Cruisin? Together

We began, of course, in Troy?the city where The Iliad ends, and where Odysseus? homeward-bound adventures begin. Troy is not the name that the Greeks gave to the city where the greatest war of myth was fought; they called it Ilion, a word ultimately derived from the ancient Hittite name Wilusa. (Iliad just means ?a song about Ilion.?) Homer calls the city ?windy,? and it is windy still. On the day we visited, there was, despite the summer heat, a faint, steady breeze, coming from somewhere you couldn?t quite identify, just enough to persuade the spiky acanthus plants to wave their hostile leaves in your direction or the thronging wildflowers to nod their heavy heads. It?s a large, meandering site, and most of what there is to look at?once you get past the pier, which has inherited the giant Trojan horse constructed for the movie Troy?is walls: The remains of what were, in fact, nine successive settlements on the site, a seemingly endless series of massive accumulations of stone, from whose crevices little yellow flowers poke out. Brian Rose, the improbably boyish University of Pennsylvania archaeologist who was one of the cruise leaders and who?s been working at the site since 1988, led us around. He explained to the rapt gaggle of shipmates how the dogleg layout of the walls may have been meant to foil invaders. It seemed pretty good at holding tourists back, too: Troy never feels as crowded as, say, Pompeii, which we later visited.

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