The text below is meant to be read aloud at the start of the discussion section. It compresses the week's lecture into about six minutes and hands the room to the two tasks. The fuller notes that follow are for setting each task up in turn.
This week's lecture opened by returning to an argument from last week: Barry Powell's hypothesis that the Greek alphabet was created to record verse, evidenced by the Cup of Nestor, a drinking joke scratched onto pottery in hexameter — though graffiti from the same decades at Methone shows the alphabet was already used for ordinary purposes too. Either way, the alphabet eventually fixed two monumental poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that creates the lecture's central problem: these are Iron Age poems remembering a Bronze Age world, across centuries an oral tradition alone had to bridge. The lecture then turned to that world in “Many Troys.” A Hittite record names a city called Wilusa in northwest Anatolia — the place the Iliad's sung tradition calls Wilios and its written text calls Ilios — ruled by a king named Alaksandu, whose name looks like a transcription of Alexandros, the name Homer also gives Paris.
None of this proves the Iliad records one real war — it shows only that names later used in Greek epic were already circulating in the Bronze Age. The lecture turned next to the site itself, Hisarlik, excavated first by Frank Calvert and then, at far greater scale, by Heinrich Schliemann. Hisarlik is not nine cities stacked one on the other, as the old phrase has it — it is one city, continuously rebuilt across nine settlement phases spanning three thousand years. Two phases matter most: Troy VI, a grand fortified citadel whose end around 1300 BCE shows the marks of an earthquake rather than a siege — displaced walls, no weapons or bodies — and the poorer Troy VIIa, violently destroyed by fire around 1200–1180 BCE. Which layer, if either, lies behind the poem's memory of a sacked city remains an open, still-debated question.
“The Homeric Question” asked how such a story could cross the centuries between that world and the poems we actually have. Here the lecture offered a striking piece of evidence: a team of evolutionary biologists once dated the Iliad the way one dates a divergence between species, tracking how many ordinary words — the Swadesh list linguists use because such words change slowly — are still cognate across Homeric Greek, Modern Greek, and Hittite. The date that emerged from vocabulary alone landed in the middle of the eighth century BCE, almost exactly where classicists, working from entirely different evidence, had already placed the poems. What crossed the intervening centuries did so through the memory and technique of singers, built into the metre itself. Homeric Greek is not stressed, as English is, but quantitative, built from long and short syllables, so Richmond Lattimore's six-beat English line — “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus” — does not actually reproduce the Greek's own rhythm. Six measures of dactyl and spondee make a line: dactylic hexameter.
“The Iliad” itself blends memory and invention: its heroes fight mainly with bronze but also handle iron and cremate their dead as the Iron Age did, yet a boar's-tusk helmet and Achilles' vast shield — forged by Hephaestus, and picturing two contrasting cities, one settling a dispute by judgment and one under siege — preserve details reaching back into real Bronze Age culture. The poem's actual subject, announced in its first word, mēnin, wrath, is that quarrel: Agamemnon seizes Briseis, Achilles' prize of honour, and Achilles' grief at Patroclus's death, once he withdraws from the fighting, is what finally drives him back to kill Hector. Its climax comes when the aged Priam ransoms his son's body and the two men weep together — a scene the lecture set beside the far older Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, where the death of the beloved companion Enkidu likewise turns the whole poem. Three Greek words organise this heroic world: aretē, excellence with no moral content — a sword has it if it is sharp; timē, honour as something external and countable, made visible in Briseis herself; and kleos, the glory of the song that outlives a man's body.
“The Odyssey” turns from the wrath that drives the Iliad to the harder business of coming home and being known again. Its moral order rests on xenia, the bond between host and guest, violated by the Cyclops and by Penelope's suitors, who abuse Odysseus's own hall for years in his absence. The poem's second half is a long study in disguise and recognition — the old dog Argos, the nurse who knows him by a scar, and finally Penelope, who will not know her husband until she has set a test only she can devise, built around the secret of their bed and a living, rooted olive tree. Where the Iliad is built on aretē in its rawest form, the Odyssey is built on a fourth word, mētis, cunning intelligence — and Penelope, who out-weaves her own suitors for twenty years, practises it exactly as her husband does.
