Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997) 105-176; Bernhard Zimmermann, “Scheiben von den
grossen Mahlzeiten Homers’: Troia und Homer in der griechischen Dichtung der
archaischen und klassischen Zeit,” in Hofmann, ed., Troia von Homer bis heute
(above, n. 23) 35-51; and Jonathan S. Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in
Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) 7-
46. For the view that Homer’s Iliad is more comprehensive, see Lang, “War Story
into Wrath Story” (above, n. 9) 149. On the ascription, in the archaic and classical
Solomon 493
The ancient mythological tradition examined thus far has been found to
be bifurcated and variable, and, insofar as Homer’s Iliad is concerned, sur-
prisingly irreverent. This pattern emerges clearly in the sixth century BC,
when the influential Stesichorus penned his versions of such post-Homeric
tales as the Oresteia, the Wooden Horse, the Sack of Troy, and the Nostoi (Re-
turns) as well as the account of Helen’s absence, and continues throughout
the classical fifth century.38 Gregory Nagy in Pindar’s Homer observes that not
only did the fifth-century Pindar fail to distinguish between the Homeric and
extra-Homeric aspects of the Troy myth, but he also treated the non-Homeric
heroes Cycnus and Memnon as equivalents of the Homeric ones.39 Thucy-
dides (1.9-11) treats Homer’s epic poems as historical texts and mines them for
historical and even archaeological information.40 Despite the statement in On
the Sublime (13.3), the author of which claims that Herodotus, Stesichorus,
Archilochus, and especially Plato are all imitators of Homer, Herodotus (2.118-
120) tells us that he believes an entirely non-Homeric variant that came indi-
rectly, through Egyptian priests, from the mouth of Menelaus himself.41
Of the thirty-three extant fifth-century B.C. Athenian tragic dramas, more

than one-third are extra-Homeric.42 None can be said to be direct dramatiza-
periods, of much of the epic cycle beyond Iliad and Odyssey to Homer see Barbara
Graziosi, “La definizione dell’opera omerica nel periodo arcaico e classico,” in
Guiseppe Zanetto, Daniela Canavero, Andrea Capra and Alessandro Sgobbi, eds.,
Momenti della ricezione omerica: Poesia arcaica e teatro, Quaderni di Acme 67 (Mi-
lano: Cisalpino. Instituto Editoriale Universitario, 2004) 1-18.
38. For Stesichorus, see David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric: Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides,
and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 28-199. In general for
this period, see Barbara Patzek, “Troia und der Troia-Mythos im Bewusstsein der
Griechen von der archaischen zur klassischen Zeit,” in Zimmermann, ed., Der
Traum von Troia (above, n. 23) 57-70. On the Nostoi, see Maria Cecilia d’Ercole,
“Back From Troy: Diomedes and Other Heroes in the Ancient Mediterranean,” in
Metoda Kokole, Barbara Murovec, Marjeta Šašel Kos, and Michael Talbot, eds.,
Mediterranean Myths from Classical Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Ljubljana:
Zalozba ZRC, 2006) 23-34.
39. See chapter 14, “Pindar’s Homer,” of Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Pos-
session of an Epic Past, ser. The Mary Flexner Lectures (Baltimore: The Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1990) 414-415.
40. See Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic, ser. Cambridge
Classical Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2002) 118-123.
41. See Ludwig Huber, “Herodot und Homer,” in Hellmut Flashar and Konrad Gaiser,
eds., Synusia: Festgabe für Wolfgang Schadewaldt zum 15. März 1965 (Pfullingen: Ver-
lag Günther Neske, 1965) 29-52, esp. 47, n. 6; Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism:
Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton and Oxford: Prince-
ton University Press, 2002) 146-152 (“Herodotus and Poetry”), esp. 148; Graziosi,
Inventing Homer (above, n. 40) 111-118, 193-195. For the sense of Longinus’ state-
ment about Herodotus see Christopher Pelling, “Homer and Herodotus,” in
Clarke, Currie, and Lyne, eds., Epic Interactions (above, n. 24) 75-104.
42. The extra-Homeric include Aeschylus’ Oresteia (see, for example, Martin Hose,
“Aischylos’ Orestie. Eine alte Geschichte neu erzählt,” in M. Hose, ed., Meister-
werke der antiken Literatur. Von Homer bis Boethius [München: Verlag C. H. Beck,
2000] 34-53); Sophocles’ Ajax, Electra and Philoctetes; and Euripides’ Andromache,
Electra, Hecuba, Helen, Orestes, Troades, and the two Iphigenia plays.
tions of the Iliad except the Rhesus, the problematic attribution and the lack of
dramatic inspiration of which are telling.43 Of the scores of lost plays, a sig-
nificant majority have nothing to do with Homer or the Trojan tradition.44 But
of those that do, Aeschylus’ Memnon, Weighing of Souls (Psychostasia), and Phry-
gian Women derive from the cyclic Aethiopis; his Iphigenia, Bone Gatherers (Os-
tologoi), Necromancers (Psychagogoi), Palamedes, Penelope, Philoctetes, and Ajax
trilogy (The Adjudication of Arms; Thracian Women, Women of Salamis) are also
extra-Homeric; and while Aeschylus’ aptly termed Achilleis trilogy (Myrmi-
dons, Nereids, Phrygians) almost certainly dramatized some aspect of the latter
third of the Iliad’s narrative, several fragments apparently attach a homoerotic
element to the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus.45 Of the more than
one dozen Sophoclean dramas which treat some aspect of the Trojan cycle, all
are extra-Homeric,46 while a few other pre-Homeric tales are reduced to satyr-
plays (The Marriage of Helen, Crisis [Judgment of Paris?]). Of Euripides’ lost
works, a half-dozen are extra-Homeric,47 and none are Homeric other than the
aforementioned Rhesus. While Aristarchus of Tegea (Achilleis), Astydamas II
(Palamedes), and the fourth-century Chaeremon (Achilles Thersitoctonus) and
Carcinus (Myrmidones) penned tragedies drawn from the Trojan War mate-
rial, none of their works have survived.48 This means that of the more than
43. For recent work, see Marco Fantuzzi, “Euripides (?) “Rhesus” and Homer “Iliad”
8.498-501: Another Possible Clue to Zenodotus’ Reliability,” Classical Philology 100
(2005) 268-273; for the question of authenticity, see William Ritchie, The Authen-
ticity of the Rhesus by Euripides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
For this period in general, see Elena Pallantza, Der Troische Krieg in der nachhome-
rischen Literatur bis zum 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005). On
Rhesus in the vase-painting tradition, see Marion True, “The Murder of Rhesos on
a Chalcidian Neck-Amphora by the Inscription Painter,” in Carter and Morris,
eds., The Ages of Homer (above, n. 10) 415-429.
44. See Ernst A. Schmidt, “Frauen nach verlorenen Krieg,” in Hofmann, Troia von
Homer bis heute (above, n. 23) 77-99.
45. Fragments 135-36 (Radt); 228-229 (Mette). For the connection with vase paintings
of the period, see B. Döhle, “Die ‘Achilleis’ des Aischylos in ihrer Auswirkung auf
die attische Vasenmalerei des 5. Jahrhunderts,” Klio 49 (1967) 63-149.
46. Probably Alexander, Antenoridae, Chryses, The Reclaiming of Helen, Eris, Eurypylus,
Iphigenia, Lacaenae, Laocoon, Nauplius, Nausicaa, Phoenix, Shepherds, Gathering of the
Achaeans, Syndeipnoi, Telegonia, Troilus, and Xoanephoroi. Proposing an Iliadic con-
text for Sophocles’ lost Aichmalotides is Albrecht von Blumenthal, “Sophokles,” RE
3 A (1927) 1052; for a discussion see Howard Jacobson, “Ovid’s Briseis: A Study of
Heroides 3,” Phoenix 25 (1971) 335, n. 11.
47. Probably Alexander, Epeius, Palamedes, Philoctetes, Protesilaus, and Telephus. See Ruth
Scodel, The Trojan Trilogy of Euripides, Hypomnemata. Untersuchungen zur An-
tike und zu ihrem Nachleben 60 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1980)
esp. 90-93, as well as George Leonidas Koniaris, “Alexander, Palamedes, Troades,
Sisyphus—A Connected Tetralogy? A Connected Trilogy?,” Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology 77 (1973) 85-124.
48. For a fuller analysis, see Jacobson, “Ovid’s Briseis: A Study of Heroides 3” (above,
n. 46) 335; Georgia Xanthakis-Karamanos, “The Influence of Rhetoric on Fourth-
Century Tragedy,” Classical Quarterly 29 (1979) 66-76; and Edward Capps, “The
Chorus in the Later Greek Drama with Reference to the Stage Question,” The
American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts 10 (1895) 287-325,
esp. 299
Solomon 495
250 titles attributed to the Attic tragedians, just a handful might have repre-
sented episodes of the Iliad, while over fifty belong to some other segment of
the myths involving the Trojan War.49
Similarly, while there are a good number of late sixth-century and fifth-
century Attic and Italic vases that depict tableaux inspired by the Iliad, there
are considerably more that do not.50 The Sosias Painter’s well known red-fig-
ure kylix depicting Achilles bandaging the wounds of Patroclus is extra-
Homeric even though the event it depicts presumably takes place during the
timeframe encompassed by the Iliad,51 as are the thirty-seven versions by Ex-
ekias, the Andocides Painter, and others of Achilles and Ajax playing dice52 as
well as the illustrations in which Achilles and Troilus visit with Polyxena,53
Achilles slays Penthesileia,54 and Ajax carries the corpse of Achilles55 or com-
mits suicide.56 There are numerous variations of the Iliupersis, including
episodes involving Ajax and Cassandra,57 the deaths of Priam58 and
49. John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1903; reprint: New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1958), I, 22-40, be-
gins his three-volume work by discussing the influence of Homer on the
fifth-century tragic poets (as well as historians, sophists, Plato, and Aristotle), but
despite his intent to demonstrate the pervasive influence of Homer, most of his ex-
amples derive from the Odyssey or cyclic epics, not the Iliad.
50. For instance, the “Achilles” entry in the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Clas-
sicae (LIMC) I.1 (1981) 37-200, I.2 (1981), 56-145. lists 922 items ranging in date and
genre from archaic Greek vases to Roman mosaics and sarcophagi. Of these 922
items, 205 are pre-Iliadic, 204 post-Iliadic. Of the 513 items illustrating Trojan
episodes within the timeframe of the Iliad, 183 depict the escapade involving
Troilus, and another 37 depicting Achilles playing dice with Ajax, so 220 of those
are non-Iliadic. Of the remainder, there are 9 illustrating the quarrel in Iliad 1, an-
other 29 illustrating the embassy in Iliad 9, 40 illustrating Achilles with Patroclus
(including non-Iliadic tableaux), 36 illustrating Thetis and the new arms in Iliad 18,
16 illustrating Achilles fighting in battle (including non-Iliadic tableaux), 26 illus-
trating the dual between Achilles and Hector in Iliad 22, 58 illustrating the muti-
lation of Hector’s corpse, and another 77 illustrating the funeral of Hector. The
latter two categories contain 135 illustrations, only 38 of which date from the fifth
century B.C. or earlier.
51. LIMC I.1, “Achilles” 468 (Berlin F 2278). See Susan Woodford, “Ajax and Achilles
Playing a Game on an Olpe in Oxford,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 102 (1982) 173-
185, esp. 173-174, n. 6.
52. LIMC I.1, “Achilles” 391-427.
53. LIMC I.1, “Achilles” 206-388.
54. LIMC I.1, “Achilles” 719-744.
55. LIMC I.1, “Achilles” 860-890.
56. LIMC I.1, “Aias I” 104-108, 115, 117-124.
57. LIMC I.1, “Aias II” 1-116, including post fifth-century entries.
58. LIMC VII.1 (1994), “Priamos,” 87-109, 115-138. See also, Margaret C. Miller,
“Priam, King of Troy,” in Carter and Morris, The Ages of Homer (above, n. 10), 449-
465.
Astyanax,59 and scenes depicting Aeneas60— whose escape was included in

Petersen’s film.61
Of the mural paintings illustrating aspects of the Trojan saga, those by
Polygnotus included a pre-Iliadic depiction of Achilles on Scyros62 and a post-
Iliadic depiction of the Iliupersis. The latter is just one of several paintings
Pausanias (10.25.2) cites specifically in reference to the account by Lescheos,
which would seem to be an alternative form for the name of the author of the
Little Iliad, by other sources (not by Pausanias) attributed to a poet Lesches.63
59. LIMC II.1 (1982), “Astyanax I” 1-33. See also Sarah P. Morris, “The Sacrifice of
Astyanax: Near Eastern Contributions to the Siege of Troy,” in Carter and Morris,
eds., The Ages of Homer (above, n. 10), 221-245, and Susanna Phillippo, “’A future
for Astyanax’: alternative and imagined futures for Hector’s son in classical and
European drama,” above in this volume (IJCT 14 [2007]) 320-321.
60. LIMC I.1, “Aineias,” 1-94. For a summary, see Anderson, The Fall of Troy (above, n.
37) 179-245.
61. Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle, 53-94, examines
Iliadic images in vase painting, tracing the “overoptimistic belief in Homeric in-
fluence on early Greek artists” to Karl Schefold, and concludes (59) that the “con-
flation of poetic and mythological traditions serves to exaggerate the importance
of the Homeric poetic tradition”; see, for example, Karl Schefold (Alan Griffiths,
trans.), Gods and Heroes in Late Archaic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992) and Göttersagen und Heldensagen der Griechen in der früharchaischen und
hocharchaischen Kunst (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 1993). Steven Lowenstam, “The
Uses of Vase-Depictions in Homeric Studies,” Transactions of the American Philo-
logical Association 122 (1974) 167-82, offers suggestions as to why the literary and
visual traditions differ, e.g. a painter’s ignorance, artistic license, and the influ-
ence of variant literary and dramatic versions. But Schefold followed a well es-
tablished literary tradition of overstating Homeric influence.
For the archaic period, see Anthony Snodgrass, Homer and the Artists: Text and
Picture in Early Greek Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Su-
sanne Muth, “Bilder des Troia-Mythos in der griechischen Kunst,” in Zimmer-
mann, ed., Der Traum von Troia (above, n. 23) 71-88. Finding a dearth of Iliadic
representations, Richard Kannicht, “Poetry and Art: Homer and the Monuments
Afresh,” Classical Antiquity 1 (1982) 70-86, concludes (85) that “the Iliad, apart from
its stock of typical battle-scenes, at that time was still beyond the ability of the
artists,” and (86) that “the Iliad seems already to be implicitly present in the early
pictures.” (Original German version: Kannicht, “Dichtung und Bildkunst: Die
Rezeption der Troja-Epik in den frühgriechischen Sagenbildern” [1977], in id.,
Paradigmata: Aufsätze zur griechischen Poesie, eds. Lutz Käppel and Ernst A.
Schmidt, Supplemente zu den Sitzungsberichten der Heidelberger Akademie der
Wissen-schaften, Philos.-histor. Klasse 10 [Heidelberg: Universistätsverlag C. Win-
ter, 1996] 45-67, here 66-67.) Cf. R. M. Cook, “Art and Epic in Archaic Greece,” Bul-
letin van de Vereeniging tot Bevordering der Kennis van de Antieke Beschaving 58 (1983)
1-10.
62. Polygnotus’ painting was in the pinacothece adjacent to the propylon of the
Athenian acropolis; Paus. 1.22.6.
63. For Lescheos and Lesches, see the translator’s note in Pausanias (Peter Levi,
trans.), Guide to Greece I: Central Greece (New York: Penguin Books, 1979) 471, n.
152. For Lesches and the Little Iliad see recently Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer
(above, n. 40) 184-185. On the Delphi mural as an evocation of the Athenian
Kimon’s victory over the Persians at the Eurymedon in Pamphylia, see Robert B.
Kebric, The Paintings in the Cnidian Lesche at Delphi and Their Historical Context,
Mnemosyne Supplementum 80 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983) 14-32.
Solomon 497
Similarly, the subjects of the sculptural program on the pediments of the ar-
chaic Aegina Temple of Aphaea are the pre-Homeric first invasion of Troy by
Telamon and Heracles and a para-Iliadic version of the second invasion fea-
turing the Aeginetan Telamon’s son, Ajax.64 The Trojanomachy of the Siphn-
ian Treasury at Delphi is not specifically Homeric, nor are the Trojanomachy
metopes along the northern entablature of the Parthenon.65 Similarly, depicted
on the east pediment of the early fourth-century Temple of Asclepius at Epi-
daurus was the post-Homeric sack of Troy.
The Hellenistic period offered new and varied genres of both literary and
visual arts. At the Museum of Alexandria in the early third century, Zenodotus
carefully examined the text of the Iliad, athetized and transposed lines, inter-
polated new readings, and thereby created an edited version of the Iliad, lay-
ing the foundations for the glosses and scholia which would soon follow,
particularly in the hands of Aristarchus in the following century. Assigning the
Homeric texts to state-of-the-art scholarly analysis would prove to be a cen-
tral feature of the Homeric tradition in several subsequent historical periods,
and this would have a significant impact on its artistic by-products. Early Hel-
lenistic scholarlship introduced a period of considerable confusion for the Il-
iadic textual tradition. When Aratus, the third-century BC author of the
influential, popular, and long-enduring didactic astronomical poem, Phaeno-
mena, asked the poet and philosopher Timon of Phlius how to obtain a reliable
copy of Homer’s poetry, Timon suggested that he find old and uncorrected
copies.66 While Aratus aimed to use these to create his own editions of the Iliad
and the Odyssey,67 Timon satisfied himself by parodying individual Iliadic
lines, along with paraphrases of Old and New Comedy, to satirize contem-
porary and deceased philosophers.68
While the Homeric epics went under scholarly scrutiny and were sub-
jected to methodic revisions, Homer himself was literally deified: according to
Aelian (VH 13.22), Ptolemy IV Philopator, king of Ptolemaic Egypt during the
last two decades of the third century B.C., actually constructed a temple to
him in Alexandria.69 Adored in the scholarly arena as well, the Homeric epics
64. Dieter Ohly, The Munich Glyptothek (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1974) 54. For the non-
Iliadic Trojan metopes of Selinus, see Clemente Marconi, Temple Decoration and
Cultural Identity in the Archaic Greek World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007) 200-205.
65. The Parthenon metopes (Athens NM 24-25) which portray Helen taking refuge
from Menelaus at the Palladium identify at least that portion of the series as post-
Homeric. Cf. Guy Hedreen, “Image, Text, and Story in the Recovery of Helen,”
Classical Antiquity 15 (1996) 171-73; and Katherine A. Schwab, “Celebrations of
Victory: The Metopes of the Parthenon,” in Jennifer Neils, ed., The Parthenon: From
Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 183-190.
66. Diog. Laert. 9.12.113.
67. For details, see T. B. L. Webster, Hellenistic Poetry and Art (London: Methuen and
Co., Ltd., 1964) 30; supplemented by H. W. Bulloch, “Hellenistic Poetry,” in P. E.
Easterling and B. M. W. Knox, ed., The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, I.
Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 598-602.
68. For details, see Webster, Hellenistic Poetry and Art (above, n. 67) 26-27.
69. Froma I. Zeitlin, “Visions and Revisions of Homer,” in Simon Goldhill, ed., Being
Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of the
Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 195-207, traces this ado-
also inspired a new subgenre of dramatic representation in the Hellenistic pe-

