buried their dead, while in Homer the dead are cremated. Experts on warfare note
that in the fighting described in Iliad13, 131–135, tactics are employed which imply
the use of the phalanx, an organized line of hoplites (infantrymen) that did not come
into being until the formation of the city state, possibly suggesting a date as late as
750, perhaps the time when Homer lived. Some have thought the scenes of ordinary
life depicted in the similes and on the shield of Achilles (including a glimpse thereon
of a public trial before a jury of elders without reference to the king) are those of
Homer’s own day and that the poet is deliberately drawing parallels between a heroic
past and his own present, thereby bringing his material up to date. The Homeric
poems are believed (largely on linguistic grounds) to have emanated from Ionia, so
that they may have preserved the memory of the Mycenaean mother culture
transmitted by those who had colonized Asia Minor in the dispersal that followed the
Mycenaean collapse.
Linguists have identified the same kind of layered structure as that revealed by
the archaeologists, in which archaic elements co-exist side by side with later forms.
The language of Homer is a fusion of elements from various dialects, the chief of
which are the Ionic, the Aeolic and the Arcadian. The Arcadian and Aeolic dialects
are thought to have developed from dialects of Greek spoken in mainland Greece in
the south and north respectively during the Mycenaean period. The fusion of these
two dialects with the later Ionic (which is the predominant element) has contributed
12 THE GREEKS
FIGURE 9 Troy
Source: Courtesy of Richard Stoneman