The Trojan War

Abstract

Mr Finley's article is an elaborated version of a talk first broadcast in October 1963. It was offered for publication with the intention of stimulating discussion of a problem which has been exercising archaeologists and historians. For this reason its author does not here answer the provisional criticisms and comments offered by Professor Caskey, Mr Kirk and Professor Page which are also printed below. It is hoped that this presentation will help to define for readers the very varied issues which attend the problem of the date and nature of the Trojan War.

Finding Cina

“…As Finlay (1964) argues for the Iliad, in the absence of supporting historical or archaeological documentation, it is impossible to separate these elements.…”

Source Criticism and the History of Brazilian Foreign Policy

“…Finley, among Greek and Roman historians, had a particularly strict view on the value of oral tradition, derived from his studies of the Homeric world (Palmeira 2007: 132-140), which led him to question, in the end, the very occurrence of the Trojan War. The main lesson here is the inverse relationship between the acuity of the information and the time elapsed or number of generations transmitting the tradition (Finley, Caskey, Kirk and Page 1964;Finley 1974). In order to bring this assertion closer to the history of Brazilian foreign policy, some points are useful: all memory (individual or collective) acts selectively, whether deliberately or not; memory which is transmitted orally often aims not to record data for practical purposes, but rather -which is very important for diplomacy -to increase the prestige or justify the existence of an institution or practice; the resulting oral tradition appears to be presented at random, and often, when it comes to specific events, modify, confuse, transplant and make up details (Finley 1965: 295-300).…”

Power, state and society among the pre-islamic Bugis

“…Such an approach 46 A graphic illustration of this mobility is given by the combined genealogy of the rulers of Sidénréng, Rappang, Suppaq and Sawitto (Mukhlis 1985:119). 47 Finlay (1964) describes the formidable problems in attempting to use the Iliad's account of the Trojan War to account for the destruction of Troy Vila. If we accept Wood's identification of Troy VI as the Troy of the Uiad, however, certain of the details of the poem match convincingly with the archaeological evidence (Wood 1985).…”