Among the stories that Western civilization has returned to again and again for nearly three thousand years, few are more resonant or more contested than the legend of the Trojan War. Rooted in the world of Mycenaean Greece and set somewhere around the thirteenth or early twelfth century BC, the tale of a ten-year siege launched across the Aegean Sea over the abduction of a queen has generated literature, philosophy, art, and debate from ancient Athens to the modern world. At its heart is a question that historians and archaeologists have never fully resolved: did it happen?
The story as the ancient Greeks knew it begins with an act of divine interference. The goddess of discord, slighted at a wedding, threw a golden apple inscribed "for the fairest" among the guests. Three goddesses — Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite — each claimed it, and the god Zeus appointed a mortal man, Paris of Troy, to judge between them. Each goddess offered Paris a bribe; Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose Aphrodite's gift and, traveling to Sparta as a guest, took Helen, wife of King Menelaus, back to Troy — whether by seduction or abduction, ancient sources disagreed.
Menelaus called upon his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the most powerful ruler in Greece, to help recover his wife. Agamemnon assembled a great coalition of Greek forces — the Achaeans, as Homer calls them — and launched a fleet across the Aegean to Troy. What followed was a siege of ten years, during which neither side could deliver a decisive blow. The Greeks could not breach Troy's formidable walls; the Trojans could not drive the Greek army back to the sea.
The primary literary source for the war is Homer's Iliad, composed sometime between the ninth and sixth centuries BC and generally believed to be based on earlier oral traditions stretching back centuries. The Iliad does not tell the entire story of the war; instead, it focuses with intense dramatic concentration on a brief period — just four days and two nights — in the tenth year of the siege, centering on the quarrel between the Greek champion Achilles and Agamemnon, and on the grief and fury that followed the death of Achilles' companion Patroclus at the hands of the Trojan hero Hector. Other parts of the story were told in additional epic poems — the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the Little Iliad, the Iliou Persis, and others — that have survived only in fragments and summaries. Homer's Odyssey recounts the troubled homeward journey of the Greek hero Odysseus following the fall of Troy and provides additional glimpses of events during the war itself.
The war's resolution came through cunning rather than force. Unable to take the city by direct assault, the Greeks devised the stratagem of the Trojan Horse: a massive wooden horse left as a supposed offering to the gods, secretly filled with Greek warriors. The Trojans, against the warnings of the prophetess Cassandra, dragged the horse inside their walls. Under cover of night the Greeks emerged, opened the city gates for their waiting comrades, and sacked Troy. The city burned, its people were killed or enslaved, and the long war was over.
For much of the nineteenth century, both the war and the city of Troy were widely dismissed by scholars as pure legend. That consensus shifted dramatically in 1868, when the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann met Frank Calvert, a British diplomat who was convinced that the ancient city of Troy lay beneath a mound called Hisarlık on the northwest coast of what is now Turkey, near the Dardanelles strait. Schliemann conducted excavations at Hisarlık and found layers of successive ancient settlements, one of which — Troy VII — shows evidence of a catastrophic burning that archaeologists date to around the twelfth century BC, roughly corresponding to the period given by the ancient scholar Eratosthenes of 1194 to 1184 BC.
Most contemporary scholars accept that there is probably some historical core to the Trojan War traditions, though the gap between the archaeological record and Homer's magnificent narrative is enormous. The Homer of the Iliad names hundreds of heroes with elaborate genealogies and describes warfare in vivid and specific detail; the burned city at Hisarlık was a modest settlement by the standards of the Bronze Age world. Many scholars believe the Homeric epics represent a fusion of memories from multiple sieges and expeditions by Mycenaean Greek forces during the Late Bronze Age, worked and reworked through centuries of oral transmission before being written down.
What is not in doubt is the war's cultural afterlife. Greek playwrights — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — drew endlessly on the story's characters and moral dilemmas. Roman poets, most notably Virgil in the Aeneid and Ovid in various works, retold it from new angles. Artists decorated pottery, friezes, and temples with scenes from the war for centuries. The Trojan War gave Western literature some of its most durable archetypes: the loyal warrior, the noble enemy, the faithless beauty, the cunning strategist, the angry hero who must learn that pride destroys. Whether or not a Greek fleet ever actually beached on the shores of Asia Minor, the war Homer imagined has proven far more lasting than most conflicts that undeniably occurred.
