A narrative gazetteer of Troy

written by Greta Hawes

The ANU data collectors ticked off a massive achievement a few months ago: we finished all of Homer’s Iliad! Amongst the catalogues of killings and the cannon-fodder names, we also had to get to grips with how the landscape of Troy fitted together, at least in the story world.

Now both data collections teams - at ANU and UNH - are joining forces to work on another massive task: Pausanias’ Periegesis. To prepare for this, Scott integrated all of the mythical names in Pausanias with the existing dataset (and blogged his thoughts here and here on disambiguating the characters of Greek myth as he went). Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about how our work on MANTO has crystallized another set of big issues, to do with mythical space. A first foray — on the importance of placenames — appears here. This blog post captures our method of building up a digital model of a fictional world.

Maps of fictional worlds are of course common — almost every edition of Lord of the Rings has one. The visual immediacy of Homer’s Iliad has made mapping Troy similarly tempting. Jenny Strauss Clay’s Homer’s Trojan Theater is a fabulous resource which captures something of what goes on in the mind’s eye as the events of the Iliad play out.

Middle Earth, mapped

Our desire to map narrative with MANTO takes us down a somewhat different path.

Unlike Tolkien, we are working with a fictional landscape that is largely the same as the geography of the historical Mediterranean. Much of our data concerns explanations for placenames and landmarks existing in the (ancient authors’) present. Where the mythical world departs from our terrestrial sphere — in the Underworld, for example — the topography described is seldom detailed or consistent enough to bear conventional mapping. On the other hand, the scale of MANTO means that we’re mainly interested in how mythic figures migrate between cities and regions, and not the details of their movements within these places, as the Trojan Theater project can show.

In MANTO, places and landmarks do not need to have locational attributes, but they always have relational ones. They are, first and foremost, nodes in a network. As we work, we tend to stay at the level of cities, which are of course well catered for in Pleiades. But of course some cities are so full of mythical detail that it makes sense to treat them with more granularity, and so in a number of places we have begun to create gazetteers.

So far, our most detailed gazetteer is of Troy as a narrative space. As you can see from the diagram below of its constituent parts, we are primarily interested in locating entities in relation to one another, rather than according to the absolute values of latitudinal and longitudinal data.

Representation of MANTO’s gazetteer of fictional Troy. Graphic: G. Hawes

So, inside the place ‘Troy’ (which has locational attributes via its Pleiades URN) are three further places, ‘the Beach’, ‘the Plain’ and ‘the Citadel’. Within each of these, there are landmarks (shown in orange). Of course, at a later point, we will no doubt capture assertions that a certain place in the spatium mythicum should be identified with a specific spot in the Troad, but for now, their locations are entirely relational: each place or landmark is specified to be ‘in’ another to create this nested effect.

Most importantly, these entities become nodes in our ever-expanding and ever-thickening network.

So, to take the example of ‘the Walls of Troy’, we start to see a kind of biography emerge. Our data now includes the following ties:

APOLLO, POSEIDON builds THE WALLS OF TROY for LAOMEDON

HELEN quarrels with APHRODITE on THE WALLS OF TROY concerning ALEXANDER

PATROCLES attempts to conquer THE WALLS OF TROY against APOLLO

HECTOR flees from ACHILLES near THE WALLS OF TROY with the aid of APOLLO

DIOMEDES fortifies DAUNIA using THE WALLS OF TROY

Each of these datapoints comes from a passage of text: the first is found somewhere in almost all of the texts we have completed so far; the next three are Iliadic. And the final one comes from Lycophron, Alexandra 592-632. From that strange text we get the story of how the Greek hero Diomedes used rubble from Troy’s walls as ballast, and offloaded it in Italy where it was then used as fortifications once more. These are the kinds of connections that MANTO is designed to reveal: Greek myth is not merely a world of travelling heroes, it is also a world of travelling places, however odd that might sound.