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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter VIII: The Trojan War & the Odyssey

The Trojan War: Causes, Heroes and the Fall of Troy in Myth

The Trojan War in Greek myth: the judgement of Paris, Helen, the long siege, the wooden horse and the fall of Troy, and what Hisarlik's archaeology shows.

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The Trojan War was the ten-year war in Greek myth between an alliance of Greek kings, led by Agamemnon of Mycenae, and the city of Troy in north-western Asia Minor, fought to recover Helen, the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, whom the Trojan prince Paris had carried off. It ended when the Greeks entered the city hidden in a wooden horse and sacked it. The war was the greatest subject of Greek epic and tragedy; whether a real war lies behind it is still debated, though the site of Troy itself has been identified at Hisarlik in Turkey.

The Causes of the War: Zeus's Plan and the Judgement of Paris§

The ancient story begins on Olympus. A fragment of the lost epic Cypria says that Zeus, pitying the Earth burdened by too many people, resolved to lighten her load by a great war. The occasion arose at the wedding of the hero Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis, the future parents of Achilles. Eris, goddess of strife, had not been invited; she threw among the guests a golden apple, which later writers say was inscribed "for the fairest". Hera, Athena and Aphrodite each claimed it, and Zeus sent them through Hermes to be judged by a herdsman on Mount Ida near Troy.

The herdsman was Paris, also called Alexandros, son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba. Before his birth Hecuba had dreamed that she bore a flaming torch that set the city on fire, and the infant had been exposed on the mountain, where shepherds raised him. Each goddess offered a bribe: Hera, rule over Asia; Athena, victory in war; Aphrodite, the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose Aphrodite. The Iliad alludes to the judgement only once, near its end, but it became one of the most painted scenes in European art, from Greek vases to Rubens.

Helen of Sparta and the Oath of the Suitors§

The most beautiful woman was Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda (in the Cypria, of Zeus and the goddess Nemesis) and sister of Castor and Polydeuces. When she was of age, the princes of Greece came to Sparta to court her. Her mortal father Tyndareus, fearing violence, followed the advice of Odysseus and made every suitor swear to defend the rights of whoever was chosen. Helen married Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon. Years later Paris came to Sparta as a guest and, while Menelaus was away in Crete, sailed off with Helen and much of the palace treasure. The suitors' oath now bound the Greek kings to go to war.

How far Helen went willingly was argued in antiquity. The Iliad shows her at Troy full of self-reproach; the sophist Gorgias wrote an Encomium of Helen defending her. The lyric poet Stesichorus composed a famous recantation, the Palinode, saying that she never went to Troy at all and that the Trojans fought for a phantom, while the real Helen waited in Egypt. Herodotus heard a similar story from Egyptian priests, and Euripides built his Helen (412 BCE) on it.

Aulis, the Greek Fleet and the Long Siege§

The Greek host gathered at Aulis in Boeotia under Agamemnon. The second book of the Iliad contains the Catalogue of Ships, listing the contingents and their leaders, a passage that many scholars believe preserves a geography older than the poem. In the tradition followed by the tragedians, contrary winds held the fleet until Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis, an act whose consequences belong to the house of Atreus.

According to the summary of the Cypria, the Greeks first landed by mistake in Mysia, where Achilles wounded King Telephus, and only on a second expedition reached Troy. On the way they abandoned the archer Philoctetes, suffering from a foul snakebite, on the island of Lemnos. Protesilaus, the first to leap ashore at Troy, was the first to die. Since Troy could not be stormed, the Greeks spent years raiding the cities of the Troad, and the Trojans were joined by allies from Asia Minor and Thrace.

From the Iliad to the Wooden Horse§

The Iliad, attributed to Homer and usually dated to the eighth or seventh century BCE, covers a short span in the tenth year: the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, the death of Patroclus and the killing of the Trojan champion Hector. Its great figures on the Trojan side include Priam, Hecuba, Hector and his wife Andromache, and Aeneas; on the Greek side Diomedes, the two Ajaxes, Nestor and Odysseus.

