From Myth to History
\V HEREVER you stand in history the past is immeasurable and poetic. It cannot be reduced to the terms of the present, for with both the poet and the historian the past is fed into the present through an interpreting and colouring mind. But with Schliemann’s discovery of Troy I like to think that poetry is more splendidly authenticated. Troy once a myth is now his-
tory. That city, the seventh Troy, according to Denys Page (over 3YC), was destroyed by fire. Then the site was for the first time in 2000 years abandoned by civilised men-2000 years, a mere pocket tucked away in time’s coat, an epoch longer than ours about which we have a haystack full of facts. Of this Troy we know little; and that we owe not to a Thucydides but to a Homer, more shadowy than the walls he wrote of. Yet upon a seemingly fragile thread he strung the facts of time to suit his tale. And this tale waited until surely the most poetic of all archaeologists, nursing a childhood vision, established the grand harmony between the city as it was and as it existed in Homer's
mind.
Westcliff
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540903.2.19.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 789, 3 September 1954, Page 10
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200From Myth to History New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 789, 3 September 1954, Page 10
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