The Trojan War

The war at Troy lasted ten years, but the Iliad covers only about fifty days of the last one, and it never shows the wooden horse.

A golden apple and a stolen queen

The story of the war begins before the Iliad. At the wedding of the hero Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis, the goddess of strife, Eris, threw down a golden apple marked "for the fairest". Hera, Athena and Aphrodite each claimed it, and Zeus sent them to a Trojan prince, Paris, to judge. Each offered him a bribe, and Paris chose Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world. That woman was Helen, already married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. Paris visited Sparta and carried Helen off to Troy, and Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, gathered a fleet from all over Greece to bring her back.

Most of these early episodes come not from Homer but from a group of lost poems called the Epic Cycle, such as the Cypria. They survive mainly in short summaries written centuries later, so we know their plots but not their words. Homer mentions the judgment of Paris only once, near the end of the Iliad. This matters because many famous parts of the Trojan story, from the apple to the horse, are not in the Iliad at all.

What the Iliad actually tells

The Iliad is a poem of 24 books and 15,693 lines in its standard edition. Its first word is "wrath", and its subject is the anger of Achilles, the best of the Greek fighters. In the tenth year of the siege, Agamemnon takes away Briseis, a captive woman who had been given to Achilles as his prize. Insulted, Achilles withdraws from the fighting, and the Trojans, led by Hector, son of King Priam, drive the Greeks back to their ships. Achilles’ closest friend Patroclus goes into battle wearing Achilles’ armour and is killed by Hector. Achilles returns in grief and rage, kills Hector and drags the body behind his chariot.

The horse and the heel

The fall of Troy is told elsewhere. In the Odyssey, the bard Demodocus sings in book 8 about the wooden horse that Epeius built with Athena’s help and Odysseus led into the citadel as a trick, with the best Greek warriors hidden inside, and the Roman poet Virgil tells the story at length in book 2 of the Aeneid. The Iliad foretells Achilles’ death but does not show it. The famous detail that his mother dipped him in the river Styx and missed the heel she held him by is much later. A study in the journal Wiener Studien notes that it is found in no text before the Roman poet Statius, who wrote the Achilleid in the 1st century CE, and in no earlier Greek art.

Was there a real Troy?

There was a real city. It lies on the mound of Hisarlik in northwest Turkey, 4.8 kilometres from the southern entrance to the Dardanelles. Frank Calvert, a British resident who owned part of the mound, suspected it was Troy, and Heinrich Schliemann began large excavations there in 1870. UNESCO, which lists the site as World Heritage, counts more than 4,000 years of settlement in layers numbered Troy I to IX. Schliemann dug so fast that he cut through the late Bronze Age levels he was looking for. ICOMOS, UNESCO’s adviser, linked signs of fire and slaughter around 1250 BCE, at the end of the phase called Troy VIIa, with the city of the Iliad, while other scholars prefer Troy VI. Whether a war like Homer’s happened there is still debated.