Troy and the True Story of the Trojan War

Michael Trapp

[Note (February 2010). This paper was delivered to the Oxford Ancient History Seminar on
4 February 1997. It has circulated fitfully in typescript since then, leaving ghostly traces in
bibliographies and footnotes. Apart from the addition of a few extra references to sources
and studies, to supplement what was on the original seminar handout, I haven't (yet) tried to
revise my text in the light of the considerable volume of relevant publication since 1997.
MBT.]

Like a sophist's concert, this paper has two parts: first some general preliminaries,

then the main set-piece. My title refers to the set piece, not the preliminaries - so

don't be alarmed if Troy isn't mentioned for the first few minutes; you aren't at the

wrong seminar. My brief in the context of this series as a whole is to speak up for the
arts of the spoken word in the first and second centuries AD. I shall therefore begin

by saying something about our general view of the place of oratory and rhetoric in the

culture of the Imperial period, before turning to what I wish to commend to you as a

particularly thought-provoking and entertaining instance.

The Greek city of the first and second centuries AD needed oratory quite as much as

its ancestors in the fifth and fourth centuries BC had done. Formal speeches - the

spoken word organized into extended patterns of unbroken discourse - were still an

essential medium for political decision-making, for the administration of justice, and

for the conduct of external relations; they were indispensable for the ceremonial life
of the city and the conduct of its festivities; and they had a large part to play in the

entertainment of the cultivated elite. In terms of the long-established categorization,

all three branches of oratory, the symbouleutic, the judicial and the epideictic all had

substantial roles to play in both the practical maintenance of the city's vital functions,

and in the shared life and culture of its citizens more generally. Whatever else those

citizens may have been, they were, unavoidably, practised listeners to formal oratory:

Cleon's taunt to the Athenian assembly in 427, recorded (or should that be 'created')
by Thucydides in Histories 3. 38, was no less applicable five and a half centuries later

1
- as for instance Plutarch makes clear in chapters 3 and 6-9 of his advice to

Menemachus on statesmanship in his Praecepta gerendae reipublicae.1

And if cities needed oratory, they also needed rhetoric: the scholarly and educational

underpinnings, by which both speakers and listeners were simultaneously trained for

the practical activity, and initiated into the cultural knowledge - the privileged facts,

the values, the attitudes - in which it was embedded. Teachers of the skills of

convincing speech might once in the dim and distant past have been regarded with

suspicion or scorn, but they had long, long since established their own distinctive

specialism as the central element in a civilized, civic education - far more central than

the alternative offered by the philosophers, who continued to snipe, but could only
thereby confirm their own relative marginality to the life of the city, and their target's

contrasting centrality. The attraction and retention of professional educators in

oratory was a continuing concern for Greek cities from the Hellenistic period

onwards; from the middle of the first century AD, their efforts were reinforced by

imperial legislation releasing both grammatikoi and rhetores (along with doctors and

- for a time - philosophers) from the burden of taxation and liturgy. Oratorical

training may not have been central to the educational system in the sense that every
citizen was exposed to it directly - not all were schooled, not all those who were

schooled went on from grammatikos to rhetor - but it provided the organizing

principal of the whole curriculum, and coloured the perception of schooled and non-

schooled alike of what counted as education and being an educated person. The

paideia of the pepaideumenos was heavily rhetorical.

Given all this - which I take to be obvious and uncontroversial - I find it surprising

how easy scholars find it not to talk about oratory and rhetoric in their accounts of the

life and workings of the Greek city, at least for the period with which we are now

concerned. There is - I think, or am I exaggerating? - a telling contrast to be drawn

1
Moralia 799b-800a, 802e-804c.

2
with studies of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, where one does - obviously - find a

much greater (and increasing) readiness to highlight oratory as a medium of civic life,

as well as a source of information about particular events, and details of political

procedure. At least at the level of general synthesis, when scholars are asked to make

up their minds about what it is really important to say (to each other, to students, to

the 'general public') about polis and politics in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods,

oratory and rhetoric tend to fall into the background. For instance, whereas Davies in

his Fontana volume on Democracy and Classical Greece has some stimulating things

to say about oratory and political performance, and about rhetoric and social change

(112-6, 160-2), one looks in vain for anything comparable in Walbank's

corresponding Hellenistic volume, or Wells's on the Empire.2 In Walbank, the topic

seems to fall into the gap between chapter 9 on 'Social and Economic Trends' and

chapter 10 on 'Cultural Developments'; it is also noteworthy that when Walbank deals

with education, he describes it as 'primarily literary' (where the word 'literary' seems

to deny any interesting connection between training in school and anything that might

belong to the world of public life and political activity). In Wells's volume, sophists

duly make their appearance (234-7), but feature more for their place in the social

structure of the Greek-speaking half of the empire, than for the nature of their skill;
and there is no acknowledgement of any continuity between their activity as

educators and epideictic performers and more mundane forms of civic activity. There

are perhaps two inter-related and mutually-reinforcing factors at work here: on the

one hand, a residual Romantic uneasiness about rhetoric, both as a mode of

expression and as a political tool, which makes scholars disinclined to highlight

verbal performance and the arts of the word as a defining feature of the culture they

are studying; on the other, a switch in focus in the account of political life from the

polis to the kingdom and the empire, which necessarily diverts attention away from

many of the prime venues and occasions for oratorical performance.