riod. In the late fourth century Homeristai, performers dressed in costumes
and equipped with simple weaponry props, reenacted “Homeric scenes,” gen-
uine slices of Homer.70 Popular enough to survive into the third century AD,
the content and nature of these performances are, however, poorly docu-
mented: Athenaeus (Deip. 14.12.620b) says nothing more than that Demetrius
of Phaleron first introduced them onto the dramatic stage in Athens;71 in the
second half of the second century AD, Artemidorus (Onir. 4.2) simply com-
pares a Homerist’s gesture for drawing blood without the intention of killing
to that of a surgeon; earlier in the second century, Achilles Tatius (8.9.3) merely
refers to a young man playing at being a Homerist;72 and a handful of papyri
preserve receipts for payment to Homerists.73 The only extant detailed de-
scription is that in Petronius’ Satyricon (59), which was clearly meta-homeric
in that Petronius intentionally confuses the plot and characters of the Iliad (e.g.
making Diomedes, Ganymede, and Helen into siblings) in order to have Tri-
malchio bring the performance to a climax by having Ajax slice up a boiled calf
decorated with a helmet. If the helmeted victim of Ajax represented Odysseus,
upon whom Ajax was seeking revenge, then we have ventured well beyond
the context of the Iliad.74
In the visual arts there are two groups of notable Iliadic renderings. The
first belongs to the “Homeric bowls” which have been traced back to a col-
lection of gold or silver cups thought to have been commissioned by Ptolemy
IV Philopator.75 The Iliad is well represented in the five dozen extant exam-
ples: passages from twelve of the twenty-four books are referenced, but so are
five books of the Odyssey, the Aethiopis, Iliou Persis, and Nostoi, as well as nu-
merous works from Greek tragedy. Four cups illustrate the Little Iliad alone.
Moreover, the bowl which depicts the final Iliadic episode, where Priam ap-
peals to Achilles, also depicts two episodes from the Aethiopis—Priam greet-
ing Penthesileia at the tomb of Hector and the death of Penthesileia.
ration back to Alexander the Great, and discusses its relationship with the votive
relief by Archelaos of Priene.
70. See Zeitlin, “Visions and Revisions of Homer” (above, n. 69) 210.
71. Timothy Boyd, “Where Ion Stood, What Ion Sang,” Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology 96 (1994) 116, n. 18, suggests that earlier rhapsodes, e.g. Plato’s Ion, “per-
formed Homer.” Ironically, Demetrius’ philosophical pedigree can be traced back
through Theophrastus and Aristotle to Plato, who certainly would have con-
demned this double form of imitation.
72. Cf. Achilles Tatius 3.20.4, for a nameless ship passenger who “recited” Homer in
theaters.
73. For these and several additional sources, see Geneviève Husson, “Les
Homéristes,” Journal of Juristic Papyrology 23 (1993) 93-99; and Gregory Nagy, Po-
etry As Performance: Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996) 156-86. Nagy makes a plausible argument that there were even “Homeric
scripts” for these performances.
74. See Edward Courtney, A Companion to Petronius (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001) 107.
75. See Ulrich Hausmann, Hellenistische Reliefbecher aus attischen und böotischen Werk-
stätten (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1959) 17-58 and passim; Webster, Hellenistic Po-
etry and Art (above, n. 67) 144-153.
Solomon 499
Lastly, the fifth book of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae (40.207d-209e) in-

cludes the detailed description by a certain Moschion of the construction and
fitting of the huge, 2000-ton freighter built by Hiero II, King of Syracuse and
a contemporary of Ptolemy IV Philopator.76 The officers’ quarters of the ‘Syra-
cusia’ contained a mosaic floor which depicted “the entire story of the Iliad
[pa~j o9 peri\ th\n 0Ilia/da mu~qoj].” In light of all the ancient Greek examples
cited to this point, one must wonder whether the adjective “entire” [pa~j]
means the representations were based on the entirety of Homer’s Iliad or in-
cluded the entirety of the Iliadic, i.e. Trojan War, narrative. If the former, this
would be one of the very few examples from Greek antiquity. In either case it
would parallel the phenomenon of the fifteenth century in Europe, when in-
dividual rulers with a passion for Homer, much like Ptolemy IV Philopator,
commissioned individual rooms to be decorated with scenes from the Iliad.77
In sum, although Homer garnered and maintained tremendous respect

and had considerable influence in many artistic pursuits and intellectual cir-
cles through the classical and Hellenistic periods in Greece, the number of
dramatic and pictorial representations of Homer’s Iliad is strikingly small, par-
ticularly in comparison with the large proportion of artworks derived from ei-
ther non-Iliadic Trojan War subject matter or non-Trojan War subject matter. It
would be naïve and outmoded to assume that the only reason for this dis-
proportionate representation was that the Iliad’s thematic intelligence, poetic
brilliance, and lofty reputation prevented ancient artists from borrowing from
it or imitating it. A more pragmatic hypothesis would be that the narrative
genres in which ancient Greek artists flourished—tragic, comic, lyric, and epic
poetry as well as vase and mural painting and temple sculpture—offered
artists, patrons, consumers, and public audiences a variety of choices for sub-
ject matter, of which Homer’s Iliad was only one. These choices differed
greatly between artistic genres and varied considerably between chronologi-
cal periods both short-term and longer-term, and there were a variety of artis-
tic, materialistic, economic, and political factors that changed periodically as
well. Of the choices for subject matter among mythological, historical, and
everyday subjects, the mythological choices offered a bounty of subjects from
the epic cycle and beyond, namely, the spectrum from the earlier generation
of the gods (e.g. Prometheus) to the death of Odysseus, and local myths from
Attica, Boeotia, the Argolid, and elsewhere, all of which offered narrative sug-
gestions ranging from military to domestic disputes. Considering this vast
array along with the dearth of Iliadic borrowings and adaptations, we can
posit that the Greeks considered the Iliad to be for the most part a complete en-
tity unto itself worthy of reverence, study, and analysis much more than a
treasure chest filled with narrative choices for poetic imitation and graphic or
dramatic adaptation.
76. Ptolemy IV Philopator also ordered the construction of extraordinarily large ves-
sels; see Ath. Deip. 5.36-41.203e-207e; along with Fik Meijer and André Wegener
Sleeswyk, “On the Construction of the ‘Syracusia’ (Athenaeus V. 207 A-B),” Clas-
sical Quarterly 46 (1996) 575-578; and R. P. Duncan-Jones, “Giant Cargo-Ships in
Antiquity,” Classical Quarterly 27 (1977) 331-332.
77. See below, pp. 514-516 (on Primaticcio et al.). For Ptolemy IV Philopator, see Web-
ster, Hellenistic Poetry and Art (above, n. 67) 144-145.
II. The Roman Period

Even the third- and second-century B.C. Roman tragedians, who flourished
during the Hellenistic period but had a considerable interest in the works of
the Attic tragedians, and who seemed to promote tales surrounding the Tro-
jan War, only rarely dramatized events that fall within Iliadic parameters.78
Accius in particular seemed to find inspiration in the Trojan cycle, but of forty
titles only Achilles, Diomedes, and Myrmidones might be Iliadic, while Aegisthus,
Agamemnonidae, Antenoridae, Armorum Iudicium, Astyanax, Hecuba, Neoptole-
mus, Philocteta, Telephus, and Troades almost certainly are not. Ennius’ Achilles
and Hectoris lytra are only two of the twenty dramas assigned to his output,
which also includes extra-Homeric tragedies about Ajax, Andromache,
Hecuba, Iphigenia, Orestes, Paris, Phoenix, Telamon, Telephus, and Thyestes.
Livius Andronicus composed both an Achilles as well as an Aegisthus, Ajax,
and Equos Troianus, not to mention that he translated the Odyssey and not the
Iliad. Pacuvius as well wrote an extra-Iliadic Armorum Iudicium, Chryses, Du-
lorestes, Hermiona, Niptra, and Teucer. And Naevius’ tragedies include an An-
dromacha, Equos Troianus, Hesiona, and Iphigenia.79
Of the later compendia of myths, the first or second century Bibliotheca
and Epitome attributed to the second century B.C. Apollodorus, which en-
compass the entire chronological sweep of Greek myths from the creation of
the gods to the death of Ulysses, devote a considerable number of sections
(Bibliotheca 3.123-176; Epitome 2.3-7.40) to the Trojan War: of 157 sections in all,
forty-one describe pre-Iliadic material, ninety-eight post-Iliadic material, and
a mere eight (Epitome 4.1-8), or about 5%, Iliadic material itself.
Similarly, of the 257 “fables” attributed to Hyginus, twenty-six treat the
material from the Judgment of Paris to the end of the Trojan war, and of these
just one (106) covers Iliadic material; the only other fables involving Achilles
recount the un-Homeric incident on the island of Scyros (96) and his death by
Paris (107), and this Iliadic gap seems to grow wider as we note that the two
longest passages in the entire collection narrate events of two other Greek
epics, the Argonautica (14) and Odyssey (125).
Where Ovid incorporates events from the Trojan War cycle into his Meta-
morphoses, he tells the tale of Achilles’ battle against, ironically, the invulner-
78. For the fragments, see Alfred Klotz, Scaenicorum Romanorum fragmenta, I: Tragico-
rum Fragmenta (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1953), and Otto Ribbeck, Scaenicae Romano-
rum poesis fragmenta3 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1897-1898; reprint: Hildesheim: Georg
Olms Verlag, 1978), Volume I. For a survey, see A. J. Boyle, An Introduction to Roman
Tragedy (London: Routledge, 2006).
79. For a survey of the Roman period, see Uwe Walter, “Die Rache der Priamos-Enkel?
Troia und Rom,” in Zimmermann, ed., Der Traum von Troia (above, n. 23) 89-103.
Putting the Troy myths in a Roman political and cultural framework is Andrew Er-
skine, Troy Between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2001), and, most recently, Stefanie Jahn, Der Troia-Mythos:
Rezeption und Transformation etc. (above, n. 9), part 3, “Der Troiamythos in der hi-
storischen Epik der römischen Republik” (pp. 39-91). For Pacuvius specifically
see now Peter Schierl, Die Tragödien des Pacuvius: Ein Kommentar zu den Fragmenten
mit Einleitung, Text und Übersetzung, Texte und Kommentare 28 (Berlin and New
York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006); for Accius see Beatrice Baldarelli, Accius und die
vortrojanische Pelopidensage, Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Altertums, 1.
Reihe: Monographien, 24 (Münster: Schöningh, 2004).
Solomon 501
able Cygnus (12.64-167), has Apollo and Paris dispatch Achilles (12.580-619),
and describes the contest between Ulysses and Ajax to win the deceased
Achilles’ divine armor, the deaths of Polyxena and Memnon, and the escape
of Aeneas (12.620-13.674). Although in his Heroides (3.30-38) Ovid does imitate
Homeric diction in the passage in which Briseis describes the gifts Agamem-
non offers to Achilles, in his Metamorphoses Ovid did not see fit to retell the
events of the Iliad at all.80 And although Vergil’s nearly contemporary Aeneid
has two of its twelve books set in intra-bellum Troy itself and also offers an
ecphrasis of the Trojan War (1.456-493), and although it is clear that Vergil
knew well and was thoroughly inspired by Homer’s epics, still, his influen-
tial poem does not replay or recast episodes of the Iliad.81
Similarly, despite a substantial number of Iliadic tableaux in Roman vi-

sual arts, the majority of them illustrate non-Iliadic portions of the Trojan
cycle. Written testimony prepares us for Homeric expectations, for in listing
decorative themes for domestic painting of the Second Style, Vitruvius (7.5.2)
suggests a Homeric grouping by including “Trojan battles or the wanderings
of Ulysses through landscapes” (troianas pugnas seu Ulixis errationes per topia),
and Petronius in his Satyrica (29) specifies that there were paintings from the
Iliad and Odyssey in the atrium of Trimalchio’s house (interrogare ... coepi, quas
in medio picturas haberent. ‘Iliada et Odyssian’ inquit).82 And there remain some
well known Trojan cycles, e.g. the dozen Iliadic illustrations in Pompeii’s
House of Loreius Tibertinus (aka Casa di Octavius Quartio) and the several
dozen frescoes in the frieze of the cryptoportico of the House of the Crypto-
porticus illustrating the end of the Iliad, not to mention individual illustra-
tions like those depicting the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in
the House of the Diocscuri and the assemblage of Achilles, Patroclus, and Bri-
seis in the House of the Tragic Poet, of which there are numerous illustrated
80. For an analysis of Ovid’s text and his Homeric exemplar, see Jacobson, “Ovid’s
Briseis: A Study of Heroides 3” (above, n. 46) 332-333.
81. For a recent study of Vergil’s use of even ancient Homeric scholarship, see Tilman
Schmit-Neuerburg, Vergils Aeneis und die antike Homerexegese: Untersuchungen zum
Einfluss ethischer und kritischer Homerrezeption auf Imitatio und Aemulatio Vergils,
Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 56 (Berlin and New York:
Walter de Gruyter, 1999), along with Georg Nicolaus Knauer, Die Aeneis und
Homer: Studien zur poetischen Technik Vergils, Hypomnemata. Untersuchungen zur
Antike und ihrem Nachleben 7 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), as
well as id., “Vergil and Homer,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt /
Rise and Decline of the Roman World (ANRW), vol. II.31.2, ed. Wolfgang Haase
(Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1981) 870-918, and Stefanie Jahn, Der
Troia-Mythos: Rezeption und Transformation etc. (above, n. 9) 92-196. – On the Tro-
jan saga in Rome, see Jacques Perret, Les origines de la légende troyenne de Rome, Col-
lection d’études anciennes, pub. sous le patronage de l’Association Guillaume
Budé 42 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1942) (controversial) and, more critically nu-
anced, Erich Gruen, Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1990) 11-20.
82. Petron. Sat. 89 offers an 85-verse ecphrasis in the form of Eumolpius’ poem, Troiae
halosis, for which see Peter Habermehl, Petronius, Satyrica 79-141: Ein philologisch-
literarischer Kommentar, I. Sat. 79-110, Texte und Kommentare 27/1 (Berlin and
New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006) 149-207.
parallels.83 But the latter sat opposite a Discovery of Achilles, the Homeric
frescoes in the Cryptoporticus, complete with Greek labels, yield to scenes
from the post-Iliadic Aethiopis and perhaps other cyclic epics, culminating in
the escape of Aeneas, while the third set includes a non-Iliadic Fury pursuing
Hector. Of the mythological frescos recovered in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and
elsewhere in Campania and Latium, the majority do not depict images of the
Trojan War, but those that do include high profile illustrations of Achilles on
Scyros (House of Jason [IX.5.2] and the House of the Dioscuri), the Sacrifice of
Iphigeneia (House of the Tragic Poet), and the Wooden Horse and sack of Troy
(House of the Menander).84
The score of relief sculpted plaques known collectively as the Tabulae Il-
iacae demonstrate how scholars in the past often assumed incorrectly that the
Iliad provided a predominant force in the retelling of Troy tales, for, despite
their collective name, only nine of the twenty-two illustrate Iliadic scenes,
while many of them depict the entry of the Trojan Horse, the escape of Ae-
neas, and other scenes from the Sack of Troy.85 In fact, the Capitoline example
contains the inscription, “Iliou Persis According to Stesichorus” (ILIOU PER-
SIS KATA STHSIXORON) and mentions other cyclic authors, and yet for sev-
eral centuries it has been referred to as if it featured the Homeric version of the
war.86 The Capitoline version does, in fact, contain a dozen or so rectangular
panels illustrating Iliadic events, but the large bird’s-eye view in the center il-
lustrates only the destruction of Troy.87
83. See William A. P. Childs, “The Achilles Silver Plate in Paris,” Gesta 18 (1979) 19-26.
84. In general, see Ulrich Sinn, “Der Troia-Mythos in der römischen Kunst,” in Zim-
mermann, ed., Der Traum von Troia (above, n. 23) 104-119.
85. Three of them illustrate non-Trojan scenes involving Heracles and Alexander. For
a description and analysis of the attribution to Theodorus, see Nicholas Horsfall,
“Stesichorus at Bovillae?” Journal of Hellenic Studies 99 (1979) 26-48. In general, see
Horsfall, “Tabulae Iliacae in the Collection Froehner, Paris,” Journal of Hellenic
Studies 103 (1983) 144-147; and Richard Neudecker, “Tabula Iliaca,” Der Neue Pauly
11 (2001) 1197 s.v.
86. Musei Capitolini (Palazzo Nuovo) Inv. MC0316. The date of its discovery in
Marino, 1683, corresponds to an era in which Homer was much more widely
known and recognized than Stesichorus or the poets of the cyclic epics. The pre-
dominance of the non-Iliadic elements in Stesichorus’s poem must have been the
reason why The Wooden Horse (dou/reioj i3ppoj) appears beside The Destruction of
Troy ( 0Ili/ou Pe/rsij) as an alternative title of the work (P. Oxy. 2803 [1st c. A.D.]).
Hellenistic scholarship noted that, in deviation from the Homeric tradition, Stesi-
chorus and Simonides had located the palace of Agamemnon in Sparta instead of
Mycenae (schol. Eur. Or. 46 [= Stesich. frg. 39 Page]). Cf. Luigi Bravi, “Stesicoro,
Simonide e la presa di Troia: compresenza o interazione?” in Paola Angeli Bernar-
dini, ed., L’epos minore, le tradizioni locali e la poesia arcaica. Atti dell’ incontro di stu-
dio Urbino, 7 giugno 2005 (Pisa and Roma: Fabrizio Serra, Editore, 2007) 127-132,
here 130 and 128, n. 6, respectively. For possible traces of influence of Stesicho-
rus’s poem in Hellenistic dithyramb and epigram see John Ma, “A Horse from
Teos: Epigraphical Notes on the Ionian-Hellespontic Association of Dionysiac
Artists,” in Peter Wilson, ed., The Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies,
ser. Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
215-245, esp. 242-244.
87. For a description, see Anderson, The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and Art
(above, n. 37) 1-3.
Solomon 503
Lastly, towards the end of classical antiquity, Quintus of Smyrna’s third-

