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FAQ: The Trojan War
When did the war take place?
The war took place in the beginning of 12th century B.C.E. and is generally thought to have
lasted from 1193 - to 1184 B.C.E.
Who fought in the war?
The tradition is believed to reflect a real war between the Greeks of the late Mycenaean period
and the inhabitants of the Troad, or Troas, in Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey.
Did the Trojan War ever really take place?
Until the 19th century scholars believed that Troy and the Trojan war were imaginary. Then,
in 1871, a German-born American citizen named Heinrich Schliemann began excavating an
ancient city in Turkey. The ruins that he uncovered sit a few dozen miles off of the Aegean
coast in northwestern Turkey, a site that indeed fits the geographical descriptions of
Homer’s Troy. Nine cities have been found at the site, one on top of the other. One layer of
the site, the seventh city, was destroyed around 1180 BCE and appears to be the Troy of
legend. This city shows evidence of fire and destruction consistent with a sack. You can
still see the ruins of its towers and its walls, which were sixteen feet thick.
Schliemann identified Troy's location through clues he found in the Iliad, the epic attributed
to the Greek poet Homer.
Although most scholars accept Schliemann’s discovered city as the site of the ancient city of
Troy, many remain skeptical as to whether Homer’s Trojan War ever really took place.
What started the Trojan War ?
Modern archaeological excavations have suggested that Troy was most probably destroyed
by fire in the early 12th century BCE, the traditional date of the war, and that the war may
actually have resulted from the desire either to plunder the wealthy city or to put an end to
Troy's commercial control of the Dardanelles a water passage between the Mediterranean
and Black seas, near Troy. Or perhaps the war truly was fought over a woman named
Helen. The truth is lost in the past.
How did the war affect the Trojans?
The Trojan's city was in havoc and there was nothing left to their kingdom because of the war.
That itself caused much stress on the Trojans. They were left to life in ruins. The women were
taken by the Greeks to be slaves, and the men that were left did not have a bright future to look
forward to. But more than that, they mourned for the losses of their great heroes and family
members.
How did the war affect the Greeks ?
The Greeks would go back to a city that was not in ruins; they still had some type of comfort.
However, the Greeks had also lost faith in themselves because there were many men dead over
this war. The Greeks knew things would not be same after generations of men were lost in this
long battle.
Who was Homer?
No one knows. Even the ancient Greeks were not able to agree about when and where Homer
lived. One popular account was that he was born some time in the 8th century BC in Smyrna in
Asia Minor, lived on the island of Chios, and died on the small island of Ios. Greek writers also
claimed that he was blind, that his real name was Melesigines, and that his father was the river
Meles and his mother a nymph named Kretheis.
Though they could not agree about the details of his life, ancient Greeks did not doubt that there
was a poet named Homer who had written the Iliad, the Odyssey, and possibly a number of
other poems. Many modern scholars dispute even this. Scholars in the last two hundred years
have established that the Iliad and Odyssey are products of a long oral tradition which became
fixed sometime in the eighth century BC. ow exactly the poems took their final shape (Was it the
work of one person or several? Did the process involve writing?) is still a matter of speculation.
Is the Iliad historically accurate?
It depends on what you mean by "historically accurate." Modern historians generally agree that
the Iliad reflects a set of historical events, but disagree about the relationship of the Iliad to
those events. Most historians accept that at some point around 1250-1200 BC the city of Troy
was destroyed by a raiding party from the Greek mainland. Most also believe that the poem,
while probably wrong in most of its historical details, reflects some historical realities from the
Late Bronze Age and Dark Ages (1200 - 900 BC) which are consistent with the archaeological
record.
How do you keep all of the names of people, places, and gods straight?
It is hard at first. There is a good glossary in the back of the Lattimore translation, and is also
helpful to keep your own list of people who occur more than once.
What is the setting of The Iliad?
Although historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence suggests that the epics were
composed between (eighth and seventh century BCE) 750 and 650 B.C.E. they are set
earlier on in Mycenaean Greece in about the twelfth century B.C.E., during the Bronze Age.
This earlier period, the Greeks believed, was a more glorious and sublime age, when gods
still frequented the earth and heroic, godlike mortals with superhuman attributes populated
Greece.
