АРИСТЕЙ XI (2015) С. 17–27 Margalit Finkelberg MEMORY OR FORGETFULNESS? <...> THE TROJAN WAR BETWEEN MYTH AND HISTORY No one today would deny that at any given moment historical myth functions as a cultural artefact representative of the period in which it circulates rather than the one which it purports to describe. <...> According to the anthropologist Jack Goody, the characteristic feature of such societies is the so-called homeostatic transformation, that is, a spontaneous process of adjusting the tradition to the society’s contemporary circumstances1 . <...> As another anthropologist, Jan Vansina, put it: ‘Selectivity implies discarding certain information one has about the past and from that pool of information keeping only what is still significant in the present. <...> Proceeding from the ancient Greek tradition of the Trojan War, I will address the following two questions: What is the historical value of the residues from the past and can such residues be discerned at all? <...> And is the spontaneous process of homeostatic transformation the only factor to be considered? 1 See e.g. Goody 2000: 42–46. <...> Homer never pretends to speak from within the period he describes: what he claims is that, thanks to his contact with the Muses, he faithfully preserves the memory of the past. <...> The Greeks are designated by their ancient name ‘Achaeans’ rather than ‘Hellenes’, as in historical times. <...> Their cities are ruled by kings and do not resemble at all the city-states of historical Greece. <...> Chariots, which played no role in historical Greek warfare, are actively involved in the military campaign. <...> There is no mention of the Dorian tribes that appeared in Greece at the very end of the Bronze Age nor of the Greek colonization of Asia Minor which started after the collapse of Mycenaean Greece, and so on. <...> Above all, the fact that the metalware is consistently represented as made of bronze points out unequivocally that Greek epic tradition purposely tried to reproduce a distant historical period, the one in which the leading metal had been bronze rather than iron. <...> From time to time, however, flashes of a different reality make their way through the magnificent heroic wrapping of the epics. <...> The chariots are not really functional, and rather often than not Homer’s battle scenes are <...>