century Greek epic—about half the size of the Iliad—begins exactly where the
Iliad ends, with the funeral of Hector. Significantly named Posthomerica, the
poem continues through the death of Achilles, the end of the war, and the voy-
ages home, excepting the completion of the voyage of Ulysses.88 On a smaller
scale, Triphiodorus’ roughly contemporary Capture of Troy focuses on the
episode of the Trojan horse.89
From this brief but broad survey of the major Greco-Roman accounts and
depictions of the Trojan War it should be clear that throughout Greco-Roman
antiquity, that is, from the late geometric/early archaic era of the Epic Cycle
poets to the advent of the medieval period, a broad corpus of tales encom-
passing the pre-Iliadic and post-Iliadic Trojan War was offered to Greek and
Roman writers and visual artists, trivializing considerably the profundity of
the Iliad by extending and fleshing out its mythological narrative. In this sense,
the general corpus of the tales of Troy continued to be popularized and var-
ied while Homer’s Iliad itself continued towards canonization and codification
as a classic text—from the archaic-period versions sung by Homer and the
subsequent offerings of the Homeridae and the Rhapsodes to the so-called
Peisistratid recension and the Alexandrian scholarly texts established and
commented on by Zenodotus and Aristarchus.90 Meanwhile, as Greek authors
struggled under the assumption of Homeric canonization, Stesichorus, Xeno-
phanes (fr. B11), Herodotus, and Thucydides rethought and rationalized
Homer’s accounts, Plato (R. 3.392B-394B) offered sharp criticisms, Vergil to a
certain extent supplanted his two great epics by dividing his own into Iliadic
and Odyssean halves, and by the second century, particularly during the Sec-
ond Sophistic which encouraged anti-iconic analysis, it had become com-
monplace to prefer anti-Homeric, pro-Trojan accounts of the war.91 In his
88. See Quintus of Smyrna (Alan James, trans. and ed.), The Trojan Epic: Posthomerica
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), with Mary Lefkowitz’ review,
International Journal of the Classical Tradition 14 (2007) 266-269; and Giuseppe Pom-
pella, ed., Quinti Smyrnaei Posthomerica, Bibliotheca Weidmanniana 7 (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 2002). Cf. Manuel Baumbach and Silvio Bär, eds., Quintus Smyrnaeus:
Transforming Homer in Second Sophistic Epic, Millennium Studien / Millennium
Studies 16 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008).
89. See Michael Paschalis, “Pandora and the Wooden Horse: A Reading of Tri-
phiodorus’ Alwsij
3 Ili/
) ou,” in Michael Paschalis, Roman and Greek Imperial Epic,
Re-thymnon classical studies 2 (Herakleion: Crete University Press, 2005) 91-115.
90. On the problematic Peisistratid recension of Homer, see recently D. L. Cairns, “In-
troduction,” in: Cairns, ed., Oxford Readings of Homer’s Iliad (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2001) 1-7; and Ruth Scodel, Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative,
and Audience (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002) 54-62.
91. On the period, see Jan Fredrik Kindstrand, Homer in der Zweiten Sophistik: Studien
zu der Homerlektüre und dem Homerbild bei Dion von Prusa, Maximos von Tyros und
Ailios Aristeides, Studia Graeca Upsaliensia 7 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet; Stock-
holm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1973); Robert L. Lamberton and J. J. Keaney, eds.,
Homer’s Ancient Readers: the Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes (Princeton:
Princeton University Pres, 1992); and Froma Zeitlin, “Visions and Revisions of
Homer,” in Simon Goldhill, ed., Being Greek Under Rome: Development of Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 195-266.
eleventh, “Trojan Oration,” Dio Chrysostom presages and by far surpasses all
of Petersen’s narrative transgressions by having Hector kill not Menelaus or
Ajax but Achilles!92 He then insists that the Greeks never conquered the city
at all.93 Similarly, the Heroicus attributed to one of the Philostrati claims as its
source the ghost of Protesilaus, who, killed during the landing at Troy—an
event featured in Petersen’s film—had a broader and more unbiased vision of
all the war’s subsequent events.94
III. The Dictys/Dares/Benoît Tradition

A different ancient variation of the Troy story was soon to be canonized as an-
other ‘classic.’ This entirely different narrative of the Trojan War, which be-
came popular probably by the fourth century, was the account attributed to
the Cretan Dictys, a companion of Idomeneus during the war itself, whose
diary had supposedly been written in Greek with Phoenician characters on
linden bark, buried with Dictys (as his pillow) in a lead box, found more than
a millennium later in Knossos during the reign of Nero, and then translated
during the 4th century into Latin by Lucius Septimius.95 Then there was also
Dares the Phrygian. Dares was the name of a Trojan priest of Hephaestus in
Homer’s poem (Il. 5.9-10), another eye-witness, who authored a different ac-
count of the war, later translated from Greek into Latin and prefaced with a
letter claiming to be written to Sallust by Cornelius Nepos.96 Having lived
92. For a more detailed description of the history of Homerepanorthosis from
Archilochus and Sappho to Philostratus and Ptolemy Chennos, see Leslie D.
Myrick, From the De excidio Troiae historia to the Togail Troi, Anglistische Forschun-
gen 223 (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1993) 9-21.
93. D.Chr. 11.95-96 and 123-24.
94. Cf. Philostr. Her. 43.5. See Jennifer K. Berenson Maclean and Ellen Bradshaw
Aitken (trans.), Flavius Philostratus: Heroikos (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature,
2001) l-lx. See also, Peter Grossardt Einführung, Übersetzung und Kommentar zum
Heroikos von Flavius Philostrat, 1: Einführung und Übersetzung, 2: Kommentar,
Schweizerische Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft 3.1 and 2 (Basel: Schwabe Ver-
lag, 2006). In addition there were the Troika ascribed to an otherwise unknown
Palaephatus, probably of the mid-fourth century B.C., and to a somewhat younger
Theodorus of Ilion, the content of which was doubtfully derived from the Iliad. For
Palaephatus see FGrHist 44, for Theodorus ibid. 48, with Felix Jacoby’s commen-
taries, and see Kai Brodersen, “‘Das aber ist eine Lüge!’ Zur rationalistischen
Mythenkritik des Palaiphatos,” in Raban von Haehling, ed., Griechische Mytholo-
gie und frühes Christentum (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005)
44-57, esp. 46. For the intellectual milieu of the period, see David S. Potter, The
Roman Empire at Bay AD 180-395 (London: Routledge, 2004) 173-211, esp. 184-196.
95. Werner Eisenhut, ed., Dictyis Cretensis Ephermeridos Belli Troiani Libri2 (Leipzig: B.
G. Teubner, 1973), and Stefan Merkle, Die Ephemeris belli Troiani des Diktys von Kreta
(Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1989). For a discussion of the preface and
letter, and dating the account, see Myrick, From the De excidio Troiae historia to the
Togail Troi (above, n. 92) 24-29; cf. William Hansen, “Strategies of Authentication
in Ancient Popular Literature,” in: Stelios Panayotakis, Maaike Zimmerman,
Wytse Keulen, eds., The Ancient Novel and Beyond, Mnemosyne Suppl. 241 (Lei-
den & Boston: Brill, 2003) 301-314.
96. F. Meister, ed., Daretis Phrygii de excidio Troiae historia (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1872);
Andreas Beschorner, Untersuchungen zu Dares Phrygius, Classica Monachensia 4
(Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1992) 2-3 (bibliography); and Myrick, From the De
Solomon 505
during the war, both Dictys and Dares were claimed to predate the famed
Homer and, more importantly, to be more authoritative.97
Until just recently the simplistic forgeries of Dictys and Dares were barely
taken seriously, even after a papyrus fragment of Dictys’ Greek text had been
discovered in Tebtunis in 1899/1900.98 But in part because of their availabil-
ity in Latin and in part because they were written in such an unexceptional
prose in comparison with Homer’s much more sophisticated poetry, these rel-
atively short narratives were able to do what Homer’s Greek masterpiece was
not, and that is, survive the medieval period in Europe.99 While Dante in his
Inferno (4.88-90) respectfully places Homer in the uppermost circle reserved
for sinless but unbaptized pagans—even if he had never read a word of
Homer’s poetry—his ninth, lowest, and most vivid circle of the Inferno in-
cludes the area of Antenora (Inf. 32.88), reserved for those who become trai-
tors to their country, and named after Antenor, who towards the end of Dares’
account ultimately betrays the Trojans by opening the gates of the city to the
Greek invaders, replacing the ruse of the Trojan Horse with human treach-
ery.100 Later in the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer cites his literary pred-
ecessors for Troilus and Criseyde (1.141-47) when discussing the fall of Troy:101
But how this toun com to destruccioun
Ne falleth nought to purpos me to telle;
excidio Troiae historia etc. (above, n. 92) 8-52. For additional bibliography, see Ste-
fan Merkle, “Telling the True Story of the Trojan War: The Eyewitness Account of
Dictys of Crete,” in James Tatum, ed., The Search for the Ancient Novel (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) 195 (n. 6); and Merkle, “The Truth and
Nothing But the Truth: Dictys and Dares,” in Gareth Schmeling, ed., The Novel in
the Ancient World, Mnemosyne Supplementum 159 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996) 565,
n. 5.
97. Ael. VH 11.2; Ptolemy Chennos apud Photius Bib. 190; cf. Eustathius Od. 11.521
and FGrHist 51 T 5; cf. Nathaniel Edward Griffin, “Un-Homeric Elements in the
Medieval Story of Troy,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 7 (1907-1908) 32-
52.
98. P. Tebt. 268. See Nathaniel Edward Griffin, “The Greek Dictys,” American Journal
of Philology 29 (1908) 329-35.
99. Stefan Merkle, “Telling the True Story” (above, n. 96) 183-96, reevaluates Dictys’
account, suggesting it was intentionally written as “dreary chronicle” to convince
its readers of its authenticity, and puts it into its presumed fourth-century, perva-
sively anti-Homeric context.
100. For Antenor’s treachery in an ancient comedy, see Maryline Parca, Ptocheia or
Odysseus in Disguise at Troy (P. Köln VI 245), American studies in papyrology 31
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991) 8. Reflecting on Dante (about the death of Ulysses)
in relation to Dictys and Dares, see Roberto della Vedova and Maria Teresa Sil-
votti, eds., Il “Commentarium” di Pietro Alighieri nelle redazioni ashburnhamiana e ot-
toboniana (Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 1978) 370-371.
101. Margaret J. Ehrhart, The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987) 44, assumes that Chaucer’s
“Dares” was a copy of Joseph of Exeter’s Frigii Daretis Yliados. On Chaucer’s
sources, see aslo Alice Walker, Troilus and Cressida (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1957) xxxviii-xlvi; and Robert Kilburn Root, “Chaucer’s Dares,”
Modern Philology 15 (1917) 1-22. Cf. Thomas C. Stillinger, The Song of Troilus: Lyric
Authority in the Medieval Book (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1992) 132-164.
For it were a long digressioun

Fro my matere, and yow to long e dwelle.
But the Troyane gestes, as they felle,
In Omer, or in Dares, or in Dyte,
Who-so that can, may rede hem as they wryte.
Chaucer, of course, had never read Homer either.102 In fact, it is highly
doubtful that at the time there were any copies of Homer in Europe, whether
in Greek or in Latin translation.103 Francesco Petrarch became the first Euro-
pean in nearly a millennium to acquire a copy of Homer’s Iliad in 1354, but he
never managed to learn to read ancient Greek.104 Then his fellow humanist,
Giovanni Boccaccio, was instructed in the Greek language by the irascible Cal-
abrian Greek Leontius Pilatus (Leonzio Pilato), whom he put up in his house
from 1360-1362, but this educational venture was ultimately not successful ei-
ther: Boccaccio had Leontius render the poem into Latin, albeit in an interlin-
ear prose translation replete with errors and infelicities.105 Even so, in his
Genealogia deorum gentilium Boccaccio refers to Homer frequently and even at-
102. For additional accounts of Antenor and Aeneas, see Sharon Stevenson, “Aeneas
in Fourteenth-Century England,” in Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin, eds., The
Classics in the Middle Ages, Medieval & Renaissance texts & studies 69 (Bingham-
ton NY: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1990) 371-378.
103. The Homeric Periochae ascribed to the fourth-century Ausonius preserved a book-
by-book summary of the characters, events, and arrangement of the Iliad; for the
text, see Rudolfus Peiper, ed., Decimi Magni Ausonii Burdigalensis Opuscula
(Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1886; repr. Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1976) 377-405; and for
a brief analysis, see Wolfgang Kullmann, “Einige Bemerkungen zum Homerbild
des Mittelalters,” in Michael Borgolte and Herrad Spilling, eds., Litterae medii aevi:
Festschrift für Johanne Autenrieth zu ihrem 65. Geburtstag (Sigmaringen: Jan Thor-
becke, 1988) 1-15, esp. 2. For “Pindar’s” Ilias Latina, written probably in the first
century during the reign of Nero by Baebius Italicus, see Marco Scaffai, ed., Bae-
bii Italici Ilias Latina: introduzione, edizione critica, traduzione italiana e commento, Edi-
zioni e saggi universitari di filologia classica 28 (Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 1982);
and George A. Kennedy, The Latin Iliad: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Notes
(published privately, 1998). This Latin hexameter poem offered only an incom-
plete epitome expanded with several un-Homeric passages.
104. He received the manuscript (Milan Bibl. Ambros. I 98 inf.) from Nicholas Sigerus.
Byzantine envoy to the papal court in Petrarch’s native city of Avignon. Later he
lamented to Sigerus: “Homerus tuus apud me mutus, imo vero ego apud illum surdus
sum. Gaudeo tamen vel aspectu solo, et sepe illum amplexus ac suspirans dico; ‘O magne
vir, quam cupide te audirem!’” (Epistolae Familiares 18.2); cf. 24.12, written in response
to a letter purportedly from the shade of Homer. See Agostino Pertusi, Leonzio Pi-
lato fra Petrarca e Boccaccio; Le sue versioni omeriche negli autografi di Venezia e la cul-
tura greca del primo umanesimo, Civiltà veneziana. Studi 16 (Venice, Rome: Istituto
per la collaborazione culturale, 1964) 73-111.
105. See Robin Sowerby, “Early Humanist Failure with Homer,” International Journal of
the Classical Tradition 4 (1997/98) 37-63 and 165-194. On Leontius now see also Vin-
cenzo Fera, “Petrarca lettore dell’Iliade,” in Michele Feo, Vincenzo Fera, Paola
Megna, and Antonio Rollo, eds., Petrarca e il mondo greco I: Atti del Convegno inter-
nazionale di studi Reggio Calabria 26-30 novembre 2001, Quaderni Petrarcheschi
12/13, [I] (Firenze: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 2002/2003 [actually: 2006]) 141-154
and Antonio Rollo, Leonzio lettore dell’ Ecuba nella Firenze di Bocaccio (= Petrarca e il
mondo greco II), Quaderni Petrarcheschi 12/13, [II] (same dates) 23-28.
Solomon 507
tempts to quote him periodically in Greek, but there are also a dozen citations
of Dares and Dictys, often juxtaposed to the citations of Homer.106
Many of the characters in Dares’ version are the same as those in the Ho-
meric Iliad, but it is especially the scope of Dares’ De excidio Troiae historia that
differentiates it from the Iliad: of the forty-four sections of Dares’ account, only
five involve the period of the war covered by Homer’s epic.107 The pre-war
mythological material, beginning with the Argonauts’ unfriendly visit to Troy
and including the subsequent abduction of Helen, comprises the first eighteen
sections; the mythological material that follows the death of Hector consumes
the final twenty sections, during the course of which, strangely for readers of
Homer, Palamedes replaces Agamemnon as commander-in-chief (25-26) but
is then killed by Paris (28). Paris will also kill Achilles (34), who had other-
wise refused to fight the Trojans any longer, not because he was quarreling
with Agamemnon, but because he had promised the Trojan royal family that
he would no longer fight against their city in exchange for the princess Polyx-
ena, with whom he had fallen in love (27).108 After Paris kills Achilles, the
aforementioned Antenor, along with—mirabile dictu—Aeneas, treacherously
opens the gates of the city to the detested Greeks for its final destruction (39-
41). One can easily get lost in the details and divergences, but the general pic-
ture is that at least in the minds of artists and the common populace alike the
broad narrative spectrum of the late-ancient forgeries contained what the Iliad
so sorely lacked—a lengthy and quickly shifting narrative filled with intrigue,
and a compelling beginning and ending.109 In addition, helping to make Dares’
account so popular during the medieval period was that the pagan gods did
not have the same omnipresence they had in the Iliad. Devoid for the most
part of the complicated Olympian apparatus, uncomplicated by Hellenic con-
cepts of destiny, and spiced with romantic tensions involving Paris & Helen
and Achilles & Polyxena as well, it was better suited to the medieval aes-
thetic.110
We should pause briefly to point out that the events of Dictys’ and Dares’
accounts are far more un-Homeric than the un-Homeric events in Petersen’s
film: in Petersen’s film Ajax is killed by Hector; in Dictys’ account (5.15) Ajax
seems to have been killed by Ulysses and the Atreides. Also, the broad chrono-
logical sweep of Dares’ account is far broader than that of Petersen’s film, and
Petersen’s overall anti-Hellenic bias is no more so than Dares’ or his Greco-
Roman predecessors’ reaching back through the Second Sophistic to Vergil.
106. E.g. 12.12: “secundum Omerum … ut ait Dares Frigius … Dites vero dicit.”
107. For a theoretical discussion about borrowing, adaptation, and imitatio in the late
middle ages and early Renaissance, see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imita-
tion and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)
8-19.
108. Jaochim Latacz, “From Homer’s Troy to Petersen’s Troy,” in Winkler, ed., Troy
(above, n. 5) 28-30, offers a schema outlining the scope of the Iliad.
109. The lack of a compelling beginning and ending does not imply that the featured
story of Achilles is not compelling nor that the Iliad is incoherent or incomplete.
For a similar argument, see Jinyo Kim, The Pity of Achilles: Oral Style and the Unity
of the Iliad, ser. Greek Studies (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
Inc., 2000) 1-8.
110. Dares also offered the pro-Trojan perspective more amenable to medieval taste.
Dictys’ account offered a Hellenic perspective, but extended the myth farther.
But while all these matters of authenticity and narrative structure elicited neg-
ative responses to Petersen’s film, they helped Dares’ version of the Trojan
War saga replace Homer in Europe for more than a millennium.111
Eventually replacing the now lost poems of the Cyclic Epics, the accounts
of Dares and Dictys continued to engender numerous imitations and adapta-
tions for centuries through the end of the Renaissance.112 Along with the
anonymous, fifth-century AD, vulgar Latin prose account known as the Ex-
cidium Troiae,113 the accounts of Dares and Dictys inspired the eleventh-cen-
tury Irish Togail Troí,114 the anonymous mid-twelfth-century Latin hexameter
adaptation Historia Troyana Daretis Frigii,115 Joseph of Exeter’s (Josephus Is-
canus) Latin Frigii Daretis Ylias (c. 1188),116 the Middle High German Der Gött-
111. For a more detailed analysis of the Troy legend in medieval literature, see Ehrhart,
The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature (above, n. 101).
112. See Louis Faivre d’Arcier, Histoire et géographie d’un mythe: la circulation des manu-
scrits du De excidio Troiae de Darès le Phrygien (VIIIe-XVe siècles), Mémoires et docu-
ments de l’Ecole des Chartes 82 (Paris: École des Chartes, 2006). 335-368 discusses
primarily the manuscript tradition of the works of both Dares and Dictys. Beyond
the parameters of the European tradition being surveyed here, the Greek text of
Dictys’ account had influence as well on such Byzantine writers as the sixth-cen-
tury Joannes Malalas (who in his Chronographia cites also Sisyphus of Cos,
Pheidalus of Corinth, and Corinnus of Ilium), the seventh-century Joannes Antio-
chenus, the eleventh-century Georgios Kedrenos, and the twelfth-century Joannes
Tzetzes; see Merkle, Die Ephemeris belli Troiani des Diktys von Kreta (above, n. 95) 22-
23; and R. M. Frazer, The Trojan War: The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the
Phrygian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966) 170. On the possibility of
a common source, whether direct or indirect, for Malalas and Dares, see Peter
Grossardt, “Die Kataloge der troischen Kriegsparteien: Von Dares und Malalas zu
Isaak Porphyrogennetos und Johannes Tzetzes—und zurück zu Diktys und
Philostrat?” in Eugenio Amato, ed., Approches de la Troisième Sophistique: Hommages
à Jacques Schamp, Collection Latomus 296 (Brussels: Éditions Latomus, 2006) 451-
454.
113. E. Bagby Atwood and Virgil K. Whitaker, eds., Excidium Troiae, The Mediaeval
Academy of America, Publication no. 44 (Cambridge: The Medieval Academy of
America, 1944). The scope of this work ranges from the wedding of Peleus and
Thetis to the early history of Rome, including a summary of Vergil’s account of the
destruction of Troy. Cf. Atwood, “The Rawlinson Excidium Troiae – a Study of
Source Problems in Mediaeval Troy Literature,” Speculum 9 (1934) 379-404.
114. The anonymous Irish monastic author who translated and adapted Dares’ ver-
sion as the Torail Troí worked in the tenth century; the earliest extant recension
dates from the eleventh; and the latest extant copy is from the fifteenth. See Brent
Miles, “Togail Troí: The Irish Destruction of Troy on the Cusp of the Renaissance,”
in Alan Shephard and Stephen D. Powell, eds., Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and
the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Essays and studies 5
(Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004) 81-96.
115. Jürgen Stohlmann, Anonymi historia Troyana Daretis Frigii, Beihefte zum “Mittel-
lateinischen Jahrbuch” 1 (Wuppertal, Ratingen, Düsseldorf: A. Henn Verlag, 1968).
116. Ludwig Gompf, ed., Joseph Iscanus, Werke und Briefe, Mittellateinische Studien und
Texte 4 (Leiden: Brill, 1970). For a translation, see Gildas Roberts, Joseph of Exeter:
the Iliad of Dares Phrygius (PhD thesis: Ohio State University, 1975). On source ma-
terial, see Peter Walsh, “Virgil in Medieval Epic,” in Richard A. Cardwell and Janet
Hamilton, eds., Virgil in a Cultural Tradition (Nottingham: University of Notting-
ham, 1986) 52-64.
Solomon 509
weiger Trojanerkrieg attributed to Wolfram von Eschenbach117 as well as the

