Artemis of Troy

Extract

Any attentive reader of the Iliad and the Odyssey will have been struck by some very odd features of Homer's religion—the sudden shift from reverence to frivolity, for example. What I want to glance at in this article is something rather different. The gods and goddesses worshipped by the Trojans are called by Greek names. Some deities are definitely partisan—Hera and Poseidon, for example, for the Greeks; Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Ares for the Trojans—while Zeus is strictly impartial. But, if the Trojans were, as we are always told, of a race distinct from the Greeks, Trojan gods will have been translated out of a native idiom into a Greek. Whenever you translate, mistakes in rendering are possible; I want to suggest one particular mistranslation here.