The Trojan War: Myth and History

The Trojan War is the central event of the Greek mythical tradition, and one of the most famous events in the history of Western literature. According to the tradition, the war was fought around 1200 BCE between a coalition of Greek kings and the wealthy city of Troy on the coast of Asia Minor. The war lasted ten years, and it ended with the fall of Troy by the stratagem of the Trojan Horse. The war is the setting for Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for most of the great Greek tragedies, and for the entire cycle of the Epic Cycle, a series of poems that was lost except for summaries and fragments. The historicity of the war was debated for centuries, but the excavations of the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and his successors have established that Troy was a real city, that it was destroyed by fire around 1200 BCE, and that the war was probably a real event that was later embellished by the oral tradition of the Greek epic.

This page is a complete guide to the Trojan War. It explains the mythological background, the historical context, the famous episodes, and the legacy. It links back to the Minoans and Mycenaeans cluster, the Iliad and Odyssey long-tails, and the Greek Mythology cluster.

The Mythological Background

According to the Greek myth, the Trojan War was caused by the Judgment of Paris. Eris, the goddess of strife, was not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of the future hero Achilles. In anger, she threw a golden apple into the gathering of the gods, inscribed “to the fairest.” Three goddesses claimed the apple: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. The god Zeus appointed the Trojan prince Paris to judge between them. Each goddess tried to bribe him: Hera offered power, Athena offered wisdom, and Aphrodite offered the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose Aphrodite, and the award of the apple to Aphrodite set in motion the war.

The most beautiful woman in the world was Helen, the daughter of Zeus and Leda, and the wife of the Greek king Menelaus of Sparta. Paris, the Trojan prince, traveled to Sparta as a guest of Menelaus, and with the help of Aphrodite he persuaded Helen to elope with him. He took her and a great treasure from Menelaus’ palace, and he sailed back to Troy.

Menelaus, enraged, called on his brother Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, to lead a Greek expedition against Troy. The Greek kings gathered a thousand ships at Aulis, the port of Boeotia, and sailed across the Aegean to Troy.

The War

The war lasted ten years. The Greek kings were the most powerful warriors of Greece: Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and commander-in-chief; Menelaus, husband of Helen; Achilles, the greatest warrior; Ajax, son of Telamon, the second-greatest warrior; Odysseus, the cunning king of Ithaca; Diomedes, the king of Argos; Idomeneus, the king of Crete; Nestor, the wise king of Pylos; and others.

The Trojans were led by Hector, son of King Priam, the greatest warrior of Troy. Priam was the father of Hector, Paris, Cassandra, and many other children, and the husband of Hecuba. The Trojan allies included the Amazons, the Ethiopians, the Lycians (led by Sarpedon and Glaucus), and the Cilicians (led by Memnon).

The war was fought mostly in a series of single combats and raids. The Greeks had no fortified base on the Trojan plain, and they were unable to break the walls of Troy by direct assault. They raided the surrounding country for food, and they held the war at a stalemate for ten years. The famous episodes of the war include:

The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon (Book 1 of the Iliad).
The duels of Paris and Menelaus, of Ajax and Hector, and of Diomedes and Glaucus.
The exploits of Diomedes (the aristeia of Diomedes, in Book 5 of the Iliad).
The embassy to Achilles, in which Phoenix, Ajax, and Odysseus beg Achilles to return to the fighting.
The death of Patroclus at the hands of Hector.
The return of Achilles to battle, his killing of Hector, and his dragging of Hector’s body behind his chariot.
The funeral of Hector, the last book of the Iliad.

The war ended when the Greeks built a great wooden horse, the Trojan Horse, and left it outside the walls of Troy. The Trojans, ignoring the warning of Cassandra and Laocoon, brought the horse into the city. At night, the Greek warriors hidden inside the horse climbed out and opened the gates, and the Greek army entered the city. Troy was sacked and burned, and the men were killed, the women and children enslaved.

The Returns

The return of the Greek heroes from Troy is the subject of the second part of the Epic Cycle, the so-called Nostoi (Returns). Most of the heroes did not return home. Ajax the Lesser was shipwrecked and drowned. Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, returned safely and was murdered in Delphi. Diomedes was blown off course and ended up in Italy, where he founded several cities. Idomeneus was shipwrecked in Crete. Agamemnon returned home to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Menelaus wandered for eight years before finally returning to Sparta. Only Nestor and Neoptolemus, among the major heroes, returned home safely and quickly.

The most famous of the returns is that of Odysseus, the subject of the Odyssey. Odysseus’ ten-year journey home — the lotus-eaters, the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the descent to the underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the Sun, the island of Calypso, the Phaeacians — is one of the great adventure stories of the Western world.

The Historicity of the War

The historicity of the Trojan War was debated for centuries. The Greek historian Thucydides, writing in the fifth century BCE, believed that the war was a real event but that Homer had greatly exaggerated the size of the Greek forces. The Romans believed the war was historical, and the Emperor Augustus claimed descent from Aeneas, the Trojan hero.

The German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated the site of Troy in the 1870s and 1880s, and his work, continued by later archaeologists (especially Carl Blegen and the most recent excavator, Manfred Korfmann), has established that Troy was a real city, that it was destroyed by fire around 1200 BCE, and that the destruction was probably the work of an invading force. Whether the war was fought over Helen, whether Agamemnon and Achilles and Odysseus really existed, and whether the Iliad preserves any actual history of the war are still debated, but the broad outlines of the legend are now considered plausible.

The Legacy of the Trojan War

The Trojan War has been one of the most influential events in the history of Western literature and thought. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the foundation of the Western literary tradition. The Greek tragedians — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — drew on the Trojan cycle for many of their greatest plays. The Roman poet Virgil wrote the Aeneid, which tells the story of the Trojan prince Aeneas’s flight from Troy and his journey to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. The story of the Trojan War has been retold in every generation since, in the literature, the art, the music, and the film of the Western world.