What Is Being Retold
The Trojan War is known from Greek epic poetry, not from a single continuous text. The Iliad and the Odyssey, traditionally attributed to Homer, are the two surviving great poems. The rest of the story comes from lost epics of the so-called Epic Cycle, known mostly from later summaries, and from tragedians, vase painters and Roman writers. Whether a real conflict lies behind the tale is debated. What follows is the story as told in the tradition, not a claim that these events happened.
One surprise for new readers: the Iliad does not narrate the whole war. It covers a few weeks in the tenth year, and it ends before Troy falls. The beginning and the end come from other sources.
Before the War: The Judgment of Paris
According to the lost poem Cypria, the war begins at the wedding of the mortal Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis, parents of the later hero Achilles. Eris, goddess of strife, is not invited and throws in a golden apple marked for the fairest. Hera, Athena and Aphrodite each claim it, and Zeus sends the three to Paris, a prince of Troy, to decide.
Each goddess offers a bribe. Hera offers power, Athena skill in war, and Aphrodite the love of the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chooses Aphrodite. That woman is Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta, and Paris carries her off to Troy. In some versions she goes willingly, in others she is taken. The tradition leaves her motives and responsibility deliberately open.
The Gathering at Aulis
Menelaus appeals to his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, who calls on the Greek leaders. These had earlier sworn to defend Helen’s marriage, according to later accounts. The fleet, said to number over a thousand ships in the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, gathers at Aulis on the coast of Boeotia. The heroes include Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax son of Telamon, Diomedes and the old counsellor Nestor. Their home kingdoms in the Catalogue are the sort of centres associated with Mycenaean palaces.
At Aulis the winds fail. In the version made famous by the tragedians, the seer Calchas says Artemis demands the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia. Versions differ on whether she dies or is rescued at the last moment. The fleet sails, and the long siege begins.
The Iliad: Wrath in the Tenth Year
The Iliad opens with a quarrel inside the Greek camp. Agamemnon must return a captive woman, Chryseis, to her father, a priest of Apollo, to end a plague sent by the god. To compensate himself he takes Briseis, the captive of Achilles. Furious at the insult, Achilles withdraws from the fighting, and his mother Thetis persuades Zeus to let the Greeks suffer in his absence.
The main stages are as follows.
- Early fighting. Paris and Menelaus agree to settle the war in single combat, but the duel is inconclusive and a broken truce restarts the battle. The gods take sides, with Hera and Athena favouring the Greeks and Aphrodite and Apollo the Trojans.
- Hector and Andromache. The Trojan champion Hector, Paris’s brother, returns to the city and takes leave of his wife Andromache and infant son Astyanax.
- The embassy. Agamemnon, now hard pressed, offers gifts, and Odysseus, Ajax and Phoenix urge Achilles to return. He refuses.
- The Trojan advance. Hector drives the Greeks back to their ships and threatens to burn them.
- Patroclus. Achilles allows his close companion Patroclus to enter the battle wearing his armour. Patroclus drives the Trojans back but is killed by Hector, with Apollo’s help.
- Vengeance. Grief ends Achilles’ anger at Agamemnon. He receives new armour made by the god Hephaestus and kills Hector in single combat outside the walls.
- Funeral games and ransom. Achilles holds athletic contests for Patroclus, a scene that echoes the later Olympic Games in miniature. Then Priam, king of Troy and Hector’s father, comes by night to Achilles’ hut to beg for his son’s body. Achilles gives it back, and the poem closes with Hector’s funeral.
The war is not decided in the Iliad. The deaths of Patroclus and Hector, and the foreknowledge of Achilles’ own early death, set the course of the rest of the legend. The poem’s tone is intense and often unsentimental about battle wounds, with weapons of bronze, heroes who ride war chariots to the front and then fight on foot, and gods who intervene. The ways such heroes fought differ from the later hoplite phalanx of Greek city-states, which is one clue scholars use when asking what period the poems reflect.
After the Iliad: Death of Achilles and the Wooden Horse
The Epic Cycle continues the story. In the lost Aethiopis, Achilles kills the Amazon queen Penthesilea and the Ethiopian prince Memnon, then is himself killed, the tradition says by an arrow from Paris guided by Apollo. Disputes follow over his armour, and Ajax, defeated in the contest, takes his own life in the tradition dramatised by Sophocles. Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, and the archer Philoctetes are brought to the war because prophecies require them.
Troy has strong walls and the Greeks cannot take it by force. Odysseus is credited with the idea of the wooden horse. The Greeks build a huge hollow horse, fill it with warriors, and sail away as if giving up, leaving only the horse and a man called Sinon to deceive the Trojans. In the Odyssey the horse is mentioned in a few passages, and the Roman poet Virgil gives the best-known full telling, in the second book of the Aeneid, a poem built around Virgil and Aeneas.
The Trojans drag the horse inside. That night the warriors climb out, open the gates, and the city is burned and sacked. Priam is killed, the women are taken captive, and Hector’s son Astyanax is killed in several versions. Details such as the fate of Helen, who is reconciled with Menelaus in the Odyssey, vary widely.
The Returns
The Greeks’ journeys home form a separate set of stories called the Nostoi. Agamemnon is murdered on his return by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, a story used by Aeschylus. Menelaus wanders for years, and Odysseus’s ten-year voyage is the subject of the Odyssey. The sack of Troy does not end the gods’ anger, since the Greeks are said to have committed impieties in the sack.
Reading the Story
The tale is a literary inheritance, shaped by generations of oral poets before it was written down, probably in the eighth or seventh century BCE. Whether any of it happened is a different question from what the poems say, and it is best asked once the story itself is clear.