2
J. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece (ed. 2, Fontana 1993) 112-6, 160-2; F.
Walbank, The Hellenistic World (Fontana 1981); C. Wells, The Roman Empire (ed. 2,
Fontana 1992) 234-7.

3
Neglect of formal speaking and related phenomena is not confined to general surveys,

however. Looking further back in the literature I find a similarly striking elision in

one of the pioneering classics in the study of later Greek culture, A.H.M. Jones's

ground-breaking The Greek City.3 In some three hundred and fifty pages on civic

structures and civic life in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, Jones finds practically

nothing to say about rhetoric in his account of education and culture (chs 14 and 21),

and practically nothing to say about oratory in his account of city politics. What little

there is, is pretty comprehensively dismissive, as if of an aspect of ancient life and

experience that is regrettable, and to be passed over as quickly as may decently be.

Here is Jones on the Second Sophistic:

It is difficult today to appreciate the diffuse speeches of Dio of Prusa, who was an
intelligent man and often had something to say. It is still harder to understand the
enthusiastic response which the banal orations of Aelius Aristides of
Hadrianutherae evoked throughout the civilized world. But it must be
remembered that technically the rhetoricians of the principate, who are legion,
were highly skilled, and that formal perfection of composition, though not greatly
appreciated by the modern European mind, still in the near East commands
immense admiration, as any one can testify who has heard an Arab audience
groaning in raptures of delight at a speech of quite trivial content, if well
composed and delivered in the classical tongue (p. 283).

And here he is on practical oratory, in the Assembly:

As time went on the assent of the people became more and more formal, and
eventually, the assembly ceased to meet. But the process of decay was slow.
Plutarch speaks as if oratory still flourished in the assemblies of the Greek cities
in his day, and it is easy to believe that in an age so passionately devoted to
rhetoric so admirable an opportunity for its display was not neglected. An
inscription from Chalcis in Euboea [Dittenberger, Syll. 898] gives a report of an
assembly held in the third century. 'Novius Lysanias, strategus for the second

4
 time, said: "You do well in rewarding good men and in conferring honours not
only on themselves but on their children; for only thus do we encourage others to
do the same. This decree has already been passed by the council. If you also
agree, hold up your hands." The people shouted: "Agreed." (p. 177)

In both these passages, Jones fleetingly acknowledges the formal spoken word as a

major element in the politics and culture of the times, but the acknowledgement is

then immediately undercut: in the first case by a bit of patronizing Eurocentrism

(epideictic rhetoric is implied to be something fit only for decadent Orientals); in the

second passage, he undercuts by passing straight from the general statement that

oratory flourished, to a specific example that seems to show quite the reverse.

Ah, but, you will say, we do things differently now. It is unfair to concentrate on a

work of over fifty years ago, written at a time and in a culture when we all know

rhetoric was a dirty word. And it is also unfair, in looking at more recent work, to

confine your attention to works of synthesis and survey, where of course some even

quite important aspects of a subject are bound to recede, and even go missing entirely.

Remove the blinkers and you will see a plethora of good writing on Greek culture in

the Imperial period that privileges rhetoric and oratory, rhetors and orators, in

precisely the way you seem to want. Look at all the work on Sophists and

declamation, and their place both in the political processes and the social structures of

the day. Look at Bowersock and Reardon and Bowie and Desideri and C.P. Jones

and Russell and Russell-and-Wilson and Anderson and Swain.4 Here are much more

3
A.H.M. Jones, The Greek City (OUP 1940).
4
G.W. Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (OUP 1969); B.P. Reardon,
Courants littéraires grecs des II et III siècles après J.-C. (Les Belles Letres 1971); P.
Desideri, Dione di Prusa (G. D'Anna 1978); C.P. Jones, The Roman World of Dio
Chrysostom (Harvard UP 1978); D.A. Russell and N.G. Wilson (ed.), Menander Rhetor
(OUP 1981); E.L. Bowie, 'The Importance of Sophists', YCS 27 (1982) 29-50; D.A. Russell,
Greek Declamation (CUP 1983); G. Anderson, Philostratus (Croom Helm 1986); id., The
Second Sophistic (Routledge 1993); S.C.R. Swain, Hellenism and Empire (OUP 1996).
Exempli gratia - omissions not pointed.

5
sophisticated discussions of verbal performance and verbal performers, informed by a

much more sympathetic approach to this whole dimension of ancient life - on the

level both of institutional structures and practices, and of individual texts and

performances.

