Accessing Universal Intelligence.
Human Ingenuity and Creativity. Our Cultural Heritage.
Favourite things. Music and Movies. Nature. Items that interest me on any topic.
The Holy Grail is a dish, plate, stone or cup that is part of an
important theme of Arthurian literature. According to legend, it has
special powers and is designed to provide happiness, eternal youth and
food in infinite abundance.
A grail, wondrous but not explicitly
holy, first appears in Perceval le Gallois, an unfinished romance by
Chrétien de Troyes.[1] It is a processional salver used to serve at a
feast. Chrétien's story attracted many continuators, translators and
interpreters in the later 12th and early 13th centuries, including
Wolfram von Eschenbach, who perceived the grail as a great precious
stone that fell from the sky.
The Grail legend became interwoven with
legends of the Holy Chalice.[2] The connection with Joseph of Arimathea
and with vessels associated with the Last Supper and crucifixion of
Jesus dates from Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie (late 12th
century) in which Joseph receives the Grail from an apparition of Jesus
and sends it with his followers to Great Britain.
Building upon this
theme, later writers recounted how Joseph used the Grail to catch
Christ's blood while interring him and how he founded a line of
guardians to keep it safe in Britain. The legend may combine Christian
lore with a Celtic myth of a cauldron endowed with special powers.
Over the past few years, even the most ardent comic book nerd might
have wondered if there were too many superhero movies playing in the
local multiplex.
For every Iron Man, or Avengers, there have been a
couple of less-than Fantastic Fours and enough dubious Hulks to smash
the sternest spirit. Studios keep making these films because they know
audiences will flock to see them, even if the heroes include a raccoon
and a tree. So the question this poses is: why are we so drawn to
superhero stories? And since when?
The answer to the second
question is more brief than the first.
Superheroes have existed for as
long as stories, before writing and across every culture from which we
can find evidence. Fionn mac Cumhaill built the Giant’s Causeway in
Northern Ireland, and Gilgamesh defeated Humbaba in Mesopotamia. Rama
was exiled from Ayodhya in India, while Beowulf slew Grendel and
Grendel’s mother in Scandinavia. And that’s before you think about the
ancient Greeks, who boasted a plethora of heroes to match any collection
from Marvel or DC.
Many of today’s most popular superheroes have roots in ancient
characters – Wonder Woman, like Hippolyta, is one of the Amazons, a
female warrior race (Credit: Warner Bros)
The rules about what makes a superhero are pretty flexible. Superman
is an alien, pre-empted by almost two millennia by the Assyrian satirist
Lucian who wrote in his True Stories of extra-terrestrial armies
engaged in a war.
Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider, and
Bruce Banner was dosed with gamma rays: in other words, they are
ordinary human beings with an extra power imposed upon them. The
ancients used a similar narrative device, but with semi-divinity as the
explanation, rather than science: Perseus, for example, is a hero
because his father is Zeus. Wonder Woman, like Hippolyta and Penthesilea
before her, is an Amazon, and so also semi-divine.
Bruce Wayne
and Tony Stark’s superpowers are their limitless credit cards, which
also explains why Agamemnon – least heroic of all heroes, surely – is so
concerned about acquiring more booty than other Greek hero during the
Trojan War: money is power.
But perhaps my favourite subgroup of
superheroes includes Hawkeye and Green Arrow, whose superpower is ‘being
especially good with a bow and arrow’. This ties them neatly to the
wiliest of all ancient heroes, Odysseus. After a 20-year absence from
his home of Ithaca, he proves his identity to those who thought him long
dead by stringing a complex bow and shooting an arrow through twelve
axe-heads.
Every superhero has his origin story, and a surprisingly large number of
modern ones owe those origins to myths of gods and heroes who existed
millennia before their cultural descendants. Even Ant-Man isn’t a
completely recent phenomenon: Zeus turned himself into an ant, as part
of his scheme to have sex with every pretty girl in the ancient world
while disguised as an array of different creatures. Leda was ravished by
him in swan form; poor Eurymedusa was accosted by him as an ant.
