Nice, thought Marcia. Perhaps a thousand men walked slowly up the ramp toward the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Great God of Rome, rearing its impressive bulk in highest place of all on the more southerly of the two hills constituting the Capitol. The Greeks built their temples on the ground, but the Romans built theirs on lofty platforms with many steps, and the steps which led up to Jupiter Optimus Maximus were indeed many. Nice, thought Marcia again as the sacrificial animals and their escort joined the procession, and all went on together until at last they clustered as best they could in the restricted space before the great temple on high. Somewhere among them were her husband and her two sons, a part of the governing class of this mightiest of all cities of the world.

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Author’s Afterword

The sources for the tale of Troy are many. Homer’s Iliad is but one of them; it narrates the events of some fifty-odd days only out of a war which lasted, all the sources agree, for ten years. The other epic poem attributed to Homer, the Odyssey, also provides much information about the war and those who fought in it. The other sources are often fragmentary, and include Euripedes, Pindar, Hyginus, Hesiod, Virgil, Apollodorus of Athens, Tzetzes, Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Sophocles, Herodotus, and more.

The date of the relevant sack of Troy (there were several) is generally thought to have been around the year 1184 BC, a time of great upheaval around the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea due to natural disasters like earthquakes and to the migration of new peoples both into the area and from one part of it to another. Tribes were pushing south from the Danube basin into Macedonia and Thrace, and Greek peoples were colonising the coasts of modern Turkey along the Aegean and the Black Seas. These convulsive movements were the successors of earlier migrations and the precursors of others, and were to persist until relatively recent times. They gave rise to much of the richest traditions inherent in the history of Europe, Asia Minor and the Mediterranean basin.

Archaeological evidence commenced with the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann at Hissarlik in Turkey, and Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos in Crete. There seems to be little doubt that a war was fought between the Achaean Greeks and the inhabitants of Troy (also called Ilium). It was almost certainly waged for control of the Dardanelles, that vital strait connecting the Black (Euxine) Sea with the Mediterranean (Aegaean) Sea, for with control of the Dardanelles (the Hellespont) came a monopoly of trade between the two bodies of water. Some of life’s necessities were hard to come by, particularly tin, without which copper could not be made into bronze.

But while trade, economics and the need to survive were probably the roots of the war, no one can dispense with the more legendary trappings, from Helen to the Wooden Horse.

For the most part, the characters bear a Greek form of name. Some, like Helen and Priam, have passed so firmly into English-speaking cultures that I have preferred to give them their English names. A few characters are better known today by the Latin form of their names, as Hercules (Herakles), Venus (Aphrodite), Jupiter (Zeus), Aeneas (Aineas), Patroclus (Patrokles), Ulysses (Odysseus), Hecuba (Hekabe), Vulcan (Hephaistos), and Mars (Ares).

Despite the existence of clay tablets (Linear A, Linear B, etc) found at Pylos and other Mycenaen sites, the Aegaean peoples of the later Bronze Age were not literate in our meaning of that word. The ability to write, as distinct from Odysseus’s contemptuous references to ‘grocery lists’ (the Linear tablets – which were a form of Greek), did not appear much before the seventh century BC.

Coins also belong to the seventh century BC, so money per se did not exist, though gold, silver and bronze were used as tools of barter.

To indicate measurement, I chose terms like ‘talent’, ‘league’, ‘pace’, ‘cubit’, ‘finger’ and ‘dipper’. Though in much later ages a league consisted of three miles, for the purposes of this book it may be assumed as one mile (1.6 kilometres). The pace was a double step measuring five feet (1.6 metres). There are arguments as to whether the cubit extended from the elbow to the wrist, or to the knuckles of the clenched fist, or to the fingertips. For the purposes of this book, assume that a cubit measured fifteen inches (375mm). Smaller lengths were estimated by the breadth of the middle finger (something under one inch, about 20mm). A talent was the load one man could carry on his back: about fifty-six modern pounds (25 kilograms). Grain was a liquid measure: assume that the vessel used to dip into it contained about four American pints (2 litres). Years were probably determined by the cycles of the seasons, whereas the month was measured by the moon, perhaps from new moon to new moon. Hours, minutes and seconds were unknown.

About this Book

It was a clash of arms that would echo through the millennia: a hard-fought conflict born of love, pride, greed and revenge; a decade-long siege of the ancient world’s greatest city from which nobody would escape unscathed.

As urgent and passionate as if told for the first time, international besteller Colleen McCullough breathes life into legend, swinging our sympathies from Greece to Troy and back again as they move inexorably towards a fate not even the gods themselves can avert. Here are Greek princess Helen, sensuous and self-indulgent, who deserts a dull husband for the sake of the equally self-indulgent Trojan prince Paris; the haunted warrior Achilles; the heroically noble Hektor; the subtle and brilliant Odysseus; Priam, King of Troy, doomed to make the wrong decisions for the right reasons; and Agamemnon, King of Kings, who consents to the unspeakable to launch his thousand ships, incurring the terrifying wrath of his wife, Klytemnestra.

Reviews

‘A powerful story told with the verve of a novelist and the commitment of a historian’

Sunday Times

‘Incomparable… Engrossing… Breathtakingly detailed… A Triumph’

Chicago Tribune

‘A truly astonishing work’

Time

Also by Colleen McCullough

THE MASTERS OF ROME SERIES

110 BC:

The world cowers before its legions, but the fate of Rome hangs in the balance.

From the marbled columns of the Senate to the squalid slums of the Subura, the city is about to be plunged into a conflict that will set rich against poor, Roman against Italian, father against son, a conflict destined to destroy the Republic but leave, in its stead, an Empire.

Unbearable cruelty, martial brilliance, murderous ambition, heroic destiny: this is the stuff of legend. Colleen McCullough’s epic Masters of Rome captures the soul of Rome in a way no other writer has ever managed.

I. The First Man in Rome

Rome, 110 BC

The world cowers before its legions, but Rome is about to be engulfed by a vicious power struggle that will threaten its very existence. At its heart are two exceptional men: Gaius Marius, prosperous but lowborn, a proud and disciplined soldier emboldened by his shrewdness and self-made wealth; and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a handsome young aristocrat corrupted by poverty and vice.

Both are men of extraordinary vision, extreme cunning and ruthless ambition, but both are outsiders, cursed by the insurmountable opposition of powerful and vindictive foes.