Indeed. There is certainly a rich literature, and I am as pleased by it and grateful for it

as anyone can be. But I still feel inclined to stick by my sense that there is a distinct

civic dimension to the oratory and rhetoric of this period that, in varying degrees,

these works fail to do justice to - one that begs for, and will reward, further

exploration. The proposition that oratory and rhetoric needed cities as much as cities

needed oratory and rhetoric can and should be leant on harder, both in our
sociological accounts of the Greek city of the later period, and in our readings of

individual texts. I suppose of the scholars I listed a moment ago, it is C.P. Jones, in

his Roman World of Dio Chrysostom, who might seem to come closest to giving the

lie to my complaint. Here indeed, epigraphic material, and a sophisticated

understanding of both local and imperial politics are brought into play to

contextualize individual orations, and the resulting readings of individual items are

fitted together into an intelligently revisionary biography of the orator. This is close
to at least part of what I think I'm looking for, but its a closeness that in the end serves

less to satisfy than to sharpen a sense of other projects to pursue. Jones uses data

about cities to illuminate speeches more than he uses speeches to illuminate the

culture of cities; and his focus on the specifics of an individual career leaves little

room for more generalizing reflection on the physical and institutional surroundings

in which that career unfolded.

I could go on with this sort of ungrateful carping - looking for instance also at the

worrying tendency to treat 'political' and 'epideictic' as mutually exclusive terms - but

it would no doubt be a relief to turn to something more positive. This will both force

6
me a little further into the open, and provide me with a transition to my declamation

proper.

What is it, then, that I would like to see instead of - or rather, in addition to - what has

already been said about oratory and rhetoric in the Imperial period? Broadly - as I

hope I have already done something to convey - I am after accounts that take a closer

look at the enmeshedness of the techniques of formal speech in civic culture - in the

ways that rhetorical training and oratorical practice were woven into the life and

processes of individual cities; in the ways in which one might want to write them in to

an anthropologically and sociologically 'thick' account of 'the city'; in the ways in

which they conditioned and interacted with the shared experience of citizens. And I
should like all these questions to be posed on the level of the individual civic

community, and from the citizen's viewpoint, rather than from some lofty and distant

eminence, from which individual detail, and the sense of individual locality, is lost in

the grander sweep of kingdom or empire. Within the territory thus marked out, I see

a number of more specific projects that I would like to see carried further.

In the first place, there is the question of the role of rhetorical training: not only in
preparing its recipients for practical activity as orators, but also in forming them as

members of the citizen elite, inculcating both norms of deportment and self-

presentation, and weapons for the competitive struggle for status. This is the seam

which Maud Gleason has started to mine so splendidly in Making Men, and it's one I

think cries out to be taken further.5 How did the kind of training in bearing and

gesture and voice-production that was internal to the rhetorical curriculum mesh with

- or pull apart from - the other sorts of advice and habituation to which the trainee

5
M.W. Gleason, Making Men. Sophists and self-presentation in ancient Rome (Princeton UP
1995).

7
citizen was exposed? Can we for instance find the tussle between rhetoric and

philosophy reproduced on this level too?6

Secondly - though this is not wholly unrelated to my first suggestion - we could think

harder about oratory as performance, and the relationship between oratorical

performance and other sorts of performance, both in terms of a single individual's

activities, and in terms of the conspectus of rival performances available in a city.

This might in turn lead us on to ask also about the city as performance-space: on the

one hand, the various physical 'platforms' and surroundings it offered for oratorical

activity; on the other, the extent to which the words spoken might or might not be

expected to interact with those surroundings - acknowledging or not acknowledging

what the eyes of an audience see, besides the orator, as they listen to his words, and

their sense of physical space. Oratory and the built (and sculpted) environment is an

intriguing topic (as I continue to feel in spite of having tried to read Richard Sennett's

Flesh and Stone while I was preparing this paper - there are some good questions

buried somewhere in that book, even if the answers are daft).7

Finally, again with some overlap, there is the question of the relationship between
oratorical performances and civic image - both the self-image of the citizen body

reflecting on their own corporate identity, character and values, and their sense of the

contrasting identities of other civic communities. How far can we legitimately see

speeches - particularly symbouleutic and epideictic speeches - and the written texts

arising from them - as places where communal values and communal pride were

sustained, tested, and modified? Is there a book on The Perpetuation of Prusa (vel

sim.) waiting to be written and placed on the shelf next to The Invention of Athens?

6
Some further thoughts on this in M. Trapp, Philosophy in the Roman Empire: ethics, politics
and society (Ashgate 2007), 233-8.
7
R. Sennett, Flesh and Stone (Norton 1994).

8
And how might the story to be told in that book connect up with other forms of civic

self- and other-imaging?