Achilles’ warriors, the Myrmidons, legendarily owe their name to this
union (the Greek word for an ant is myrmex): they too are Ant-men.
Comics and classics So that brings us
back to the first question, which is rather more complicated: what is it
about the superhero narrative that has such a primal appeal we’ve been
telling stories about men and women with superpowers for as long as
we’ve told stories? For the ancients, heroes and gods acted as a kind of
bridge between what they could understand and explain, and what they
could not.
For example, ancient Greeks and Romans experienced large
numbers of earthquakes; they knew the ground shook, but they could not
possibly have guessed the existence of tectonic plates. So they
extrapolated: a light, wooden table would shake if you stamped your foot
next to it, on a wooden floor. When buildings shook, it made sense then
that something very powerful was stamping on the ground somewhere.
Thus, Poseidon acquired his honorific title ‘Earth-shaker’. The idea of a
god lurking beneath the ocean smacking his trident into the seabed may
seem like a fanciful explanation to us. But as a way of explaining the
information available to the ancients, it’s not bad.
Some Marvel characters aren’t just indirectly inspired by antiquity –
The Avengers’ Thor, and his brother Loki, are supposed to be the gods of
Norse myths (Credit: Disney/Marvel)
And heroes in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid – the epic poems of the
Trojan War and its aftermath – often have an intimate connection to the
gods that shapes their heroic stories.
Achilles is the son of Thetis (a
sea-nymph for whom Zeus has an especially soft spot). Aeneas is the son
of Venus, and though Odysseus boasts mortal parentage, he is the
favourite of Athena (and bête-noire of Poseidon).
Odysseus is described
by Homer as ‘Polumetis’, which means ‘of many wiles’. But still, some of
his best schemes are provided by one god or another: without the help
of Hermes, for instance, he would not have the stratagem in place to
defeat the witch Circe.
This connection to a higher power which
can influence the world around them (whether it is Zeus or SHIELD) is a
crucial aspect of many heroes. And perhaps it is this particular
characteristic that grants the superhero one of their more troubling
tendencies: the excessive individualism which allows them to operate
outside the rules of society and beyond or above the rule of law.
It’s a
common trope of modern superhero films: who is Batman to decide what
kind of justice Gotham deserves? He’s a masked vigilante who sets
himself above his fellow citizens and acts as judge, jury and sometimes
executioner on the villains who populate the city.
The existential X-Men This question too
is not a modern one. In Book II of The Iliad, a man named Thersites
makes a brief cameo appearance. He is not described, as so many
characters are, with reference to his father: whoever that is, he’s not
important enough for a name-check.
Thersites is also vulgar and
misshapen: we are surely supposed to conclude that he is far from heroic
material.
More so when he begins to speak, and issues a trenchant
critique of the character of Agamemnon, the king who oversees all the
Greeks: Theristes accuses him of being greedy and cowardly – sentiments
which echo those Achilles has made of Agamemnon earlier in the poem.
Thersites
is then beaten by Odysseus and he weeps at the pain and humiliation.
But the question is now surely lodged in the audience’s mind: why should
Agamemnon be treated as a great king, worthy of all the treasure he has
claimed for himself. What sets him above us, apart from his monstrous
self-regard? Especially when all are agreed that Achilles is the greater
warrior, a braver man.
And what happens when a hero turns
completely away from the path which most of us would consider good?
Magneto, for example, starts out fighting alongside Charles Xavier,
before their choices place them on opposing sides.
His story echoes that
of Ajax, who fights alongside the other Greek heroes during the Trojan
War. But after he is tricked out of what he sees to be his rightful
reward (which is instead given to Odysseus), he turns on his erstwhile
comrades. Only an enchantment from Athena (protecting Odysseus as
always) clouds his mind, and convinces him that he is slaughtering Greek
warriors when he is actually killing livestock. The humiliation is so
terrible that he takes his own life when he realises what he has done.