Because the two epics (The Odyssey and the Iliad) strive to evoke this pristine age, they
are written in a high style and generally depict life as it was believed to have been led in the
great kingdoms of the Bronze Age. The Greeks are often referred to as “Achaeans,” the
name of a large tribe occupying Greece during the Bronze Age.
But Homer’s reconstruction often yields to the realities of eighth- and seventh-century
B.C.E. Greece. The feudal social structure apparent in the background of the Odyssey seems
more akin to Homer’s Greece than to Odysseus’s, and Homer substitutes the pantheon of
deities of his own day for the related but different gods whom Mycenaean Greeks
worshipped. Many other minor but obvious anachronisms—such as references to iron tools
and to tribes that had not yet migrated to Greece by the Bronze Age—betray the poem’s
later, Iron Age origins.
What language was the original Iliad written in?
Like the Odyssey, the Iliad was composed primarily in the Ionic dialect of Ancient Greek,
which was spoken on the Aegean islands and in the coastal settlements of Asia Minor, now
modern Turkey. Some scholars thus conclude that the poet hailed from somewhere in the
eastern Greek world. More likely, however, the poet chose the Ionic dialect because he felt
it to be more appropriate for the high style and grand scope of his work. Slightly later Greek
literature suggests that poets varied the dialects of their poems according to the themes
that they were treating and might write in dialects that they didn’t actually speak. Homer’s
epics are Panhellenic (encompassing all of Greece) in spirit and use forms from several
other dialects. This suggests that Homer suited his poems to the dialect that would best
complement
Mythological Beginning/Causes of the Trojan War


I. Wedding of King Peleus to sea-goddess, Thetis (parents of Achilles)
 A. What happened?
 1. all gods and goddesses invited except for Eris, goddess of discord
 2. Eris angry - tosses golden apple inscribed, "For the fairest one" among
the guests
 3. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite claim prize
 4. Paris, son of king Priam and Queen Hekabe of Troy, chosen to decide
who gets apple
 5. Goddesses offer Paris bribes
 a.) Hera - kingship / power/ thrones
 b.) Athena - victory in war / wisdom—military strategy
 c.) Aphrodite - love of most beautiful woman in the world
 6. Paris chooses Aphrodite's bribe and wins Helen, wife of Menelaus, king
of Sparta (a Greek city-state founded by the Dorians in approximately 900
B.C.E.)
 7. Menelaus asks for aid of brother, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae
 8. after refusal of Greeks to return Helen, Trojan War begins in
approximately 1200 B.C.E.)
II. "the Trojan war, which was fought, according to legend, because of a quarrel among
gods and the resulting incidents of betrayal among mortals." (2)
 A. Intervention/Competition of Gods
 1. Personal Glory
 a.) "It is undeniable that if we take Homer literally, divine
intervention determines a great many outcomes in which a human
life is at stake."(1)


2. Divine Intervention
 a.) Zeus arranges the tremendous loss of Greek lives so that
Achilles (the greatest warrior among the Greeks), feeling void of
his honor, after losing his war prize to Agamemnon, will be
begged to rejoin his men--fueling progression of war.
 b.) Helen uses Aphrodite's pressure as an excuse for her
engagement. "I know that I behaved badly, but I was so in love I
couldn't think straight." (1)
 c.) "The great leader of the great expedition is Agamemnon, king
of Mycenae. His place in a list of what seem to be shepherd kings,
deriving their authority from Hermes, the god of flocks, given very
early in THE ILIAD." (8)
 d.) The gods meddle with human lives by offering spiritual gifts
and people, like bargaining chips, taking pieces of human souls.
 3. Personal Biases
 a.) Athena - encourages Hector, Trojan hero, to fight Achilles,
knowing it will lead to his demise--fueling battle.
 b. Hera - favors Greeks; rejected by Paris at wedding of King
Peleus and sea-goddess, Thetis
 4. Competition/Jealousy
 a.) competing bribes offered by Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, at all
costs, to win honor of being "the fairest"
B. Mortals
 1. feud between Achilles and Agamemnon over war prizes (4)--fuels battle