It is this last set of questions that provides me with my transition. A couple of years

ago, I tried out some ideas along these lines in connection with Dio Chrysostom's

Alexandrian Oration (Or. 32), arguing that Dio is there precisely playing pointed

games with Alexandrian pride and self-image in an attempt to restore them to a more

constructive and safer frame of mind - attempting to engineer a change in their view

of their present behaviour by turning subtly to their discredit the very things they

would normally expect a visiting orator to be complimenting them on.8 What I wish

to suggest this evening is that another of Dio's orations, the Eleventh, can
interestingly be read within the same frame of reference, as a further example of

interplay between oratorical performance and civic self-image.9

The civic self-image at issue this time is that of the people of Ilion. For this is the

speech in which Dio argues, in Ilion, perhaps in the course of the festival of Athena

Ilias, that Troy was never captured by the Greeks. The story told by Homer in the

Iliad, and by all the subsequent poets influenced by him, Dio proclaims, is a tissue of
lies, which, for all their cunning and all the credence they have enjoyed over the

centuries, can be decisively unmasked, both by internal analysis of their

implausibilities and inconsistencies, and by confrontation with a superior historical

source.

That superior historical source, we discover in chapters 37-8, is a venerable Egyptian

priest, whom Dio claims to have encountered in the city of Onouphis, and who was

himself dependent on the section of Egyptian historical records compiled from

information received from the visiting Menelaus (in Egyptian terms, a relatively

8
M.B. Trapp, 'Sense of Place in the Orations of Dio Chrysostom', in D. Innes et al. (ed.),
Ethics and Rhetoric (OUP 1995), 163-175.
9
See Appendix for a synopsis of the speech.

9
recent section). What Dio presents in the remainder of the oration (or at least its

greater part, chapters 43-144) is supposed to be a report of what the priest told him,

bulked out by supporting considerations of his own that testify to its superior

plausibility compared with the mendacious Homeric alternative. In practice, the

situation becomes somewhat blurred as the oration proceeds: the priest rather fades

from view (he is last definitely in the frame in ch. 68), and it becomes

correspondingly unclear after a while whether Dio is reporting what was said to him,

or speaking on his own account. This awkwardness may be connected with the fact

that we seem to have in the text of the oration as it now survives a combination of

several different versions.10 However, the overall argumentative strategy remains

clear. The audience (and/or the reader) are taken through the story of the Trojan War
step by step, from Paris's visit to Greece to the aftermath of the cessation of

hostilities; at each step, the plausibility of the true story is sharply juxtaposed with the

outrageousness of Homer's lies.

Thus at the outset we are told that Paris came to Greece not as an adulterer and an

abductor, but as a legitimate suitor for Helen's hand, and that Tyndareus, with a sharp

eye for a good dynastic union, accepted his suit. Accordingly, the Greek expedition
against Troy was not mounted to take just vengeance for villainy, but from wounded

pride (wasn't a Greek good enough?) and from fear of the territorial claims that Priam

and his family might choose to make on the strength of the union, just as Pelops had

once done following his marriage to Hippodameia. The rival Homeric account, that

makes Paris the villain of the piece, simply will not stand up. It is absurd to imagine

Paris falling in love with a woman he had never seen, and Helen consenting to leave

home and family for a foreigner. And even if Paris had conceived such a lunatic

scheme, would wise Priam and noble Hector ever have let him carry it out? How

come neither Helenus nor Antenor nor Cassandra had anything to say about it?

Again, if Menelaus had been at home, he couldn't have failed to see what was going

10
See H. von Arnim, Leben und Werke des Dion von Prusa (Weidmann 1898), 172-204.

10
on; and if he was away, a visitor would never have been let near his wife. And come

to that, doesn't Homer somewhere say that Troy had been sacked only a few years

before by Heracles? How is that consistent with Priam's sitting on the throne of Troy,

let alone conniving at a venture that was bound to provoke reprisals? (43-74 - but

with a lot more that I haven't summarized.)

At the end of the story, we learn that the Greeks were ultimately forced to sail away

from the Troad after a negotiated settlement, leaving behind a wooden horse

dedicated to Athena Ilias, in acknowledgement of their failure. Homer's story (hinted

at by him, and developed by others under his spell) that they sacked the city, and that

the dedication was in fact the crucial strategem that allowed them to do it, does not
bear close scrutiny. It is in general deeply implausible that a tiny expeditionary force

should succeed against a rich and powerful city, and the claim that this was done by

packing armed men into a wooden horse only makes things worse. Moreover, Trojan

rather than Greek success makes far better sense of what is recorded as happening

next to each of the two sides: sorry returns from the Greeks, to find murderers and

usurpers at home, but for the Trojans, a whole string of successful colonial ventures

(including the foundation of what was to become the greatest city of all - Rome).
(119-144, again with much omitted.)

So much for the rival version of events at Troy. Lengthily and lovingly as it is

unfolded and defended, it is not however the only element in Dio's assault on Homer,

nor the first. He begins by arguing in chapters 15 to 37 that we can know Homer to

be a liar on other grounds too, and these other grounds provide an essential prelude to

the case of Troy. Firstly, there is general agreement (even among those who accept

his authority) that Homer was a wanderer and a beggar; no shame in that, but beggars

in general have strong reasons for saying what they need to in order to curry favour

rather than what is true. Moreover, Homer himself is open in his praise and sympathy
for liars: witness what he says about Odysseus and Autolycus (15-19). Secondly,

11
whatever we may think of what Homer tells us about human deeds, he quite clearly

lies about the gods, claiming to know what was said in private divine tête-à-têtes, at

which no witness can have been present, and even to be able to speak the gods' own

language (19-24)! Thirdly, there is something deeply suspicious about Homer's

narrative style - that choice to begin in medias res and to end before the real end of

his story. To thus relegate what ought to be the essential elements of the tale (the

initial crime of Paris, and the eventual fall of his city) to positions of near-invisibility

can only be a sign of evasiveness and of a guilty conscience, of a liar trying to divert

attention from the most dangerous proof of his mendacity (25-37).