thirteenth-century Troilus by Albert von Stade,118 the anonymous Icelandic
Trójumanna Saga of c. 1263,119 an extensive insertion into the thirteenth-cen-
tury Spanish account of the life of Alexander the Great (Libro de Alexandre),120
and several other lengthy poems,121 but especially Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s in-
117. Wolfram (von Eschenbach), Der Göttweiger Trojanerkrieg, edited by Alfred Keppitz,
Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters 29 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1926); Keppitz attributed
this version to a pupil of Konrad von Würzberg. See also, Elisabeth Lienert,
Geschichte und Erzählen: Studien zu Konrads von Würzburg ‘Trojanerkrieg’, Wis-
sensliteratur im Mittelalter 22 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1996) 350-
375. For the Germanic tradition, see Manfred Kern, Alfred Ebenauer, and Sylvia
Krämer-Seifert, eds., Lexikon der antiken Gestalten in den deutschen Texten des Mittel-
alters (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003); Jan-Dirk Müller, “Das höfische Troia des
deutschen Mittelalters,” in Hofmann, Troia von Homer bis heute (above, n. 23) 119-
141; and Horst Brunner, ed., Die deutsche Trojaliteratur des Mittelalters und der Frühen
Neuzeit: Materialien und Untersuchungen, Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter 3 (Wies-
baden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1990)
118. Thomas Gärtner, ed., Albert von Stade. Troilus, Spolia Berolinensia 27 (Hildesheim:
Weidmann, 2007). For Albert’s dependence on Lucan as well, see Eva Matthews
Sanford, “Quotations from Lucan in Mediaeval Latin Authors,” American Journal
of Philology 55 (1934) 5.
119. Jon Sigurdsson, “Trójumanna Saga ok Breta Sögur, efter Hauksbók, med Dansk
Oversettelse,” Annaler for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie 4 (1848) 4-101. Cf. Ste-
fanie Würth, “Intention oder Inkompetenz: Die Bearbeitungen der Trojuman-
nasaga,” skandinavistik 22 (22) 1-26 and ead., Der ‘Antikenroman’ in der isländischen
Literatur des Mittelalters. Eine Untersuchung zu Übersetzung und Rezeption lateinischer
Literatur im Norden, Beiträge zur Nordischen Literatur 27 (Basel: Helbing & Lich-
tenhahn, 1998)
120. Alfred Morel-Fatio, ed., El Libro de Alexandre: Manuscrit esp. 488 de la Bibliothèque
Nationale de Paris, Geschellschaft für Romanische Literatur 10 (Dresden: GRL [Max
Niemeyer. Halle a. S.], 1906; repr. Georg Olms Verlag: Hildesheim & New York,
1978) 39-95 (st. 306-754); Raymond S. Willis, Jr., ed., El Libro de Alexandre: Texts of
the Paris and the Madrid Manuscripts, prepared with an introduction, Elliott Mono-
graphs in the Romance Languages and Literatures 32 (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1934; repr. New York: Kraus Reprint Corp., 1965) 62/63-138/139 (st.
306-754 [P]/st. 299-726 [O]); Jesús Cañas Murillo, ed. Libro de Alexandre, Letras his-
pánicas 280 (Madrid: Catedra, 1988) 199-281 (st. 322-772). See Ian Michael, The
treatment of classical material in the Libro de Alexandre, Publications of the Faculty of
Arts of the University of Manchester 17 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1970) 256-261.
121. Cf. Bernard of Fleury’s relatively early De excidio Troiae in the eleventh century,
and the twelfth-century Ylias by Simon Aurea Capra (Chèvre-d’Or), for which,
see André Boutemy, “La version parisienne du poème de Simon Chèvre d’Or sur
la Guerre de Troie (Ms Lat. 8430),” Scriptorium 1 (1946/1947) 267-288 and Jürgen
Stohlmann, “Magister Simon Aurea Capra. Zu Person und Werk des späteren
Kanonikers von St. Viktor,” in: Guy Cambier, ed., Hommages à André Boutemy, Col-
lection Latomus 145 (Brussels: Latomus, 1976) 343-366. See also F. M. Warren, “The
Story of Troy in Orderic Vital,” Modern Language Notes 28 (1913) 203-205; and the
list in Myrick, From the De Excidio Troiae historia etc. (above, n. 92) 49-52. For the in-
fluence of Dares in several works by Christine de Pizan, see Margaret J. Ehrhart,
“Christine de Pizan and the Judgment of Paris: A Court Poet’s Use of Mytho-
graphic Tradition,” in Jane Chance, ed., The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the
Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (Gainesville: University of Florida
novative, twelfth-century, Old French verse romance.122 Benoît’s Le Roman de

Troie had a particular and timely resonance because of the well-established
belief in the Trojan origins of France – which, however, Benoît himself does not
mention at all.123 In addition, the Dictys/Dares/Benoît tradition offered a gen-
erous slice—to borrow from Aeschylean imagery—of the histoire universelle,
the late medieval version of the Eusebian notion that the history of hu-
mankind was all-inclusive, which encouraged poets and chroniclers to pro-
vide sequels and prequels as well as stories of not just epic magnitude but
epic compass, particularly in the mythographical telling of history. Many of
the late medieval tales of chivalry and romance did so, as did the Homeric
cyclic epics and Dares’ accounts, as did the numerous accounts following the
Dictys/Dares/Benoît model, as does Petersen’s film, but as Homer’s Iliad does
not.
Press, 1990) 149; for her representation of the hero/anti-hero Hector, from whom
the French nobility traced their ancestry, as a symbol of masculine violence, see
Lorna Jane Abray, “Imagining the Masculine: Christine de Pizan’s Hector, Prince
of Troy,” in Shephard and Powell, eds., Fantasies of Troy (above n. 114) 133-148;
and for the late fifteenth-century tapestries showing the battle of queen Panthe-
silea and her Amazons with the Greeks during the Trojan War see J. P. Asselberghe,
“Les tapisseries tournaisiennes de la Guerre de Troie,” Revue Belge d’ Archéologie et
d’Histoire de l’Art 39 (1970) 93-182 and Susan Groag Bell, The Lost Tapestries of the
City of Ladies: Christine de Pizan’s Renaissance Legacy (Berkeley, Los Angeles & Lon-
don: University of California Press, 2004) 54-55, 68-69 (and pl. IV). See also, Man-
fred Kern, Agamemnon weint; oder arthurische Metamorphose und trojanische
Destruktion im “Göttweiger Trojanerkrieg” (Erlangen and Jena: Verlag Palm & Enke,
1995) 175-83. For the relationship between these and still other medieval versions
of the Troy tale (e.g. the early fourteenth-century Middle English poem The Seege
or Batayle of Troye, and the Compendium Historiae Troianae-Romanae), see E. Bagby
Atwood, ed., Excidium Troiae (above, n. 113) xi-xli; and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle,
ed., The Seege or Batayle of Troye (London: Oxford University Press, 1927) lvi-lxxiv.
For a version thought to be unrelated to the Dares/Dictys tradition, see E. Bagby
Atwood, “The Rawlinson Excidium Troie: A Study of Source Problems in Medi-
aeval Troy Literature,” Speculum 9 (1934) 379-404. For comparisons, see Wilhelm
Greif, Die Mittelalterlichen Bearbeitungen der Trojanersage (Marburg: N. G. El-
wertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1886). For citations of Dares in historical chroni-
cles, see Louis Faivre d’Arcier, Histoire et géographie d’un mythe (above, n. 112)
277-292.
122. Léopold Eugène Constans, ed., Benoît de Sainte-More. Le roman de Troie (Paris:
Firmin-Didot et cie, 1904-1912). See also, Udo Schöning, “Der Troiaroman des
Benoît de Sainte-Maure: Zur Funktionalisierung der Geschichte im Mittelalter,” in
Hans-Joachim Behr, Gerd Biegel and Helmut Castritius, eds., Troia – Traum und
Wirklichkeit. Ein Mythos in Geschichte und Rezeption (Braunschweig: Braun-
schweigisches Landesmuseum, 2003) 198-205 and earlier Idem, Thebenroman -
Eneasroman - Trojaroman: Studien zur Rezeption der Antike in der französischen Lite-
ratur des 12. Jahrhunderts, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 235
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991) esp. 98-119, as well as Paul Strohm, “Storie,
Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinctions in the Middle English
Troy Narratives,” Speculum 46 (1971) 348-359.
123. Trojan origins would have provided a strong incentive for interest in and adapta-
tion of the tale for not just France but also individual cities and aristocratic dy-
nasties. See Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nationhood
in Late-Medieval France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 226-244 and
Solomon 511
Just as the Dictys/Dares version of the Troy saga had provided the clas-
sic narrative parameters to be varied for centuries by a number of authors in
several languages, so with Benoît’s adaptation, which quickly became the new
standard version, the tales of Troy would metamorphose considerably once
again. The chronological scope of the story still ranged from the voyage of the
Argonauts to the death of Ulysses, but now Achilles battles between Love and
Honor because Polyxena wants him to suffer for slaying her brother Hector.124
More significantly, a new romance has blossomed, that between Troilus, the
prince of Troy barely mentioned in the Iliad but depicted in ancient Greek vi-
sual art, and Briseida, that is, the ancient Greek Briseis, soon to become more
widely known—mostly through Boccaccio’s Il filostrato (c. 1335)—as Cres-
sida.125
The popular influence and the artistic impact of Benoît’s huge (30,108 oc-
tosyllabic lines) poem written in the third quarter of the twelfth century was
tremendous.126 Much more so than any direct influence Homer had in the cen-
turies following the Iliad and Odyssey, Benoît’s poem was immediately
333-345 (= ead., Naissance de la nation France, ser. Bibliothèque des histoires [Paris:
Gallimard, 1985] 38-54 and 19-38); Paul Cohen, “In Search of the Trojan Origins of
French: The Uses of History in the Elevation of the Vernacular in Early Modern
France,” in Shephard and Powell, eds., Fantasies of Troy (above, n. 114) 63-80; and
Bernd Roeck, “Trojaner, Goten und Etrusker: Städtische Gründungsmythen der
Renaissance,” in Therese Fuhrer, Paul Michel, and Peter Stolz, eds., Geschichten
und ihre Geschichte (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2004) 175-198. In contrast, Venice later
distanced itself from its Trojan origins; see Sheila Das, ”The Disappearance of the
Trojan Legend in the Historiography of Venice,” in Shephard and Powell, eds.,
Fantasies of Troy (above, n. 114), 97-114.
124. See Alfred Adler, “Militia et Amor in the Roman de Troie,” Romanische Forschungen
72 (1960) 14-29; and Rüdiger Schnell, Causa amoris: Liebeskonzeption und Liebes-
darstellung in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, Bibliotheca Germanica 27 (Bern:
Francke, 1985).
125. For Troilus, see, for instance, Hom. Il. 24.257, and Kern, Ebenauer, and Krämer-
Seifert, Lexikon der antiken Gestalten in den deutschen Texten des Mittelalters (above,
n. 95), s.v. “Troilus” 625-626. That this new romance arose in the wake of Boccac-
cio’s Filostrato, see Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Arthur Beckwith Myrick (eds.
and trans.), The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1929) 26, n. 1; cf. R. M. Lumiansky, “Aspects of the Relationship of
Boccaccio’s “Il Filostrato” with Benoît’s “Roman de Troie” and Chaucer’s “Wife of
Bath’s Tale”,” Italica 31 (1954) 1-7.
For some critics of Petersen’s film, Briseis’ romance with Achilles presented
problems in authenticity, but Ovid’s fictitious love letter (Her. 3) from Briseis to
Achilles provides ample literary precedent; see Luca Barbieri, Le “epistole delle dame
di Grecia” nel Roman de Troie in prosa: la prima traduzione francese delle Eroidi di
Ovidio, Romanica Helvetica 123 (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 2005) 3-78. In ad-
dition to the Benoît/Boccaccio narrative, additional precedent was established in
opera librettos written between the late seventeenth century and the late eigh-
teenth, e.g. the Lully/Collasse Achille et Polyxène (1687), the Rodríguez/Cruz Bri-
seida (1768), the Corradini/Cruz La Briseida (1745), and the Paer/De Gamerra
Achille (1801). See now, Alena Allen, “Briseis in Homer, Ovid, and Troy,” in Win-
kler, ed., Troy (above, n. 5) 148-162.
126. For overviews, see Knut Görich, “Troia im Mittelalter—der Mythos als politische
Legitimation,” and Jan-Dirk Müller, “Das höfische Troia des deutschen Mittelal-
ters,” in Zimmermann, ed., Der Traum von Troia (above, n. 23) 120-134 and 135-
adapted and translated in an explosion of Gothic romantic epics, including

Herbort von Fritzlar’s Middle High German Das Lied von Troya (c. 1200),127
Segher Diengotgaf’s Dutch Trojeroman (c. 1250),128 Jacob van Maerlant’s Flem-
ish Historie van Troyen (c. 1263),129 the huge, 40,000-verse Der Trojanerkrieg com-
menced by Konrad von Würzburg (c. 1287) and perhaps completed by a
pupil,130 and the Sicilian Guido delle Colonne’s Latin prose chronicle Historia
destructionis Troiae (1272-87),131 which was translated into Italian by Filippo
148, respectively; and Thomas Gärtner, Klassische Vorbilder mittelalterlicher Tro-

jaepen, Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 133 (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1999).
127. Helga Lengenfelder, Das ‘Liet von Troyge’ Herborts von Fritzlar: Untersuchungen zur
epischen Struktur und geschichts-moralischen Perspektive, Europäische Hochschul-
schriften : Reihe I, Deutsche Literatur und Germanistik 133 (Bern: Lang, 1975), an-
swers critics who, much like Petersen’s detractors, found Herbort von Fritzlar’s
Troy tale different from and therefore inferior to Homer’s and Benoît’s.
128. Jozef Janssens and Ludo Jongen, eds., Segher Diengotgaf. Trojeroman (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2001).
129. Jacob Verdam, ed., Episodes uit Maerlant’s Historie van Troyen naar het te wissen gevon-
den handschrift (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1873); complete edition: Napoleon de
Pauw and Edward Gailliard, eds., Jacob van Maerlant, Dit is die Istory van Troyen,
Naar het vijftiendeeuwsche handschrift van Wessel van de Loe, met al de Mid-
delnederlandsche fragmenten, 4 vols. (Ghent: Boekdrukkerij A. Siffer, drukker der
Koninklijke Vlaamsche Academie, 1889-92). See most recently W. P. Gerritsen, “Ex-
culpating Aeneas. An Ovidian Argument in Maerlant’s History van Troyen,” in
R.I.A. Nip, H. van Dijk, E.M.C. Houts, i.a. eds., Media Latinitas: A collection of essays
to mark the occasion of the retirement of L.J. Engels, Instrumenta Patristica XXVIII
(Steenbrugis: in Abbatia S. Petri; Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 1996) 217-221. The
Trojan narratives of both Benoît de Sainte-Maure and Diengotgaf, as well as ad-
ditions from Statius’ Achilleis, Vergil’s Aeneis and Ovid’s Metamorphoses were in-
corporated into this version by Jacob van Maerlant.
130. Adelbert von Keller, G. Karl Frommann, and F. Roth, eds., Konrad von Würzburg.
Der trojanische Krieg, Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 44 (Stuttgart:
Litterarischer Verein, 1858; repr. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1965). Konrad as
well seems to have derived his Trojanerkrieg from a variety of sources in addition
to Benoît; Greif, Die Mittelalterlichen Bearbeitungen der Trojanersage (above, n. 121),
95, for instance, identified details in Konrad’s version quite similar to those in the
Ilias of Simon Capra Aurea. On Konrad and Herbort von Fritzlar, see Martin Pfen-
nig, Erniuwen—Zur Erzähltechnik im Trojaroman Konrads von Würzburg, Europäis-
che Hochschulschriften. Reihe I, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur 1537 (Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang, 1995) 13-18; Elisabeth Lienert, Geschichte und Erzählen: Stu-
dien zu Konrads von Würzburg ‘Trajanerkrieg,’ Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter 22
(Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1996), esp. ch. B III, ‘diz getihte grôz: Ten-
denzen von Konrads Quellenadaptation’ (182-222) and Kern, Ebenauer, and
Krämer-Seifert, Lexikon der antiken Gestalten in den deutschen Texten des Mittelalters
(above, n. 125) 687-689. For Konrad’s vision of Troy as a medieval mimesis of the
heavenly city, see Hartmut Kugler, Die Vorstellung der Stadt in der Literatur des
deutschen Mittelalters, Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Li-
teratur des Mittelalters 88 (Munich: Artemis, 1986) 131-136.
131. Nathaniel Edward Griffin, ed., Guido de Columnis: Historia destructionis Troiae, Me-
diaeval Academy of America Publication 26 (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval
Academy of America, 1936; repr. New York: Kraus Reprint Company, 1970). See
Hugo Buchthal, Guido delle Colonne: Historia destructionis Troiae, Codices illuminati
medii aevi 3 (Munich: H. Langenfelder, 1987); Francesco Bruni, “Boncompagno
Solomon 513
Ceffi in 1324, translated into Spanish by Pero López de Ayala, rendered by

