Troy’s war sits between myth, Homer, and hillside ruins
Greek myth sets the Trojan War around the 13th or early 12th century BC, when Achaeans besieged Troy after Paris took Helen from Menelaus of Sparta. Ancients treated it as history; by the mid-1800s many scholars called city and war fiction—until digging resumed at Hisarlik.
Greek myth sets the Trojan War in the thirteenth or early twelfth century BC. Eris, goddess of discord, was left off the guest list for the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and tossed in a golden apple marked for the fairest. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each claimed it, and Paris, a Trojan prince raised as a shepherd on Mount Ida, judged between their bribes of power, wisdom and battle skill, or love. He chose Aphrodite, who delivered Helen of Sparta, and her husband Menelaus called on the Greek kings who, as her former suitors, had sworn to defend that marriage.
Agamemnon of Mycenae led a ten-year siege. Heroes on both sides—Achilles and Ajax, Hector and Paris—died before the city fell to the ruse of the wooden horse. The victors slaughtered or enslaved the Trojans and desecrated temples, so few got home safely, and Rome later claimed descent from the Trojan survivor Aeneas. Legend said Thetis dipped the infant Achilles in the Styx holding him by the heel, source of the phrase Achilles’ heel.
No single ancient text tells the whole story. The Iliad covers just four days and two nights in the tenth year, and the Odyssey follows Odysseus home to Ithaca. The six poems of the Epic Cycle survive only in fragments and in Proclus’s summary. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides staged episodes, and in Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas recounts the city’s fall.
Ancient Greeks treated the war as history, but by the mid-1800s scholars had dismissed city and war alike. In 1868 Frank Calvert persuaded Heinrich Schliemann that Troy lay at Hisarlık in Turkey, and most scholars now accept that identification. Whether a real war sits behind the tale remains open: many see a fusion of Mycenaean raids, while others favour Eratosthenes’ dates of 1194–1184 BC, close to the burning of Troy VII.
Source: Trojan War
