The Trojan War Museum

Illustration: Somnath Bhatt.

The first Trojan War Museum was not much more than a field of remains. Dog-chewed, sun-bleached, and wind-blown bones, some buried, many burnt—but the Trojans prayed there, mourned their dead, told tales of their heroes, asked penance for their mistakes, pondered their ill fortune, poured their libations, killed their bulls, etceteraetceteraetcetera. There were not a lot of Trojans left; but, all the same, they hoped for a better future, and they believed in the gods, so they made sacrifices. Children, cattle, women, you name it.

Enter Athena. Motherless daughter, virgin version, murderer of Hector and Ajax and Arachne, at least a little bit.

The dead added to the dead, she said. What do they expect us to do?

Whatever the Trojans may have expected or hoped for, the gods did nothing.

The first Trojan War Museum was abandoned after a flood, a fire, an earthquake, not necessarily in that order.

The dark came swirling down. The city disappeared. Again.

Sing to me now, you Muses, of armies bursting forth like flowers in a blaze of bronze.

Soldier: I begged for sleep, and if not sleep, death. I was willing to settle for death. Then again, I’ve never felt more loved. 

He looked at his father, a veteran; his grandfather, a veteran; his uncle, a veteran; his sister, a veteran; and he saw his future foretold, no different than birds and snakes foretelling nine more years of war.

Think: museums turn war to poetry. So to poets. So to war.

You know, Athena forgot Odysseus was out there.

Oh Muses.

The second Trojan War Museum was built in approximately 951 BC, upon the site of the first Trojan War Museum, after Apollo—boy-man beauty, sun-god, far-darter, Daphne-destroyer-and-lover-too—looked upon the empty plain dotted with the same old bones—more bleached, more burnt, more buried, more chewed—and declared it a ruin of a ruin and a dishonor.

They are forgetting, he told Zeus. We must make them remember.

Zeus—master of the house, lord of the lightning.

You’re not wrong, Zeus said.

A museum run by gods is unusual, of course.

Ares argued for an authentic experience and so there was a room where one in ten visitors was killed and another in which vultures and maggots devoured the flesh of the rotting dead while dogs licked up their blood then turned upon each other.

The second Trojan War Museum did not last long.

The dark came swirling down. Again.