In view of these considerations the burden of proof must be held to lie with those who hold that the story is fictitious. Until such proof is forthcoming it seems to me that the only reasonable course is to follow the opinion of the ancients, except in so far as we have good reason for believing that they were mistaken. The ancients not only accepted the siege of Troy as a historical fact; they were prepared also to point out the site of the city. The correctness of this identification was indeed disputed by Demetrios of Scepsis, a native antiquary of the second century, who fixed upon another site, some four miles away; while modern scholars until recently believed that both were wrong. This is why in the passage quoted above Sir R. C. Jebb used the expression "a city in the Troad." But about five or six years after the publication of his book the traditional site was fully vindicated by the excavations of Dr Dörpfeld, which brought to light the remains of a fortress dating, approximately at least, from the period indicated by the story. It was made clear also that this fortress had been destroyed, presumably by enemies. That the destroyers were Greeks could not of course be proved by the excavations. But the evidence of the poems in this respect is confirmed by the fact that the district was inhabited by Greeks in later times[451].
It is held by many scholars that the story of the siege of Troy is a reflection of the Aeolic colonisation of the Asiatic coast. We have already discussed the principle underlying this theory and found no evidence in its favour. But it does not follow from this that the two events were unconnected. One of the most famous stories[452] recorded by Scandinavian tradition is that of the expedition to England which was undertaken by the sons of Lothbrok for the purpose of exacting vengeance for their father's death. Now we have an account of this invasion from a contemporary historical work (the Saxon Chronicle), which gives the names of two of the princes (Inwaer and Healfdene), as well as that of the Northumbrian king Aella against whom the expedition was directed. We know also that Lothbrok's sons were by no means contented with the overthrow of Aella; that on the contrary they ravaged the greater part of England. Long after they were all dead or departed the eastern half of the country remained Scandinavian territory. According to the Iliad Achilles did not confine his energies to Troy; he is said to have ravaged Lesbos and several places in the country round the Gulf of Adramyttion. Is there any valid reason for denying that the Greek occupation of these lands may have originated in such events? We need not suppose of course that the conquered lands were fully occupied at once. But the first settlers may well have secured enough to serve as a refuge for those of their countrymen who fled from the Thessalian invasion, probably no long time afterwards. A good parallel is furnished by the Scandinavian settlements in the British Isles, which served as a retreat for many Norwegians who refused to bow to the encroachments of Harold the Fair-haired.
The Greek settlements in this region were Aeolic, a fact due probably, as we have said, to the Thessalian invasion. But Achilles was an Achaean, and the same is true of most of the other chief heroes. The Iliad does not represent Troy as being attacked merely 'by Greeks,' but by an army gathered together from nearly all parts of Greece. This is one of the features in the story to which objection has been taken most generally. We may grant freely that no parallel for such an undertaking is to be found in historical times. Indeed, the objection itself contains a weak point here; for from all that we know of the earliest historical period it is scarcely credible that such an idea could have suggested itself, even in a work of fiction. On the other hand in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries the monuments of Rameses II, Merenptah and Rameses III give us information of expeditions which were on at least as large a scale and covered much greater distances. We have no reason for doubting that such an undertaking was possible also in the eleventh century.
But if the expedition itself is nothing incredible in such a period, what shall we say with regard to its motive? The reason assigned by the poem—that it was brought about by Paris' escapade—is one of those features which have been put aside by modern scholars as unworthy of consideration. This attitude is due partly to the application of modern political theories to a state of society in which they are quite out of place. With this question we shall have to deal in the following chapter. But it is due still more to the absurd hallucination that a story of abduction must have originated in the 'hypostasis' of natural phenomena. According to Scandinavian tradition the expedition of Lothbrok's sons was inspired by a purely personal motive—the desire to exact vengeance for their father's death. But in the Heroic Age itself we have from a strictly contemporary authority (cf. p. [97] f.) the story of the great expedition of the Angli against the Warni, which was caused by a breach of promise of marriage.
It appears then on examination that the central feature of the story, namely the destruction of Troy, rests upon fact, while the other main features gain in probability the more one takes into account the conditions of the age and the analogies furnished by similar stories elsewhere. These considerations tend to support the view that the employment of fiction is to be seen rather in the presentation than in the conception of the story. But the term 'presentation' here, just as in Chapter VIII, must be interpreted in a very liberal sense.
What has been said above applies of course properly only to the Iliad. With the Odyssey the case is quite otherwise. In the first place we have to note that the ancients themselves took a different view with regard to this poem—at all events that part of it which relates to the hero's wanderings. The credibility of the various incidents was frequently and warmly debated; but many of them were defended only by an allegorical interpretation. Then again the conditions are similar to those in which we find the most pronounced use of fiction in early Teutonic poetry. Sigemund is expressly said to have been alone when he attacked the dragon, and most of Beowulf's marvellous exploits are performed when he is either alone or with a single companion. The motif of the lonely wanderer in distant lands is not prominent in the remains of our poetry, but from what is said of Sigemund in Beow. 876 ff. we can scarcely doubt that it would have been utilised for the exercise of the inventive faculty.
Now we have seen (p. [258] ff.) that the hero's narrative in Od. IX-XII is evidently derived from an accumulation of folk-tales. Here the art of fiction is shown chiefly in the poet's adaptation of this material to his own purpose. But there are other parts of the poem—notably the preceding three books (VI-VIII)—which obviously require a different explanation. It is frequently assumed that the Phaeacians are wholly a creation of the poet's fancy. Without going so far as this[453] we may seriously doubt whether they were a Greek people and whether there was any foundation in history or tradition for the account given here—with a quite exceptional amount of detail—of their princes, their city and institutions. If this part of the story is to be regarded as fiction it is certainly a more elaborate type of fiction than anything which we meet with in the early heroic poetry of the Teutonic peoples. But the false stories told by Odysseus in the latter part of the poem at all events go far towards showing that such fiction was not beyond the power of Homeric poets.
According to our explanation the extensive use of fiction in the story of Odysseus is due to the fact that in this case the poet or poets had a free hand, whereas elsewhere, more particularly in the Iliad, they were bound down by tradition. It is not to be overlooked however that the Iliad itself contains many incidents which may similarly be regarded as products of invention—additions to the story which did not conflict with anything that had been 'handed down.' As a likely instance of this kind we may cite the Doloneia. But since we can seldom or never get beyond a hypothesis with such cases, it will be more profitable, I think, now to turn our attention to another question, namely whether the use of fiction also included the invention of characters—and if so to what extent.
In our consideration of the Teutonic stories we came to the conclusion that there was no really satisfactory evidence for such invention. In the Homeric poems the evidence is much stronger. We will first take the case of names which appear to have been coined with an obvious meaning. A good example occurs in Od. VIII 111 ff., where the Phaeacian athletes are enumerated:
ὦρτο μὲν Ἀκρόνεώς τε καὶ Ὠκύαλος καὶ Ἐλατρεὺς
Ναυτεύς τε Πρυμνεύς τε καὶ Ἀγχίαλος καὶ Ἐρετμεὺς
Ποντεύς τε Πρωρεύς τε, Θόων Ἀναβησίνεώς τε
Ἀμφίαλός θ' υἱὸς Πολυνήου Τεκτονίδαο·
ἂν δὲ καὶ Εὐρύαλος βροτολοιγῷ ἶσος Ἄρηι,
Ναυβολίδης θ', κ.τ.λ.