Ancient tales not only depicted the struggles of heroes, but of villains
too – such as Polyphemus, brought to terrifying life by Swiss artist
Arnold Böcklin (Credit: Wikipedia)
We are surely drawn to heroes and superheroes because they illuminate
the human condition – and they do so precisely because they operate at a
slightly inhuman level. Heroes are like us, but more so: stronger,
cleverer, faster. They suffer from the same human frailties as we do,
but because of their superior powers, these struggles are played out in a
more dramatic arena than our own.
Superheroes impose order on a
chaotic world, which can often seem to be filled with nefarious powers
(from natural disasters to supervillains) that mere mortals cannot
identify or hope to fight. We clearly prefer a world of lawless
superheroes to one with no superheroics at all. And we always have.
Historian Frank Kolb shifts Trojan War from Turkey
to Greece
About 6km inland from Turkey’s Aegean coast stands
a pile of ancient masonry believed to be the site of legendary Troy. An outsized
Trojan horse — very Disney — rears beside it. A few broken doric columns lend a
classical air. And tour guides explain how at this stronghold, more than 1000
years before the birth of Christ, the Trojan champion Hector fought the Greek
superhero Achilles in a war over a faithless beauty named Helen.
Now one of Germany’s most distinguished ancient
historians, Frank Kolb, is challenging this article of faith with claims that
the Trojan War was fought not in Turkey but in mainland Greece. Kolb, a
professor at Tubingen University, is out to deflate the popular belief in a real
Trojan War fought at the archeological site identified with Troy since the
German amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann began excavating there — the
locals call it Hisarlik hill — in the 1870s.
Kolb, an expert in the ancient history of western
Turkey, argues in the next issue of Talanta, journal of the Dutch
Archeological and Historical Society, that the legend of the Trojan War was
formed in Greece before migrating between the 11th and the 8th centuries BC to
Turkey, or Asia Minor as it was then called. “Together with the Trojan legend,
the names of persons, settlements and tribes were transported into that region,
which thus became a kind of lookalike of central Greece,” he writes.
The Trojan War story is told in
The Iliad, an epic poem written around 700BC. The work, composed by
a reputedly blind bard named Homer, is the distillation of an even more
venerable body of myth preserved in the aspic of formulaic verse. Homer was the
first epic poet in Western literature. Some scholars believe the Greek alphabet
was developed to bear his work. Little, though, is known about him.
Throughout its 2700-year lifespan The Iliad
has been many things. It tells of the rage of one warrior, Achilles, and its
consequences. Of the sorrows, and the splendours, of war. And the necessity —
the democracy — of death. These days it is often read as a
clash-of-civilisations tale pitting the Greek West against the Oriental East.
Kolb’s essay, titled Phantom Trojans at the Dardanelles, suggests the
clash at the heart of the poem is Greek-on-Greek. Achilles’ famous duel with
Hector, he claims, cannot have been staged on Turkey’s Aegean coast. Instead, it
“reflects a war between neighbouring tribes in central Greece”.
Ilios is Homer’s preferred name — a Greek name —
and TheIliad is, by definition, “the story of Ilios”. The word
Troy, which relates to the surrounding region — the Troad — is used less
frequently and never explicitly to name the settlement. And yet it is Troy, and
not Ilios, to which our culture has the deeper attachment.
The idea that the Trojan War was really a kind of
Hellenic war that shook itself from its moorings, drifted east across the
Aegean, and washed up in Turkey, will likely cause a stir. Athens will be
delighted to reclaim its foundational epic from the hands of its Turkish
antagonist; Ankara will be nettled.
Turkey is deeply attached to the idea that the
Trojan champion Hector, whom many readers of Homer see as the poem’s real hero,
was one of its own. In 2009, a 5m statue of Hector was erected near Canakkale,
the jumping-off point for tours of the World War I battlefields of the nearby
Dardanelles as well as the archeological site of Troy. In that year the local
mayor, Alaaddin Ozkurnaz, told the Anatolia news agency: “It is very important
for us to have a permanent marble work of art about Hector, an Anatolian who we
embrace as one of our own.”
