ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine not just the classical myth of the fall of Troy but the significance of Troy for contemporary and twentieth-century social theory. The protean and multipliable story of the Trojan War would inform the classical world and subsequent social formations and persist as a compelling metaphor into our own period. But what might these metaphors mean? They hint at a peculiar type of human identity and culture that emerges in the interregnum between the ‘actual’ war and its representation in the Iliad some centuries later. This might be because the Iliad displays a shift in the nature of the human mind or because it acts as the foundational myth of European cultures. It is important to address what the war and the fall of Troy can tell us about the nature of human societies and social thought and expression. Its emanation in material culture and the continued persistence of its motifs (like the wooden horse, like the wrath of Achilles and the wiliness of Odysseus, like the story of Helen and her captivity and fate, like the monstrous Atreides – the brothers Menelaus and Agamemnon) can reveal processes of possession and dispossession and of aesthetic objects and material culture which are utterly decisive for the way we shape our notions of humanness.
