In our search for the Trojan War, we've constantly spoken of Homer.
Homer's epic poem, the "lliad"
tells the tale of the war.
The "lliad" is the beginning of European literature
and yet it's still one of the widest-read books.
Here, penguin books are running off
the 35th printing since 1952 of their translation.
That amounts to about a million copies of just one version into English alone.
So if Homer were still around today,
he'd be a very wealthy man indeed.
The reason he's still read is not because he's a classic
but because he's a great storyteller who uses wonderful language,
even in translation.
He gives us an image of a heroic age which is so vividly realised that, ever since,
the audience have been unable to resist the idea that it's true.
But is there any historical truth behind Homer's tale of Troy?
Did that story go back, as so many people would love to believe,
to a real event in the Bronze Age, a historical Trojan War?
Homer has always been seen as the first
and greatest poet in Western culture.
But what connection, if any, is there between the Greek Homer,
who may have composed in the eighth century BC,
and the Mycenaean bards of the 13th century BC
when the war is supposed to have taken place?
The tale of Troy has been told for two and a half thousand years.
According to the legend, an armada of 1,000 ships came from all over Greece
to try to recover the Greek - or Achaean - queen, Helen,
who had eloped with paris, prince of Troy.
The contingents gathered at Aulis in central Greece.
There, their leader, Agamemnon,
sacrificed his daughter lphigenia
to gain the gods' approval for the war.
After 10 years of siege, the city was destroyed.
Succeeding generations have seen the tale
as an archetypal image of the tragedy of war.
Homer's heroes fought with bronze weapons
but his portrayal of the common sufferings of victors
and vanquished is universal.
It came to mind to one man even in the Western Desert.
General Sir John Hackett.
It's a story about the sort of people I know.
It doesn't matter where they are
or what their nationalities, what environment.
These are fighting people.
They share a lot of the characteristics of people I've known
in circumstances which to me are not by any means unfamiliar.
Does this suggest to you that the facts of the story of Troy
as told by Homer are a mere story,
or could they actually reflect military reality?
Oh, I think so.
I remember outside Mersa Matruh,
when there'd been a battle all day and in the morning.
And in the short night there we were,
and German flares were going up practically all around us.
And we were eating a little, talking a little,
sleeping hardly at all and waiting for the morning.
Now, there's that story about how the campfires of the Achaens and Trojans,
like stars on a still night, twinkled at each other out of the gloom
while the men around them waited for the battle that would begin in the morning.
And I couldn't help asking myself whether the thoughts and feelings
that were in these men's hearts and minds
were very different from those that on that occasion outside Mersa Matruh
I knew were in our own.
Fire!
- Fire! - Fire!
"A thousand fires burned in the plain
"and beside each one were 50 men in the glare of the flames.
"So the Trojans stood to arms all night.
"Meanwhile, immortal panic, companion of cold fear, gripped the Greeks
"as even their best men were stricken with stark terror."
We begin with Troy itself.
Archaeologists have proved
there was an imposing citadel where Homer's tale says,
at the mouth of the Dardanelles.
A royal fortress with well-built gates and towers.
Finds of pottery show
it had trading relations with Agamemnon's Mycenae,
but that doesn't prove Homer's tale is true.
Is there anything in Homer's language which can tell us whether his story
actually goes back 500 years before his day?
We'll start with a text, the one we saw coming hot-foot off the press.
This is translated from modern, printed texts,
and they go back to this great book,
the original printed edition of Homer's "lliad",
done in Florence in 1488.
What a wonderful piece of bookmaking it is.
The Greek scholars who constructed this text
used medieval manuscripts.
Behind those medieval manuscripts lie
Roman papyruses,
preserved in fragments in the sands of Egypt.
But this written tradition
only takes us back about as far as 550 BC.
In other words, 700 years after the Trojan War
and perhaps 200 years after Homer's own time.
There's a problem, then.
Did Homer, whoever he was,
actually write this poem?
The opinion in Roman times was that he didn't,
that the poem had been preserved orally for a long time
before it was committed to writing.
If that's the case, then this text that we know as a book
is actually the record of an oral performance about two and a half millennia old!
The question was how to prove it.
The text of Homer contains features
that aren't explicable if it was written down.
Chief among them are the repetitions.
The text is full of repeated lines, phrases
and even whole chunks.
