David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘He said that?’ Dillen murmured, his eyes twinkling.

‘Go on,’ Jeremy said.

Dillen sucked for a moment, then took out the pipe and gave them a penetrating look. ‘All right. Just between us. There is one object, an artefact that’s beguiled me since I first read Homer as a schoolboy. It was the most sacred object of ancient Troy, held in a temple to the god Pallas, who the Greeks identified with their goddess Athene. Homer called it the palladion.’

‘The palladion!’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘I remember that. Didn’t Odysseus and Diomedes steal it, after they snuck into the city through an underground passageway and Helen told them where to find it?’

Dillen nodded. ‘That’s the story. As long as the palladion remained within the walls, Troy wouldn’t fall. After stealing it, they took the wooden horse filled with warriors into Troy, and the rest is history.’

‘Or myth,’ Rebecca said.

‘So what happened to the palladion?’ Jeremy asked.

‘A thousand years after the fall of Troy, the Roman poet Virgil imagined the Trojan prince Aeneas bringing the palladion to Rome. For the Romans, that became a central part of their foundation myth. For them the palladion was a small wooden statue of Pallas, and was hidden away somewhere in Rome. Then, in the late Roman period, rumour was that it was secretly taken to the new capital city, Constantinople, along with so many of the old treasures of Rome, and buried under the column of Constantine in the forum.’

‘So isn’t that where we should be looking for it?’ Jeremy said.

‘A wooden statue doesn’t sound, um, very exciting,’ Rebecca said. ‘I mean, you know, treasure-wise.’

‘Do you believe any of this?’ Jeremy asked.

Dillen clasped his pipe bowl in one hand, and leaned forward. ‘Well, we do know that statues of gods in the Aegean Bronze Age could be wooden, quite crude. People still venerated inanimate objects, and had only just begun to anthropomorphize their gods. The Romans are unlikely to have known that. If they were making up the story of the palladion, they’re far more likely to have imagined an impressive statue of stone, of marble. That would have been an instant giveaway. So I can believe the story.’

‘But?’ Jeremy said.

‘ But,’ Dillen replied. ‘Even if there was a wooden statue, I don’t believe that it was the palladion. Rebecca’s right. A wooden statue’s hardly treasure. Odysseus and Diomedes may have snatched a statue from the temple, but the true palladion is most likely to have been concealed by the Trojans. And there’s a tantalizing snippet of evidence. One of those epic fragments says the palladion had “fallen from heaven”, a gift to Dardanos, founder of Troy. That could be metaphorical, meaning an extraordinary treasure, a gift of the gods. Or it could be literal.’

‘I’ve got it.’ Rebecca clapped her hands. ‘ Fallen from heave n. A meteorite.’

Dillen looked at her. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time a meteorite has been venerated.’

‘So this is what you think we might find here?’ Rebecca said quietly. ‘That’s so cool.’

‘Just guesswork. But the idea that the most sacred object from ancient Troy, the richest city in the Bronze Age world, should have been a little wooden statue doesn’t ring true. If a thousand years later the Romans had the true palladion, it would have been an extraordinary object, something people came to gawp at, an object that would resonate through history, like the golden menorah they took from the Jewish temple.’

‘So Odysseus and Diomedes made their way into Troy by a secret passage,’ Jeremy mused. ‘Maybe the palladion’s what Maurice is really after, at the end of the tunnel he’s found.’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘He wants to find a hieroglyphic inscription. Not Agamemnon was here, but Rameses was here. He says he wants to prove that Egypt truly was the superpower of the ancient world. He says that’s the only reason he ever leaves Egypt to come on these digs with Dad.’

Dillen cast a glance at Jeremy, and they both grinned. ‘Your dad and Maurice go back a long way,’ Dillen said. ‘And don’t discount the lure of treasure. I can remember interviewing Maurice when he was applying for a place at the university. He’d brought along the catalogue from the Tutankhamun exhibition, the one that travelled the world in the 1970s. It had the famous golden mask of King Tut on the cover, and Maurice was almost weeping with excitement when he showed it to me. I knew then I had to offer him a place.’

‘Dad says every archaeologist worthy of the name secretly wants to find treasure,’ Rebecca said. ‘He told me they may spend their careers specializing in something as dry as bones, but unless they have that fire within them, they’ll never have the vision, the passion, to take their exploration that one step further, to make the big leap of imagination.’

‘Mmm.’ Dillen smiled. ‘Where have I heard that before? I seem to remember telling that to Jack and Maurice in their first tutorial with me. And who was it who told it to me? Sir Leonard Woolley, or was it Sir Mortimer Wheeler? And they’d been told it by Sir Arthur Evans. And he’d been told it by Heinrich Schliemann. It’s the thread that ties all the great archaeologists together. Not science, not techniques, but the passion, the drive. The yearning for discovery.’

‘And the willingness to take risks,’ Rebecca said.

Jeremy gestured at the jumble of overgrown ruins behind them. ‘The palladion. It could have been anywhere here?’

Dillen nodded. ‘The temple to Pallas would have been close to where we are now, though I fear it may have been where Schliemann put in his great trench. But temples often had repositories, underground strongrooms. That’s where something as sacred as the palladion might have been kept.’

‘Maybe the palladion is what Agamemnon was really after when he came here,’ Rebecca said. ‘Maybe that’s what the Trojan War was actually about. Not about women, about Helen of Troy, but about treasure.’

‘Maybe that’s what Schliemann was after too,’ Jeremy added. ‘And maybe he didn’t find it here, so he went in search of it at Mycenae, where Agamemnon might have taken it after looting and burning Troy.’

‘There’s nothing about the palladion in Schliemann’s notes,’ Dillen said. ‘Jack asked me to look at them before coming out here. But Schliemann was a man of powerful imagination, and capable of great secrecy when his ego would allow it. And he truly believed in the myths. Let’s imagine the palladion was what he was really after. He may never have confided his thoughts to paper. He may only have told his wife, Sophia, and maybe a few close friends. Schliemann was perfectly prepared to gamble his reputation with big announcements, but he was also shrewd, and this would have been an extraordinary treasure.’

An excited shout came up from below, a man’s voice with a German accent. ‘James. Rebecca. Jeremy. Come on down. James, bring your camera gear. We’ve found something wonderful.’

‘They’re nowhere near the end of the tunnel yet,’ Rebecca said. ‘I was just there. They were only finding rubble. What on earth could it be?’

‘Maybe Maurice has got his Egyptian inscription,’ Jeremy said, getting up quickly. ‘And I haven’t even seen this tunnel yet.’ He paused, looking at the wall painting of the bard with the musical instrument, and then at Dillen’s lyre in the corner of the trench. ‘You really did get your lyre right, you know. Exactly right. It’s uncanny. What you were saying earlier, about the bardic tradition? You said you felt as if you’d heard music up here. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so flippant about it. Maybe there really is a bit of Homer in you.’