Kolb, however, argues that the name Hector has no
Anatolian, or Turkish, roots. But it does turn up in Mycenaean Linear B tablets,
which preserve the earliest form of written Greek, along with other names of
important Trojan figures in The Iliad. In fact, Kolb writes, in The
Iliad “the large majority of the personnel on the Trojan side bear Greek
names”. Homer’s Greek heroes, such as Achilles and Ajax, are also mentioned on
the clay Linear B tablets. “There is, however, nothing heroic about their role
in the Mycenaean world,” Kolb adds. “They appear as servants, artisans or
administrative functionaries in Mycenaean palaces.”
Anchises is another name powerfully connected with
the Trojan War. He was the lucky Trojan who got to sleep with the love goddess
Aphrodite. She bore him a son, Aeneas, who fought valiantly for his home town.
Aeneas escaped from the ruins of Troy, after the quintessential Greek ruse of
the Trojan Horse, to found Rome. That story is told in Virgil’s epic
The Aeneid, a Latin sequel to The Iliad. However, as Kolb
points out, Anchises was also a famous Greek aristocrat in the Greek
Peloponnese.
This might explain why Greek place names, such as
Thebe, turn up in Homer’s Trojan world. Another example is Larissa, which in
The Iliad is inhabited by a tribe loyal to the Trojans. But Larissa
also happens to have been a city in ancient Thessaly, now northern Greece. The
Leleges and the Pelasgoi, groups that Homer places near Troy — the poet has
rampaging Achilles destroy their cities — were in reality inhabitants of central
and northern Greece.
In Homer’s time the Aegean coast of Asia Minor was
land rich for the taking. Migrants set out for these shores by boat (much like
today’s refugees) in search of a new life. Homer was, in all likelihood, part of
this migration. His poetic language is a fusion of two Greek dialects, Ionian
and Aeolian, both of them used by immigrant Greeks to the eastern Aegean. And he
has clearly, in composing his story, braided together heroic tales from
different regions of Greece and Asia Minor. But one thing, Kolb argues, is
certain: there were never any Trojans at this place. There were Dardanians, and
they gave their name to the Dardanelles; but the Trojans, he believes, are a
Homeric invention.
Homer is the original dead white male and
The Iliad is the taproot of Western civilisation.
The poem was
glamorous in antiquity — it was the “milk” on which Athenian boys were raised.
And its glamour — its allure — has never dimmed.
When the British poet Patrick Shaw Stewart, who
fought at Gallipoli during World War I, gazed across the Dardanelles to the
ruins Schliemann had exposed less than half a century earlier, he spied there a
god of war and comrade in arms.
The Homeric hero Achilles chose immortal death
over a long, yet forgotten, life. And it was to him that the poet penned these
heart-wrenching lines:
Was it so hard,
Achilles,
So very hard to
die?
Though knewest, and I know not —
So much the happier am
I.
So I will go back this
morning
From Imbros over the
sea;
Stand in the trench,
Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.
In the past 12 months two new translations of
The Iliad have appeared between hard covers, while a live-relay
reading by some of the finest actors of the British stage — including Simon
Russell Beale, Simon Callow, Sinead Cusack, Ben Whishaw and Samuel West — was
broadcast in August last year to a global audience. The professors, meanwhile,
are at odds over the poem’s precise relationship to the ruins in Turkey. Homer
is the Western canon’s version of antimatter: Homeric problems are drawn to the
void; few Homeric solutions emerge.
Until relatively recently the scholarly consensus
held that Homer’s verses were mere myth and the archeological site had little or
no relationship to the text that is still read, studied and, increasingly,
adapted for stage and screen.
That began to change under the direction of the
Manfred Korfmann, best known of the recent directors of excavation at
Troy-Hisarlik.
