does concern us is that the Homeric poems have (along with the Bible and Shakespeare's plays) been the most notable and influential works of literature ever produced in the Western world, and that in 1601 Shakespeare wrote his own version of the Homeric tale.
Shakespeare was by no means the first, nor was he the last, to do a version of Homer.
Homer's poem may have first been put together about 850 b.c. and have been sung or recited by bard after bard, the tale being carried or from generation to generation through oral tradition. About 500 B.c it was carefully edited by Athenian scholars and placed into the form we now have.
Homer tells the tale of but a single episode in the long Trojan War which, according to legend, lasted ten years. The episode takes place in the tenth and last year and deals with a quarrel between two of the Greek leaders, with the near disaster that befalls the Greek cause as a result, and with the dramatic reconciliation that follows after all the participants have suffered tragic losses.
In the course of the epic, hints are given as to events that took place before the incident of the quarrel and of events that were to take place after the reconciliation. The popularity of Homer's tale led later Greek poets and dramatists to try their hand at telling other portions of the tale based on Homer's references and on other legends then extant but no surviving today.
Other ancient writers even tried retelling the tale of the quarrel itself in their own way, and the habit of doing so continued through the Middle Ages and into modern times. In 1925, for instance, the American write:
John Erskine published The Private Life of Helen of Troy, putting the tale of Troy into twentieth-century idiom.
Shakespeare tried his hand at it too, producing, alas, a play that is not considered one of his better productions and is by no means worthy of the grand original.
In Troy ...
Shakespeare chooses to tell (more or less) the same incident that concerns Homer, which means that he too must concentrate on the final stages of a long siege. Where Homer was dealing with incidents in a war which (in his time) must have been well known to all Greeks, with its heroes' names being household words, Shakespeare was not quite in the same position.
Educated Englishmen in Shakespeare's time knew of the Trojan War, but chiefly through writings on the subject in Roman and medieval times. It was only toward the end of the sixteenth century that Homer's poem itself was translated into English by George Chapman (whose work inspired a famous sonnet by John Keats two centuries later). At the time Troilus and Cressida was being written, only a third of that translation had yet appeared, so it is doubtful how much firsthand knowledge of Homer's actual tale Shakespeare himself had and how much he had to depend on later (and distorted) versions of the Troy tale.
Shakespeare did not apparently feel safe in starting, as Homer did, toward the end of the war, and inserts a somewhat apologetic Prologue to set the stage. The Prologue begins directly:
In Troy there lies the scene.
- Prologue, line 1
The name of the walled city which endured the long siege was, apparently, Ilion (or Ilium, in the Latin spelling). Homer's poem is therefore called the Iliad. The region in which Ilium was located was known as Troas or the Troad, and from this, the city took the alternate name of Troia. It is the English form of this latter name, Troy, that is most familiar to us.
It is over three thousand years now since Troy was destroyed and yet, thanks to Homer, its name remains forever fresh to us.
Indeed, it remained fresh and alive through a period in early modern times when skeptical scholars considered the Trojan War to have been purely mythical and were sure that no city of Troy had ever existed. Considering that Homer filled his tale with gods, goddesses, monsters, and wonders, it was easy to feel skepticism.
However, after all the overlay of the marvellous has been scraped away, a core remains and, as it turns out, that core has value.
A German businessman, Heinrich Schliemann, who implicitly believed the essential truth of the Iliad (minus its gods), amassed wealth and in the late nineteenth century used it to go to Greece and Turkey, where he hoped to dig up the ruins of Troy and some of the great Greek cities of