When I first watched "In Search of the Trojan War" I was a history graduate student, fascinated by stories of the past.
Forty years on I'm retired from University work but I watched my home-videotaped version, and now my dvds, quite often. It's a great story (though not my field) and the youthful Michael Woods does a good job of tracing down the history and archeology of the presumed site of Troy.
But neither history nor archeology has stood still and unless one reads specialized periodicals one won't know all the changes in thinking. This show was once shiny and new. Now it's decades old. It's still a great show, but a bit of an artifact.
First, Woods needs to correct a few of his own misleading mistakes. For instance, about the old Trojan treasure, he speculates that they were in the hands of a collector in the west. During the Cold War artists, intellectuals and journalists tended to blame the west for everything and sanctified the Soviet Union. In the brief thaw after the collapse of the Soviet Union the treasures were found to have been in Soviet hands since World War Two.
Also, while Woods does an excellent job much of the time, and makes it clear that in the archeological record "love leaves no trace," his search for a Helen was always doomed.
Propelling ourselves forward three thousand years from our present, let's pretend the only book surviving from our time is GONE WITH THE WIND, which I find more boring than Homer. Future peoples might wonder if there were a United States as such, if we had a Civil War, and if Scarlet O'Hara was real. Woods might have brought in a novelist to address that angle. The Trojan War and Helen are not necessarily dependent on each other. Homer, writing long after the War, was not an historian but what today we'd call an historical novelist.
Still, Woods makes the much-misunderstood and -represented discipline of history to life. That's great, especially for ancient history. Everyone should watch this show, not just for an insight into the ancient world but also for the exciting (if misguided) birth of archeology. Woods does a superb job of following those disparate but parallel trails simultaneously in a way non-professionals can comprehend.