Thus before the individual lies about Troy are unmasked, it has already been
established in general and in principle that Homer is a liar. It remains only to

consider the Introduction and Peroration, with which Dio encloses this complex of

arguments. Here perhaps we may see some attempt to steer his audience's reaction to

it. The peroration (chs 144-154) takes the form of a gesture of reassurance, directed

at anyone who may still be worried at the propriety of impugning Homer's honesty

and insulting the Greeks by denying them one of their greatest achievements. Homer

had every reason to lie as he did, and he can be seen to have lied in a good cause.
After such a defeat as that, it was essential to lie in order to sustain Greek morale -

just as the Persian high command lied to the Persian people about the outcome of

Xerxes's expedition. But the need for such an exercise is now long gone - there is no

further danger of east-west conflict in the Roman empire - so the lie can safely and

respectably be unmasked. Nor are the Greeks thereby done down in any hurtful

sense. The sack of Troy as the poets tell it is full of shocking and criminal actions on

the part of the victors: surely sacrificing the glory of sacking Troy is a small part to

pay for being freed from the more serious charge of vice and depravity.

The closing moments of the speech, therefore, are directed at an audience assumed to
be suffused by Hellenic feeling, for the national classic and the glorious past. The

12
introduction, ostensibly, appeals to a more general level of reflectiveness, even as it

anticipates a specifically local reaction to what Dio is about to say (1-10). The

reluctance that the people of Ilion are going to feel to accept that the Greeks never

sacked their city is just one instance of a general human tendency, that of clinging to

familiar falsehoods when confronted with a novel truth; it is a striking but by no

means unique testimony to the power of doxa over aletheia. The people of Argos

would feel the same at being told that Thyestes didn't in fact commit adultery with

Aerope, as would the Thebans on hearing that King Oedipus never did and suffered

what the old stories claim.

There then is Dio's Troicus. What are we to make of it? Who is it for, and what is it
trying to do for them? On one level (though not one I think is done full justice to in

the literature) it is a tremendous piece of learned fun, entertainment for the literate

élite that simultaneously flatters them on their acquaintance with the literary (and

literary-critical) heritage. To impugn Homer's veracity and to question the outcome

of the Trojan War is in itself a gorgeous paradoxon, worthy of Gorgias's Helen. An

apparently outrageous 'what if?' ('what if Homer got it all deliberately and

systematically wrong?') is pushed through with such verve and thoroughness as to

carry even the determined doubter along with it. But the piquancy of the exercise is

immensely enhanced by the way this attack on a pair of cultural monuments is itself

conducted with materials drawn from almost equally central elements of the Hellenic

heritage. Dio himself says early on that he will 'refute Homer from nowhere else than

his own poetry' (which I would like to see as a knowing parody of the critical maxim

of 'illuminating Homer from Homer') [ch. 11]; it is equally true to say that he is, more

generally, destabilizing one part of the Hellenic heritage with that heritage's own

resources.

This mobilization of resources from the educated repertoire has a number of aspects.
As was pointed out long ago (by Kroll, and in his footsteps by Mesk), the negative

13
arguments that Dio and his priest bring against the veracity of Homer's version, both

in themselves, and in the way they are piled one on the other, draw on the strategies

of the familiar rhetorical exercise of anaskeue ('refutation'), which was canonically

the fifth or thereabouts in the sequence of progymnasmata (and one might also note

that attack on the proponents of the view or story refuted, as well as on the story

itself, is recommended by the handbooks for this exercise).11 But at the same time, as

Kindstrand points out, Dio's attack is also constantly evoking the manoeuvres of the

Homeric critics, for whom propriety and plausibility are as much a concern as they

are for the rhetorician. For Kindstrand, this is an indication that anaskeue is not a

useful key to the oration, which he wishes in general to read as a piece of moral

philosophizing rather than a rhetorical (sophistic) performance (more on this later). I

would prefer to accept that both associations - anaskeue and Homeric criticism - are

in play, and to add that the contemporary audience will also have heard echoes of

judicial oratory - specifically, the undermining of the opposition's narrative and his

witnesses (which is, after all, what anaskeue was there to train the aspiring orator in

in the first place).

