Troy and Homer

Joachim Latacz, Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery . Translated by Kevin Windle and Rosh Ireland. Oxford University Press, 2004. 342 pp.

Since I was a young teenager, a memory has haunted my mind, a memory of something I never saw: A man running around the base of a desolate tell, the tails of his Victorian overcoat madly flapping in the howling wind. The man is Heinrich Schliemann, archeologist, entrepreneur, charlatan, the ostensible founder of the site of Troy, who, according to a biography of Schliemann I read as a boy, was so convinced of the accuracy of Homer’s epic that he tested his theory about the location of Troy by seeing if he, like Achilles chasing Hector, could circle the city three times in a single day.

Schliemann was certain he had found Troy, but his discovery merely touched off a “quest for the historic Troy” among archeologists and historians. In this new and exciting contribution to one of the greatest of all historical mysteries, Joachim Latacz, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Basel and author of numerous works on Homer and Troy, announces the completion of the quest. Latacz says that in the light of recent research there is “no doubt” that Homer’s Iliad has an historical basis. Homer’s Ilios (Troy) is equivalent to the Hittite city Wilusa, and there are equivalents to Homer’s names for the Greeks (e.g., Achaean) in Hittite and Egyptian records from the Late Bronze Age. And, it turns out, Schliemann was right about the location of Troy, the ruins at Hisarlik in Northwest Turkey. Like the unreliable Schliemann, the highly reliable Latacz concludes that we can now employ the Iliad as an historical source “for the first time in good scientific conscience.”