Korfmann claimed in 2004 that Homer should be
“taken seriously”. What is more, “his story of a military conflict between
Greeks and the inhabitants of Troy is based on a memory of historical events —
whatever these may have been”. Majority opinion in the English-speaking
scholarly world — though not the European, specifically German, academic milieu
— now supports him.
But the archeological site of Troy-Hisarlik is
not, at first sight, amenable to his vision. He had to work hard to make it
stick.
The site is made up of at least nine settlements
built atop one another, much like a multi-level carpark, and it is the sixth and
seventh layers, destroyed around 1200BC, that are most often identified with
Homer’s Troy. The Greek, or Achaean, forces are led by Agamemnon, the lord of
Mycenae — “king of kings” — and brother of the cuckolded Menelaus of Sparta,
husband to the wayward beauty Helen.
Any later than 1200BC — the late Bronze Age — and
there would have been no Greek attack on Troy, for the palace of Mycenae lay in
ruins. However, in the century before its collapse, Mycenae certainly looked the
part. Visitors to its remains, in the Greek Peloponnese, get that. With its Lion
Gate, its riches of beaten gold and its massive walls of well-cut masonry —
dubbed cyclopean because it was thought only a Cyclops could assemble them —
powerful Mycenae lives up to Homeric expectations. But Troy — not so.
The believers maintain that here, within a tiny
citadel, a wealthy Trojan kingdom withstood a siege by an armada of 1200 ships
filled with the Greek world’s best fighting units. These included Achilles and
his fearsome Myrmidons — Navy SEALS in shin greaves.
Homer’s Troy is rich in gold, with sumptuous halls
and high-vaulted roofs. King Priam, who sired 50 sons and 12 daughters, ruled
from a magnificent structure built wide with porches and colonnades of, in the
poet’s words, “smooth, lustrous ashlar, linked in a line”. Not by any stretch of
the imagination do the visible ruins match Homer’s wonders.
While Troy VI and VIIa fit the time frame of a
possible Mycenean Greek attack, nothing else about them dovetails neatly with
Homer. The former is the more impressive of the two settlements, yet it was
destroyed by earthquake. The latter came to a violent end, but there are no
Greek calling cards in the charred rubble: nothing definite to link the
settlement’s end to a war bearing any resemblance to Homer’s.
The crux moment came when Korfmann presented
archeological evidence of a much larger “lower city” at the site. A bigger Troy
was more Troy-like. He proposed an ancient city 15 times larger than the
undistinguished pile atop Hisarlik hill. This Troy would have housed up to 8000
souls.
Kolb argued against this view at the time.
Korfmann was not only a compatriot of Kolb’s; both worked at Tubingen
University. When Korfmann presented his conjectural recreation of Troy as an
Anatolian power city, Kolb scorned him as the “Erich von Daniken of archeology”.
It was at this point that their stoush hit the English-speaking papers. In
October 2002, The New York Times covered the contretemps in a report
headlined: “Was Troy a metropolis? Homer isn’t talking”. The piece, which
ping-ponged the arguments of Korfmann and Kolb back and forth, concluded
inconclusively by asking whether Korfmann or Kolb would be Achilles the
victor.
The debate about the “historicity” of Troy — the
question of whether and to what extent Homer’s Trojan War has a grounding in
reality — has since broadened into other fields. One of these is the wonderfully
named discipline of epigraphy: the study of inscriptions. Much of the interest
now revolves around whether cuneiform inscriptions from the Hittite empire —
the reigning Anatolian superpower in 1200BC — shed any light. But there’s still
no clincher. For each push from a believer, there is pushback from a
sceptic.
Since Korfmann’s death in 2005, the intensity of
the debate has subsided, but it continues nonetheless. And now the battle over
Troy is to be revived, along fresh lines of attack, by Kolb’s Talanta
piece.
If the success of an argument can be measured
purely by the amount of modern statuary erected in support of it, then Korfmann,
with the support of the Trojan Horse and the 5m-high Turkish Hector, must surely
be the posthumous victor.
But the Greeks are pretty good at statuary, too.
And who knows how they will respond to news that Hector is really a
Hellene.