Jacques Milet into the drama, Lystoire de la destruction de Troye (1498),132 and
which provided the exemplar for John Lydgate’s expanded, English Troy Book
(1420),133 and through Boccaccio’s Il filostrato—possibly via Louis de Beau-
vau’s French translation, Le Roman de Troye et de Criseida—for Chaucer’s Troilus
and Cresseyde (c. 1385) and Raoul Lefèvre’s French prose Le recueil des hystoires
de Troyes (1464).134
In assessing the relative reception of the Trojan sagas narrated by Dares
and Benoît, Hugo Buchthal in his work on Guido found that in comparison to
Benoît and his romantic narrative, Dares was considered to be a “more reliable
historian.”135 In this respect, and insofar as Dares had been read, translated,
imitated, adapted, and expanded for more than a millennium, his Trojan nar-
rative had become a classic. To the modern aesthetic trained in Homeric stud-
ies, it may seem preposterous, perhaps even scandalous that such a blatant
forgery, not to mention an unfocused narrative written in vulgar prose, could
have been held in such high regard that many of the most accomplished artists
of the medieval period and early Renaissance employed his work as their nar-
rative exemplar. It may seem even more preposterous that a significant num-
ber of subsequent accomplished artists, who now regarded Dares as a classic
and used Benoît’s version as their model, created a secondary corpus of works
for the next several centuries. But this is the result of the very cyclical processes
of codification and variation and popularization and classicization we are ex-
amining. As for vacillation, just as most of the early Greek cyclic epics inspired
da Signa, Guido delle Colonne, Jean de Meung: metamorfosi dei classici nel Due-
cento,” in: Claudio Leonardi and Enrico Menestò, eds., Retorica e poetica tra i seco-
li XII-XIV, Quaderni del Centro per il collegamento degli studi medievali e
umanistici nell’Università di Perugia 18 (Perugia: Regione dell’Umbria, 1988) 79-
108 (on disparaging attitudes to Vergil, Ovid and Homer); and James Simpson,
“The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae in
Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” Speculum 73 (1998) 397-423.
132. Jacques Milet, L’istoire de la destruction de Troye la grant, translatée de latin en françoys
mise par parsonnages et composée par Jacques Milet. Imprimée à Paris par Jehan Bon-
homme 1484 Autographische Vervielfältigung veranstaltet von E. Stengel (Marburg:
N.G. Elwert, 1883). See Gustav Häpke, Kritische Beiträge zu Jacques Milets drama-
tischer Istoire de la Destruction de Troye la grant (Marburg: M. G. Elwert, 1899).
133. For the relationship between Guido and the British “Gest Historiale” of the De-
struction of Troy and the Laud Troy Book, see C. David Bronson, The History of Troy
in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae in Me-
dieval England (Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980). For similar but not nec-
essarily Trojan tales, e.g. in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum and
the Tannhäuser legend, see Ehrhart, The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Me-
dieval Literature (above, n. 101) 47.
134. For a list, see Reid, The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts (above, n. 3)
II.1043-1044. For Chaucer’s additional use of Statius, see Julia Ebel, “Troilus and
Oedipus: The Genealogy of an Image,” English Studies 55 (1974) 15-21. The defin-
itive edition of Lefèvre’s work is: Marc Aeschbach, ed., Raoul Lefevre: Le recoeil des
histoires de Troyes, Publications universitaires européennes, Série XIII: Langue et lit-
térature française 120 (Bern & New York: P. Lang, 1987).
135. Hugo Buchthal, Historia Troiana; Studies in the History of Mediaeval Secular Illustra-
tion, Studies of the Warburg Institute 32 (London: Warburg Institute, University of
London, 1971) 4-5.
so many artists for the better part of a millennium but then literally disap-
peared and survived as mere summaries in an obscure late ancient/early me-
dieval treatise written by an otherwise little known antiquarian, so the works
of the Dares/Dictys/Benoît tradition would fade from view eventually and be
reduced to being thought of as relatively insignificant aberrations from the
reconstituted Homeric model. These once well regarded and/or popular me-
dieval and Renaissance works have for the most part been reduced to ency-
clopedic summaries and subjects for a subdiscipline of scholarly inquiry.
IV. The Renaissance

The survey has reached the last half of the fifteenth century, the period in
which European artists began to paint depictions of Greco-Roman myths, sub-
ject matter that had previously been relegated for the most part to individual
cassoni and the like. Nearly contemporary with Raoul Lefèvre’s mid-fifteenth-
century Le recueil des hystoires de Troyes was the first notable Greek mytholog-
ical series—three Antonio Pollaiuolo canvas paintings—now lost—depicting
Herculean labors painted in the 1460s or 1470s,136 followed soon after by such
prominent individual works as Botticelli’s “Primavera” (1478) and “Birth of
Venus” (1482/5).137 The two generations of artists who followed Botticelli in
the first half of the sixteenth century had occasional opportunities to paint
works in large formats and ambitious cycles to decorate palace and munici-
pal chambers. Not surprisingly, as in the literary tradition, Homer’s Iliad in-
spired relatively few of these cycles early on. Raphael’s “Parnassus”
(1508-1513) in the Vatican depicts only a portrait of Homer along with those
of Dante, Vergil, Petrarch, and many other ancient and Italian poets, while at
the Farnesina in 1518 he (and his workshop) featured Apuleius’ “Cupid and
Psyche,” as did his Mannerist protégé Giulio Romano at the Palazzo del Te in
Mantua in the 1520s.138 But Giulio also decorated Mantua’s Palazzo Ducale in
the next decade, and here he depicted illustrations of the Trojan War in the
Appartamento di Troia.139 The paintings are characteristically of mixed tradi-
tion, the Homeric Aristeia of Diomedes sprawling majestically just above de-
pictions of the arming of Achilles and the Battle for the Body of Patroclus, two
pre-Iliadic scenes of Paris, and the post-Homeric events of the Entry of the
136. For the 1460s dating, see Herbert Cook, “The New Haven Pollaiuolo,” Burlington
Magazine 9 (1906) 52-53, who points out that copies of “Hercules and Nessus” and
“Hercules and the Hydra” were painted onto the ends of a Florentine cassone; for
the 1470s dating, see L. D. Ettlinger, “Hercules Florentinus,” Mitteilungen des
Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 16 (1972) 128-138. For Pollaiuolo’s sources,
see Laurie Fusco, “Antonio Pollaiuolo’s Use of the Antique,” Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979) 257, n. 2:
137. For recent scholarship, see Sergiusz Michalski, “Venus as Semiramis: A New In-
terpretation of the Central Figure of Botticelli’s “Primavera”,” Artibus et Historiae
24 (2003) 213-222. On Botticelli’s use of Ovid, see Paul Barolsky, “As in Ovid, So
in Renaissance Art,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998) 451-474.
138. For the tradition, see Luisa Vertova, “Cupid and Psyche in Renaissance Painting
Before Raphael,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979) 104-121.
139. Giulio’s Sala delle Metamorfosi in the Palazzo del Te included a Judgment of Paris
among its eight illustrations.
Solomon 515
Trojan Horse and the Death of Laocoon.140 Nonetheless, this and several other
mixed cycles constituted a mid-sixteenth-century renascence of interest in de-
picting events and characters from the Iliad, albeit much more so in graphic
arts than in poetry. Romano’s pupil, Francesco Primaticcio, who spent most of
his career in the service of a succession of French kings, decorated
Fontainebleau’s Chambre du Roi in 1533-35 with six Iliadic and quasi-Iliadic
frescoes illustrating the wiles of Hera, the Chambre de la Duchesse d’Etampes
(1541-43) with scenes of the Life of Alexander, and the Porte Dorée with the
Olympian Gods. From the late 1530s until his death in 1570 he designed an en-
tire Ulysses gallery, which offered fifty-eight scenes illustrating Homer’s
epic.141 And while Luca Cambiaso and his father Giovanni were decorating
Genoa’s Palazzo Doria in the latter half of the 1540s with a depiction of
“Apollo Shooting the Greeks Encamped Before the Walls of Troy” surrounded
by a score of lunettes of scenes illustrating the Trojan War, in 1555 Pellegrino
Tibaldi painted a Ulysses cycle covering two rooms of Bologna’s Palazzo
Poggi, and in 1561-62 Giovanni Stradano executed a contemporary Ulysses
cycle designed by Giorgio Vasari for the Sala di Penelope in Florence’s Palazzo
Vecchio.142
Generally throughout the later middle ages and early Renaissance it was
not Homer’s Iliad but Benoît’s Le Roman de Troie and its scions that had the
greatest influence on the literary tradition of the Trojan saga, but Homer’s
Iliad, along with the Odyssey, did have some influence on the visual artistic
tradition. The Homeric epics provided ample and inspirational tableaux with
which to decorate the halls of courtly patrons, and although the cycles they
painted were not necessarily derived exclusively from or limited to scenes
from Homer’s epics, this was one of the few periods in which there existed an
artistic medium for which the Iliad could provide appropriate inspiration. But
this period was to be relatively short-lived. It could not begin until enlight-
ened court patronage demanded such decorative schemes, which, as we have
just seen, was a phenomenon that flourished in the first few decades of the six-
teenth century, nor until the text of the Iliad had been promulgated to at least
a limited extent in a language other than ancient Greek, which, as we will soon
see, had occurred by this same period. But just a few decades later in the mid-
dle of the sixteenth century came the introduction of illustrated mythological
manuals, first Virgil Solis’ illustrated version of Lodovico Dolce’s verse trans-
lation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1553), and then the illustrated second edition
of Vincenzo Cartari’s Imagini, con la spositione de i dei de gli antichi (1571). In the
140. See Bette L. Talvacchia, “Homer, Greek Heroes and Hellenism in Giulio Romano’s
Hall of Troy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988) 235-242; and
Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958) 179-182.
141. The frescoes illustrating the Abduction of Helen, the Feigned Madness of Ulysses,
Achilles at Scyros, the Election of Agamemnon, and the Greeks Sacrificing, are no
longer extant; see Louis Dimier, Le Primatice (Paris: Leroux, 1900) 256. For the
Fontainebleau cycle, see Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, “Women on Top at Fontaine-
bleau,” Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993) 34-48. In general, see Emmanuel Schwartz,
The Legacy of Homer: Four Centuries of Art from the École Nationale Supérieure des
Beaux-Arts, Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).
142. See R. A. Scorza, “ A ‘Modello’ by Stradanus for the ‘Sala di Penelope’ in the
Palazzo Vecchio,” Burlington Magazine 126 (1984) 432-435, and 437.
wake of this concentrated popularization of the vast corpus of Greco-Roman

myths, and with Cartari’s publication being adopted as an iconographic
sourcebook, the Trojan cycle and Homer’s Iliad were overshadowed again.
During the Renaissance there were two divergent Trojan traditions, for
while the anti-Homeric Dares and Dictys tradition was still thriving 400 years
after Benoît, the Petrarch/Boccaccio impetus for the reestablishment of Homer
in Europe had finally begun to take root.143 Significantly, it took more than an
entire century after Petrarch’s acquisition of the first modern European Iliad
in 1354, but the Byzantine Athenian Demetrios Chalcondyles finally published
the editio princeps of Homer in Florence in 1488.144 This was two decades after
the printing press had already been used to create first editions of the Latin
works of Cicero in 1465 as well as Apuleius, Caesar, Lucan, Pliny, Vergil, and
Livy before 1470 and Tacitus, Terence, Ovid, Varro, Horace, Lucretius, Quin-
tilian, and many others before 1475.
But Greek, of course, requires a different font as well as a variety of dia-
critical marks and a skilled editor, not to mention a Greek-reading audience.
The latter is no minor factor in the choice an artist makes in continuing the tra-
dition along either the Homeric or the Dares/Dictys/Benoît models, for as
we have just seen, the Dares/Dictys/Benoît tradition was available in not just
Latin, the lingua franca, but also in several variants of French and German as
well as in Dutch and English, all before 1475.145 In addition, some of the an-
cient Latin accounts of the Trojan War, which we recall were primarily non-
Homeric or at best peripherally Homeric, were already printed during this
early wave: Vergil’s Aeneid in 1469, Statius’ Achilleid in 1470, and Ovid’s Meta-
morphoses in 1471.146 That the Iliad, despite the fame and the respect associated
with its author’s name, was not committed to print until 1488—twelve years
after the first edition of Aesop’s Fables, two years after the mock epic, the Ba-
trachomyomachia, and only after Chalcondyles’ careful examination of the com-
143. For the proliferation of ethical, allegorical, and Christian readings of Homer from
the Renaissance to the seventeenth century, see Luc Brisson, Introduction à la
philosophie du mythe, I. Sauver les mythes, ser. Essais d’art et de philosophie (Paris:
Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1996 [2me éd., 2005) 194-197 (= Brisson, How
Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology (Cather-
ine Tihanyi, trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 139-141.
144. See Deno J. Geanakoplos, “The Discourse of Demetrius Chalcondyles on the In-
auguration of Greek Studies at the University of Padua in 1463,” Studies in the Ren-
aissance 21 (1974) 118-144.
145. This situation cannot be attributed entirely to the inaccessibility of Homer’s an-
cient Greek language. Almost every new version of the Troy tale that emerged be-
tween 1175 and 1464 was derived from a version written in a different language.
Moreover, Leontius had rendered the Iliad into Latin well before 1400, and there-
after still more variations and adaptations of the Dictys/Dares/Benoît model pro-
liferated while imitations and adaptations, let alone translations, of the Iliad were
rarities. It was not until about 1440 that Pedro González de Mendoza’s Castilian
translation of Pier Candido Decembrio’s Latin translation of the Iliad (Homero ro-
manceado) appeared, but it was almost exactly contemporary with Juan de Mena’s
translation of “Pindar’s” (Neronian) Ilias Latina.
146. The sole manuscripts of Hyginus and Apollodorus were not found and commit-
ted to print until 1535 and 1555.
Solomon 517
mentaries by Eustathius—corroborates our understanding that Homer’s Iliad

was still not the paradigm for the Trojan tale, even after the revival of Greek
in the Renaissance. As we will see increasingly from this period to the outset
of the twentieth century, the Iliad was more a treatise for serious study and
intellectual stimulation than it was an exemplar for artists and popular en-
tertainments.
The publication of Chalcondyles’ carefully prepared text of the Iliad in
ancient Greek did not inspire a renascence of interest in the work or its con-
tents. Indeed, although Homer’s epic had by now been rendered into the gen-
erally more accessible language Latin by the aforementioned Leontius Pilatus
(1360-1362) as well as Pier Candido Decembrio (1439-1441), the latter accepted
the authority of Dares and Dictys.147 Hampered by an inability to capture the
artistry of Homer in the Latin language, Decembrio’s efforts were not widely
acclaimed, nor were those of Lorenzo Valla (and, subsequently, Francesco Grif-
folini [Arretino]), who just after Decembrio began translating the work into
Latin, albeit into Latin prose.148 Then the precocious teenager Angelo Poliziano
commenced a Latin hexameter translation, but even he, whose mastery of
Greek and Latin was not surpassed by his contemporaries, succumbed to the
difficulty of the task after completing only five books.149 And it is important
to note that his initial attempt at translating the first seven lines of Homer’s
second book depended not only on Vergil’s Aeneid (8.26-30) but also on the
Ilias Latina (111-113).150 Perhaps even more significant is that in 1485, soon after
abandoning the Iliad project, Poliziano adapted the Olympian gods’ Ethiopian
retreat described in the first book of Homer’s Iliad for his own Latin poem
“Ambra, in poetae Homeri enarratione pronuntiata.” Here, in order to render
the Homeric material more palatable to Renaissance sensibilities, Poliziano
has Jupiter speak of Achilles as the predecessor of Alexander the Great, the en-
lightened conqueror of the East and the worthy pupil of Aristotle. To the Ren-
aissance audience in search of ancient epic heroes, Achilles was not one to be
admired.151 Finally, even the mid-sixteenth-century Latin verse translations of
147. Decembrio used the copy of Leontius’ translation annotated by Petrarch as well
as a copy of the Greek text borrowed from the Visconti-Sforza library in the ducal
palace of Pavia, which may well have been the copy given to Petrarch in 1354. See
Aubrey Diller, “Petrarch’s Greek Codex of Plato,” Classical Philology 59 (1964) 270-
271; and Sowerby, “Early Humanist Failure with Homer” (above, n. 105) esp. 56-
60.
148. Valla translated the first sixteen books into Latin prose in 1442/4; the rest was
completed by Griffolini in 1458 but not published until 1474; see Sowerby, “Early
Humanist Failure with Homer” (above, n. 105) 61-63; and Alice Levine Ruben-
stein, “Imitation and Style in Angelo Poliziano’s ‘Iliad’ Translation,” Renaissance
Quarterly 36 (1983) 50.
149. Poliziano worked under the tutelage of Andronikos Kallistos, a Byzantine scholar
working at the Florentine Academy. See Rubenstein, “Imitation and Style in An-
gelo Poliziano’s ‘Iliad’ Translation” (above, n. 148) 48-70; and Rubenstein, “The
Notes to Poliziano’s ‘Iliad,’” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 25 (1982) 205-239.
150. Rubenstein, “Imitation and Style in Angelo Poliziano’s ‘Iliad’ Translation” (above,
n. 148) 52.
151. See Sowerby, “Early Humanist Failure with Homer” (above, n. 105) 168-171; and
David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 4-9.
the Iliad by the Bavarian Vincentius Opsopoeus (Books 1, 2, 9) and Niccolò

