Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery.

• Author: Katz, Joshua T.
• Position: Book review

Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. By JOACHIM LATACZ. Tr. Kevin Windle and Rosh Ireland. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004. Pp. xix + 342, illus. $45.

Jaan Puhvel's 1991 pamphlet Homer and Hittite--one of many relevant works that the author of Troy and Homer does not cite--ends with the words, "Homer is too important to be left to single-track hellenists" (1); similarly, of course, Troy is too important to be left to Anatolian archaeologists. Joachim Latacz, a specialist in Homer, has for many years been a particularly vigorous proponent of the view that the eighth-century B.C. Greek epic known as the Iliad is a reliable source of information about the city of Troy (modern Hisarlik) and its environs in the Troad in the Late Bronze Age. Understandably enthusiastic about archaeological and epigraphic finds from the past fifteen years and giddy over the resulting reassessments of the history of the eastern Mediterranean that bring the worlds of Greece and Asia Minor ever closer together (while also bringing a new academic Trojan War to the dinner table throughout German-speaking Europe), Latacz in 2001 published Troia und Homer: Der Weg zur Losung eines alten Ratsels, of which the present book is an updated translation. (2) Against what is probably the standard line in Anglophone scholarship today (see, e.g., Ian Morris's influential and, indeed, finely argued paper "The Use and Abuse of Homer," Classical Antiquity (5) [1986]: 81-138--also uncited), I am in substantial agreement with Latacz that certain significant details in Homer reflect society as it was long before the eighth century, in a shared Greco-Anatolian setting (think of the bond of guest-friendship between the Trojan Glaukos and the Greek Diomedes described in Book 6 of the Iliad), and I strongly urge both Classicist colleagues and the readers of JAOS to (re-)acquaint themselves with the indubitably very interesting interdisciplinary matters at stake. That said, it is not so easy to recommend Latacz's book, which is repetitive (the more something is said, the more it is taken as fact in his "logical" schemes), pompous (all the more so in English), and positively hagiographic in its advancement of the ideas of a very few scholars but inattentive to the work of many others.

The primary evidence that Latacz presents comes from two very different fields: archaeology and linguistics/philology. I am not knowledgeable enough about the former to be able to comment...