Among them one special feature
and that is what we call the formulas,
the descriptive tags or epithets applied to the heroes.
"Swift-running Achilles",
"Hector of the bright helmet".
We can just make out one of them here.
"Theos Odysseus",
"Brilliant Odysseus."
And just higher up here, "Great-hearted Odysseus."
An even more interesting group of epithets is applied by Homer to Troy,
which he calls "well-built", "finely-towered",
"beetling", "windy" and "bearing many horses".
Has Homer made up those descriptions
or do they go back before his time,
perhaps to before the end of the Bronze Age?
To answer that, we need to know more about Homer himself.
Homer's identity, however, is still a great mystery.
Modern experts cannot agree whether he was one man,
two, several, or even a woman.
The ancients believed that he was one man,
whose name, mysteriously, means "the hostage".
They thought he was blind,
that he had lived just before 700 BC in lonia -
what is now the western coast of Turkey.
Here Greeks had migrated in the Dark Age
which followed the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation.
It was a new world which would see the birth of Western science, medicine
and philosophy.
If Homer existed,
he worked as a professional singer, a bard,
in royal and noble courts on these coasts.
His was an oral society on the verge of literacy.
The ancients assumed he had written his text.
Modern scholars think the "lliad" was
committed to writing in the century after his death
but that Homer himself was working in a fully oral tradition.
But what does that mean?
Kilgalligan, on the Atlantic coast of County Mayo, Ireland.
Here, the oral tradition has lingered on.
The last performer of epics the length of the "lliad"
died only 40 years ago
but there are still storytellers reciting tales of
heroic deeds in heroic language.
They resemble Homer in their style of speech,
especially in the formulas or runs,
whose repeat passages,
like Homer's, are highly formalised.
The storyteller we have come to hear cannot read
or write and speaks only Gaelic.
His name is John Henry.
For 10 summers, John's repertoire has been recorded by
Dr Seamus O'Cathain of University College, Dublin.
John has not yet run out of stories.
You couldn't just break it down for me in translation, line by line?
Is that a difficult thing for a storyteller to do?
It's very hard to do and very hard to translate.
A lot of the words don't mean anything in particular.
It's alliterative.
It's fully within the ancient tradition of runs.
Just to catch the flavour of it?
"They raise their sails..."
perhaps billowing or bellying sails or something like that.
"Long threads or ropes to the tops of the masts."
"200 rowing...
"12 on the steering...
"Sand coming up and foam going down...
"Splish-splash..."
"Whales and seals swimming behind..."
In English, you might say they set sail and they got there!
But it's more complicated than that!
What impelled him to learn the stories?
John's the man to answer that.
John says this was the attitude of mind he always had.
He was greedy for stories. And, of course, he got them.
Now no one in Kilgalligan is learning the tales from John,
to pass them on, as he did.
His only audience is the tape recorder,
a sure sign that the tradition is nearing its end.
Now we have no need of such guardians of the tradition.
Today we recall our lists from a computer terminal,
not from the memory of a bard.
The idea of memorising 200 names on
an international flight would seem absurd to us.
To deliver a poem the length of the "lliad" is simply inconceivable.
But it is still possible to see such a performance.
To find it, we must travel far afield.
This is the barren landscape of Turkish Armenia,
within sight of the Soviet border,
over 1,000 miles from Homer's "wine-dark Aegean".
To these lands the Turks migrated
from the Asian steppe in the 11th century AD,
bringing their ancient traditions with them.
In the town of Kars, they still survive.
Like Homer, these men are professional bards.
They sing and play at weddings, feasts and funerals.
They were brought up from childhood in the tuition of a master.
This man, Seref Tasliova, was given away at seven years
because even then it was seen he had the bardic gift.
He is now a master.
His repertoire includes 100 tales from
the Turkish medieval epic of "Koroglu",
many of them over an hour long.
He's singing from "Koroglu" now.
Here in Kars, the audience sat for three hours,
as long as we might sit in a cinema,
thrilled by the playing and
by the pathos of the singing.
Here it is still possible to feel
the spell worked by a bard
when he has an audience who believe in his magic.
However distantly,
Homer did something like this two and a half thousand years ago
when he sang the tale of Troy.
But what does this tell us about the way Homer's text has come down to us?
In Homer's "Odyssey", King Odysseus
praises the bard Demodocus for
his performance of the tale of Troy.