della Valle (Nicolao Valla) (Books 3-5, 8, 18, 20, 22-24) were bound together
with Joseph of Exeter’s and pseudo-Pindar’s non-Homeric versions to pro-
vide readers with a “complete” version of the Trojan saga.152
By another measure more relevant to the general populace, the Iliad was
not translated into the vernacular languages of Europe—other than some se-
lections and paraphrases beginning in the 1470s, and some of these, too, e.g.
Jehan Samxon’s French prose translation of 1530, were embellished with pas-
sages from Benoît (via Guido delle Colonne), Dares, and Dictys—until well
into the sixteenth century. At the order of King Francis I, Hugues Salel trans-
lated the first ten books of the Iliad into French in 1545,153 ultimately published
the first eleven books, and worked on the twelfth and thirteenth books pub-
lished posthumously in 1570, but the remaining books were translated by the
poet Amadis Jamyn only in 1577—thirty-two years after Salel’s decad was
originally published.154 Salel’s French rendering was then translated into Eng-
lish by Arthur Hall in 1581.155 George Chapman used the Greek text to trans-
152. Daretis Phrygii Poetarum et Historicorum omnium primi, de bello Troiano, in quo ipse
militavit [...] a Cornelio Nepote Latine carmine Heroico donati, & Crispo Sallustio dedi-
cati, nunc primum in lucem aediti. Item Pindari Thebani Homericae Iliados Epitome [...]
Ad haec Homeri Poetarum Principis Ilias, quatenus a Nicolao Valla, & V. Opsopoeo
carmine reddita (Basel: J. Parcus, 1541). For a more complete list of Latin transla-
tions, see Pertusi, Leonzio Pilato fra Petrarca e Boccaccio (above, n. 104) 521-529. See
also, Austin Warren, “Pope on the Translators of Homer,” Modern Philology 29
(1931) 229-232.
153. Jehan Samxon, Les Iliades de Homere poete grec et grant hystoriographe: avecques les
premises et commencemens de Guyon de Coulonne, souverain historiographe: additions et
sequences de Dares Phrygius et Dictys de Crete (Paris: Jehan Petit: 1530). – Hugues
Salel, Les Dix Premiers Livres de l’Iliade d’Homère, Prince des Poètes (Paris: Iehan Loys,
1545). For a survey of Salel’s predecessors see Philip Ford, “Homer in the French
Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006) 1-28. – See Philip Ford, De Troie à
Ithaque: Réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance, Travaux d’Humanisme et
Renaissance CDXXXVI (Genève: Librairie Droz S.A., 2007) 192-195 (on Samxon)
and 240-244 (on Salel). – It was Francis I as well for whom Primaticcio began paint-
ing the aforementioned frescoes as Fontainebleau (see above, p. 515); see Ford, De
Troie à Ithaque, 269-270.
154. Amadis Jamyn, La Continuation de l’Iliade d’Homère (livres XII-XVI) (Paris: L. Breyer,
1574); and Les XXIIII Livres de l’Iliade d’Homère, traduicts du grec en vers François, les
XI premiers par M. Hugues Salel, et les XIII derniers par Amadis Jamyn (Paris: Lucas
Brayer, 1577). Additional editions were produced in 1580, 1594, and 1599. See,
Hélène J. Harvitt, “Hugues Salel, Poet and Translator,” Modern Philology 16 (1919)
595-605, esp. 599-602, and Noémi Hepp, “Homère en France au XVIe siècle,” Atti
della Academia delle Scienze di Torino: Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 96
(1961-62) 389-508. – See also Petra Fochler, Fiktion als Historie: Der Trojanische Krieg
in der deutschen Literatur des 16. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Ver-
lag, 1990) 69-98. – Johann Spreng’s predecessor Simon Schaidenreisser published
his translation of the Odyssey into German prose in 1537, but his projected Iliad
translation never materialized. Johann Baptista Rexius derived his 1584 German
prose translation from Valla’s Latin prose translation; see Antje Willing, “Die ‘Ilias
Homeri’ des Johannes Baptista Rexius,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und
deutsche Literatur 136 (2007) 480-499.
155. Arthur Hall, Ten Books of Homers Iliades, translated out of French by Arthur Hall (Lon-
don: Ralph Newberie, 1581).
Solomon 519
late books 1-2 and 7-11 of the Iliad in 1598, but he did not publish his entire
English Iliad until 1611.156 Similarly, the first German translation by Johannes
Spreng did not appear until 1610,157 which is also the approximate date of
Cristòbal de Mesa’s Spanish translation.158
That is some 400 years after the first vernacular translations of Benoît,
which puts the late medieval and Renaissance differences between the popu-
lar reception of the Dares/Dictys/Benoît model and the arcane obscurity of
the Iliad into deep perspective. The supposition remains that the Iliad at the
time seems to have been so difficult to access physically, or was so revered in-
tellectually, or had such a complex narrative or such unappealing characters
that it only rarely inspired a significant work of contemporary art. As it was,
the Iliad had not been read in Western Europe for nearly a millennium before
Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Leontius, but as if anticipating and spoiling its re-
turn in the fourteenth century, Benoît’s Dares and Dictys-derived romance
had already established thoroughly throughout northern Europe an entirely
different template for the Trojan saga. And then when Homer was reintro-
duced to Greek-reading scholars in northern Italy, they found something in
the heralded text of the most revered poet from ancient Greece that they had
not expected—a strangely complex and ultimately pessimistic narrative that
seems to have been not very enjoyable or comprehensible or perhaps even in-
teresting to the late medieval and early Renaissance aesthetic. From their per-
spective no doubt the Iliad lacked romance;159 it also lacked the characteristic
late-medieval tension between Honor and Amor; its theme of destructive
156. See Millar MacLure, George Chapman: A Critical Study (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1966) 158-191.
157 Spreng’s Iliad translation was accompanied by his translation of the Aeneid (Ilias
Homeri. Das ist Homeri, dess uralten fürtrefflichen Griechischen Poeten, XXIIII. Bücher.
Von dem gewaltigen Krieg der Griechen wider die Trojaner. ... Dessgleichen die 12 Bücher
Æneidos ... P. Virgilii Maronis ... In artliche Teutsche Reimen gebracht von ... Johann
Sprengen (Augsburg: Christoff Mangen, 1610).
158. Christòbal de Mesa’s translation has not been preserved. On the reception of Ho-
meric epic, the Odyssey rather than the Iliad, in Spain in the 16th century see Luis
Arturo Guichard, “La Ulyxea de Gonzalo Pérez y las tyraducciones latinas de
Homero,” in Barry Taylor and Alejandro Coroleu, eds., Latin and Vernacular in Ren-
aissance Iberia II: Translations and Adaptations, Cañada Blanch Monographs 8 = Man-
chester Spanish & Portuguese Studies 17 (Manchester: University of Manchester
Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, 2006) 49-72. – Long after
Lodovico Dolce translated the Odyssey into Italian in 1573, Girolamo Bac[c]elli
made an attempt at translating Iliad 1-7 into Italian; Federico Malipiero finally
translated the Iliad into Tuscan in 1642 (L’Iliada d’Omero trapportata dalla greca nella
toscana lingua da Federico Malipiero nobile Veneto (Venice: Paolo Baglioni, 1642), fol-
lowed by Bernardino Bugliazzini in 1703/1705 and Anton Maria Salvini in 1723.
For a list of translations, see R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954) 516-517.
159. This attitude is not unlike that described by Jenny Strauss Clay at the opening of
her 2007 presidential address to the 138th Annual Meeting of the American Philo-
logical Association: “... a substantial proportion of what is recognized as great lit-
erature is boring. ... Now, among Greek texts frequently appearing as finalists for
Most Boring Award are undoubtedly the Catalogue of Ships and the so-called Bat-
tle Books of the Iliad”; see Jenny Strauss Clay, “Homer’s Trojan Theater,” Transac-
tions of the American Philological Association 137 (2007) 233-252, esp. 233.
anger failed to resonate; and its pantheon of gods was rather bewildering to
a society so thoroughly devoted to its Christianity that Boccaccio, who for
nearly two centuries after the promulgation of his Genealogia deorum gentilium
was considered an authority on ancient mythology, believed that Jupiter and
the other pagan gods were nothing other than Euhemerized mortals who had
lived in early antiquity.160
The Iliad was not the only victim of early Renaissance culture shock: so
were the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In contrast to the
number of popular productions of Plautus and Terence initiated at the d’Este
court at Ferrara in 1486 and performed subsequently elsewhere, performances
of authentic Greek tragedies—not including Senecan adaptations and school
productions—were almost non-existent throughout the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries.161 Of the small handful of translations and productions that
appeared in the first half of the sixteenth century, Alessandro de’ Pazzi’s Edipo
re (c. 1525) was merely an unpublished literary exercise;162 and Giovanni An-
drea dell’Anguillara’s Edippo tragedia was performed at most twice in the pe-
riod from 1556-1561.163 Gian Giorgio Trissino’s Sofonisba (c. 1515), an attempt
at an ancient Greek-style tragedy (without the requisite five acts) based on
Livy’s account—via Petrarch’s Africa—of the Numidian queen, was printed
first in 1524 and nearly two dozen times subsequently but not performed until
1562, after Trissino’s death, and even that had to take place at Vicenza’s
Olympic Academy designed by Palladio, Trissino’s protégé.164 There were sev-
eral productions of tragedies penned by the prolific Lodovico Dolce, e.g. Gio-
casta (1549),165 but I think it is fair to say that there was not a significant,
authentic, large scale production of an ancient Greek tragedy in Renaissance
Europe until Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus was produced for the inauguration
of Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in 1585.166 Thereafter there were a few notable
adaptations of Oedipus by Corneille, Voltaire, and Dryden, and operatic ver-
160. E.g. Boccaccio, Gen. 2.1.

161. Soon after the Society of Jesus was founded by St. Ignatius Loyola, Jesuit schools
became in circa 1565 a venue for annual performances of Latin plays, but these
schools showed little interest in performing authentic Greek tragedy. For a list of
these, dwarfed by the number of productions of Terence and Plautus comedies, see
Oxford’s Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama: http://www.ap
grd.ox.ac.uk.
162. For a survey, see Richard Fabrizio, “Moravia’s Il Dio Kurt: Sophocles and the Oedi-
pus Legend in Italy,” Italica 58 (1981) 262, n. 7.
163. Richard Fabrizio, “The Two Oedipuses: Sophocles, Anguillara, and the Renais-
sance Treatment of Myth,” Modern Language Notes 110 (1995) 178-179, points out
that the drama was severely criticized largely because he strayed from the Sopho-
clean narrative.
164. Jonas Barish, “The Problem of Closet Drama in the Italian Renaissance,” Italica 71
(1994) 7-9, discusses this kind of unperformed “teatro letto,” citing as another ex-
ample, Sperone Speroni’s Canace, a Senecan-style tragedy based on the myth of the
daughter of the mythical Aeolus, which was performed only once two decades
after it was written.
165. Adapted for the London stage in 1566.
166. See Daniel Javitch, “La canonizzazione dell’Edipo re nell’Italia del sedicesimo se-
colo,” in Anna Maria Palombi Cataldi, ed., Teatro e palcoscenico dall’Inghilterra all’I-
talia, 1540-1640 (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2001) 17-43.
Solomon 521
sions (usually ending happily) of the Iphigenia and Alcestis myths in the mid-
dle of the eighteenth century. Despite Goethe’s efforts in the early nineteenth
century and Ludwig Tieck’s production of Donner’s translation of Sophocles’
Antigone at the Prussian court of Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1841, performances
of Greek tragedy would reach the popular culture only in the 1880s via uni-
versity productions and then spectacular outdoor productions in southern
France.167
IV. The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Even the introduction of vernacular translations of the Iliad to a broader au-
dience at the outset of the seventeenth century failed to inspire a literary Il-
iadic renascence. Europe had by now after four centuries become blasé about
even Benoît’s Dares and Dictys-derived romantic template of the Trojan saga.
Shakespeare gave the Dares/Dictys/Benoît tradition its last Renaissance hur-
rah with his Troilus and Cressida in approximately 1602.168 Chapman’s transla-
tion of the Iliad and some of the aforementioned continental translations
appeared less than ten years later, and at that point the balance between the
two main branches of the Trojan War stemma seems to be even. In 1699 John
Dryden published his translation of the first book of the Iliad, but twenty years
earlier he had also adapted Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1679). Alexan-
der Pope’s highly regarded translation of 1715-1720 seems to have finally
tipped the balance in the Iliad’s direction, and the final nail in the coffin for the
Dares/Dictys/Benoît tradition would come with the renewed interest in Hel-
lenism that followed in the wake of Winckelmann’s publications one genera-
tion later.169
The seventeenth century also deepened another critical division in the

Homeric tradition one generation after the appearance of Chapman’s trans-
167. Most notably the production in Orange featuring Jean Mounet-Sully.

168. Shakespeare’s sources included the aforementioned works by Chaucer and Lyd-
gate as well as Robert Henryson‘s late fifteenth-century The Testament of Cresseid,
William Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473/4), and Robert Greene’s Eu-
phues his Censure to Philautus (1587). On his sources, see Charles and Michelle Mar-
tindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1990) 91-120. On
Shakespeare’s adaptation of the Trojan myth in Hamlet, see Andrew Hiscock,
“’What’s Hecuba to him…’: Trojan Heroes and Rhetorical Selves in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet,” in Shephard and Powell, Fantasies of Troy (above, n. 114) 161-175. For Eliz-
abethan England as “Troynovant,” see Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Slanderous Troys:
Between Fame and Rumor,” in Shephard and Powell, eds., Fantasies of Troy, 215-
235; John S. P. Tatlock, “The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, Especially in
Shakespeare and Heywood,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 30
(1915) 673-770, offers a catalogue of dramatic performances and quotations relat-
ing to Troy. For meistersinger Hans Sachs’ dramatic rendition inspired by Dictys,
see Niklas Holzberg, “Staging the Fringe Before Shakespeare: Hans Sachs and the
Ancient Novel,” in Panayotakis, Zimmerman, and Keulen, eds., The Ancient Novel
and Beyond (above, n. 95) 393-400.
169. Pope’s English verse translation was contemporary with Anne Le Fèvre Dacier’s
high profile French prose translations of the Iliad (1711) and Odyssey (1716). This
followed Jacobus Perizonius’ academic repudiation of the veracity of Dares and
Dictys in 1702, for which see Griffin, “Un-Homeric Elements” (above, n. 97) 37-38.
lations of the Iliad in 1611 and then the Odyssey, which he published together
with the Iliad in a complete Homer edition in 1616. The division between the
Iliad tradition and the Odyssey tradition, which we have recently observed in
Mannerist fresco cycles, becomes visible on stage in the early 1640s. The ad-
vent of the Baroque era brought with it the musical/theatrical development
of opera, which combined renewed popular interest in Greek mythology, a
scholarly examination of ancient Greek music, and the desire to recreate an-
cient Greek tragedies with happy endings and without incest or intrafamilial
murders.170
In the years 1640-1643, Claudio Monteverdi produced in succession the
first operas based on Homeric and Vergilian epics, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria
(1640) and Le nozze d’Enea e Lavinia (1641),171 as well as L’incoronazione di Pop-
pea (1643), based on the Annals of Tacitus.172 We note the conspicuous absence
of an opera based on the Iliad. Simply put, the Odyssey and Aeneid offered pow-
erful female roles, while the Iliad, with brief and infrequent appearances by
Briseis, Helen, Hecuba, Andromache, Hera, and Aphrodite, lacks the romance
that Troilus and Cressida had provided for centuries, and that now Ulysses &
170. Renewed popular interest in Greek mythology developed just after the middle of
the sixteenth century with the publication of Dolce’s illustrated verse translation
of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1553), Cartari’s Imagini, con la spositione de i dei de gli an-
tichi (1556), and Natale Conti’s Mythologiae sive explicationis fabularum libri decem
(1567). A new understanding of ancient Greek music, never a popular subject, was
being formulated at the same time by Girolamo Mei, e.g. in his little known but
influential treatise, De modis musicis antiquorum (1573). His influence was felt by
Vincenzo Galilei (Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna [1581]) and Giovanni
Bardi, the latter serving as the patron of the Florentine Camerata, which produced
the impetus towards what would eventually be known as opera. This was also
the period in which contemporary translators tackled such treatises as the pseudo-
Plutarchan De musica (Carlo Valgulio), Aristides Quintilianus’ De musica (Giovanni
Burana), and Ptolemy’s Harmonics (Nicolò Leoniceno and Giovanni Augio).
171. Hans Ferdinand Redlich (Kathleen Dale, trans.), Claudio Monteverdi, Life and Works
(London: Oxford University Press, 1952) 105 and 175, cited by Reid, The Oxford
Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts (above, n. 3) II.748, has little justification
for attributing La Delia e l’Ulisse to Monteverdi in 1630, although it is not impos-
sible that Monteverdi reused some earlier music in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. –
The title of the latter work (Le nozze ...) as it appeared on the only extant printed
argomento was Le nozze d’Enea in Lavinia, but manuscript copies of the libretto use
the more familiar Le nozze d’Enea e Lavinia. In this I follow Ellen Rosand, Opera in
Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of Genre (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1991) 18, n. 25. On Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria see now Michael Ewans,
Opera from the Greek: Studies in the Poetics of Appropriation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate
Publishing, 2007) 9-29 and Ellen Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Tril-
ogy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2007) 27-34,
52-59, 86-97, 133-143, and 149-150, on Le nozze d’Enea e Lavinia ibid., 8-10, 15-17,
143-150 and 158-174.
172. For the literary tradition in the Tacitean opera, see Robert C. Ketterer, “Militat
omnis amans: Ovidian elegy in L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” International Journal of
the Classical Tradition 4 (1997-1998) 381-395. See also Albert Gier, Das Libretto. The-
orie und Geschichte einer musikoliterarischen Gattung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft 1998) 49-54 and Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Operas (above, n. 149)
34-38, 61-68 and 90-97.
Solomon 523
Penelope, and Aeneas and Lavinia, or more regularly, Aeneas and Dido,
would provide for the next century.173 And so, in the wake of Chapman and
the continental European translators and Monteverdi’s operas, during the sev-
enteenth and much of the eighteenth century the Odyssey becomes the Ho-
meric epic of dramatic romance and action, while the Iliad continues to be
relegated for the most part to the cerebral world of scholarship.174
At the conclusion of the Baroque, Homeric studies, particularly scholarly