Along with this, Dio also weaves into his oration a series of reminiscences of classic
literature, which both flatter his audience's ability to recognize and appreciate them,

and implicitly claim the authority of the greats of the past for his own procedure (or

rather, for the procedure of the persona through which he speaks this particular

oration). The invocation of the priest of Onouphis, and deference to his authority,

recalls above all Herodotus's account of his own Egyptian researches (which, it will

be remembered, include a revisionary account of the story of Helen, and thus of the

aetiology of the Trojan War, in which priestly records and the testimony of Menelaus

are used to 'correct' Homer).12 One might also catch here an echo of Plato's Solon in

11
W. Kroll, 'Randbemerkungen XXXI', RhM 70 (1915) 607-10; J. Mesk, 'Zur elften Rede des
Dio von Prusa', WS 42 (1920-1) 115-124. Cf. Aphthonius, Rhet. Gr. II, 27-30 Spengel, with
G. Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (Princeton UP, 1983) 54-73, esp. 62.
12
Hist. 2.113-20.

14
the Timaeus, learning the truth about ancient history from a 'very ancient' priest of

Neïth-Athena in Sais.13 Revisionary stories of the Trojan War centering on Egypt

take Dio into the same territory as the Stesichorus of the Palinode,14 who is duly

invoked in chs 40-41. Towards the end of the oration (ch. 146), Thucydides's

comments on Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and on erroneous beliefs about the

Spartan army, are cited as evidence of the tenacity of falsehoods in the popular

imagination - which not only borrows Thucididean authority for the observation, but

also implicitly compares 'Dio' to him as a clear-sighted and courageous campaigner

for truth. Finally, as a critic of Homer, who wishes to argue that his poetry is both

mendacious and inappropriate to present needs, 'Dio' takes on something of the

mantle of the Plato of Republic 2 and 3.

You need to know your literature, and your literary criticism, and your oratorical

techniques fully to appreciate the cleverness of what Dio has done - and the better

you are aware of this fact, the better you are going to enjoy the performance, not only

in itself, but for what it tells you about your own status as one of the cultivated élite.

But is there another level to all this? Is there also some moral and / or political

aspect? And is there something extra that the performance gains from its location - as
(this time round at least) a speech to educated Ilians, rather than some other group of

educated Hellenes?

The two most prominent attempts to answer these questions in the affirmative come

from Kindstrand (in Homer in der Zweiten Sophistik) and Desideri (in Dione di

Prusa).15 Kindstrand, reacting against what he sees as the excessively rhetorical

approach of the majority of earlier critics, and impressed by the similarities he finds

in topic and vocabulary with the Orations 4 - 10 (the 'Cynic' orations), urges a

13
Tim. 21a-25d.
14
Frr. 192-3 PMG.
15
J.F. Kindstrand, Homer in der Zweiten Sophistik (Uppsala 1973)141-162; P. Desideri,
Dione di Prusa (n. 3 above), 431-4, 496-503.

15
strongly moral-philosophical reading. For him, it is emphatically the mature,

philosophical Dio who speaks, not the callow young sophist. On this reading, the key

section of the oration is its very first, the discussion of truth, falsehood and opinion.

The demolition of Homer's account of the Trojan War is just one possible example

among many - albeit one with a special immediacy for the people of Ilion - with
which to advance Dio's ongoing 'Kampf gegen die dovxa' (p. 156), his Cynic-inspired

campaign to free humanity from the empty vanity and pretentiousness of

conventional, materialist culture. At the same time, though this seems for Kindstrand

to be a secondary matter, the speech is also pro-Roman propaganda, an attempt to

counter anti-Roman scorn by pointing out that they are the descendants of the victors

of the Trojan War, not its vanquished. (An analysis which picks up - perhaps a little
credulously - on the statement in Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities 1.4.2

that 'almost all the Greeks' have a false view of Rome's origins, largely spread by the

city's detractors.)

Desideri, for his part, declares for what he calls a 'political' reading of the speech,

though this turns out in practice to be - in keeping with his overall project - as much

cultural-political as polis-political in nature. For him, the key passage comes towards
the end of the oration, where Dio points out that changed political circumstances - the

advent of the Roman Empire - make exercises like Homer's in boosting Greek morale

against the Trojans unnecessary. Myths, that is to say, go out of date, and it is the

entitlement, even the duty, of the modern intellectual to rewrite them in tune with the

changed times, as Dio has done to Homer. The speech thus emerges as a general

programme for cultural action, the theoretical justification for Dio's practice (as

Desideri sees it) not only in this speech, but in many others besides. At the same

time, it delivers the practical message that in the world of the Empire concord and

treaties are better than conflict.

16
On both readings, therefore, the Trojan setting is held to be important to an

understanding of the speech, to the extent that Dio has chosen Homer's Trojan War as

an example calculated to speak immediately to his Ilian audience. But in neither case

is Troy the real point; it is only a specific illustration of some more general truth,

about myths and the modern world, or about self-deception and vanity. And in

neither case is the local context discussed at any length. Now, I am not entirely

hostile to the idea that Homer's Trojan War may be a means to some further end, but I

am pretty sure that the end is not what either Desideri or Kindstrand wants it to be.

And I would like to think that the process of coming up with something better takes

us via a more careful look at local sentiments.

