As I sheltered from the pale winter sun in the shade of Mycenae’s Lion Gate, I had never felt closer to Homer’s Iliad – and the Greek heroes of the Trojan War.
This was where Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, headed off to Troy, on Turkey’s west coast, to bring back Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world – and the wife of Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus.
In my hand was the new translation of the Iliad by Emily Wilson, a British professor at Princeton and the first woman to translate the Odyssey, which dates from roughly 750 BC, into English. Guided by her lovely work – true to Homer’s original Greek but not strangled in olden-days English – I set out to explore Homer’s Greece.
And in the Peloponnese, a great deal of it remains – not least the creamy stone palace of Mycenae. The city was certainly standing in 1200 BC, when the Trojan War is thought to have taken place, and Agamemnon’s citadel still fits Homer’s description as one “rich in gold”. While Zeus, king of the gods, adored Troy, his wife, Hera, said in the Iliad: “I love three cities most of all by far – Mycenae with its spacious streets, and Sparta, and Argos.”
I walked through the Lion Gate, built in around 1250 BC – with its two lionesses nestling up against a Doric column, the oldest coat of arms in the world – and strolled along Mycenae’s spacious streets.
Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/greece/on-the-trail-homers-heroes-greece-sparta-mycenae/
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Publish date : 2024-01-14 03:00:00
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