The lecture closed with “After Homer” and the argument that carries into next week: the Homeric hero and the classical citizen are incompatible. Achilles' absolute priority on his own honour, and his willingness to let his own side die for a private grievance, is exactly what a hoplite line — where no man may step forward alone — cannot tolerate. And yet the poems became the common possession of all Greeks, memorised and performed at festivals and folded into paideia, the education of every young Greek; Alexander is said to have slept with an annotated Iliad beneath his pillow, understanding himself as Achilles reborn. The lecture's own closing formula gathers the whole argument into four words: the poems are an oral inheritance fixed by the new alphabet, an Iron Age memory of a Bronze Age war, and an expression of a heroic code — aretē, timē, kleos, and mētis — built on values a citizen, not only a solitary hero, will have to answer to. That tension between hero and citizen is exactly where the two tasks below begin.
≈ 1,000 words
Setting up the two tasks
Two tasks, each pairing physical or textual evidence with an argument built on it, and each asking a version of the same underlying question: how far can evidence — a layer of ash, a word's own history — actually be pushed, and what would even count as settling the argument it is being asked to support? Both were signalled directly in the lecture; the notes here mark the line between that framing and the work the groups will do. A thread runs through both: Homer is the hardest material to read precisely because everyone thinks they already know it, so each task is built to interrupt the familiar story and make you look at what the evidence actually says — whether the evidence is a stratigraphic layer or a Greek word.
Task AArchaeology of Troy: What Would Count as Evidence for the War?
This task sends groups down into the stratigraphy the lecture's Troy section opened up, working outward from the two great destruction layers at Hisarlik: Troy VI, whose end around 1300 BCE reads as an earthquake — displaced walls, no burning, no concentration of weapons or bodies — and the poorer Troy VIIa, destroyed by fire around 1180 BCE, with the unburied dead and sunk storage jars Carl Blegen read as a siege. Groups first list the physical features that separate an earthquake from a sack in the archaeological record, then move to the excavators' own long-running quarrel over which layer matters: Wilhelm Dörpfeld for Troy VI, Blegen for VIIa, and Manfred Korfmann's later discovery of a substantial lower city that reopened the whole question of scale — a disagreement still running today between Frank Kolb, who argues the Late Bronze Age settlement was never more than a modest citadel, and Peter Jablonka and C. Brian Rose, from Korfmann's own excavation team, who answer him directly from the site's own stratigraphy and finds. The decisive move the task asks groups to make is to hold two questions apart: the archaeological one — was this city violently destroyed, and when? — which the layers can answer, and the historical one — does the Iliad record that destruction? — which they cannot, because a burnt city cannot say who burned it, or why a poem composed four centuries later should happen to be singing about it. Bryce's case for a historical kernel behind the tradition and Sherratt's case that the tradition is bricolage — welding together more than one war and more than one destruction into a single story — give groups two live, opposed scholarly positions to weigh against each other rather than adjudicate from nothing. The full-group question asks whether “the Trojan War,” as a single, locatable historical event, is a phrase historians should keep using at all.
Task BThe Four Words a Hero Lives By: Aretē, Timē, Kleos, and Mētis
The second task returns to the poems themselves for a close reading of the vocabulary the lecture argues organises the entire heroic world. Groups first restate the lecture's own definitions of aretē, timē, and kleos in their own words, and explain what is lost if aretē is translated as “virtue” rather than “functional excellence.” They then locate each value in action using the Iliad cards — timē treated as a countable, material thing in Briseis's seizure by Agamemnon, and a hero's explicit refusal to let timē be bought back in the Embassy of Book IX — before turning to the Odyssey to find the moment the poem announces that it values mētis over aretē outright. The test the task poses is sharp: is Odysseus's cunning a form of aretē, a different excellence judged by different standards, or something the Odyssey is quietly substituting for aretē altogether? Penelope's own mētis, controlling the terms of the bow-contest from within a household she cannot leave, is the check case the task uses — is she excellent by the same standard Achilles is, or by a wholly different one? The scholarly framework behind the discussion is A.W.H. Adkins's argument that Homeric values are organised almost entirely around competitive rather than co-operative excellences — a thesis the task asks groups to test directly against mētis, which can serve co-operative ends (Penelope holding a household together for twenty years) as easily as competitive ones (Odysseus defeating the suitors). The full-group question bridges directly into the polis: whether any of the four words on the page — even the most “intelligent” of them — describes a virtue a democratic citizen, rather than a solitary hero, could actually practise.