All episodes

The Achaean camp and the wall

Iliad 7.436–441Iliad

The Iliad's second setting: a beach of drawn-up ships, a ditch, a wall with gates, and the ground between it and the city where almost all the fighting happens.

In the poem

The camp is built like a place — ships in rows, huts, an assembly ground, a wall thrown up in Book 7 and breached in Book 12. Thucydides already read the Iliad's camp as evidence about how the siege must have worked.

The distance between camp and city governs the poem's action, and it depends on where the shoreline was. Coastal geology says the bay reached much further inland in the Bronze Age, which shortens the battlefield to something a day's fighting can cross.

Why it matters for the atlas

It is the part of the Trojan landscape that can be tested by geology rather than by excavation, and it comes out well.

Competing theories

  • The silted bay north of Hisarlık

    Proposed by: Coastal geology of the Troad · Contemporary

    Plausible

    Geological work on the Troad shows the Bronze Age shoreline lay well inland of the modern one, which would put the beached ships closer to the citadel than the present landscape suggests. This is the strongest physical argument that the Iliad's battlefield is a real space.

    Troy (Ilios)
    • ScholarshipReconstructions of the Bronze Age coastline of the Troad: the bay silted by the Scamander has advanced several kilometres since antiquity
    • ArchaeologyManfred Korfmann, Troia/Wilusa excavation reports, Studia Troica (1988–2005)

What is disputed

How far inland the Bronze Age shore actually lay, and whether the wall of Book 7 belongs to the oldest layer of the poem — an ancient critical question, since the poem also says the gods destroyed it without trace.

Questions

Can the Achaean camp be excavated?
Nothing identifiable as the camp has been found. What supports the setting is the reconstruction of the Bronze Age coastline, which places a suitable beach much closer to the citadel than today's plain does.
Why does the poem destroy the wall?
Poseidon and Apollo sweep it away after the war, which conveniently explains why nothing of it remains. Ancient critics noticed the convenience.

Sources

  • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
  • ArchaeologyManfred Korfmann, Troia/Wilusa excavation reports, Studia Troica (1988–2005)
  • Primary textThucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.11 — on the Achaean camp and the length of the siege
  • ScholarshipReconstructions of the Bronze Age coastline of the Troad: the bay silted by the Scamander has advanced several kilometres since antiquity