The rest of the war was told in the poems of the Epic Cycle, now lost but known from fragments and from prose summaries attributed to one Proclus. The Aethiopis told of the Amazon queen Penthesilea and the Ethiopian king Memnon, both killed by Achilles, and of Achilles' own death. The Little Iliad told of the contest for Achilles' armour, which Odysseus won and after which Ajax killed himself; the fetching of Philoctetes, whose bow (once Heracles', see Heracles and the Twelve Labours) killed Paris; the arrival of Achilles' son Neoptolemus; and the theft of the Palladium, the image of Athena that protected Troy.

Finally, on Athena's advice, the craftsman Epeius built a great wooden horse. The best warriors hid inside, the rest burned their camp and sailed to the nearby island of Tenedos. The Trojans debated what to do with the horse. In Virgil's Aeneid (book 2) the priest Laocoön hurls a spear into it and is killed with his sons by two sea serpents, and the Greek Sinon, posing as a deserter, persuades the Trojans to drag the horse into the city; the prophetess Cassandra warns them in vain. The Odyssey has Helen walk round the horse imitating the voices of the Greeks' wives. That night the warriors emerged and opened the gates.

The Sack of Troy and the Returns of the Heroes§

The sack, told in the lost Iliou Persis and in the tragedians, was remembered as a catalogue of sacrileges. Neoptolemus killed the old King Priam at the altar of Zeus; Hector's infant son Astyanax was thrown from the walls; the Locrian Ajax dragged Cassandra from the image of Athena; Priam's daughter Polyxena was sacrificed at Achilles' tomb. Euripides' Trojan Women (415 BCE; see Greek Tragedy) shows the captive queens waiting to be shared out as slaves. Menelaus, about to kill Helen, dropped his sword at the sight of her. Aeneas escaped with his father Anchises and his son, the beginning of the Roman story told by Virgil.

The gods punished the victors' crimes. The Nostoi ("Returns") told how storms scattered the fleet; Ajax of Locris drowned, Menelaus wandered to Egypt, Agamemnon was murdered on his return, and Odysseus spent ten years reaching home (see Odysseus and the wanderings of the Odyssey). Greek chronographers dated the fall of Troy; the figure of Eratosthenes, equivalent to 1184/1183 BCE, became the standard ancient date.

Hisarlik and the Archaeology of Troy§

The mound of Hisarlik, near the Dardanelles in north-western Turkey, was identified as the site of Troy by the Scottish journalist Charles Maclaren in 1822 and probed by the British consul Frank Calvert before Heinrich Schliemann began large-scale excavations in 1870. Schliemann dug a great trench through the mound and in 1873 announced "Priam's Treasure", a hoard of gold and silver that later proved to belong to a level of roughly 2500–2300 BCE, more than a thousand years too early for any Trojan War. His collaborator Wilhelm Dörpfeld identified the impressive walls of Troy VI; Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati, excavating in the 1930s, argued for the burned settlement Troy VIIa, destroyed in the twelfth century BCE; and Manfred Korfmann from 1988 found evidence of a lower town that made Late Bronze Age Troy considerably larger than once thought, a conclusion that provoked sharp debate.

Hittite documents add a further, contested layer. They mention a western Anatolian state called Wilusa, which many scholars equate with Greek (W)ilios, a ruler of Wilusa named Alaksandu, reminiscent of Alexandros, and a power called Ahhiyawa, often identified with Mycenaean Greeks, that was involved in disputes in western Anatolia. These parallels are suggestive but not conclusive. The cautious position, held by most archaeologists, is that Hisarlik was a substantial Bronze Age city, that it was destroyed more than once, and that conflicts between Mycenaean Greeks and Anatolian states are plausible; the poems, composed centuries later, cannot be read as a record of one particular war. Troy has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998.

Frequently asked questions§

Was the Trojan War real?§

No ancient source independent of the poetic tradition proves the war. Archaeology shows that Troy at Hisarlik was a real, fortified Bronze Age city that suffered destructions, and Hittite texts suggest Greek involvement in western Anatolia, so many historians allow that legends of a war may preserve distant memories, much transformed.

Is the Trojan horse in the Iliad?§

No. The Iliad ends with the funeral of Hector before Troy falls. The horse is mentioned in the Odyssey, was told in the lost Little Iliad and Iliou Persis, and is described most fully in book 2 of Virgil's Aeneid.

What was the judgement of Paris?§

It was the contest in which the Trojan prince Paris had to choose the most beautiful of three goddesses, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. He chose Aphrodite, who had promised him Helen, and his choice set the war in motion.

Sources and further reading§