Fantastic Metropolis

Indeed, it’s interesting to watch the entirety of the Trojan War from the perspective of a chessmaster. Zeus, having recently rebuked Hera, Apollo and Poseidon for their roles in attempting to overthrow him (an attempt thwarted by Thetis, the aforementioned sea goddess who may well have replaced Hera as Queen of the gods if not for that pesky legend that whoever fathered a child on her would be replaced by that child, destined to be more powerful than its father) might well have either set up Eris via the omission of her invitation to the wedding or merely have seized upon a good use for a bad bit of business. Either way, those of us who have read Shakespeare remember that old advice about one way to busy giddy minds… the Trojan War as a distraction to keep his fractious herd of Olympians too busy to plot against him doesn’t seem unlikely. The setting of Peleus and Thetis together to create Achilles, the death of Laodemon at the hands of Zeus’ son, also a descendant of Pelops the ancestor of Menelaus and Agamemnon… a series of test runs and preparations for the final war that would rock the eastern Mediterranean and usher in the dark age that would swallow Greece for 500 years, until the descendants of Dorus would take the name of his son Hellen as their own and a blind poet would try and sing the lost epic world back to life? Again it seems as though a god may have been hammering and forging his chosen people as well as setting his own kingdom to order.

I am mightiest of all. Make trial that you may know. Fasten a rope of gold to heaven and lay hold, every god and goddess. You could not drag down Zeus. But if I wished to drag you down, then I would. The rope I would bind to a pinnacle of Olympus and all would hang in the air, yes, the very earth and the sea too.

—Homer, The Iliad

Praise the goddess, the most awesome of the goddesses.
Let one revere the mistress of the peoples, the greatest of the Igigi.
Praise Ishtar, the most awesome of the goddesses.
Let one revere the queen of women, the greatest of the Igigi.

—James Pritchard, ed., The Ancient Near East—Hymn to Ishtar

Big talk for a guy who needed a hundred handed giant and a sea goddess to save him, but the very rhetoric in such a conspicuous place as the Iliad makes one wonder if Zeus wasn’t making a point. And if we consider Aphrodite to be the same goddess as Ishtar/Innana transplanted into the Olympian pantheon via contamination (perhaps even originally brought over by Pelops himself as he fled Lydia… was the ancestor of the Heraclidae driven from Lydia by the Hattusa?) then we see that he may well have had a good reason to make sure she knew that the son of Cronos was not so tolerant a god as Marduk the Dragonslayer.

Imagine that all of this was in Schliemann’s mind as he searched the lost cities of the dead titans that were the heroes of the Greek Heroic Age. This was a man who had, just as the Mycenaean warrior-kings, a combination of ruthless mercantilism and broad vision. He’d profited off both the Crimean War and the American Civil War, established a fortune in worldwide exploits that left him so wealthy that he could afford to sponsor massive excavations in some of the most resonant ruins in all of Greece. What if Schliemann’s uncanny ability to be right on the money time and again wasn’t a mere quirk of luck, but rather an example of something else?

Schliemann resolved to dig there:

By its splendid situation close to the Asiatic coast, its delicious climate and its exuberant fertility, Crete must have been coveted from the first by the peoples of the coastlands; besides the most ancient myths refer to Crete and especially to Knossos, I should therefore not at all wonder if I found here on the virgin soil the remnants of a civilisation, in comparison to which even the Trojan War is an event of yesterday.

Schliemann once again could hardly have been closer to the mark, for this was precisely what Arthur Evans would uncover in 1900.

—Michael Wood, In Search Of The Trojan War