A coalition of Greek forces led by Agamemnon, the powerful king of Mycenae, has come to Troy to regain his brother Menelaus’s beautiful and errant wife, Helen, who had eloped with the Trojan prince Paris. Some background: the Iliad tells of events in the 10th and final year of the legendary Trojan War. Like any other half millennium of human activity, this period spanned times of colossal upheaval, including a mass migration of populations out of Greece-which scholars increasingly recognize as central to the evolution of the Iliadic story. It has long been recognized that individual poets performed and developed the early epic, generation after generation, from at least the 13th century B.C., and very probably much earlier, until the age of Homer himself, around 750–700 B.C. I was on a quest that I had long wanted to make, following the journey of the Iliad-or, more specifically, following the route taken by the pre-Homeric Greek poets who carried the oral tradition that would become the Iliad out of Thessaly and Greece, eastward to new people in new lands. That returning there to my beloved fatherland I “Spercheios, in vain did my father Peleus vow to you Which he was growing luxuriant and long for the river Spercheios,Īnd troubled he then spoke, looking out to sea as dark as wine: Standing away from the pyre he cut his tawny hair,
Then swift-footed godlike Achilles thought of yet one more thing It is this river, as Homer tells us in Book 23 of the Iliad, that Achilles recalls as he stands grieving by the funeral pyre of his slain companion, Patroclus:
The river itself was sparkling, picturesquely overhung with oak and wild olive, but on closer inspection I saw machinery and discarded appliances rusting in its shallows. At the village of Paliourio, road and river converged, and leaving my car, I wandered down a track that led to a shattered bridge shored with makeshift planking. On my right, at some distance from the road, screened by cotton fields and intermittent olive groves, flowed the Spercheios. Away on the left, the foothills of Mount Oiti were hazed with heat. I arrived there in late October, but it still felt like summer, and few people were around. The Spercheios river-which, legend tells us, was dear to the warrior Achilles-marks the southern boundary of the great Thessalian plain in central Greece. The area has yielded significant evidence of interaction between Mycenaean Greeks and Anatolians.