interest in the Iliad, made a significant advancement.175 Robert Wood had de-
parted from Naples in the spring of 1750 to visit the Troad and elsewhere in
the eastern Mediterranean, among other purposes, to avail himself of the op-
portunity to read the Iliad at the actual sites once visited by Homer. (Perhaps
I should note here that none of the medieval, Renaissance, or subsequent
scholars or artists mentioned in this article thus far, with the exception of sev-
eral Byzantines, had ever been to Greece.) Returning to his native England, he
immediately assumed the position of Under-Secretary of State at the end of the
173. The need for romance, or at least an interesting female protagonist, be she mortal
or immortal, seems to have been so compelling that a great number of art works
depicting Achilles from the late seventeenth century into the twentieth incorpo-
rate as well Briseis, Thetis, Athena, Deidamia, Penthesileia, or Polyxena. Jean-Bap-
tiste Lully’s last opera, Achille et Polyxène (1687), completed by Pascal Collasse,
does cram elements of the Iliad into the first act, e.g. the quarrel between Achilles
and Agamemnon, the embassy (Diomedes alone) to Achilles, and the death of Pa-
troclus, but by the third act he introduces an operatic love triangle and reverses the
Homeric original by having Agamemnon introduce Briseis to Achilles so she can
entice him away from the Trojan Polyxena.
174. Between 1640 and 1750, according to the number of works in fine arts, music,
dance, and literature catalogued in Reid, The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in
the Arts (above, n. 3) I.2, 9-10, 12-13, and II.726-27, 733, 735-36, 739,-40, 741-43, 745-
46, and 748-49, the number of works derived from the Odyssey (95) outnumbers
that of works derived from the Iliad (20) by almost five to one. The eleven works
listed under the promising “Wrath of Achilles” heading (9-10) include a painting
of the horses of Achilles by a secondary artist, a drawing (“Thetis Urges Achilles
to Return to Battle”) attributed to Rembrandt, an unfinished tragedy Achille by
Jean de La Fontaine, an unattributed painting of “Achilles Wounded at the Siege
of Troy,” Sebastiano Ricci’s lost “Rape of Briseis,” two André Campra cantatas de-
picting a static Achilles, and Francesco Corradini’s revision (serenata armonica) of
Pietro Torri’s opera, La Briseida; those works under “Return to Battle” (12-13) in-
clude a misattribution and three lost paintings attributed to Jacob Jordaens, and
five of the works depict merely Achilles arming, with or without Thetis. This large
number of para-Iliadic, lost, and minor works suggests that the ratio of Odyssey-
related works to genuinely Iliad-related works is even higher. In addition, recent
scholarship, e.g. Gordana Lazarevich’s essay on Torri in Stanley Sadie, ed., The
New Grove Dictionary of Opera, IV.764, doubts even the attribution of La Briseida to
Torri. Proving the point even further is that Torri’s securely attributed works in-
clude a para-Iliadic pastoral Enone (1705) as well as the post-Iliadic opera, As-
tianatte (a.k.a. Andromacca) (1716/17).
175. For a current summary of the period of transition from Baroque and Classicism to
Romanticism see Bruce Graver, “Romanticism,” ch. 6 in Craig W. Kallendorf, ed.,
A Companion to the Classical Tradition, ser. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient
World (Oxford: Blackwell. 2007) 72-80 (“Homeric Criticism and Romantic Primi-
tivism”).
Seven Years War. The anecdote, that while reviewing a draft of the Treaty of
Paris, Lord Carteret, President of the Council, quoted to Wood from memory
Sarpedon’s exhortation towards duty in the Iliad (12.322-8), demonstrates how
inspirational and cerebral the Iliad had become in 1762.176 But, occupied with
diplomatic duties, Wood did not publish his findings until many years later,
and even then in only a preliminary version, A Comparative View of the Ancient
and Present State of the Troade (1767), to which his Essay on the Original Genius
of Homer was prefixed.177 Only six copies were printed, but he sent several to
Germany where the essay was much admired by Heyne, Goethe, and oth-
ers.178 Europe was becoming aglow with Homeric fire. In the 1750s and 1760s
Winckelmann had declared Greek art superior to all others, and Lessing ap-
plied the same valuation to Greek literature and especially Homer. Now in
1770 Johann Gottfried Herder, in his prize-winning treatise On the Origin of
Language, identified Homer as the first exponent of natural poetry, poetry in
its original and purest form.179 In the summer of 1770 Europeans began to read
of the Russian naval campaign, sponsored by Catherine the Great, to free
Greece from the Turks, and then in November came the Vienna première of
the opera Paride ed Elena, its libretto written by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi and set
by Christoph-Willibald Gluck.
In his essay, Wood (35) praised Homer for his ability to be a “constant
and faithful copier after Nature.…Homer therefore had only the great book of
Nature to peruse, and was original from necessity, as well as by genius.” Be-
cause the contemporary academic hypotheses were that poetry was the first
language of man, that the Greeks lived very soon after the poetic invention of
language, and that Homer was first and primary of the Greek poets, it fol-
lowed that any imitation of Homer should be as natural and pure as possible
176. See W. Baring Pemberton, Carteret, the Brilliant Failure of the Eighteenth Century
(London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1936) 329-330.
177. Reprinted as Robert Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1769 and
1775). (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1976). Thomas Blackwell’s attempts in 1735 and 1736
at advancing the prestige of Homer were premature, not recognized until they
were translated into German by Johann Heinrich Voss in 1776. See Kirsti Simon-
suuri, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-Century Notions of Early Greek Epic (1688-
1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 133-142.
178. See T. J. B. Spencer, “Robert Wood and the Problem of Troy in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957) 75-105.
179. Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (definitive edition by Ulrich Gaier, in:
Herder, Frühe Schriften 1764-1772 (= Werke I [Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klas-
siker Verlag, 1985] 695-810, with commentary, 1274-1328) won the prize of the
Royal Academy of Berlin in 1770 and was published in 1772. See Helene M.
Kastinger Riley, “Some German Theories on the Origin of Language from Herder
to Wagner,” The Modern Language Review 74 (1979) 617-632; William A. Wilson,
“Herder Folklore and Romantic Nationalism,” Journal of Popular Culture 6 (1973)
819-835; and Christa Kamenetsky, “Folklore Revival in the Eighteenth Century:
Herder’s Theory of Naturpoesie,” Journal of Popular Culture 6 (1973) 836-848. Fur-
ther for Herder on the nature and influence of the Homeric epics see “Homer und
Ossian” and “Homer, ein Günstling der Zeit” (both 1795), in: Herder, Schriften zu
Literatur und Philosophie 1792-1800, ed. Hans Dietrich Irmscher (= Werke 8 [1998])
71-87 and 89-115, respectively; cf. Joachim Wohlleben, “Friedrich August Wolfs
»Prolegomena ad Homerum« in der literarischen Szene seiner Zeit,” Poetica 28
(1996) 154-170.
Solomon 525
to retain Homer’s primordial spirit. Gluck reflected this thinking in attempt-

ing to represent purely the ethnic stereotypes of the Spartan Helen and Phry-
gian Paris. The week before the première, Gluck wrote in a preface to the
published score:180
I was obliged to find some variety of color, seeking it in the different
characters of the two nations of Phyrgia and Sparta, by contrasting
the roughness and savagery of one with the delicacy and tenderness
of the other. I believed that since singing in opera is nothing but a
substitute for declamation, I must make Helen’s music imitate the
native ruggedness of that nation, and I thought that it would not be
reprehensible if in order to capture this characteristic in the music, I
descended now and then to create a coarse effect. I believed that I
must vary my style in the pursuit of truth. … Tolle Syparium sufficit
mihi unus Plato pro cuncto populo (Raise the curtain! One Plato, rather
than everyone, is enough for me)181
Rousseau, for one, thought Helen’s music was “coarse,” but, Gluck was
attempting to recreate the ethos of the ancient Dorian and Phrygian modes. He
captured the austere, steadfast, even manly Dorian ethos of the ancient Spar-
tans, to the point of nearly creating an androgynous Helen, thereby creating
a musical dichotomy similar to the architectural dichotomy between the grace-
ful Ionic order of the Anatolian Greeks and the more austere Dorian order of
Western Greeks, which had experienced its own renascence in Europe just a
few decades before.182
Plato states categorically in his Republic (4.399A) that the Dorian and
Phrygian are the only styles of music pedagogically appropriate for develop-
ing the ideal human state, and in the early 1770s an opera about not just an-
cient Greece but the primordial Homeric period was very close to representing
the artistic origins of humankind. The story of the opera takes place in Sparta,
visited by the Phrygian Paris, lyre in hand, almost an Ionian Homer redivivus,
who sings beautifully, naturally, and simply about Helen, the beautiful rep-
resentative of an austere Dorian Greece. In the static visual arts, this same di-
chotomy between Phrygian and Dorian and the understanding that Homer
180. Christoph-Willibald Ritter von Gluck, Paride ed Elena. Dramma per Musica (Vienna,
1770), as translated in Patricia Howard, Gluck: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in
Letters and Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) 98; this preface was written
in the form of a letter to Duke Giovanni Braganza. It was probably written by
Gluck’s librettist Simone Francesco Maria Ranieri de’ Calzabigi. The difference
between Gluck’s Phrygian and Dorian interpretations are clearly audible in Paris’
“Le belle immagini d’un dolce amore” (II.3) and Helen’s much harsher, almost mili-
taristic “Donzelle semplici, no, non credete” (V.1).
181. Gluck’s Latin seems to be a variation of Cicero’s Brutus (51 [191]: Plato enim mihi
unus instar est centum milium).
182. Jacques-Germain Soufflot, for instance, in 1750 rendered a popular engraving of
the Temple of Poseidon at Paestum, which represented the Doric ideal, and re-
turned to Paris five years later to design the multi-ordered Panthéon in Paris.
reaches back towards the origins of human arts influenced Jacques-Louis

David as well in his subsequent representation of “Paris and Helen” (1788).183
Unlike Gluck’s very successful operatic versions of the Orpheus myth
and the quasi-tragic Alceste and Iphigénie operas, Gluck’s Trojan opera was not
a success.184 The increased analysis and intellectualization of the Troy tale
served to render the story—and now also the romance of Paris and Helen—
even less suitable for dynamic, popular theater. And then two decades later,
after the French Revolution had rendered the Iliad and its cast of aristocratic
characters irrelevant—and perhaps politically incorrect—for public con-
sumption,185 the Iliad was to become the focus of a new intellectual contro-
versy after the publication in 1795 of Friedrich August Wolf’s iconoclastic
Prolegomena to Homer.186 Wolf refined the assumption that “Homer” was just
one of many poets who developed the epic Iliad and Odyssey over a period of
183. David’s “Funeral of Patroclus” (1779) and “Andromache Mourning Over the Body
of Hector” (1783) preceded “Paris and Helen.” Interestingly, Yvonne Korshak,
“Paris and Helen by Jacques Louis David: Choice and Judgment on the Eve of the
French Revolution,” Art Bulletin 69 (1987) 102-116, bases her argument on the fact
that David’s painting “seems anomalously unphilosophical and ‘feminine’” (102).
Dora Wiebenson, “Subjects from Homer’s Iliad in Neoclassical Art,” Art Bulletin
46 (1964) 23-37, identified 300 illustrations of Iliad subjects, only 40 of which be-
longed to the period 1470-1750, while over 200 belonged to the neoclassical period
(1750-1825). That most of the latter belong to the category of minor arts corrobo-
rates the intellectual nature of Homeric interest during the late eighteenth cen-
tury but qualifies the period as a mini-renascence at least in the minor visual arts.
See also, Helge Seifert, Themen aus Homers Ilias in der französischen Kunst (1750-
1831), Beiträge zur Kunstwissenschaft 24 (Munich: Scaneg, 1988). For the reception
of Homer in France during this period, see Françoise Létoublon, Catherine Volpil-
hac-Auger, Daniel Sangsue, eds., Homère en France après la Querelle (1715-1900).
Actes du colloque de Grenoble (23-25 octobre 1995) Université Stendhal – Grenoble 3,
Champion-Varia 32 (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 1999).
Following Gluck’s Paride ed Elena by eight years came the inauguration of La
Scala in Milan, for which Michele Martellari set Mattia Verazi’s three-act libretto,
Troia distrutta (1778); the first act covered from the abduction of Helen to the death
of Hector, the third the episode of the Trojan horse and the fiery deaths of both
Paris and Helen.
184. Daniel Heartz, in his review of Federico Marri, La figura e l’opera di Ranieri de’ Calza-
bigi, in Music and Letters 71 (1990) 568, calls Paride ed Elena “the proverbial Cin-
derella—a neglected child on account of her older sisters.” Achilles plays an
important role in Gluck’s pre-Iliadac Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), his first Parisian
opera, the plot of which is derived not from Homer but from Euripides and
Aeschylus via Racine; see Susanna Philippo, “Clytemnestra’s Ghost: The
Aeschylean Legacy in Gluck’s Iphigenia Operas,” in: Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis
Michelakis, Edith Hall and Oliver Taplin, eds., Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC
to AD 2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 77-103.
185. Compared, for instance, with revivals of Voltaire’s Brutus (originally 1730) and
Bernard-Joseph Saurin’s Spartaco (originally 1760). Prior to and during the French
Revolution, Brutus and then Spartacus were revered as ancient prototypes for
anti-monarchical revolutionaries. See Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient
Rome, Cinema and History (London: Routledge, 1997) 34-37.
186. See the annotated English translation: F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795; trans-
lated with introduction and notes by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James
E.G. Zetzel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Solomon 527
several centuries, and in doing so Wolf influenced subsequent classical philol-

ogists, even if many of his contemporaries had already accepted this concept.
No longer was Homer simply a revered natural poet: he, and as a consequence
the Iliad as well, had now shifted further from the realms of Renaissance hu-
manists and Baroque literati to the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century
realm of scholars and textual critics.187
VI. The Nineteenth Century

The Iliad was now ever farther from the public eye as a beloved work of an-
cient art. There are notable examples. Goethe’s epic Achilleis was certainly not
designed to be a popular work: it was to be his attempt at embracing and re-
fashioning Homeric poetry.188 Moreover, the eight cantos were dependent in
part on Dictys’ account because they were to narrate Achilles’ affair with
Polyxena and his subsequent death. Ultimately Goethe completed only one
canto, and it was published in 1808.189 The youthful Donizetti’s L’ira d’Achille,
written in 1817, was and remains unperformed. The heroic melodrama Achille
(1801), for which Ferdinando Paer set a libretto written by Giovanni De
Gamerra, was not nearly as popular an opera as Paer’s earlier mythological
works Orphée et Euridice (1791) or Circe (1792). To the contrary but much to
Paer’s good fortune, the opera was much favored by Napoleon, who later ap-
pointed Paer to multiple imperial posts.190 Giuseppe Nicolini’s setting of the
187. Ibid 5-39. For a non-technical survey of earlier Homeric scholarship, see Anthony
Grafton, “Renaissance Readers of Homer’s Ancient Readers,” in Lamberton and
Keaney, eds., Homer’s Ancient Readers (above, n. 72) 149-172. Contemporary was
Heinrich von Kleist’s romantic tragedy Penthesilea (written in 1806/7, published
1808, but staged for the first time only in 1876), which was transformed into an
opera by the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1927), and into a made-for-
television film by Hans Neuenfels (1983); for a brief introduction and overview
(with rich bibliography) see Dieter Borchmeyer, Kindlers Neues Literatur Lexikon
IX (1988) 482-484; for an interpretative study Jochen Schmidt, Heinrich von Kleist.
Die Dramen und Erzählungen in ihrer Epoche (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge-
sellschaft, 2003) 105-128.
188. See R. B. Harrison, review of Humphry Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks, in Classi-
cal Review 32 (1982) 266. Julius Bryant in John Spurling and Julius Bryant, The Tro-
jan War: Sculptures by Anthony Caro (London: Lund Humphries, 1994) 6-9 discusses
Homeric inspiration with Joshua Reynolds as a theoretician of art and in subse-
quent works of sculpture created in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies.
189. See Wolfgang Schadewaldt, “Goethes «Achilleis». Rekonstruktion der Dichtung,”
in Schadewaldt, Goethestudien: Natur und Altertum (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1963)
301-395; and Christian-Friedrich Collatz, “Achilleis,” in Bernd Witte, Theo Buck,
et al., eds., Goethe Handbuch 1: Gedichte (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1996) 537-540.
190. Contemporary with this Napoleonic-era opera were Ingres’ canvases depicting
events from Iliad 9 (“Achilles Receiving the Ambassadors of Agamemnon” [1801])
and Iliad 1 (“Jupiter and Thetis” [1811]), as well as several versions of Bertel Thor-
waldsen’s “Briseis Led Away from Achilles by Agamemnon’s Heralds” (1803); see
also Jérôme-Martin Langlois’s “Priam at the Feet of Achilles” (1809), Michel-Mar-
tin Drölling’s “The Wrath of Achilles” (1810), and Jean Alaux’s “Briseis Mourning
Patroclus” (1815) in Brooks Beaulieu, “Dieux et Mortels: Les thèmes homériques
dans les collections de l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris,” Nine-
two-act opera seria L’ira d’Achille (1814) was an exception in that it was rea-
sonably successful at its première at La Scala in 1814. But to a considerable
extent this success can be attributed to the librettist, the learned Felice Ro-
mani, who was a member of the faculty of letters at the University of Genoa
and an artist able to bridge the scholarly and popular artistic worlds. Romani
was an early advocate for the analytical study of mythology and contributed
to a multi-volume dictionary of mythology and antiquity.191 In addition, un-
like many of his artistic peers, Romani made a scholarly pilgrimage to
Greece.192
As the process of the intellectualization of the Iliad continued through-

out the first half of the nineteenth century, the simultaneous popularization of
the modern novel among the urban industrialized populace drastically re-
duced even their awareness of the Greco-Roman classics. The predominance
of classical literature among the educated elite, which had continued from late
antiquity to well into the eighteenth century, was now experiencing its first de-
mographic challenge. That challenge was met promptly and effectively, how-
ever, after the southern Italian sojourn of the young English novelist, Edward
Bulwer-Lytton, who returned home to write The Last Days of Pompeii. The
novel was released on September 29, 1834, the very week that the front pages
of many London newspapers were filled with vivid descriptions of the August
27-29, 1834 eruption of Vesuvius.193 No doubt this increased initial sales con-
siderably, and the resulting phenomenal popular success of this ground-break-
ing ancient historical novel helped establish classical antiquity as a source
from which to draw and develop popular and commercially viable subject
matter. But it renewed interest in popular works set in ancient Rome, not
Greece. In contrast, Homer’s Troy had been so relegated to the intellectual
sphere that just seven years later, in 1841, Hector Berlioz, the dominant French
composer and musical intellectual of his day, could write in a Parisian news-
paper of erecting “a Temple of Sound at the foot of Mount Ida,” where he
“would then take the finest orchestra in the world to the ruins of Troy to play
the “Eroica Symphony”.”194 In other words, for Berlioz the ruins of Troy have
become part of an inspiration for idealized art; the Iliadic narrative has be-
come irrelevant.
teenth-Century Art Worldwide 4 (2005) online: http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/

spring_05/reviews/beau.html.
191. Girolamo Pozzoli, Dizionario d’ogni mitologia e antichità … continuato ed ampliato dal
prof. Felice Romani e dal dr. Antonio Peracchi (Milan: Batelli e Fanfani, 1809-1827).
192. Romani also penned the libretto for Mayr’s Medea in Corinto (1813).
193. James C. Simmons, “Bulwer and Vesuvius: The Topicality of The Last Days of
Pompeii,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24 (1969) 103-105.
194. This very essay seems to have had a profound influence on the young Richard
Wagner, then living in Paris, giving him the inspiration to build his Bayreuth Fest-
spielhaus as the venue for his ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk some thirty-one years
later. Berlioz’s article appeared in the Gazette musicale, January 28, 1841, and Wag-
ner’s reaction in The Artist and Publicity (Der Künstler und die Öffentlichkeit) in the
same paper (as “Le musicien et la publicité) on April 1, 1841. For the text, see William
Ashton Ellis, trans., Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (New York: Broude Brothers,
1892) VII, 134-41.
Solomon 529
Berlioz spent many of the last years of his career writing his operatic Tro-
jan epic, Les Troyens, a five-act grand opera based predominantly on Vergil’s
Aeneid.195 The action of the first two acts of Les Troyens takes place in Troy and
include events from the Trojan horse episode to the flight of Aeneas; that of the
last three acts takes place in Carthage and includes the ill-fated romance be-
tween Dido and Aeneas. That this masterwork was Vergilian and not a Ho-
meric work already speaks volumes in itself about the intellectual aura that
kept Homer’s Iliad out of the public view for the most part in the mid-nine-
teenth century, but even more telling about the public regard for the Trojan
myth in that period was this: although Berlioz could not generate enough in-
terest to get his Trojan masterpiece performed on stage even once, just two
years later Paris reveled in 400 performances of Jacques Offenbach’s farce
about the Trojan War, La Belle Hélène (1864).196
The next decade brings us to Schliemann’s excavations, which widened

the reception rift between the Iliad and Odyssey into a chasm. Schliemann’s
widely publicized excavations in Troy in the 1870s changed the public per-
ception of Troy from that of Homer’s mythical city to that of Schliemann’s
controversial archaeological mound.197 Following Schliemann’s death in 1890,
Wilhelm Dörpfeld proclaimed to the world in public lectures after his subse-
195. See Heinz Hofmann, “Troia im Musiktheater: von Lodovico Dolce und Claudio
Merulo, Le Troiane, bis zu Hector Berlioz, Les Troyens (und darüber hinaus),” in
Hofmann, ed., Troia von Homer bis heute (above, n. 37) 142-185, and, more specifi-
cally, Christian Doumet, “La musique et les mythes (à propos des Troyens de
Berlioz),” in: Françoise Létoublon, Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Daniel Sangsue,
eds., Homère en France après la Querelle (1715-1900) (above, n. 183) 439-453.
196. Berlioz was able to get only the final three acts produced in 1863, but this was
largely because at the time Paris was experiencing a Carthaginian craze in the
wake of the publication of Flaubert’s Salammbô in 1862, which in turn had just fol-
lowed upon Charles-Ernest Beulé’s excavations at Carthage and the resulting
Fouilles à Carthage (1861).
197. For the perception that Troy was a controversial archaeological mound, see, for in-
stance, “Priam’s Palace: Has It Been Unearthed By Dr. Schliemann? – Remnants of
an Older Troy Than That of Homer,” The New York Times (December 27, 1878) 4;
and the very critical unsigned article, “The Land of Homer,” The New York Times
(December 19, 1880) 4: “Even now Dr. Schliemann does not abandon his theory
that the city of which Homer sang is the one which he has unearthed upon the hill
of Hisarlik. ... The fact still remains that only by an effort of the imagination can
the remains of the comparatively small citadel and town of which he has discov-
ered the debris be connected with the glory and magnificence of Priam. ... If in
this age we cannot know whether Homer himself was one poet or many, and in
his time the events of which the ‘Iliad’ tells belonged to the realm of legendary
lore, it does not seem likely to have been given to an explorer of this generation
to discover the scene where all these marvels took place.” For later perspectives,
in addition to the literature cited above, n. 9, see Justus Cobet, “Schliemanns
Troia,” in Zimmermann, ed., Der Traum von Troia (above, n. 23), 149-164; Johannes
Haubold, “Wars of Wissenschaft: The New Quest for Troy,” International Journal of
the Classical Tradition 8 (2002-2003) 564-579, and for the publicity around the re-
cent debate stirred up by Manfred Korfmann’s excavations and subsequent pub-
lications Wolfgang Ernst, “Datenkrieg. Troia zwischen Medien und Archäologie,”
in Knut Ebeling and Stefan Altenkamp, eds., Die Aktualität des Archäologischen in
quent excavation at Troy, that the Trojan War was a historical event that took
place in the late bronze age.198 It was now a well publicized fact: there was a
historical Trojan War. Troy itself was no longer a city of mythology, and as a
famed historical city reclaimed from the foggy grip of the mythical world, it
would lose even more of its artistic allure and be even further confined to ac-
ademic study and controversy. It would be many years before Troy and par-
ticularly the Iliad would provide the subject matter for a significant or
successful work for stage or the soon-to-be invented cinema.
In contrast, Schliemann’s excavations at Ithaca in 1868 had not been
nearly so productive or informative, and soon after the Odyssey would provide
inspiration for a very popular novel, The World’s Desire (1890), which told the
story of Ulysses and his death at the hands of Telegonus. The novel was writ-
ten by the successful adventure-novel writer Sir H(enry) Rider Haggard in
collaboration with Merton fellow Andrew Lang, whose previous publications
included a prose translation of the Odyssey (1879) and a narrative poem, Helen
of Troy (1882).199
VIII. The Twentieth Century