Desideri's myth-manipulating Dio is an interesting construct, as is his picture of Dio

as ideological evangelist for Roman Imperial values. But I wonder in general at the

wisdom of trying to make every last major oration fit the same pattern (to give him

his due, Desideri himself is a little uneasy, speaking of the 'temptation' at least to try

to include this oration in the political scheme). Moreover, in the specific case of

Oration 11, it seems strained to make a relatively fleeting remark in the final stages of

the performance the crucial key to the whole, as Desideri has to. There may also be
problems in the view of mythological and ideological truth that he attributes to Dio in

the course of constructing his reading, but I am not sure I'm in a position to take those

on now.

Kindstrand perhaps deserves a slightly more extended discussion, if only because he

offers some more obvious handles to criticism. His confidence that the oration can be

read as a Cynicizing, therefore philosophically serious piece rests on some very shaky

foundations. For one thing, it depends on an uncritical acceptance of the sophist-

versus-philosopher antithesis as a useful tool for understanding Dio (he agrees with

Synesius that the oeuvre can be divided into the early and sophistic and the later and
philosophical). Secondly, it involves arguing (or rather, simply taking for granted)

17
that when similar material and vocabulary recurs in more than one speech, it has to be

used the same way both times. In addition, the identification of individual Cynic

elements is frequently optimistic: to give just one example, a single instance in Or. 11
of a proverbial expression (ojstravkou metapevsonto", 'at the flip of a coin') is

identified as a Cynic trait on the grounds that Cynic diatribe is full of proverbial

expressions. But above all, it seems to me that Kindstrand has to attribute to Dio an

almost incoherent overall strategy in the Oration. The aim is allegedly to cure the

Ilians of their unhelpful vanity and pretentiousness, by showing them just how deeply

in error they can be even when they are surest of their ground, and by revealing to

them the perversity of basing their civic pride on what ought to count as the greatest

of misfortunes. In the abstract, this would indeed make sense as an attempt to shake
them free of worldly values. But can this really be the aim when the actual speech is

- as we have seem - so very full of appeals to just the kind of educated values and

empty cultural pride that the Cynic ought to foreswear? There is surely too much

conventional culture and educated pride in the attack for it really to be an attack of the

kind Kindstrand wants.

But if the oration is not to be read as moral preaching or political propaganda, how
exactly are we to place it instead? I've already suggested that, irrespective of the

circumstances, the precise location, of its delivery, it can be taken as a splendid piece

of entertainment for the classically educated. What I now wish to add is that for a

specifically Ilian audience, it might be rather more - splendid entertainment with a

hidden sting, which in its turn offers (although it does not insist on) deeper reflection.

However, the kind of reflection I want to see is not that envisaged by Kindstrand or

Desideri. To get at it, we need to take that closer look at the civic environment in

which Dio performed.

The city of Ilion in the first and second centuries AD was deeply committed to its
Trojan past, and had been for centuries. Its status as the descendant of Priam's city

18
had earned it wide renown and respect, evidenced by a string of distinguished

visitors, and above all a special relationship with Rome, both sentimentally and

materially, from the third century BC onwards. Its great shrine to Athena Ilias, first

developed under Antigonus Monophthalmus and rebuilt under Augustus, with its

festival, could look back to the temple in which Theano and the women of Troy pray

in Iliad 6. Trojan heroes adorned the coinage and stood in bronze and stone in the

city's public spaces: we have inscribed statue-bases for statues of Priam, Hector and

Aeneas (plus one for an unidentified Achaean hero from among those who died in the

siege); repeated images of Hector and Aeneas on the coins may be images of these

very statues. And it appears that some of the city's twelve tribes were named for the

Trojans of old: so much seems certain for the Panthois, though the existence of an
Attalis shows that old Troy did not provide all the names, and it must remain unclear

whether the Alexandris was named for the older or the more recent Alexander.16

Literary, numismatic and epigraphic evidence thus converge to underline just how

heavy an investment this polis had in its legitimate descent from Homer's Troy - not

only in its internal organization and self-image, but also in its sense of its

relationships with the wider world. Not everyone, however, was sure that the line
was true. Book 13 of Strabo's Geography reveals that something like the controversy

that we know best in connection with Schliemann was already under way in antiquity.

There was the possibility of polemic between the Ilians, proudly defending their

claim to geographical identity with Priam's city, and those who maintained that the

present city of Ilion was the result of a migration, and that the site of Ilus's foundation
was the hamlet now known as the 'Village of the Ilians' ( jIlievwn kwvmh). Moreover,

these sceptics, according to Strabo, based their arguments on the analysis of Homer

(13.1.25, p. 593):

16
E. Meyer in RE Suppl. XIV. 815-7; Inschriften griechischer Stätde aus Kleinasien 3. Die
Inschriften von Ilion (ed. P. Frisch, Habelt 1975), nos. 31 and 122-3 (tribes), 141 (Priam), 142
(Hector), 143 (Aeneas), 145 (Greek hero); A.R. Bellinger, Troy. The coins (Princeton UP
1961), e.g. nos. 115, 129, 134, 140, 148, 158, 181, 203-8, 210, 284, 290; Strabo 13. 1.24 ff.

