The Trojan War

The story comes down to us mostly from the ancient Greek poet Homer, who set it down perhaps eight centuries before our era — already long after the events it describes were supposed to have happened. According to the legend, it began not with armies but with a quarrel among the gods, and a beautiful woman named Helen, said to be the most beautiful in the world.

Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. When Paris, a prince of the great city of Troy on the coast of what is now Turkey, visited Sparta as a guest, he took Helen back to Troy with him. Whether she was carried off against her will or left willingly, the poets never quite agree — but the insult was the same. Menelaus turned to his powerful brother, Agamemnon, and the kings of Greece, bound by old promises, gathered the largest army the legend had ever seen: a thousand ships, sailing east to bring Helen home and punish the city that had taken her.

So a private betrayal became a war between nations. The Greeks crossed the sea, drew up their ships on the beach below Troy's high walls, and laid siege to the city. They expected it to fall quickly. They were wrong by ten years.

Homer's great poem, the Iliad, does not tell the whole war. It takes just a few weeks near the end of the tenth year, and at its centre is not a battle but a sulk. Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors — almost unbeatable, but proud and quick to anger — fell out bitterly with Agamemnon over honour and a captured woman, and refused to fight. Without him, the Greeks were driven back to their ships.

Both sides fought for glory as much as for victory. Battles often paused for a truce, or came down to single combat between champions, watched by the two armies. The Trojans had their own great hero, Hector, eldest son of King Priam — a defender of his city and his family rather than a glory-hunter. When Hector killed Achilles' dearest friend, Patroclus, the grief and rage finally drove Achilles back into the fight. The two heroes met before the walls of Troy, and Achilles cut Hector down, then dishonoured his body — until the old king Priam came alone, at night, into the enemy camp to beg for his son back. The Iliad ends there, with Hector's funeral, the city still standing.

The most famous moment of the war isn't in the Iliad at all. It survives in scraps of the Odyssey and, fully told, in the Roman poet Virgil's Aeneid, written centuries later. After ten years of stalemate, it was the cunning of Odysseus, the cleverest of the Greeks, that finally broke the siege.

The Greeks built an enormous wooden horse, hid a band of their best warriors inside it, and then burned their camp and sailed away — or seemed to. To the watching Trojans it looked like surrender, and the horse like a gift to the gods. A single Greek, Sinon, was left behind to lie convincingly and lure the city into taking the bait. Not everyone was fooled: the priest Laocoön warned them not to trust it, and Priam's daughter Cassandra, cursed always to speak the truth and never be believed, cried out that the horse would doom them all. But the Trojans, exhausted and longing for the war to be over, ignored every warning and the omens around them. They pulled down part of their own wall and dragged the horse inside as a trophy.

That night, while Troy slept off its celebration, Sinon let the hidden warriors out. They opened the gates to the returning Greek army, and the city that had held for ten years was sacked in a single night — burned, plundered, its people killed or carried off. Helen was taken back to Sparta. After all the blood, the war ended not in a great battle but in a trick.

For most of history, people read all this as pure myth — a poet's invention. Then, in the 1870s, a wealthy German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann set out to prove the legend real. Guided in part by a local amateur, Frank Calvert, he began digging at a mound called Hisarlik, in north-west Turkey, near where the ancient writers had placed Troy. Beneath it he found not one city but the buried ruins of many, stacked one on top of another across thousands of years.

Schliemann was a careless and impatient excavator — he drove a great trench straight through the site, even using dynamite, and destroyed much of what he was trying to find. He announced he had uncovered a hoard of gold and called it "Priam's Treasure", but it later turned out to be far older than any Trojan War, belonging to a city that had stood a thousand years before Homer's heroes. He had wanted glory so badly that he had exaggerated what the ground actually showed.

And yet a real city was there. One of its layers — known to archaeologists as Troy VII — dates to roughly 1180 BC and shows signs of violent destruction by fire, at about the right time for the war the Greeks remembered. It may have guarded the trade routes to the Black Sea, a prize worth fighting over. So historians today walk a careful line. There was almost certainly a Troy, and perhaps some real conflict behind the legend. But Helen, Achilles, the gods and the great wooden horse remain where Homer left them — in the world of story, where they have lived on, undefeated, for nearly three thousand years.