All episodes

Achilles and Hector

Iliad 22.131–166Iliad

Three circuits of the city at a run, past the springs where the women of Troy used to wash — the most topographically specific action scene in Greek epic.

In the poem

Hector waits outside the gate, loses his nerve when Achilles comes, and runs. They pass the lookout point, the wind-blown fig tree, the wagon track and the two springs of the Scamander, one hot and one cold. Three times around the city, and then Athena tricks Hector into standing.

The springs drove a century of Troy topography: Lechevalier read them into Pınarbaşı, Maclaren answered with Hisarlık, and Schliemann's excavation settled the site without ever settling the springs.

Why it matters for the atlas

It is the passage where the Iliad reads most like a map, and where the map has failed most instructively: the springs have never been matched at Hisarlık.

Competing theories

  • A circuit around the walls of Troy VI

    Proposed by: The topographical debate from Lechevalier and Maclaren onward · Modern

    Plausible

    The chase needs a walled city with room to run around it and springs nearby. Troy VI's circuit is large enough; the springs are the detail that once anchored the rival Pınarbaşı identification.

    Troy (Ilios)
    • ArchaeologyCarl W. Blegen et al., Troy: Excavations Conducted by the University of Cincinnati 1932–1938 (1950–1958)
    • ArchaeologyManfred Korfmann, Troia/Wilusa excavation reports, Studia Troica (1988–2005)
    • ScholarshipThe springs of the Scamander and the topography of Iliad 22, debated since Lechevalier and Maclaren

What is disputed

Whether the springs are a real Bronze Age feature now dry or buried, a poetic doublet, or evidence that the poem's topography is composite.

Questions

Do the hot and cold springs exist at Troy?
No pair matching the description has been identified at Hisarlık. The springs were the strongest argument for the rival Pınarbaşı site, which excavation otherwise ruled out.
Does that weaken the identification of Troy?
Not materially. It shows that a poem can be right about a city and unverifiable about a detail — which is why this atlas scores criteria separately.

Sources

  • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
  • ArchaeologyCarl W. Blegen et al., Troy: Excavations Conducted by the University of Cincinnati 1932–1938 (1950–1958)
  • ArchaeologyManfred Korfmann, Troia/Wilusa excavation reports, Studia Troica (1988–2005)
  • ScholarshipThe springs of the Scamander and the topography of Iliad 22, debated since Lechevalier and Maclaren