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Epic without Kleos: a Troy Story for our times

Zach Case


A Review of Troy: Myth and Reality, at the British Museum until 8th March 2020.


Get yourselves down to the British Museum and give yourselves hours to spare. For you’ll need time to take in this exhibition of epic proportions. This Troy story is told in three parts: the first narrates the entire epic cycle with a dazzling array of ancient art, the second focuses on the archaeological site of Troy itself, and the third retells the story of Troy from a variety of modern perspectives in a daring and urgent act of classical reception.



We follow the story of Troy through a smorgasbord of objects d’art: Achilles killing and simultaneously falling in love with Penthesilea on a black-figure vase, Helen looking ominously worried about leaving Sparta on a fresco, and Priam supplicating Achilles on a silver goblet, scenes from the life of Achilles on a sarcophagus, to pick several examples at random. We get everything from the Cypria to the story of Circe – Odysseus’ travels do get a lot of attention for an exhibit about Troy – and from Nestor (the amusing geometric ‘cup of Nestor’) to Neoptolemus (brutally slaying Priam using Astyanax’s body as a weapon on an Attic black-figure vase). The geographical scope is impressive too: artefacts are drawn from all over the Mediterranean basin and from as far away as South Asia (a Gandharan relief panel depicting the Trojan Horse).




The next section brings us to the archaeological remains at the historical site of Troy, detailing the history of excavations since Schliemann, while hurling the German off his self-constructed pedestal, and also taking into consideration other historical evidence about a real Trojan War (e.g. Linear B and Hittite records). It’s a lot to take in before we’ve even reached the final section, though perhaps the fact that this is a slog should come as no surprise – epic is tantae molis, after all. Less densely packed, the final section is admirable primarily for how it works as an act of classical reception (more below). It begins with a brief chronological survey of receptions of Troy (such as the Historia regum Britanniae and the Hollywood movie Troy) and moves towards a more thematic approach from a range of interesting perspectives, drawing on art and literature from the Caribbean to the WWI battlefields.


I am hardly doing this exhibition justice by segmenting it into simple thirds, since there are also tangible historical artefacts in the mythic part (e.g. pupils’ exercise boards from the fifth-century AD with verses from the Homeric poems) and myth in the archaeological part (i.e. Schliemann’s Troy where he claimed he had found ‘Priam’s treasure’, some of which is on display). Just as it is quite impossible to reconstruct the Shield of Achilles as an actual artefact – though this exhibition dares to end with two brazen efforts (a silver-gilt shield monument from 1822 and a fluorescent light fixture from 2013 repurposed for this exhibit) – it is quite impossible to encapsulate the richness of this collection.

But just as the Shield in the Iliad is a representation of the cosmos, there is here something of the whole gamut of the Troy, and thus, we might say, mortal experience.

...Except one thing we might expect does seem to be missing. Strikingly, in this Troy story, there is hardly any trace of kleos aphthiton (‘immortal glory’, Iliad 9.413), the pursuit of which seems to vindicate Achilles’ choice to fight and die at Troy rather than live a long and comfortable life at home, and to justify ideals of manly heroism drenched in blood. There are, to be sure, a couple of early modern works of art which commemorate certain military triumphs by analogy with the Greek victory at Troy – though this cannot be a particularly good analogy, since Euripides’ Trojan Women reminds us that the Greeks are not much better off after Troy has fallen (nor even while Troy stood, Cassandra dares to suggest in that play), and it a 2014 reproduction, Queens of Syria, that grabs the limelight as we enter the final part of the exhibition.

To adopt Wilfred Owen in Dulce et Decorum Est, the emphasis of this exhibition is firmly on ‘The old Lie.’ It does epic without kleos – or at least without the kind of kleos that is predicated upon slaughter.

The tone is clear as soon as you enter the introductory room and immediately perceive two vast works of art: Cy Twombly’s spear-like drawing Vengeance of Achilles screams blood and horror while Antony Caro’s sculptures made of lumps of wood and clay from The Trojan War series reconstruct the earthly desolation of the battlefield. In the exhibition space proper hang the words ‘Discord’, ‘War’ and ‘Fall’, writ large above the first three segments of the gallery, not just marking the sequence of the story of the Trojan War but also focalising tragic destruction rather than heroic consolation. Images of pain and suffering abound and, as we are constantly told, many of the deaths that are depicted constitute perversions of the ‘rules’ of war and accordingly stir the gods’ anger (Ajax violating Cassandra at Athena’s shrine, the Greeks sacrificing Polyxena etc.). It is a sombre experience wandering through the galleries in semi-darkness accompanied by what sounds like a quasi-ritual lament in the background, perhaps a continuation of the laments at the end of the Iliad. Schliemann himself, who claimed to have found the ‘Ilium of eternal glory’, is shown to be a fool rather than a hero in the middle section.





The final part of the exhibition raises the stakes for a twenty-first-century audience. Centre stage is not martial valour but the plight of refugees, of soldiers and of women. For example, Claude Lorrain’s The Arrival of Aeneas at Pallanteum (1675) is a model of hospitality towards the displaced Other; Angelica Kauffman’s Hector Taking Leave of Andromache (1768) captures the inner loss felt by the duty-bound soldier; Evelyn De Morgan’s Helen of Troy and Cassandra (1898) shows that war is also a concern for women (as is its artistic representation, since many of these paintings are painted by women). War itself is de-glorified in numerous works (Max Slevogt’s lithographs of warlike Achilles are particularly harrowing, as is the juxtaposition between the original copy of Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s ‘I saw a man this morning’ and Norman Wilkinson’s stark painting of the plain of Gallipoli). Many of the works on display are accompanied by the voices of both literary figures (Pat Barker, Derek Walcott, etc.) and representatives of charities for the homeless (Crisis) and for veterans (Waterloo Uncovered). The myths of the Trojan War – a mythic tradition proven to be owned by nobody – thus become a tool for powerful social critique in our own times.



Yet this Troy story stripped of kleos is not one that is necessarily alien to antiquity either.

The exhibit flows in such a way that the modern appropriation of the Trojan War in the final section does not jar with the ancient representation of the Trojan War in the first section. Nowhere is there an apology for violence; bloodshed has always been bad. Nor is this Troy story totally alien to the Homeric poems themselves. It is often pointed out how sensitive the Iliad is to the grim reality of war and its victims: it is not at all a triumphalist poem about Greeks vanquishing Trojans, and the pursuit of kleos is not unequivocally worthwhile but deeply paradoxical. It is only certain readers who whitewash those facts. Let Achilles, as he meets Odysseus in the Underworld, tell it for himself: ‘Glorious Odysseus: don’t try to reconcile me to my dying. I’d rather serve as another man’s labourer, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead’ (Odyssey 11.488-91, trans. Kline). In his own words, the Homeric hero of heroes disavows kleos earned on the battlefield.


Past and present coalesce in Troy: Myth and Reality. Modern appropriations of the Trojan War myth can help us re-read Homer and other ancient sources more sensitively, just as much as the myths of the Trojan War in Homer and elsewhere can help us productively reflect on living in the here and now.


Troy: myth and reality runs at The British Museum, Great Russell Street, London, from 21st November 2019 – 8th March 2020. Admission: members, free; adults, £20; concessions, £17 (including students and jobseekers); under-16s, free. Booking required. For more details about the exhibition, location of the museum, opening hours, and to book, see https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/troy-myth-and-reality


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