New Troy show celebrates foundations of Western storytelling

After a two-month Japanese hiatus, it was time to re-engage with Western civilisation. Troy seemed a good place to start.

The three epics that sprng from the fall of this legendary city ... The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid ... are arguably the foundations from which all the rest of Western literature springs. Every basic plot line that writers have been spinning and enhancing for 3,000 years starts here: star-crossed lovers; the toxicity of jealousy; duty vs. desire; dysfunctional families; the nature of friendship; the capriciousness of fate ... and so much more. This is the genesis of storytelling. (And pre-dates the official Book of Genesis by as much as 500 years.) Much of the time, artists and writers haven't even bothered to invent their own variations on the theme. They've simply re-told these great tales from Roman mosaics to medieval tapestries, Renaissance plays to modern film.

That's the lens through which the British Museum sees things in its new exhibition Troy: Myth and Reality. Blockbuster shows here usually assemble the cultural treasures of lost civilisations to allow us to imagine what they must have been like in their glory days. There is a bit of the real Troy here, but those humble artefacts can't compare to the art that's been created in celebration of what may (or may not) have happened there.

To remind you of the basics: three goddesses are debating their supremacy. They pick a human to arbitrate, Paris, Prince of Troy, and bribe him shamelessly. He falls for the offer of Aphrodite, goddess of love: the most beautiful woman in the world will be his. Problem is, she's married to King Meneleaus of Sparta. Paris and Helen run away to Troy. Meneleaus rallies his brother, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, and all the other Greeks, to sail to Troy to get Helen back. Many adventures and side-plots take place as they're gathering the troops.

When the Greeks get to Troy, they find the city too strong to take, so they start a siege that lasts 10 years. Many more adventures and side-plots ensue as they camp on the beach below town. Eventually, a series of tragedies leads to an epic battle between two of the greatest heroes of all time, Greece's Achilles and Troy's Hector. Achilles wins, but his brutal desecration of Hector's body pretty much ensures that he'll die soon after. Unable to break the siege, the Greeks finally win by treachery, pretending to give up and sailing away but leaving a wooden horse as an offering to the sea god Poseidon on the beach. The Trojans bring it inside. Greeks are hiding within. The city falls. Nobody ever trusts a Greek gift again. That gets us through The Illiad.

Then there are two sequels. The first, also by Homer, tells us about the journey home of Odysseus. He was the genius who came up with the horse idea, and was basically the tricksy strategist throughout Part 1. But he sucks at navigation.  He spends 10 years getting home, regularly frustrated by capricious gods who'd been on the Trojan side and want him to pay for his tricks. Even the most basic perusal of a map will suggest that a decade of travel time between Troy and Odysseus' kingdom of Ithaca is preposterous (you could drive it today in 14 hours). But Odysseus' adventures through the islands of the Aegean and Mediterranean are a ripping good yarn.

At the same time Odysseus is going through his travails, a Trojan prince by the name of Aeneas manages to escape the flaming ruins of his city. He also has a rip-roaring series of adventures, including making the queen of Carthage fall in love with him and throw herself on a bonfire when he leaves her. Because he's got better things to do. Namely, travelling up the Italian peninsula to become one of the founders of Rome. This is one of history's earliest examples of PR spin, as author Virgil whipped up this fantasy 1,000 years after Homer's original epic to give his scrappy upstart of a country a more noble backstory. It worked.

The first half of the exhibition tells these stories and some of their more popular spin-offs through the medium of classical art. The British Museum has been able to mine its own collections extensively. Greek vases that normally sit upstairs on shelves with scores of others are called out to individual glory here, their storytelling enhanced by projected text and images and, occasionally, a soundtrack. Early on, hearing the cadence of the lines in ancient Greek before they’re translated into English reminds you that these tales were poems created to be listened to, and translations never capture the music of the original. Sculpture, wall paintings from Pompeii, sarcophagi and other treasures augment the tale, sourced selectively from other museums.