As we move into the twentieth century, therefore, the Odyssey flourishes, first
with August Bungert’s massive operatic tetralogy Die Homerische Welt (1898-
1903), nine additional dramas featuring Nausicaa,200 Gabriel Fauré’s operatic
Pénélope in 1913, and thereafter with consistent bursts of inspiration in a vari-
ety of modern genres, highlighted by Samuel Butler’s (still circulating) trans-
lation (1900), Jean Giraudoux’s Elpénor (1919), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922),
Nikos Kazantzakis’ Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1925-1938), individual poems
by H. D., allusions by Ezra Pound, and drawings and paintings by Giorgio
de Chirico, all paralleled by silent film versions in 1908, 1911, and 1918.201
Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,

2004) 233-251.
198. For the widespread acceptance of Dörpfeld’s assertions, cf. the standing-room-
only New York audience that thronged to hear him lecture in German at Columbia
in 1895, as described in “Ruins of Ancient Troy: Dr. Dörpfeld’s First Archaeolo-
gical Lecture at Columbia College,” The New York Times (November 10, 1896) 3.
199. Lang used contemporary academic theories and discoveries about the ancient past
to expand his artistic inspiration; cf Andrew Lang, Anthrolopology of the Classics: Six
Lectures Delivered Before the University of Oxford by Arthur J. Evans, Andrew Lang,
Gilbert Murray, F. B. Jevons, J. L. Myres, W. Warde Fowler (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1908) 44: “Even in the few fragments of the so-called Cyclic poets … there
are survivals of barbaric customs—for example human sacrifice, and the belief in
phantasms of the dead. … It is not easily conceivable that Homer was ignorant of
any of these things.”
200. Reid, The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts (above, n. 3) II.747.
201. Bungert’s Die Homerische Welt included Kirke (1898), Nausikaa (1901), Odysseus
Heimkehr (1896), and Odysseus Tod (1903). Like the Haggard/Lang novel, it con-
tinued through the story of Telegonus and the death of Odysseus. The filmed
adaptations include Charles Le Bargy’s Le retour d’Ulysse (1908) for Pathé Frères
and Milano Film’s Odissea (1911) with Giuseppe De Liguoro. That of 1918 was Vic-
tory Films’ The Triumph of Venus, which focuses on Venus’ affair with Mars as told
Solomon 531
The Iliad, on the other hand, had already had several centuries of relega-
tion to the intellectual, academic, and now historical sphere, and it had had
nearly three millennia of competition with and for the most part domination
by an array of pre- and post-Iliadic mythological material; and now it had
been deprived of what little mythological allure it had left. In 1899 Karl Gold-
mark responded to Bungert with his opera featuring Briseis (Die Kriegsgefan-
gene), but it spawned no sequel, and Bungert had abandoned his own Die Ilias
project by the time of his death in 1915. Even including such minor works as
Wilhelm Schmidtbonn’s verse tragedy Der Zorn des Achilles (1910) and André
Suarès’ Achille vengeur (1922), there were barely a half-dozen Iliadic works
produced for the entire first half of the century.
Not surprisingly, the Iliad would leave relatively little trace in the rela-
tively new art form of the cinema, which, now that the twentieth century has
come to its completion, can be said arguably to be the most significant art form
of the century. In fact, there were no film versions of Homer’s Iliad, while Gio-
vanni Pastrone’s La caduta di Troia (1911), Georges Hatot’s Le jugement de Paris
(1922), the German Der Raub der Helena (1924), and Itala Film’s Hollywood-
produced La Regina di Sparta (1931) all celebrated the events of the non-Iliadic
cyclic epics.202 The events of John Erskine’s novel, The Private Life of Helen of
Troy (1925), which Alexander Korda rendered cinematically two years later,
take place after the Trojan War has ended.203
The only significant Iliadic work of the first half of the twentieth century,
Jean Giraudoux’s La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (1935), appeared at the dawn
of the German reoccupation of the demilitarized Rhineland, inspired, of
course, by the looming war. It drastically converted Hector into a pacifist who
tries in vain to talk the elders of Troy into returning Helen to Menelaus in the
hope that they could avoid fighting a war against the Greeks, while Helen,
earlier enamored of Paris, ends the play ironically by flirting with Troilus.204
This is a particularly interesting characterization of Hector insofar as our sur-
vey is concerned, for Petersen’s Hector attempts as well to avert the war to-
wards the beginning of the film by returning Helen to Menelaus, but
Petersen’s Hector is overruled.
in Od. 8.266-366. See Solomon, The Ancient World in the Cinema (above n. 4) 7-8.
For a broader survey, see Bernd Seidensticker, “Aufbruch zu neuen Ufern. Trans-
formationen der Odysseusgestalt in der literarischen Moderne,” in Bernd Sei-
densticker and Martin Vöhler, eds., Urgeschichten der Moderne: Die Antike im 20.
Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2001) 249-270.
202. See Winkler, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Winkler, ed., Troy (above n. 5) 15-17, and
id., “The Trojan War on the Screen: An Annotated Filmography,” ibid., 204-205.
There may have been also a French La Chute de Troie (1911), which some attribute
to Pathé. Cf. http://ibelgique.ifrance.com/peplums/pep18d.htm.
203. In addition, Erskine also wrote a companion piece, Penelope’s Man: The Homing In-
stinct (1928).
204. See G. Grammann, “Les allusions politiques dans, ,La guerre de Troie n’aura pas
lieu‘,” Cahiers Giraudoux 7 (1978) 27-46; Rolf Kloepfer, “Anmerkungen zu Girau-
doux’s Stück ,Der trojanische Krieg findet nicht statt‘,” in Hans-Jürgen Horn and
Hartmut Laufhütte, eds., Ares und Dionysus: das Furchtbare und das Lächerliche in der
europäischen Literatur, Mannheimer Beiträge zur Sprach- und Literaturwis-
senschaft 1 (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1981) 177-187.
The middle of the twentieth century experienced a renascence of popu-

lar interest in the ancient world in general. When the Great Depression and
World War II had receded into recent memory, first Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson
and Delilah (1949) and subsequently MGM’s Quo Vadis (1951) created a new ex-
citement among the movie-going public and attractive profits for film studios.
Meanwhile Maria Callas was thrilling the operatic world with her renditions
of Cherubini’s Medea, Robinson Jeffers’ adaptation of Euripides’ Medea star-
ring Tony Award winner Judith Anderson had just completed its run of 214
performances, the New York Times Best Seller List included Thorton Wilder’s
The Ides of March (1948), Lloyd C. Douglas’ story of St. Peter, The Big Fisherman
(1948), Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian (1949), and Thomas Costain’s The Silver
Chalice (1952), and the Gilberton Corporation issued its “Classics Illustrated”
version (#77) of the Iliad (November, 1950), followed by a version of Homer’s
Odyssey (#81) in March, 1951. Popular projects evoking classical antiquity (in-
cluding the Passion of Christ) would continue to flourish during the ensuing
decade, particularly in the cinema. But among the few hundred films set in
Greco-Roman antiquity, only four included Iliadic material, and one of them,
The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships (1954), was never completed, while
two others, The Fury of Achilles (L’Ira d’Achille—1962) and The Trojan Horse (aka
La Guerra di Troia—1962) were Italian pepla which received little public or crit-
ical attention.205 The only completed project of note was Warner Brothers’
Helen of Troy (1956), with Robert Wise as director, which like so many Troy
tales of the previous two and one-half millennia, ranges from the abduction
of Helen to the death of Achilles and a little beyond.206 In fact, of the two most
visible, high-cost theatrical arts operative during the twentieth century, film
and opera, there is only one major representation of the Iliad in each, the op-
eratic entry being Michael Tippett’s King Priam (1962), which, again, begins
with the abduction of Helen and then concludes by focusing on how the
Achilles-Patroclus-Hector tragedies directly affect the Trojan King.207 Inter-
estingly, just a few years earlier the Dares/Dictys/Benoît part of the tradition
205. The Fury of Achilles (L’Ira d’Achille—1962) unfolds more or less within the chrono-
logical parameters of the Iliad, beginning with and elaborating upon the sack of
Lyrnessus, the arrest of Briseis, and the assignment of booty, and concluding with
the ransom of Hector. Chryses invokes Apollo to punish the Greeks, and there are
even double-exposure divine interventions of Athena (Book I) and Thetis (Book
XVIII). The Trojan Horse (La Guerra di Troia—1962) begins towards the end of the
Iliad with the dragging of Hector’s corpse, the funeral games of Patroclus, and
Priam’s visit to Achilles. The Swedish film, Sköna Helena (1951) included Hercules
rather than Achilles. The same period inspired a French stage comedy, André
Roussin’s Le tombeau d’Achille (1956). See Winkler, “The Trojan War on the Screen”
(above n. 202) 207-208.
206. Helen of Troy includes several Iliadic moments, including the farewell between An-
dromache and Hector, and the quarrel in Book I, which lasts just over one minute.
Cf. the remarks by Nisbet, Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture (above, n. 5)
31-36.
207. See Ewans, Opera from the Greek (above, n. 171) 129-151. – For other minor repre-
sentations, see Winkler, “The Trojan War on the Screen” (above n. 202) 208-215.
Solomon 533
had a significant revival in Sir William Walton’s Chaucerian Troilus and Cres-
sida (1955), which included both Chaucerian and Shakespearean elements.208
For the most part209 that brings us to the current renascence of films with
ancient subjects that has followed in the wake of Sam Raimi’s highly success-
ful syndicated television series “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” (1994-
2000).210 On the silver screen this renascence brought forth DreamWork’s
highly acclaimed Gladiator (2000),211 a number of made-for-television films,
and then Troy (2004).212 Among the made-for-television films was Helen of Troy
(2003), aired originally on the USA Network, wherein an actor named Joe
Montana—not the football player—portrayed Achilles. The film, broadcast
over two nights (April 20-21), did not have the players reach Troy itself until
the second evening, but thereafter it did spend some 20 of its 177-minute run-
ning time on the duels between Menelaus/Paris and Achilles/Hector. But al-
though those minutes include Menelaus defeating Paris and pulling his
helmet by the crest, as at Iliad 3.369-73, Menelaus then shows mercy, engages
in a lengthy conversation with Paris, and chats calmly about how his wife is
faring while living with the Trojan prince. In contrast, Achilles dares Hector
to throw his javelin at him, but Hector claims he does “not fight that way”;
Achilles says, “I do!” and immediately spears his unaware opponent.213
That brings us back to Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, and it is important to
realize, in light of the preceding survey, that in the formative stages of the
project Warner Brothers originally considered producing Michael Tabb’s script
featuring the story of Troilus and Cressida. This illustrates again that in the
2700-year tradition of the myths surrounding the Trojan War, whether the rea-
son has been its unparalleled style of artistry, its archaic ambience, its limited
narrative scope, its lack of romance, or its Greek text, the Iliad has only rarely
been an exemplar for artists. And while my purpose here has been to place Pe-
208. The same period produced Robert Graves’ novel, Homer’s Daughter (1955), which
formed the basis for the libretto of Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ opera, Nausicaa (1961).
For other contemporary novels related to the Trojan War, see http://www.rhul.
ac.uk/classics/NJL/novels.html.
209. During the year-long hiatus following the relatively unsuccessful Casanova (1976)
and City of Women (1980), Federico Fellini took some steps, with Anthony Burgess,
towards developing a version of the Iliad in 1980, planning to tell “stories of men
and gods who wonderfully represent the human creature in all of its most secret
psychic components.” See Hollis Alpert, Fellini: A Life (New York: Atheneum, 1986)
276-279. The year before the British made-for-television Of Mycenae and Men (1979)
detailed what happened to Helen (Diana Dors) after the war.
210. The second pilot film, Hercules and the Lost Kingdom (1994), involved the “lost city
of Troy,” and in the first season of the spin-off “Xena: The Warrior Empress” se-
ries, the twelfth episode, “Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts” (1996), had Helen asking
Xena to assist the Trojans during the last days of the war against the Greeks.
211. See Winkler, Gladiator: Film and History (above, n. 15).
212. See the chronology offered in Karl Galinsky, “Film,” in Craig W. Kallendorf, ed.,
A Companion to the Classical Tradition (above, n. 160) 399-400.
213. Dictys’ version also has Achilles defeat Hector through human treachery; Homer’s
Hector is tricked by the immortal Athena. In the made-for-television Helen of Troy,
Agamemnon slays Priam in his palace, as in Petersen’s Troy,—just before he rapes
Helen, an obscenity Petersen does not repeat.
tersen’s Troy into this art-historical perspective, I conclude the process with
the thought that the mythological tradition of the Trojan War is ongoing. In-
sofar as Petersen and Benioff continued this tradition, they had, as we have
seen, essentially an art-historical imperative, to expand the Iliad beyond the
Homeric parameters and fashion the story as befitted the cinematic medium
with all the considerable financial pressures attached to making a high-profile
Hollywooden release, not to mention the specter of anticipated initial audi-
ence responses and critical opinions, both of which would determine whether
their efforts had pleased the masses and earned back its nearly $200 million
investment. As for the historical and archaeological authenticity of the film
and its fidelity to Homer, again, this is a much larger investigation that de-
serves separate treatment.214 But I hope that I have demonstrated that for over
two thousand years matters of authenticity have very rarely been of con-
cern.215 In fact, Petersen’s Troy is actually one of the few major works of art in
the past 2700 years even to attempt a balance between respecting Homer’s
thought-provoking slice of the Troy tale and a glorification of its more user-
friendly, non-Iliadic aspects while satisfying its intended audience, which, I
emphasize, does not include the professional classicist.
214. See, for instance, J. Lesly Fitton, “Troy and the Role of the Historical Advisor,” and
Kim Shahabudin, “From Greek Myth to Hollywood Story: Explanatory Narrative
in Troy,” in Winkler, ed., Troy (above n. 5) 99-106, and 107-118, respectively.
215. Cf. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay (above, n. 94) 195-196.

Solomon2007 Article TheVacillationsOfTheTrojanMyth

Uploaded by

Solomon2007 Article TheVacillationsOfTheTrojanMyth

Uploaded by

DOI 10.

The Vacillations of the Trojan Myth:

© Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008

Introduction: Artists, Invention, Authenticity, and the Classical Tradition

1. The following article developed out of a paper presented at a conference on “The

Jon Solomon, Department of Classics, University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign,

novative thematic interpretation.6 Accounts of ancient historical events have

final duel between Achilles and Hector as indeed a grand championship. In

Because the subject of authenticity in contemporary popular cinema, in-

consisted of multiple branches, making accuracy and authenticity a matter of

Of the thirty-three extant fifth-century B.C. Athenian tragic dramas, more

Astyanax,59 and scenes depicting Aeneas60— whose escape was included in

also inspired a new subgenre of dramatic representation in the Hellenistic pe-

Lastly, the fifth book of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae (40.207d-209e) in-

In sum, although Homer garnered and maintained tremendous respect

II. The Roman Period

Similarly, despite a substantial number of Iliadic tableaux in Roman vi-

Lastly, towards the end of classical antiquity, Quintus of Smyrna’s third-

III. The Dictys/Dares/Benoît Tradition

For it were a long digressioun

weiger Trojanerkrieg attributed to Wolfram von Eschenbach117 as well as the

novative, twelfth-century, Old French verse romance.122 Benoît’s Le Roman de

adapted and translated in an explosion of Gothic romantic epics, including

148, respectively; and Thomas Gärtner, Klassische Vorbilder mittelalterlicher Tro-

Ceffi in 1324, translated into Spanish by Pero López de Ayala, rendered by

IV. The Renaissance

wake of this concentrated popularization of the vast corpus of Greco-Roman

mentaries by Eustathius—corroborates our understanding that Homer’s Iliad

the Iliad by the Bavarian Vincentius Opsopoeus (Books 1, 2, 9) and Niccolò

160. E.g. Boccaccio, Gen. 2.1.

IV. The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The seventeenth century also deepened another critical division in the

167. Most notably the production in Orange featuring Jean Mounet-Sully.

At the conclusion of the Baroque, Homeric studies, particularly scholarly

to retain Homer’s primordial spirit. Gluck reflected this thinking in attempt-

reaches back towards the origins of human arts influenced Jacques-Louis

several centuries, and in doing so Wolf influenced subsequent classical philol-

VI. The Nineteenth Century

As the process of the intellectualization of the Iliad continued through-

teenth-Century Art Worldwide 4 (2005) online: http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/

The next decade brings us to Schliemann’s excavations, which widened

VIII. The Twentieth Century

Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,

The middle of the twentieth century experienced a renascence of popu-

You might also like