History 160: Troy & the Trojan War

In antiquity, the fall of Troy marked the beginning of history: a universal point from which all subsequent cities and communities could anchor their own stories of the past. Over 2,700 years later, the narratives of Troy and the Trojan War continue to accumulate significance, as successive generations have used them to work through their own experiences of war, the shape of history, the rise-and-fall of greatness, and in the end, what it means to be human. This course is an exploration of these layered encounters between past and present, in both written and material culture. It begins by considering the traditions of the Iliad and Odyssey in their geographic, poetic, and historical settings, and it then traces the myriad inflections of these traditions in the subsequent “worlds” of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. All the while, it investigates the site of Troy as the locale for the ancient imagination: a place of memory and of the framing of history. The course then considers subsequent receptions of Troy and the Trojan War, in the wake of the fall of Rome, and leading up to the modern “epic” of searching for the “lost” Troy. It surveys the 19th-century search for historical “truths” that gave rise to early classical archaeology, to Schliemann’s controversial activities at Hisarlik and Mycenae, the decipherment of Linear B, and to 20th and 21st -century discussions of war and trauma, cultural heritage, and the place of “antiquity” itself in modern and post-modern arenas. May be taken for credit toward the Greek and/or Roman history elective requirement of the Classics major.