Just from the fact that this is a Very Short Introduction, you have a pretty good idea what it's like: An easy-to-read overview in a very short compass.

The difficulty, when one has a thin book and a huge topic, is to decide what to include and what to leave out. Should you talk about the Iliad or the archaeology? Author Cline does a bit of both, summarizing Homer and then getting on to our reconstructions of the Late Bronze Age. We hear about Schliemann, who discovered that there were bronze age ruins on the site of Hisarlik; we take a brief trip to Mycenaean Greece; we look at the Hittites, we learn about the most recent explorations. All these glances are rather brief (the Hittites probably get the most attention and the Mycenaeans the least), but they at least bring us more up to date than, say, Michael Wood's In Search of the Trojan War, and with fewer digressions.

The question of the amount of history in Homer is, correctly, left undetermined; we just don't know enough. Cline allows that Homer might have been building on history, and gives us a few possible pegs to work from, without committing to anything. On the whole, I think the book does a good job on those issues. It would be nice if it could say more, but the main body of the book is only 110 pages, so something has to give.

One thing that is almost entirely omitted is accounts of the later writings about Troy. The Aeneid, Dares and Dictes, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida are merely alluded to. They're all non-historical, of course, even you think Homer is historical, but it's part of the Troy myth and of our culture. Given that there are Very Short Introductions that are half again as long as this one, there probably could have been a few pages devoted to the "afterlife." And more maps and diagrams would really have helped (e.g. some drawings of what was found at Hisarlik). There are lots of other nitpicks one can make. But if you accept 110 small-format pages as the limit on what can be told, I think this is close to the ideal 110 pages. ( )

"The Trojan Horse is mentioned only once in the Odyssey, within Book IV" (9).

"This attribution [of the Trojan Horse idea to Epeius] is repeated in the Odyssey (VIII.492-94; see also XI.523-35)" (21).

So yeah, this is a sloppily argued, repetitive, contradictory book, that builds sweeping claims for the historicity of Homer on scant evidence and speculative leaps (see for example the discussion of Helen on pp. 107-108 or the). A waste of my time. ( )