Troy: Myth, City, Icon
FRANK L. HOLT
Naoíse Mac Sweeney
2018, Bloomsbury Academic, 978-1-47252-937-4, £19.99 pb.
No one, not even Homer, has ever tried to tell the whole story of Troy, but this slim volume comes incredibly close. The author guides us briskly through 5,000 years of fact, fiction and folklore. We walk the ruins of the city at the southeastern end of the Dardanelles in today’s Turkey in each of its physical iterations; we witness layer by layer the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann and others; we wade into the controversies surrounding those discoveries and weigh the theories spun from them; we wind up in the Troy of today with a broad understanding of how and why ancient lives and literatures affect us still. Travelers to the site of Troy need this book in their backpacks. For everyone else staying at home, reading this volume is the next best thing to being there.
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