My favourite piece was an enormous table base depicting Scylla and Charybdis (an episode from The Odyssey) on loan from Naples’ magnificent archaeological museum. The two writhing sea-monsters, each the size of a person, would have hoisted the table on their backs. The sculptor was clearly more interested in beauty than capturing the menace of the story, since both “monsters” are deeply attractive and the three-headed hound accompanying one ... who is supposed to be ripping drowning sailors to shreds ... looks like a drowsy spaniel gnawing on an after-dinner bone.

Even before we leave the classical age, there are signs of the tale’s global traction. There’s a beautiful repousse silver cup with a scene from Achilles’ life, made by the Romans and unearthed in a Danish chieftain’s grave. (Proving that the Danes have always had cosmopolitan tastes.) More surprising is a scene showing the Trojan horse being brought into the city, localised for the Indian market. A Hindu goddess oversees proceedings.

The museum makes the most of its flexible, modern exhibition space with clever lighting and hanging partitions; views through gaps mean the sections bleed into each other more than usual, emphasising the eternal nature of the story. You may be looking at an Etruscan sarcophagus, but there’s a Rubens painting in your peripheral vision. A magnificent wooden cage evokes the famous horse, insubstantial enough that it’s actually more effective if you don’t look at it directly. As with the original poem, your imagination puts the finishing touch on the story.

The half-way point offers a brief sojourn in the real Troy, architecturally separated from the rest of the show in a pod as if to emphasise the gulf between epic and reality.  The curators are keen to point out the irony that while the stories never went out of circulation, the city itself was so thoroughly lost that many people believed it to be a myth. Turkish locals never really “lost” the place, of course, but it took a German to put it back on the global map.

This section introduces us to Heinrich Schliemann, whose obsession led to the first modern archeological dig on the site. His techniques were cavalier, he bent a lot of facts to fit his theories and he effectively looted all the good stuff he found to take back to Berlin. (In a karmic turn of fate, the Soviets took the treasures for themselves at the end of WWII so they now live in Moscow's Pushkin Museum.) But he was probably in the right place. In the 150 years since his time, more scientific excavations have discovered seven different levels of habitation over 1,000 years. The latest ones reveal a substantial walled city could fit the narrative, but there’s still no conclusive proof that Paris, Hector, Achilles and the gang were here.

It doesn’t really matter, of course. The story is more culturally significant than the truth.

The second half of the exhibition returns to the narrative of Troy as inspiration for art through the ages. There are magnificent Italian Renaissance wedding chests. A maquette of the stage design for Offenbach’s La Belle Helene.

Pathos-stirring Victorian sculpture. Copies of the jewellery Schliemann unearthed and, famously, had his wife photographed wearing. Presumably, the Pushkin wouldn't lend the originals for fear that the Germans would find a way to keep them once they were in the European Union.

And even a few masterpieces. The aforementioned Rubens is fine, but Cranach’s “Judgement of Paris”, on loan from the Queen, may be the most significant work of art here.

The show ends with two interpretations of The Shield of Achilles. The first is a Regency re-imagining of what it might have looked like in the grandest of traditions, based on Homer’s description. It’s glistening silver gilt. Apollo and his four-horse chariot emerge in high relief from the centre. Detailed figures in lower relief process around the rim. It weighs nearly 40 pounds. Impractical for any hero. The contemporary interpretation is an equally dazzling though entirely different take in multi-coloured neon.

Given that this show was more about the art of storytelling than the artefacts of a place, I would have liked a bit of literary analysis on why these epics are so enduring. Surely it’s more than just the plot lines. Could we talk about Homer’s use of language? The connection to the human psyche? (I dimly remember these being major points when I studied it in high school.) But these are small things and no doubt addressed in some of the museum's related special events.

Overall, this is a great show for anyone with any interest in the tales of ancient Troy, and would be a gift from heaven for students encountering it in their curriculum at the moment. Sure, you can screen the recent BBC version or roll the Brad Pitt film (the latter makes an appearance here) but the figures on the artwork in the exhibition display more drama and human emotion than most of the acting in either of those productions. And it’s all a great deal more fun than the very worthy production of Euripides’ Trojan Women I endured at age 16, which almost put me off the whole saga for life. After the British Museum exhibition, a new translation of Homer is on my Christmas list. I think it’s time to re-read the original binge-worthy epic.