Meta Description: Join Dr. David Noe and Dr. Jeff Winkle as they dig into the archaeology, geography, and linguistics of the Iliad. Discover why the Trojan War wasn’t just a myth, the significance of the “Boar’s Tusk Helmet,” and why Homer is to be taken seriously as a historian.
Introduction: Nausea in the Vomitorium
Welcome back to the “Vomitorium,” listeners! In Episode 5 of the Ad Navseam Podcast, hosts Dr. Jeff Winkle and Dr. David Noe are battling the Michigan chill outside and a bit of metaphorical seasickness inside.
Dr. Winkle opens the episode feeling “nauseous,” comparing himself to a sailor stumbling across the deck of a bronze-beaked trireme on the wine-dark sea . This leads to the Latin Word of the Day: Nauseator.
- Definition: One who is prone to vomit or seasickness.
- Usage: Seneca once described Odysseus as a nauseator. While Homer doesn’t describe Odysseus vomiting much (aside from his emotions), the term sets the stage for a dizzying amount of material.
The hosts workshop a few rejected titles for this episode, including Troy Story, Mycenaean? No, Yourcenaean, and License to Ill-iad (a nod to the Beastie Boys and students who misspell “Iliad” with three L’s).
But beneath the dad jokes lies a serious question: Was the Trojan War real? Or is it, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, just a pretty story we tell ourselves?
The Three Pillars of Evidence
To answer this question, the hosts turn to two heavyweights of Homeric scholarship: Sir Denys Page (History and the Homeric Iliad, 1959) and Joachim Latacz (Troy and Homer, 2004).
These scholars argue that the Iliad is not just fiction. It is based on a historical core that survived the 400-year “Greek Dark Ages” (c. 1200–800 BC) through the power of oral tradition. The evidence rests on three pillars: Archaeology, Geography, and Linguistics.
Pillar 1: Archaeology (The Boar’s Tusk Helmet)
The most striking piece of evidence is a specific object described in Iliad Book 10: the Boar’s Tusk Helmet (Galea in Latin, Korys in Greek).
Homer describes Odysseus wearing a helmet made of rows of white boar tusks, with the teeth curving in opposite directions. For centuries, scholars thought Homer made this up. It sounded ridiculous—like wearing a helmet made of Legos or fingernails. Why would a hero wear teeth on his head?
Then came Heinrich Schliemann and the golden age of archaeology. Excavators found exactly what Homer described: helmets made of boar tusks.
- The Kicker: These helmets were fashionable in the 16th and 15th centuries BC. They were obsolete by the 13th century and extinct by the 12th century.
- The Implication: Homer, composing in the 8th century BC, was describing an object that hadn’t circulated for 500 years. He couldn’t have seen it. The memory of this object was preserved perfectly in the “amber” of the epic tradition.
Another example is the Cup of Nestor—a golden cup with doves on the handles, described in the Iliad and found by Schliemann at Mycenae.
Pillar 2: Geography (The Catalogue of Ships)
In Iliad Book 2, Homer gives us the “Catalogue of Ships”—a long, exhaustive list of every Greek commander and the town they came from. It reads like a tax audit or a Linear B tablet.
However, Denys Page points out that about 25% of the place names in this list were unknown to the Greeks of the historical period. They were “ghost towns.”
- Later geographers couldn’t find them.
- Skeptics said Homer invented them.
- The Reality: Excavations proved these places existed in the Mycenaean Bronze Age but were destroyed or abandoned during the Dark Ages. Homer was reciting a map of a world that had vanished centuries before he was born.
Pillar 3: Linguistics (The Fossilized Dialect)
The language of Homer is a busy soup of dialects. It is predominantly Ionic, but it contains fossils of Arcadian and Aeolic Greek.
Why? Because the meter (Dactylic Hexameter) acted as a preservative.
- Certain phrases (epithets) fit the meter perfectly in the old dialect. If you updated them to the “modern” Ionic Greek of Homer’s time, the line would break.
- Example: Hector is called Koruthaiolos (“of the flashing helmet”) and Chalkokorustes (“bronze-helmeted”). These epithets are applied only to Hector, never to anyone else.
- Denys Page argues this is because, in the deep past, Greek helmets were non-metallic (leather or boar tusk). Hector, a Trojan, perhaps wore a different, metallic style. The epithet preserves a genuine memory of a material distinction between Greek and Trojan armor.
The Dark Ages and the Oral Tradition
How did this information survive a 400-year gap where literacy (Linear B) disappeared?
The answer is Oral Tradition (Traditio).
As Dr. Noe explains, we live in an age of “glowing bricks” (smartphones) that have made our memories weak. We don’t need to remember anything because Google knows everything. The ancients were different. They cultivated massive feats of memory. Bards sang these stories at weddings and feasts immediately after the war (c. 1180 BC). The songs were passed down, memorize-perfect, generation after generation, preserving the “DNA” of the Bronze Age until the alphabet was reinvented and Homer wrote it down.
Conclusion: Homer is History
So, was there a Trojan War? The hosts conclude with a resounding Yes. Scholars like Joachim Latacz argue that the evidence is “overwhelming.” The names, the places, and the objects are real. While the gods and the speeches may be poetic embroidery, the skeleton of the story is hard history.
Latin Language Spotlight
- Nauseator: One prone to seasickness (Seneca).
- Galea: Helmet (Latin). Korys (Greek).
- Traditio: Handing down (Tradition).
- Corrigendum: Something to be corrected. Dr. Noe corrects a previous error about “henotheism” (attributed to Max Müller, not Walter Müller).
Sponsors
This episode is brought to you by:
- LatinPerDiem: Daily doses of Latin from Caesar to Aquinas. Visit latinperdiem.com.
- The Moss Method: Expert, self-paced Greek instruction. Go from “Neophyte to Erudite” at mossmethod.com.
The Gustatory Parting Shot
Dr. Winkle ends the episode with a quote from a student on a trip to Greece in 2011. It was a cold, misty day at Eleusis (the site of the Mysteries). As the professors basked in the atmospheric gloom, a young woman was overheard saying:
“If I see another old rock, I’m going to puke.”
Truly, a nauseator for the ages.Valete! (And join us next week for Heinrich Schliemann!)