"You sing it," he says,
"as if you were there yourself
"or as if you spoke to someone who was."
In Ireland and Turkey we gained some idea of how
bards achieve that kind of effect.
The sort of formulas, for example, that John Henry used in Mayo
show the mechanism of memory and show how ancient elements
can be preserved within the formulas and their rigid metrical patterns.
And in Turkey, the great length of the "Koroglu" epic
and its archaic medieval language, shows how poems of this immense length
can be memorised and orally transmitted by a single man, a professional.
Both the audiences in Ireland and in Turkey
view the tale teller as a professional,
a specialised occupation.
For Seref Tasliova in Kars,
it's his job, quite simply.
But we have to ask whether that tale
actually goes back to the Bronze Age.
Before we do, it's worth pointing out there's nothing intrinsically unlikely
in the idea that the "lliad" could go back to an eye-witness account of a Bronze Age war.
In Dark Age medieval Europe,
Viking kings took their bards with them on their campaigns
in order to sing old songs and compose new ones about their deeds.
These were only written down centuries later.
If that could happen in one culture,
it could have happened in Mycenaean Greece.
But did it?
Was there a Mycenaean bardic poem about Troy
and how were the stories
transmitted over the 500 years before Homer?
Such questions are now at the centre of the academic industry spawned by Homer.
At Cambridge, Dr John Chadwick, an expert in Bronze Age Greek,
is especially interested in the problem of
the transmission of the tales before Homer.
I think they are transmitted by being taught
from one generation to the next.
In each generation there are people who devote themselves
to learning these stories.
I don't think they transmit them exactly and purely accurately.
They will improve upon the story in retelling it.
They may just forget what the original was
or they may quite consciously take two different stories and combine them into one.
And that is the impression which one gets from Homer,
except that, of course, in so doing he has produced a masterpiece.
He has not just put together separate, isolated poems.
He has transformed the whole into a completely new poem.
But his sources no doubt consisted of these transmitted,
orally transmitted versions of
events in Mycenaean times.
And you would be prepared to accept that they contained...
they also included the story of a sack of a city called Troy?
I think it's very likely, yes.
There was a poem on the sack of Troy.
I think that the details which Homer includes in this
very likely come from a number of other sources as well.
But that there was something which connected Troy
with Mycenaean Greece seems to me very likely indeed.
But what was that connection?
Why did Greek tradition focus its most heroic legend
and an armada of 1,000 ships on this tiny place?
Can we detect when Troy became the centre of the tale
from clues in Homer's language itself?
The description of Troy in the "lliad"
certainly suggests that bards of Homer's day
knew what the site of the city looked like.
Homer gives us a few interesting facts
about the general situation of Troy.
The first one is that it's windy, very windy.
I don't think that's just a stock phrase by a poet.
Anybody who's been here knows
the wind blows from the north 12 months a year.
In the days before moisturisers, what that must have done for Helen's complexion,
your guess is as good as mine.
The windiness has added point because the site was an exposed high one.
Homer tells us that it was "beetling, towering".
That may seem to be an exaggeration,
but you've got to remember that the hill was much higher than it is today.
The level of the royal palace would have been well above my head.
Its classical builders have cut the top away.
Schliemann pushed the side out.
You've got to imagine the hill being much more compact and steep.
This was a tall headland exposed to the blasts of wind from the north.
But that, doubtless, was true in Homer's own day too.
Does Homer know
what Troy looked like in the Bronze Age?
Here, there has been a dramatic new discovery.
Soil cores taken in the plain show that at the time of the Trojan War,
the city stood above a great bay which silted up during classical times.
This could be reflected in Homer's description of sailing
from the Dardanelles inside llios,
and when he tells of the wide bay of the sea in front of Troy.
But that was still true in Homer's time.
Is there anything in his picture of the city itself
which could go back to the time of the Trojan War?
Three of his phrases suggest the handing down of a genuine bardic
memory of a late Bronze Age Troy.
First, Homer tells of "the great or sacred tower of holy llios
"by the main gate of the city."
Here, Hector's wife Andromache ran like a mad woman
because she had heard the Trojans were losing.
At the main gate of the city, there was a tower enclosing an altar
and fronted by pedestals for the idols of the Trojan gods.
Is Homer's "great tower of holy llios"
a genuine memory of the gate tower of Bronze Age Troy?