19
 The people of the present Ilium, in their desire for glory and wishing
theirs to be the ancient city, have argued stoutly against those who base
their argument on Homer's poetry, because theirs does not appear to have
been the Homeric city. Other students too relate that the city has
changed its place several times, before eventually settling for good where
it now is in about the time of Croesus ... They say that the present Ilion
was for some time a mere village ...

Examination of local conditions, then, shows us a city in which the cultivated élite

will have thought of themselves as heirs to the glory of Priam, Hector and Aeneas,

but also have been well aware of the jealous attempts of rivals to spoil the purity of

their inheritance. At the same time, we must remind ourselves, they will also have

been as keen as any such group anywhere in the eastern half of the Empire to think of

themselves as educated Greeks, heirs also to the riches of Hellenic culture. Loyalty to

Priam's Troy did not involve renunciation of Hellenic in favour of Phrygian identity.

It is this context - which Desideri and Kindstrand do not take the time to explore even

as briefly as I have just done - that I believe opens the way to another reading of Dio's

oration. For it allows us to envisage, behind the uncomplicated enjoyment of the

rhetorical skill and mastery of the classical heritage with which Dio works, a more

sophisticated and provocative (or at least, teasing) current.

For what the argument of the Trojan Oration implicitly does is to remind its Ilian

audience of just the dual heritage I have just sketched, and to propose them a dilemma

arising from it, a dilemma that threatens to pull apart the two sides to that heritage, as

Trojans and as Hellenes, and to manoeuvre them into a position in which they are

threatened with having to choose one or the other. Are they going to welcome the

revelation that their city was never captured, and accept its truth? Or are they going

to cling to the old Homeric story, in the teeth of reasoned criticism, simply because it

is the old Homeric story? As loyal Trojans, as citizens of this particular polis, they
ought to prefer, other things being equal, a history in which their proud city was never

20
defeated. But if they do that, then they will have to renounce the role that has brought

them all their fame in the Greek-speaking world, and turn their backs on the greatest

Hellenic poet. If, on the other hand, they prefer to maintain their credentials as

admirers of Homer, and sustainers of hallowed tradition, then they will have to

acknowledge more openly that their reputation is built on the shame of military

defeat.

I say that this strategy 'threatens' to put the Ilians on an uncomfortable spot, because

in the event the blow is softened by Dio's peroration, in which he suggests an

accommodation that salvages everybody's credit, and even affects surprise that his

arguments might be believed. But I would like to think that this final softening does
not entirely remove the tease. Something of the challenge, of the sense of the

paradox of being a Trojan Greek remains, even if the suggestion that a real choice has

to be made eventually recedes.

At the same time, as I have hinted, I don't want to rule out all suggestion of something

a shade more 'serious'. The question 'are you keener to be Trojans or Greeks?' can

perfectly well be taken lightly, but it might also prompt the reflection that the choice
is not in the end the most important one to make, that there are other values that take

precedence over ancestry and local loyalty. Anyone who wanted to press for this

understanding could point to the way Dio chooses to end the speech on a moralzing

note, with the suggestion that it would be better for the Greeks not to have sacked

Troy, if sacking a city necessarily involves the vicious actions normally associated

with such an event. If the Greeks have reason to relinquish conventional glory for

moral reasons, perhaps the Trojans do too; and if moral motives take precedence, then

one is being offered a vantage-point from which issues of Greekness or Trojanness

might fade away.

*****

21
If any version of this is right, then Dio's Trojan Oration can be set aside others of his

city speeches as an example of carefully calculated play with local conditions and

local sentiment. It would, for instance, be both like and unlike his performance in the

Alexandrian Oration: like it in the closeness of attention to the locality, but unlike it

in the end towards which this close attention is directed - not this time an attempt to

reform behaviour, but something less immediately practical, whether that means

wickedly entertaining or entertainingly thought-provoking. There is more than one

way for a visiting orator to display his sensitivity to this audience in this place. But

what remains true is that we risk missing something important about the speeches if

we do not attend closely to the civic context, just as we risk missing something

important about the civic context if we do not attend closely to the speeches.

Appendix: Synopsis of the Trojan Oration

Proem (1-14)

1-10: Truth and error; human perversity in clinging to familiar falsehood

11-14: Preliminary indications of Homer's mendacity, and of the means to unmask
them

Argumentation (15-144)

15-37: Homer the Liar

37-144: The True Story of the Trojan War, as told by the priest at Onouphis,
contrasted with Homer's fictions

37-43: the priest's credentials, and opinion of Greek poetry

44-144: The True Story

43-61: the wooing of Helen

62-74: the true cause of the war
74-88: early stages of the war
89-93: Hector's triumph
93-110: Achilles's sortie and death at Hector's hands
111-124: the end of hostilities
125-144: Greek homecomings and Trojan colonization

Peroration (144-154)

The persistence of falsehoods. Defense of Homer's lies as a sensible response to

post-war conditions, now no longer needed. No shame to the Greeks not to have
captured Troy.

22