TFBT; "Troy" by Walter Leaf

I recently purchased a copy of “Troy: A Study in Homeric Geography” by Walter Leaf.  (Ends up I did not get a real book, rather one of the Xeroxed copies where you see a person’s hand occasionally and badly bound in a hard cover.  The pages are already coming out of the binding.)  I find Leaf’s writing beautiful and his concepts way ahead of their time.  (Although I skipped the flat-out archeology bits.) He was writing about stuff in 1912, that I thought hadn’t been worked out until recently.  A few great quotes.  More to come. 

 

“The summit of Ida is a shapeless plateau, strewn with stones, and in itself most unlovely. But as the pasture of the plains below begins to die out in the heat of early summer, the fresh grass grows on the heights, and offers food to countless flocks and herds. And all round the fields of melting snow there springs up in May a glory of colour which those who have seen it are not likely to forget — crocus and hyacinth carpeting the slopes with brilliant orange and blue, mingled in thick beds worthy for the couch of gods.”

 

“It would seem to follow that there existed from the first some sort of a metrical narrative of the [Trojan] war... gradually transformed, by the natural growth of centuries, from a narrative into a poem, each generation taking up the tradition, and gradually moulding it by expansion and omission, to be handed on to the next for fresh development, till it reached its final form in the Iliad as we now have it.”

 

Leaf speaking of the Iliad, “the story which, of all that have ever been set down, has most affected the imagination of succeeding generations”

 

“Careful investigations by Virchow and others have failed to produce any sign of marine deposits in the plain, and it may be taken as certain that the coast-line did not in the Mycenaean age materially differ from that which now exists. Hissarlik [Troy] was as far from the sea then as it is now.”

 

“Skamandros, and Simoeis, where many cowhide-shields and helmets fell in the dust—as also a generation of demigods.”  (Iliad 12:22-23)

 

“One thing at least has passed for me beyond all doubt: that the poet who wrote those lines either knew the scene himself, or was following in careful detail a predecessor who had put into living words a tradition founded on real fighting in this very place.”

 

Referring to Achilles chasing Hector; “The triple course round the city is easy even now: it must have been still easier when the neck to the south-east of the fortress was materially lower than it is to-day. That it should be done in full accoutrement after a morning of hard fighting with river gods as well as men raises it to the level of a truly heroic performance.”