Second, Homer says that the Greeks almost broke into Troy
when three times the Greek hero patroclus
tried to scale the slope of Troy's towering wall.
But three times Apollo battered him back.
The walls of the historical Troy do have a distinctive angle
but in Homer's own time
they were buried in debris.
The last passage concerns the fine walls of Troy
which Homer says had been built with the aid of the gods.
Here he gives us an extraordinarily precise detail.
He says that at one point in the circuit, on the western side,
there was one section of the wall which had not been replaced
by those beautiful constructions of Apollo and poseidon,
that on the western side there was a badly built weak wall,
and that was where the goddess Athena told the Greeks to attack Troy.
And amazingly enough, when Wilhelm Dorpfeld
was excavating the circuit of Troy VI, in 1893-4,
he found that on the western side
there was one section of the old circuit had not been replaced.
Now, Homer cannot possibly have seen this.
He was composing 500 years on
when this whole section was under mounds of debris.
That suggests that he is incorporating a genuine bardic memory
of this place from the Bronze Age.
That raises the question,
is Homer talking about a real war?
Finds made by archaeologists show that the bards had handed down to Homer
some genuine memories of Mycenaean warfare.
Homer accurately describes what is clearly a Mycenaean helmet
sewn with rows of boars' tusks.
Though he lived in the Iron Age,
everywhere in the "lliad" Homer assumes
that the weapons and armour
are of bronze.
In describing their swords,
Homer sometimes uses the phrase "silver-studded".
The memory and even the expression could be Mycenaean.
The bards then did hand down to Homer
some genuine memories of the heavily- armed Mycenaean warrior class,
Bronze Age knights in armour.
Historical artist peter Connolly, an expert in ancient weaponry,
has recreated the heroes of Troy
with the Mycenaean war gear which might lie behind Homer's descriptions.
We do have a few fragments of armour
and some ideas coming from central Europe and places like that
that give us some inkling of what it may have been like.
There have been found three scales like this at Troy.
If one looks at the holes along the side
one can see that they were stitched to a fabric
or leather garment underneath
and probably overlapping like this
to cover the stitching here
so it wouldn't get cut in the actual fighting.
The difficulty is to what extent do earlier cuirasses -
like this reconstruction of the Dendra armour -
have to the period we're talking about?
This is a particularly interesting armour because Achilles had one weak spot,
the back of the lower leg or the Achilles' heel.
This covers you right the way from the nose down to the knees,
with leg guards covering the front.
But if you turn it round...
...you can see the only part that is vulnerable is the back of the lower leg.
Fantastic.
What about the things that Homer says about the heroes,
like Ajax's great shield and the swords of the time?
It is possible that Ajax is an earlier legend.
The giant in his armour with this huge shield may come from an earlier legend
which must put Hector on an earlier legend too
'cause he also has this huge shield.
As Homer says of Hector,
when he walked away from the duel with Ajax,
his shield tapped him on the heels and neck.
He wore it over his back
on a strap going round the neck.
As he walked it tapped his neck and heels.
The perfect example is the most revolutionary of weapons.
This was an entirely new type of weapon, a slashing weapon.
This could cut off a man's arm.
This is the pitiless bronze?
The weight is up here. It's a lashing weapon like that.
This was introduced around the period of the Trojan War?
We find a lot in central Europe
but they're coming into Greece about this time.
They were also developing this,
which is a mixture of the earlier Mycenaean types for the handling.
Also has characteristics of this.
Again, it's very small, but it's a hacking weapon,
like a butcher's cleaver.
Imagine someone having his shoulder cut off!
The "lliad", then, has many layers,
some even older than the Trojan War.
But some trace elements seem to go back to a Mycenaean war poem.
So is it possible to say whether that poem was about a specific war,
that is, a war fought by Greeks in the plain of Troy?
At the Dardanelles, wars have been fought
from pre-history to our own times.
The irony was not lost on those Homer lovers
who died in sight of Troy in 1915.
"They say Achilles in the darkness stirred
"and priam and his 50 sons wake,
"all amazed...
"...and hear the guns and shake for Troy again."
This is Cape Helles,
by the Dardanelles, opposite Troy.
Here stands the monument to the 36,000 men of what was the British Empire
who died in 1915 in as futile a war as Troy itself -
Gallipoli.
