Troy: Myth and Reality – First look at the British Museum's dazzling new exhibition

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Melanie McDonagh19 November 2019

The first object you encounter as you enter this exhibition at the British Museum — past the room-high letters spelling out TROY — pretty well sums up what’s to follow.

It’s a fine Attic jar from 530BC showing Achilles plunging his spear into the queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea, her skin snow white against his black armour. But we can see their eyes meet, and it’s at this unfortunate moment, when he’s dealt the death blow, that Achilles falls in love with her. That’s Troy for you: love and death and war and tragedy. It’s got it all, the gamut of human experience, mostly bad.

This wonderful exhibition is divided into three parts. The first deals with Troy as seen in the ancient world, from a funny drinking cup, 740 BC, to a stunning Roman table from 140AD with scenes from the Odyssey which could be a product of the Italian Renaissance.

It would be easy to be overwhelmed by a succession of dazzling artefacts about the most popular subject in the ancient world but the triumph here is to make it all coherent.

It’s divided by themes, beginning with Discord (shown here as a malign figure on a bowl) and going on through war, war crimes, the fall of Troy and Odysseus’s return home.

But first the aural backdrop, a recitation of the Iliad, reminds us that this was for centuries a story told, and we see a terrific image of one such storyteller with an antique speech bubble showing words pouring out of him.

Homer was also part of the school curriculum, and there’s a wooden tablet showing a schoolboy’s copy of lines from the Iliad, and a scrap of papyrus where another has written a line of the Aeneid out seven times where the centuries fall away and we see ourselves.

Trouble in Troy: A pot from c2550BC

What the story doesn’t do is glorify war. From the beginning, when a lovely fresco from Pompeii shows Helen hesitant as she follows Paris, to the water jar where Ajax seizes Cassandra by the hair as she clutches a statue of Athena for help, image after image shows the horror of war.

There are repeated depictions of poor Priam begging Achilles to have the body of his son Hector for burial — in one Roman silver cup he kisses his hand — and later we see Achilles’ son beating Priam to death with the body of his little grandson. All played out in artefacts of pure beauty. The Roman silver cup shown here is from the tomb of a Danish warlord: how, you wonder, did it get there?

But there’s humour too: there are funny little images of Odysseus scampering over wine jars in the sea which are pure cartoon: 400 BC. The ordering of the exhibition is stunning too. Images from the cups and bowls are projected in haunting images on the walls and the centrepiece of the fall of Troy is shown inside what looks likes the wooden ribs of a ship. It’s only later you see it’s a horse.

The second part shows the discovery of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann, with the help of a Briton, Frank Calvert. The objects are presented in their historic layers within a projection of the actual looming terrain in which he worked.

It’s a stunningly effective device, which makes clear that poor Schliemann was just too keen; he dug down to Bronze Age remains. It was only in the 1890s he realised it was the upper layers around 1300BC that showed contact between Troy and Greece.

The third part is to do with the effect of the story of Troy on the modern world. It’s from this we get the fabulous statue that advertises the exhibition, Filippo Albacini’s Wounded Achilles, (1825). This bit would actually merit an exhibition in its own right and the curators heroically bring the whole thing bang up to date with a video of Syrian refugees as a chorus of Trojan women. But it says everything about the quality of the stellar works from antiquity that everything that follows seems anti-climactic.

Troy: Myth and Reality is at the British Museum, WC1 (britishmuseum.org) Thur-March 8

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