Round the monument are lists of regiments
drawn from every part of the Empire -
Assam, New Zealand, Ireland, Lancashire,
men who no doubt died as fearfully as
the heroes on the other shore.
Just imagine that all the written records of our own civilisation
were destroyed in some inconceivable catastrophe,
and that in three or four thousand years' time,
archaeologists came and uncovered the foundations of this structure.
If they dug around it, they might come across fragments of the lists of names
with a "Singh" from Burma, a "Joyce" from Dublin,
a "Wood" from Manchester.
But I wonder whether from those simple facts, without any written record,
they could guess the story of Gallipoli,
the story of that fruitless venture by an imperial power
which had once extended across the world,
coming to this windswept and forlorn spot.
The story of Gallipoli, if it had only survived in legend,
would never have been believed.
Yet it is a real war and this is a real record of that war.
But what form would such a record have taken in a prehistoric oral society?
And did the bards ever have such a record for the Trojan War?
Amazingly enough,
something like it was preserved by Homer himself.
In the "lliad"
there is a strange list of 164 places.
Homer says these provided the troops
for the 1,000 ships which went to Troy.
It claims to be the actual roll call of the Greek expedition -
"the catalogue of ships".
But what is it?
An authentic Bronze Age war record
handed down by the bards?
Or a later fiction?
Geoffrey Kirk, formerly Regius professor of Greek at Cambridge.
Many of the places mentioned
were known in the Mycenaean age
and ceased to be of any importance afterwards.
It's obviously based on perhaps a poem, perhaps a prose
listing of the ships as they assembled
at Aulis to go over the Aegean to Troy.
Could you bear to let me hear some?
We have the Codex mori open at the entry of Argos and Mycenae,
both of which are interesting.
So then Diomedes, good at the war cry, was leader.
And then it goes on to say that he...
"With them there came 80 black ships."
I think myself that it's got a good deal of Mycenaean content
but it also certainly has some Dark Age content.
Like everything in Homer, it's a mixture of the very archaic, the Mycenaean,
contemporary with the Trojan War,
the views of Homer's own time in the eighth century BC and shortly before,
and the whole period between the two.
- The problem is detecting which bit's which. - Exactly.
And that, for Homer lovers,
is the $64,000 question.
There's only one way to find the answer.
Go and look.
Agamemnon's capital, Golden Mycenae.
Any bard worth his salt
would have heard of this and other major sites in the catalogue.
Their legends were famous.
Their cyclopean walls still stood.
But it is the obscure sites,
often forgotten in later times,
which offer us the hope of
proving at least part of the catalogue goes back to the Bronze Age.
The search takes you far off the beaten track.
Take the delightfully named "Thisbe of the Many pigeons",
which Homer says was one of 60 places in central Greece
which sent their men to Troy in 50 black ships.
The only clues are the pigeons and the name.
There's still a Thisbe in Greece.
Like most of the catalogue sites,
it's not in the tourist guides.
It's best to ask the locals for guidance.
These could even be the descendants of
the men who went to Troy.
The trouble is, there's so much history to choose from,
the Bronze Age is not what immediately springs to mind.
That squared masonry is the classical city.
What we want is 1,000 years earlier.
There it is.
A Mycenaean tomb was plundered here long ago.
It's now part of local folklore.
On top, typical cyclopean walls
and a scatter of Mycenaean pottery.
Thisbe of the Many pigeons was real enough.
One up to Homer.
Pity about the pigeonsl
At Thisbe, I learned my first lesson.
"Never underestimate Homer."
Dawn in the Evrotas estuary
on the south coast of Menelaus' kingdom of Sparta.
Somewhere here, says the catalogue,
lay the seaward city of Helos which sent men to Troy
in the 60 ships of the Spartan contingent.
The plain here is still called Helos,
but the search is complicated
by the fact that the sea has receded miles.
After the pigeons of Thisbe, however,
the Bronze Age past had started to come alive.
It's easy as you approach through this flat country with reeds and marshes,
the bumpy road, the seabirds,
to imagine paris himself, perhaps, approaching it by sea.
This was the main Mycenaean port of the Gulf of Helos.
You see this limestone cliff
rising above the plain about 70 or 80 feet,
what was in fact a low promontory in Mycenaean times.
It's called Agios Stefanos.
There was a little city on that limestone bluff
under an impenetrable tangle of thorns.
But why here when there is nothing today?
An abandoned Bronze Age quarry
behind the site shows why.
Agios Stefanos was the export point for this mottled green stone, found only here,
which was much coveted by Bronze Age kings.
It is the only possible site for Homer's seaward city of Helos.
Homer's catalogue of ships says
that Agamemnon took troops to Troy
not only from mainland Greece,
but from many islands including Crete.
And in the 80 Cretan ships,
there were men from an obscure little place called Rhytion.
Here we have no clues, only the name,
perhaps partly preserved in today's village name, Rotasi.
Here there is an unexcavated Acropolis-like hill
with a scatter of pottery sherds going back deep into pre-history.
The locals must think I'm crazy
I hope he doesn't ask where I'm going.
He won't believe a town in Homer
- Rhytion, Rhytion! - Rhytion!
So Homer's world is still alive after all
The search for Homer's catalogue
takes you to many such forgotten corners.
My journey led me to over 40.
Half of the 164 names have so far been identified
and all those examined have shown
traces of Mycenaean occupation.
Most important, some were abandoned
after the fall of the Mycenaean world
and never lived in again until after Homer's day.
Proof that at least some of the catalogue
does go back to the Bronze Age.
Exactly why the catalogue was compiled
we may never know for sure.
But it remains possible that it is connected with a real event.
That brings us back to the first line of the catalogue,
Homer's "rocky Aulis".
This is where the legend
said the Greek armada assembled for Troy.
Here Agamemnon
sacrificed his daughter lphigenia -
Iphianassa, as Homer calls her -
to get a fair wind.
Gave her to the goddess Artemis, as was later believed,
where the classical sanctuary of Artemis stood.
Its ruins are visible today
in the shadow of an immense cement factory.
Over the railway, you enter a strange deserted valley,
barren and sinister.
Almost a taboo place.
Bronze Age Aulis looked over the famous straits
where the tides meet.
Here, it was said, the Greek fleet had anchored.
Above the little bay is a rocky acropolis
where the familiar broken sherds of Mycenaean pottery have been found,
although all is now blanketed by concrete dust.
Mycenaean chamber tombs were found down there when the concrete works was built.
There's also traces of Mycenaean settlement around the sanctuary.
So this part of the catalogue and the story does fit with archaeology.
And if the Greek chiefs did indeed meet here in Mycenaean Aulis before they set sail,
then it may have been here that they held their last night's celebrations,
although celebrations blood-dimmed by the events which took place
down there in the sanctuary of Artemis.
On the sacrifice of lphigenia, Homer is silent.
Later Greek tradition gives us the detail.
"In Aulis they waited, waited while the winds brought costly delay.
"Hulls and cables rotting, wasting away the flower of the Greeks.
"Then the army prophet came up with a solution.
"The winds could be changed by an offering to the gods,
"the blood of a girl.
"Her prayers, her cries of 'Father',
"her virgin youth counted for nothing.
"Her father prayed and told them to hold her like a goat
"above the altar,
"to bind her mouth, to gag the sound
"which might be a curse upon her royal house.
"Agamemnon brought himself to sacrifice his daughter,
"to sponsor a war for a faithless woman."
Did it really happen?
The sacrifice sounds like a fairy tale.
When we know more about the Bronze Age,
we may be able to say whether, like so much of Homer's story,
it has a darker truth.
In conclusion, Homer stands at the end of an oral tradition
which must take the story far back before him.
It took generations of bards to refine the language in which he tells the tale.
And inextricably embedded in that language,
with its elaborate range of formulas,
is Troy itself.
It seems to me, then, there's very good reason to think that the expedition against Troy
is the fundamental and central fact of the story
and must go back to the Bronze Age.
You can deny that the Trojan War ever took place
but then you have no historical or archaeological peg
to explain the creation of a fictional tale of Tro centring on the hill called Hisarlik,
at any time in between the end of the Bronze Age and Homer's own day.
And to me that is a fatal objection
to those who would deny that the Trojan War ever took place.
An overgrown and deserted ruin
in a sparsely populated corner of north-western Anatolia
is hardly likely to be picked out as the scene of the Greeks' national epic
unless at some point it really had been the focus of war-like deeds
so memorable that ever after they were celebrated by the bards in song.
"Was it so hard, Achilles, so very hard to die?
"Thou knowest and I know not.
"So much the happier, I."